In Yue Region, which had reverted to a savage wilderness, Wei Keng pushed northwestward day and night. The exchange of gunfire with Jian City had become a thing of the past.
About twenty hours after Wei Keng had released Fang Hong and Zeng He, the people in Jian City who had been anxiously waiting received the official news of the returning expedition from the city gazette:
The white-bearded General Zeng Kaomu had led the Ironclad Chariot Unit beyond the frontier. They had driven deep into enemy territory and reached the enemy camp. Without a word, they opened fire, their guns and cannons roaring for hours without pause. At last, their loyalty and courage moved the heavens, and they had thoroughly defeated the Southern Same-faced People. The enemy had been forced to return our people and compensate us for our money and goods.
But Heaven was jealous of a great man! During the pursuit, Old General Kaomu had unfortunately fallen from his vehicle and suffered severe injuries. A hundred meters from the city—no, five kilometers away—his wounds had grown too grave for him to go on. In his final moment, he had rallied and said, "I've spent my whole life on horseback. Now I'll be wrapped in my horse's hide and buried. What a joy, what a joy."
Zeng He and Fang Hong had reorganized the troops that returned from the battle and led them back. However, after the "victorious" combat unit reached the city, its members were all taken into custody and quarantined, cut off from the outside world.
There were simply too many wounded soldiers returning, and the few Armored Vehicles were badly damaged, their Steel Plates visibly warped and cracked. Rumors soon spread through the city about how bloody the battle had been.
City Lord Zeng Longmu summoned Zeng He and Fang Hong once more to a room in the city tower and questioned them in detail about everything they had seen. There was no way to tell from his face what decision he would make.
As for Wei Keng, after a Forced March lasting forty-eight hours, he had reached the front line and begun fighting the External Species of the invading Gene Colony.
In the forest, the Wei Kengs sniffed the air. They still couldn't confirm anything by sight, but some strange sense in their minds let them pinpoint the presence of threats ahead.
Following that instinct, Wei Keng divided into groups of twenty, each fifty meters apart. More than twelve squads spread out across a wide front and began sweeping forward.
The entire Wei Keng Collective was grave and focused. In that state, they had passively entered a state of mental communication, which grew clearer and clearer, like a ringing in the ears in the dead of night.
As each group explored, its members entered their observations into the system table in a standard format. They combined information from droppings, tracks, and the scents detected by the Reconnaissance Squad at various downwind points to assess what lay ahead.
Now Bai Linglu, the observer at the system terminal, could no longer tell which individual had provided each piece of information as she logged the reports sent by Wei Keng.
In other words, within one squad, Wei Keng One might spot a bent branch ahead; Wei Keng Two might smell the humus exposed where something had kicked away the soil beneath the plants; and Wei Keng Three, Four, and Five might hear a sound from three different angles. Then the brains of the whole squad—including those that had supplied these sensory details—would assess the situation and determine that their target was only minutes away.
As these reports came in one after another, even Wei Keng might not know which of them had contributed each observation. It was like a person playing a video game in a state of excitement, unable to tell which part of the brain that excitement came from.
This state Wei Keng was in was very important, and Bai Linglu was recording it closely.
According to the Time-Space Administration Bureau's standards for evaluating Transmigrators, Wei Keng's collective absorption in a single goal seemed to have gone beyond being a group. It was starting to become a unified consciousness based on a group—like dolphins, whose left and right brain hemispheres took turns thinking by day and night, yet still belonged to a single mind.
Now Wei Keng had begun to merge while searching. What would happen in the future?
Forty-three minutes into the forest skirmish.
A Swift Leopard suddenly sprang from a thorny thicket with a rustling crash.
A leopard? Well, let's call it that. Its leg muscles were built for explosive speed, like a leopard's, but the rest of it looked haphazardly put together. It had a pair of elephant ears, saber teeth on its upper jaw, and wild boar tusks on its lower jaw.
The creature looked vicious, and it was fast, too. But Wei Keng was even sharper. The instant it sprang out, three shots rang out almost together, striking its head and both sides of its torso.
As it fell, the Wei Keng it had ambushed kept a calm expression. He gripped his Steel Gun as if he had been waiting for this moment, raised his arm, and thrust. The bayonet sank straight into the beast's throat. Within 0.3 seconds, two nearby Wei Kengs arrived and drove in their own bayonets. They gripped them with both hands and thrust downward, pinning the beast to the ground without giving it a chance to struggle.
The division of labor among the six Wei Kengs at the front of the squad was as smooth as a person eating a hamburger: incisors cut through it, canines tore the meat, the tongue twisted it over, molars ground it up, and then it was swallowed.
Wei Keng's state was uncanny. Was this man and sword as one? No—this was everyone as one.
As they hunted through the forest, the Wei Kengs in each group exchanged information mentally with ever-greater intensity. As mentioned earlier, Wei Keng could hear what other individuals heard and smell what they smelled.
Now it went even further. When they smelled something, they knew where the target was, but no longer cared who had smelled it. When they heard where the enemy was, they no longer wondered which self had heard it. They had grown used to it—just as people used their eyes, noses, and ears to see, smell, and hear, without paying much attention to what those organs looked like.
In the battle just now, each Wei Keng could see only thirty meters with his own eyes, and each pair of ears could hear only the slightest sound within seven or eight meters. But! But every individual acted in coordination, guided by the perception of the group.
This coordination was like the reflex that made a person throw out an arm and brace their body when they stumbled while running. The single beast had burst out fast, but Wei Keng's combined response was faster! Each individual knew exactly how to stop the beast from his own position.
Unity and coordination were humanity's greatest weapons throughout its evolutionary history. Once language developed to help coordinate these skills, all the large creatures on Earth, though individually stronger on paper, could still be caught off guard while hunting or fighting. Coordination let humans seize on a momentary weakness.
Take this Swift Leopard. When it lunged at the first Wei Keng, it had tremendous power from the front, but its flanks were very vulnerable.
Now, among the rear ranks of Wei Keng's formation, those with loaded rifles moved in unspoken accord to the front. Those who had already fired drove their bayonets into the leopard's skull again, severing its neural pathways completely. Then, right in the center of the formation, they began reloading.
After killing three ambush leopards, Wei Keng had etched crosses into all his homemade bullets to increase their stopping power.
The war against the Gene Colony was completely different from the war against the Human City-State.
Against the Human City-State, the battle took place within a hundred meters, in open sight. They had to judge who should fire first and see whose squad could react faster and suppress the enemy's return fire.
Now the fighting was taking place at a range of five to ten meters, no more than twenty at the most. It was a contest of composure, speed, and coordination at close quarters.
Wei Keng had no claws or fangs, and had not evolved any extra muscles. Yet he was absolutely dominant.
The twelve vanguard squads plunged into the forest like ten fingers digging into dough. They didn't merely enter—they waded right in!
On the broader map, Wei Keng's Forced March had only brought him into contact with one part of the threat in Yue Region. In the mountain forests stretching hundreds of kilometers around the outskirts of Zhushui Jiao, the Gene Colony's resonating signals revealed at least sixty Node Creatures, each with Life Radiation exceeding 30,000 BMR, scattered across Northern Yue. They were now leading their own Gene Colonies slowly toward the area where Wei Keng was active in the south.
Among the core Node Creatures of these colonies was a Four-legged Six-limbed Tyrant Dragon weighing over sixty tons. There was also a mammoth, clad in heavy armor like roof tiles and bearing four trunks. The Liquid Spider that had captured Wei Keng was small by comparison. Of course, precisely because it was smaller, it had been able to push to the very front and capture Wei Keng's squad.
BMR stood for basal metabolic rate. A normal adult man in his prime had a value of 2,000. Because traditional genes within each species had become unstable in the Pandora Era, genes alone could no longer determine how strong a creature was. Two similar stretches of genes might belong to a cat and a tiger. So the creatures' Life Radiation was standardized using their metabolic rate.
Anything above 30,000 was undoubtedly a Node Creature within a Gene Colony. If such a creature was wounded but not damaged further, its cells could quickly fuse into the wound. Its vitality was astonishing.
[According to Wei Keng's records: Its Health Bar is extremely thick. Even if you inflict a fatal wound, you have to put explosives in it and land a critical hit before it finally dies.]
Yet these radiating nodes of the Gene Colonies could feel the pressure of Wei Keng's Life Radiation.
And as the Wei Keng Collective drew closer, the captured Wei Keng also began emitting sufficiently strong Life Radiation! Now, when the Thought-Stealing Spider used its neural filaments, some of them were instead being seized by Remnant Wei Keng.
The Gene Colonies in this region were conscious.
The Node Creatures that had fused with some human genes carried part of their colony's consciousness and could express its feelings about certain things in something like human language.
For example, if the Fused Humans were to describe the effect Wei Keng had on the Gene Colonies, they might say: "This spring, as the ocean monsoon began to grow stronger, the World Evil suddenly came into this world. First, he drove the leaders of the estuary's Gene Colony away, and then—trampled the life order of the entire region. He resists nature more than the humans now entrenched in the cities, and he persists without pause along the path of desecration."
Now that Wei Keng had arrived, this idea in the minds of the Node Creatures had grown even clearer.
All the Fused Humans could feel the steady advance and destruction ahead, each heavy gunshot, each vicious thrust that mercilessly killed a Swift Leopard-like creature weighing around fifty kilograms.
Even the Flying Insects released to attack were slowed by his powerful Life Radiation. Wei Keng simply wore grass gloves and crushed them in his hands.
Speaking of venomous insects in the forest, Wei Keng hadn't realized these attacks were coming from the hostile Gene Colony. Never mind that the poisonous insects were already moving quite slowly by the time they flew through Wei Keng's strong Life Radiation. After they arrived, Wei Keng would wave a burning torch, and most of them would fall to the ground. A few managed to bite him, but they caused no serious harm.
First of all, Wei Keng had to admit that being bitten by these Poison Mosquitoes and Poison Bees was very painful. But after more than half a year here, the individuals in the Wei Keng Collective had been chewing small amounts of plants each time and using the system to analyze their medicinal properties.
The system had also compiled a complete database of alkaloids. Now, whenever a sting caused a sharp pain in the skin, Wei Keng immediately took a little from a bottle, mixed it with saliva, and smeared it on the skin. His Self-Healing Ability was already strong thanks to the Life Radiation of his collective; with the ointment's help, the toxins quickly seeped out through his pores. What would have left him itching for seven or eight minutes now cleared up in one.
Bound up in Spider Silk like a silkworm in a cocoon and reduced almost to a remnant, Wei Keng was still stubbornly alive.
The self in this consciousness was also beginning to sense more and more clearly everything happening within a kilometer.
Yet this Wei Keng didn't feel relieved at the thought of being rescued soon. He was worried that his individual body might bring danger to the group!
The next time the Liquid Spider inserted neural filaments into him, would it be able to see the images flickering through his mind? If so, it might endanger more lives in his collective! Remnant Wei Keng murmured, "This has to end."
A strong will was one thing. But from a materialist point of view, a steadfast consciousness was only a phenomenon residing in a material state. The subjective initiative of consciousness could seize material to the greatest extent possible, but could not change the fact that material itself could be seized. Now, after sensing the information that his collective was approaching, Remnant Wei Keng objectively judged that he could not fully control the information in his mind or keep it from being taken by the neural filaments inserted by the Thought-Stealing Spider.
This had happened to him, so he had to take responsibility. That was what Remnant Wei Keng thought.
After being captured and enduring all kinds of torture, Remnant Wei Keng had gone from despair, to struggling to survive, to the indignation he had felt a few hours ago, wanting to see his tormentor show fear. Now, Wei Keng had become detached.
Amid the immense torment, he seemed to have let go of the distinction between self and world: the vanity of his own body, and all its pain. After all, once he endured the torment, he found that pain and humiliation would always fade with time. By the same token, joy and honor—the counterparts of pain—would also pass.
So what would not fade for him? In the midst of his torment, Wei Keng began to think about his own essence.
When his individual self suffered, another group of selves kept pushing beyond their limits to rescue him. They had taken their once unremarkable intelligence and willpower to the extreme. That was the progress of his essence! Now, he had to set everything else aside and keep advancing that essence.
This detachment Remnant Wei Keng had reached might have been like Ji Chang, imprisoned in Youli.
As a Zhou Person, he had come to a region of the Shang Civilization, where people still worshipped through divine rites. The cruelty of human sacrifice and the punishment of imprisonment had been a terrible ordeal for both mind and body. By modern standards, there was no reason a person in such circumstances wouldn't break down or go mad. But madness could not perfect the I Ching. So King Wen of Zhou must have—not, he had to have—forgotten the distinction between self and world, and begun to think through his own essence.
Remnant Wei Keng thought: "When the time comes, I should leave. The death of an individual doesn't matter! What matters is that the selves who remain alive keep facing this blood-soaked world through their essence."
Amid the mutual radiation of life, Remnant Wei Keng's thoughts crossed the few hundred meters between two hilltops and reached the consciousness group of Wei Keng, which was preparing for battle.
After hearing the words of the self in the wreckage, who was following his essence, the Wei Keng Collective fell silent for a minute. The consciousnesses of hundreds of individuals exchanged no more than five lines of information on the matter. It was fair to call this silent thought.
In the end, the collective sent Remnant Wei Keng an order born of its own willpower: "Follow orders. You must hold on. You must not give up. The act of persevering is itself the greatest meaning to us."
The Wei Keng Collective didn't deny that Remnant Wei Keng falling into enemy hands objectively risked leaking information during battle, but—
A remnant individual might sacrifice himself for righteousness, but the Wei Keng Collective, with only fifteen hundred members, could never accept that as the norm.
Looking back through history, once a human society accepted its own members' tragedies as "just the way life is," it wouldn't be long before that society was left to eke out a miserable existence.
Here, in this wilderness teeming with beasts, as human beings, they could not let go of their splendor.
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