Ren Sha

Confidence—this was really an experienced judgment of a situation made after gathering enough information. You knew whether you could return a ball before it reached your racket, and a student knew whether they would pass an exam the day before it took place.

After surveying the area from the hilltop, the Wei Keng Collective began to feel reasonably confident that they could bring their own remains back.

As long as they were skilled enough to carry out the plan they believed they could manage, they could act faster than these colonies could react.

For now, the bamboo on the hillside was being cut down one stalk after another as Wei Keng began making the final batch of tools.

After comparing a series of records he had made in the system, Wei Keng concluded that whenever he arrived somewhere, his "Sixth Sense" could detect the direction of the enemy. He would then use his eyes to confirm the threat, making sure the perception wasn't just a coincidence conjured by his imagination.

Earlier, these Gene Colonies had rushed here in response to Wei Keng's Life Radiation. Then, as Wei Keng approached, they had become as wary as if facing a formidable enemy. By the same token, when Wei Keng arrived, he had also used Life Radiation to locate them.

What was more, Wei Keng was sensing the location of his own remains with increasing precision!

So?

What if?

Wei Keng trembled as he began to form a hypothesis!

The feeling was like dismantling a bomb that could explode at any moment, wondering whether he really had his hand on the line between life and death. Every reason pointed to success, but the thought that "one mistake could mean eternal regret" left his heart clenched and unable to move.

Wei Keng: What if that thought-stealing spider is still wrapping its tendrils around my remains?

You could tell how hot a flame was by touching it.

If his life was surrounded by the enemy's Life Radiation, could he pinpoint it precisely?

If so, Wei Keng felt he might have a slim chance of destroying the enemy and saving himself.

The Wei Kengs who reached the battlefield first numbered five hundred and thirty-seven. They were equipped with light weapons, with Grenade Launchers as their projectile weapons.

Another hundred and twenty men were on their way to the battlefield, carrying four Heavy Machine Guns, 60 mm mortars, forty Nitro-Sugar Rockets, and Satchel Charges. They were still two days away.

When it came to saving someone, the sooner the better. Every extra hour meant another chance for something to go wrong.

But if they wanted to minimize casualties while wiping out the enemy, they would have to wait for the heavy firepower.

It was a choice like facing a railway junction!

Option one: They might save one individual, but several times, or even dozens of times, that many individuals might die.

Option two: They would be extremely unlikely to save this individual, but many fewer individuals would die when they wiped out the enemy.

However, after the hundreds of Wei Kengs exchanged thoughts, their reasoning didn't become muddled. Instead, it gradually grew clearer.

Wei Keng: "What is the purpose of my fighting? To eliminate the enemy? Or to protect myself? Most of the time, eliminating the enemy is the same as protecting myself. There's no conflict. But this time, the cause and effect have to be clear: I'm eliminating the enemy because I want to protect myself."

"Then?" Wei Keng felt completely at peace now, and calmly chose option one.

Even if he was in a weaker position, even if he was the only one left, he would protect himself as long as he kept going and refused to give up.

And even if he was in a position of strength, he would defend his principles, no matter how deadly the obstacles ahead.

Five hundred of him could beat the enemy—that meant they were in a position of strength. No explanations, no weighing the pros and cons. In principle, he simply had to attack!

In the final five minutes, every individual in the Wei Keng Collective confirmed the thousands of observations and targeting measurements they had just made, along with their predictions about the positions of everything around them.

Without pausing for even a moment, they launched their attack.

The Wei Keng Collective spread out on both flanks and launched a frontal assault.

Life Radiation let both sides sense the other's threat, so a sneak attack was useless. Wei Keng wasn't trying to sneak up on them. He was acting openly, moving rapidly within a very short time—so fast that the enemy could see what was happening, but couldn't stop it.

In short, it came down to execution!

The flanking forces moved around the Gene Colony on the hilltop, making no effort to hide. They were sure the enemy couldn't spare enough strength to drive them back from the front.

One by one, the half-ton Giant Beasts on the hilltop charged downhill. When these large predators charged in groups of seven or eight, they resembled a surging flood. The Wei Kengs attacking uphill from below looked frail against the onslaught.

Ten days earlier, Wei Keng had planned around his own capabilities: if he encountered a creature weighing over a ton, he had to avoid it and destroy it with a Sniper Rifle and heavy firepower.

Now, though, they had only twenty-six Sniper Rifles, and those had to suppress the targets on the hilltop. They could only intercept two-thirds of the Giant Beasts charging down toward the front line.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh! The Grenade Launchers opened fire. At a distance of two hundred meters, they laid down a creeping barrage in front of the Wei Kengs attacking uphill. Black Powder and iron fragments had limited stopping power, but the explosions stunned the charging Giant Beasts. During each blast, their sight and hearing were useless, and they could only charge along the route they had seen two seconds earlier.

The Wei Kengs at the head of the charge anticipated where the shells would land and rolled aside just in time.

On World War II battlefields, when tanks charged, there were always brave soldiers who hid among the dead. As a tank rolled toward them, their comrades' machine-gun fire provided cover. They seized the moment to roll beside the tank and shove a bundle of grenades into its treads.

These Giant Beasts were nowhere near as formidable as tanks.

The Submachine Guns opened fire on their flanks.

As a Giant Beast passed close by, the Wei Kengs squeezed their triggers. Before firing, they raised their guns diagonally upward, their arms bent around them. Afterward, they held the guns with the muzzles angled down. At point-blank range, a dozen or so bullets tore through the creature's vulnerable organs, temporarily robbing it of its ability to fight.

When a Giant Beast collapsed on the gentle slope and hadn't yet managed to get back up, a Wei Keng holding a Demolition Rod rushed over. While it bled, he thrust the bamboo pole into its abdomen or throat, then dropped the pole and walked away. (The Demolition Rod was just a grenade tied to a bamboo pole.)

The Wei Kengs nearby raised their guns and fired a loud, chaotic barrage, pinning the creature to the ground until it couldn't move, then waited for the grenade to explode.

And so the sequence went: stun it with a Grenade Launcher, cripple it with a flank attack, then finish it off with a Demolition Rod. Nine times out of ten, it worked. It was the very definition of "planned in advance."

As a human, Wei Keng had imagined as many plans as possible before the battle, rather than relying on brute force alone.

The two colonies fighting here had roughly equal total BMR. Before the battle, though, Wei Keng had looked more frail. Every Giant Beast in the Gene Colony seemed capable of pouncing on him and killing him. Yet once the fighting began, Wei Keng suffered only sixteen casualties as he charged directly from the foot of the hill to the summit.

Wei Keng's strength lay in his brain. The energy his metabolism supplied supported the coordination of many complex minds, proving that this kind of specialization was superior.

By the fifteenth minute of the battle, Wei Keng's frontal assault had reached the hilltop, while the two flanking forces had made their way diagonally up the slopes.

The Gene Colony assessed the situation: it didn't have enough strength to face the "Calamity of Nature" and should withdraw.

At that moment, the Liquid-Drop Spider in the colony swallowed Wei Keng's remains again, hoping to digest him completely within five minutes, obtain his Life Energy, and extract one last piece of information.

It had no idea that this final act of greed perfectly matched one of Wei Keng's best-case scenarios.

Three hundred meters away, Grenade Launchers had been placed in earthen pits, with most of their barrels buried and held in place. They were pointed toward the approximate location indicated by Wei Keng's Life Radiation Perception.

Now that the Liquid-Drop Spider had swallowed his remains, Wei Keng could pinpoint their location.

They loaded the Grenade Launcher with one and a half times the normal amount of propellant. After one shot at that charge, the weapon would be irreparably deformed and unusable. But it could achieve an extended range in the short term. To prevent it from possibly bursting, they had buried it in the pit beforehand.

With the location confirmed, Wei Keng took an Entrenching Tool and gently levered the buried Grenade Launcher into position. He made a final adjustment to the trajectory, wedged a stone in place to stabilize it, and saw that the system's predicted impact point overlapped with the location he sensed.

The Wei Kengs who had their attention on this Artillery Position shouted together, loud and clear: "Fire!"

Eight shells hurtled toward the spot he had predicted! A series of explosions followed, sending countless tiny fragments into the air before they fell back down.

It was over.

By the time the Wei Keng Collective reached the hilltop, the Gene Colony had abandoned its dead and fled north.

Wei Keng cut open the spider's belly and found his own remains inside.

Looking at the version of himself who had barely survived, Wei Keng could hardly imagine that a person could be reduced to such a state. His skin was gone, and most of his muscles had been stripped away.

Perhaps the spider had digested his limbs first, then discarded what was left of the skeleton. There were no eyes in the sockets; the empty cavities led into his brain. Some sort of thread held his internal organs in place, keeping them from spilling through his ribs.

Yet although this version of him couldn't breathe normally, he was still alive. His heart was beating.

The radiation from the Life Field forced his associated organs to stay active. The Remnant Wei Keng's muscles were covered in many tiny openings that opened and closed, forcibly drawing oxygen into his abdomen.

They had to move him now. Just as the Wei Kengs were carefully trying to pull their remains out of the spider's liquid abdomen,

they noticed that the back of Wei Keng's head and the muscles in his lower legs were attached to the spider's remains in many places. It was difficult to tell them apart by their tissue.

Then the spider suddenly twitched, making every Wei Keng jump. Apart from the two who remained close by to keep watch, the others retreated, raised their firearms, and stood guard.

Could the spider still be alive?

Wei Keng didn't think that made sense. They had already severed several major nerve centers, and he couldn't sense any threat from the spider. Then again, that Life Radiation recorded by the system might just be the natural twitching of frog muscles.

Soon, however, Wei Keng confirmed that the spider hadn't come back to life. The remains of his own body were struggling, and seemed to be making the spider's tissue twitch along with them.

The changes that followed left Wei Keng utterly baffled.

After twenty minutes of observation, they found that the Remnant Wei Keng's body was drawing tissue from the spider and absorbing it. Tissue connected to his eye sockets and skin began to grow back.

It all pointed to one thing: this was a world shaped by the Pandora Field, where Carbon-Based Life could be incredibly resilient.

Earlier, the Fused Human Spider had swallowed Wei Keng in an attempt to dominate him through symbiosis and steal the information in his mind. Wei Keng had fought back stubbornly, never giving up. Some of the spider's nerves had even entered the Remnant Wei Keng's body and been partially assimilated by his Life Radiation. Then, when the Wei Keng Collective arrived, the struggle between the two had grown even more intense. By the time the spider finally prepared to digest Wei Keng, it was already too late.

Now the spider had been blasted into a crippled state, and its central nervous system had been torn out. It could no longer control the symbiotic process. And with the Wei Keng Collective here, their Life Radiation was even stronger, making it all the more impossible.

Watching the Remnant Wei Keng lying inside the spider, surrounded by something like amniotic fluid, Wei Keng decided that things might turn out much better than he'd expected.

The system, which hadn't spoken in a long time, suddenly spoke up and offered a suggestion that seemed quite reasonable!

Bai Linglu: "You could try giving him a blood transfusion."

Wei Keng paused, then immediately called for a First Aid Kit and took out a syringe.

The nearest Wei Keng rolled up his sleeve, found a vein, and steeled himself before inserting the needle. As he drew back the plunger, the syringe filled with blood. He pulled out the needle and pressed down on the wound, but the tiny puncture healed in an instant.

In the Pandora Field, medical conditions didn't need to be especially strict. When groups of genetically similar beings gathered together, all other life forms were at a disadvantage.

The Remnant Wei Keng, inside the liquid bubble, broke through its membrane and pushed out a shoulder with a growing forearm. As the shoulder squeezed out of the bubble, the translucent, still-growing arm bent like a noodle.

When a syringe of blood entered the Remnant Wei Keng's vein, they could see the red liquid flowing beneath his translucent skin. Everywhere it went, tissue and capillaries grew at a pace like plants sped up in time.

It worked—astonishingly well.

Within the Life Field, beings of the same kind could only convert Carbon-Based Energy. But they still had to exchange physical matter through their bodies!

One syringe of blood after another was injected into the Remnant Wei Keng's body.

A large number of bubbles emerged from the spider's transparent remains, and liquid like sweat streamed from its outer skin. The liquid bubble rapidly deflated. Clearly, the spider was being forced into a rapid metabolism.

The Remnant Wei Keng felt thirsty, so the Wei Kengs immediately poured water from a canteen into it. The spider's remains began to sweat even more profusely.

Within three hours,

the missing eyes, skin, and even hair had grown back. At last, the body that had endured so much had survived.

Of course, it still wasn't over. The Wei Keng Collective, encamped here, radiated a killing intent so intense that no Flying Bird dared approach within ten kilometers.

[When life is preparing to hunt, its metabolism changes throughout the body. In the Pandora Era, this is reflected in its Life Radiation. Wei Keng wasn't hunting, but his thoughts and emotions were keeping his body tensed, maintaining this state. When radiated through the Life Field, it felt like Killing Intent to weaker creatures!]

The Wei Keng Collective had lost three bodies in the battle! Every Wei Keng felt his scalp prickle, and he could sense several sources of hostile Life Radiation within a radius of dozens of kilometers.

As he thought back over the battle, he realized that all three of the Wei Kengs who had died during the assault had suffered fatal head injuries.

The system clearly recorded the moment each of the three Wei Kengs died. One had been caught by a dying Giant Beast while charging with a Demolition Rod. The other two had been tackled and pinned down by Giant Beasts. All three had died the same way: once the Giant Beast had them under control, they couldn't escape. Long claws and sharp teeth pierced their eye sockets, killing them outright.

Still worked up and a little neurotic from the bloody fight, Wei Keng said, "Those things are learning how to kill people. That alone is reason enough to wipe them out."

Back in the 21st Century, any predator that had hunted humans was captured and brought under control. If people had to risk their lives to catch it, they were allowed to kill it outright.

So Wei Keng had ample justification for issuing himself the order to "pursue the enemy": "Only by killing them outright can I eliminate the threat."

Five hours later

After the Remnant Wei Keng had fully recovered, he rejoined the group and quickly became part of the mental link. His thoughts and consciousness also integrated into the collective during the work that followed.