One Wei Keng was insignificant compared to the Gene Colony's many strange creatures.
But once Wei Keng's numbers exceeded a hundred, it became a qualitative change! Even if they couldn't beat the Gene Colony head-on, they could rely on their endurance and organizational skills to quickly move in, make brief contact, and withdraw without losing a single one of their number—then move in again, and withdraw again.
Once Wei Keng's numbers exceeded five hundred, they could truly run rampant throughout the entire jungle.
In this era, large, aggressive carbon-based groups found it difficult to maintain a gathering of more than a thousand while traveling long distances. Their logistical capabilities simply couldn't support it.
Logistics—this referred to a living being's ability to control and gather energy from an area. Old Era Humans had cultivated a single crop across entire alluvial plains, collected and concentrated organic matter, then gathered it through transportation networks. This was what had allowed armies of tens of thousands to march over a hundred miles to wage war. The Gene Colonies, still in a state of barbarism, had no such capabilities.
Within a week, Wei Keng had set his sights on the four Gene Colonies at the forefront of this area and begun sweeping them away.
Strategically, it was a sweep—a storm wind scattering fallen leaves. Tactically, however, it was a cat playing with a mouse!
For the first five days of the engagement, Wei Keng had patiently harried them. It was a lesson from the fighting around Jian City: kill the horses, destroy their transport capacity. Once the enemy's transportation forces were immobilized by your interference, it was like the weak stave in a barrel—every other factor contributing to their combat strength would be compromised.
The heavy sniper rifle was, without question, the most effective military supply Wei Keng had acquired this time. The huge herbivorous beasts, with their enormous bellies and tiny heads, became Wei Keng's priority targets.
On October 17, sixty kilometers northeast of the Qingyuan Ruins, Wei Keng Collective faced off against one of the invading groups. This was the battlefield.
Wei Keng's current strategic red line was that the northern Gene Colonies could not cross the Qingyuan Ruins.
This was apparent from satellite images: the northernmost part of the Zhushui Jiao alluvial plain was Qingyuan. Farther north lay nothing but mountains. Wei Keng would climb one or two mountains when carrying out production activities, but would never treat mountain trails as a hobby. There weren't even step counters on this plane to record your steps. Bai Linglu remarked, "There could be."
Back to the battlefield at hand.
In the mountain forest, the Gene Colonies' supply beasts had grown skeletal. They hid in the jungle, afraid to come out. They could eat trees, but what about water?
"Crack!" A sharp gunshot rang out from the mountaintop. By the riverbank, before the sound had even reached it, the head of a giant beast trying to drink water exploded, and it crashed to the ground. Its massive body lay half-submerged in the water. Small crustaceans in the lake and cockroaches in the surrounding soil caught the scent of blood and came to claim their share. The two kinds of small creatures might even end up biting each other.
The giant beast that had supplied blood to the entire Gene Colony's upper ranks had died like this. Judging by the dozens of skeletons along the riverbank, it wasn't the first.
Though smaller creatures would decompose these species after their deaths, returning their energy and nutrients to the powerful groups in the jungle, without these giant beasts as the primary channel for converting matter into energy, the Gene Colony's highest-ranking Node Creatures suffered enormous losses when acquiring energy. Those losses could no longer sustain the metabolic demands of their internal groups.
And the most helpless thing for the Gene Colonies was this: the Wei Keng who had launched the snipe was eight hundred meters away! Even their most combat-capable individuals couldn't retaliate from that distance.
Those Node Creatures, along with the surrounding giant beasts weighing a ton, were like the Yamato and Nagato classes—the pillars of the empire in the Pacific theater of World War II. "The most frustrating thing in the world is that there's fighting across the vast Pacific, and I never make it to a single battle."
For the first five days of the battle, the Wei Kengs refused to meet these giant beast groups in a stand-up fight!
Wei Keng taunted them from afar. "Just stay there. I'll plant you an orange tree, okay?"
Keeping the huge, slow-moving, slow-metabolizing supply beasts away from water was like cutting off an industrial nation's lifeline of oil in wartime! Keep it up, and victory was assured.
And so, Wei Keng, lying in wait by the water, bottled up four groups.
These four groups had originally possessed several times the Life Radiation of Wei Keng, but just four days without water cut it in half.
And today—
On the evening of the fifth day, the four Gene Colonies finally couldn't take it anymore and launched an attack.
When Wei Keng saw large numbers of swift species burst out as a fast-moving force, he was delighted. He had been waiting for the lighter creatures within the Gene Colonies to separate from the heavy, thick-skinned units.
That night, the straight lines drawn by bullets and the arcs traced by grenade launchers combined to form a geometric night.
Through the Night Vision Goggles, wave after wave of charging beasts were completely stopped by the Fire Net. Wei Keng's homemade rifle rounds alone shattered their skulls from a hundred meters away. When the beasts closed to within fifty meters, the Heavy Machine Guns could tear their bodies apart. Of course, the machine guns only fired four bursts at them. Most of the time, the shrapnel from the grenade launchers did the killing.
In just one night, six hundred swift creatures were taken out at eight ambush points. By the time the giant beasts had covered only half the distance, the vanguard was already gone.
This kind of separation was deadly.
When the Gene Colonies realized there was no hope and turned the giant beasts around, Wei Keng, having finished the sniping battle, blocked their way again with a Type 60 mortar and Heavy Machine Guns. There was no need to worry about fast-moving groups attacking from either side, so they could fire at their leisure.
The giant beasts' powerful healing abilities couldn't save them from the heaviest barrage. After the Wei Kengs hit them with a thousand rounds in five minutes, even the thickest Health Bar couldn't keep them alive. Their blood drained away, and their soft tissues suffered so much damage that they couldn't regenerate quickly enough.
Once one fell, several Wei Kengs would raise four-meter bamboo poles, drive them into a wound, then set off the bundle of Hand Grenades at the end. There was no coming back from the resulting explosion.
By the morning of the sixth day, the radiation output of the four Gene Colonies within a radius of one hundred and twenty kilometers had already fallen below Wei Keng's. And, with no water, their life values were still plummeting.
Inside the system space,
Bai Linglu, with her long hair falling to her waist, sat high on a glowing chair. Oh, she had hair only in this space. Returning from the Gravity Well Mouth left her so smooth and hairless that she couldn't bear to look in a mirror.
She looked at the latest figures. Pressing her lips together, she controlled herself and made no sound. If she opened her mouth to describe it, she wouldn't be able to keep the delight and pride out of her voice!
The Wei Keng Collective's figures for mental resonance had increased fourfold again.
According to the Main World side's measure of how much consciousness could increase the scale of Node Creatures' ability to receive Information Enthalpy, the average value for each Wei Keng individual had surged from 43 to 129. Though this average had dropped somewhat from its peak, it still remained above 80.
One individual's peak value had reached 675. Consciousness above 1,000 was High Minister.
Wei Keng's numbers weren't just one individual. On this plane, they existed in groups, by the hundreds! Bai Linglu had checked: among all the transmigration cases, including the various Transmigrators caught up in the current Plane War, there was no phenomenon like Wei Keng's. Such an explosive surge in the scale of consciousness was extraordinarily rare.
After what seemed like a night of slaughter, the entire sixth day passed without incident. The mountain forest here was silent.
But the lives of the few Gene Colonies that Wei Keng had pinned down continued to decline. Their existence as living beings had become utterly pitiful.
However, on the seventh day, Wei Keng discovered widespread cannibalism within the groups. Many individuals were shrinking. It was clear that the hunger inside them had reached a critical point; they could barely even maintain normal movement.
So the Wei Kengs gathered their smaller groups together, forming one large group, and prepared to wipe out the colonies one by one. After marching all morning and going around two mountains, they reached their first target. It was the strongest of the Gene Colonies Wei Keng had trapped, and the one Wei Keng had confirmed was responsible for killing one of his individuals.
After the observing Wei Kengs determined the wind direction, the action team lit a woodpile at the foot of the hill. Thick smoke billowed up over the mountaintop. On another path halfway up the mountain, Wei Keng set up firearms to block the way, determined not to let even a fox-sized creature escape.
After half an hour of smoking them out, they covered several Smoke Piles with earth. The smoke at the foot of the mountain stopped at once, but the smoke above hadn't yet cleared. Just then, the Wei Keng Collective charged up the mountain. They smashed through everything in their path. Some beasts remained frenzied right up until their deaths, but faced with coordinated attacks from multiple directions, even those crazed animals ended up as nothing but deflated skins.
On reaching the summit, Wei Keng quickly found the Node Creature with the strongest Life Radiation. But when he saw it, he fell silent once again.
A week ago, after seeing what remained of himself, melted into a ruin by the Thought-Stealing Spider, Wei Keng had already prepared himself to accept any horror this world could offer. But this world could still find ways to challenge his limits.
What he saw now was a two-meter-tall Corpulent Creature, sitting upright. It looked much like a toad, but it wasn't one. Its mouthparts belonged to a Death Worm. It had no eyes—or rather, its eyes were in its neck.
A ring of four lump-like growths, like tumors, protruded from its neck. On closer inspection, they were human heads. The eyes in those heads allowed the Corpulent Creature to see.
Three of the heads had clearly been there for some time. Their skulls seemed to have shrunk, gradually collapsing into the skin. Their features were impossible to make out. But Wei Keng was sure the newest head was his own.
Gazing at his own remains, Wei Keng said nothing.
As Wei Keng drew closer, the head that was his opened its eyes. When its eyes, already parasitized by the Corpulent Creature, met the gazes of so many of him, they seemed to sense the excitement of the gene radiation and flickered briefly. But the light vanished in an instant, like a spark leaping from dead ashes before going out for good.
This didn't mean there was still a living consciousness inside the head. Rather, Wei Keng's powerful Life Radiation had briefly resonated with the remnants of the same-gene tissue in the head, allowing the Wei Keng Collective to read the final events recorded in part of its brain tissue.
The Wei Keng Collective consciousness, integrated through combat, received a complete image:
Half a month ago, when the squad stationed in the north was cornered by a beast horde, Wei Keng Reconnaissance Team 98, along with 94 and 93, had fought a delaying action so some Self Individuals could return and deliver the news. Individuals 84 through 91 had withdrawn.
[Individual 87 was the one captured by the Thought-Stealing Spider. The withdrawal group had also failed to escape; the Thought-Stealing Spider had intercepted them. Only 87 had been saved, when the Wei Keng Collective arrived in time.]
The three Wei Keng individuals had made their final, desperate stand behind the earthen mounds around the temporary outpost.
Individual 98 had shot one enemy and stabbed another before being knocked down. Knowing there was no way out, Wei Keng bit open a Hand Grenade, held the smoking thing between his upper and lower jaws, and gave the "giant bear" that had tackled him a kiss goodbye. His death had been painless.
Individual 94 died inside a wooden hut. After four beasts broke in and mauled him until he was a bloody mess, Individual 94 endured the pain, shut the door, knocked over the Oil Lamp, and struck a lighter at the same time. The flame caught the branches he had just dried and piled up to use as cushions.
Amid the billowing smoke, he hugged one of the beasts, ignoring its bites, and rolled to the doorway, bracing himself against it to keep the door shut so the creatures couldn't break it down and escape. As he gradually lost consciousness in the smoke, feeling the last little sting of the blazing fire on his skin, he couldn't help reflecting, "Oh, this ending feels just like my Previous Life!"
Individual 93 was the last to die. He watched helplessly as his belly was cut open, and all his strength drained away. His gun was out of ammunition. Even if it hadn't been, Wei Keng hadn't had the courage to pull the trigger and end his own life. And when he sensed what had happened to the other two versions of himself, he was left adrift, still undecided about which path to take.
93 said, "I still want to live. I don't want to keep dying. There should be another way. Why not try?"
But then the monsters carried him in their pincers to this Corpulent Creature.
Faced with such a terrifying thing, 93—Wei Keng as an individual, all alone—couldn't keep his fear at bay.
It took a moment's courage to make a true sacrifice. If that moment passed, you might become a coward instead! 93 had no resonance in his Life Radiation, and no support from the final Blood Courage that came in battle. Instead, he wavered and made one cowardly choice after another.
93: Once I realized this thing could communicate, I wanted to beg for mercy.
In this final fragment of memory, 93 laid out his pleas in detail, repeatedly emphasizing that his group had a great secret.
Of course, he had to claim that he knew an even greater secret, to buy time. In 93's logic, an interrogator had to torture you little by little to extract the secret without killing you. Each time you couldn't endure it, you revealed a little more and dragged things out. This was what Wei Keng had read in a manual for captured reconnaissance soldiers.
But then he saw that the members of the withdrawal team he had covered had also been captured and brought back. One by one, those demons had disposed of them over the course of two days. In the end, 93 despaired. He stopped begging for mercy and faced the enemy with contempt, calmly stating, "I don't know anything."
"Better to put away my weakness and die with some dignity." That was 93's final thought. Then he watched as the Corpulent Creature opened the bloody maw of its Death Worm, and endless darkness swallowed him. All his senses were ripped apart by pain, his brain and consciousness forcibly destroyed, and even some of his memories were scattered into fragments.
Now that Wei Keng's consciousness had finished reading the memories of his own final moments, he fell silent.
He couldn't lie to himself. He had the Blood Courage to fight when there was no way out. He had the helplessness of wanting to find a way to live when faced with the same ending again. And, in the end, there had been even greater despair and self-loathing.
The four Wei Kengs who approached the Node Creature picked up their bayonets, wanting to carve himself and the other three heads out. The Corpulent Creature struggled, making it difficult for them. After thinking it over, Wei Keng only removed his own head, placed it in a box, and prepared to bury it where 98 and 94 had fallen. That was because 93's final thought had been that perhaps it would have been better if he had died there instead.
Then the Wei Kengs looked toward the ugly Node Creature, and flames of extremity appeared in their eyes. The flames didn't seem out of place at all. They seemed to have been part of Wei Keng all along.
The sun sank slowly. Though the bonfire had been lit, its dancing flames seemed only to make the darkness flicker between the Wei Keng individuals. Wei Keng's shadow stretched out impossibly long, until at last it merged with the gloomy jungle.
I can't remember which one I used as a reference for that monster. It's been a whole year—maybe Nurgle, maybe Slaanesh. Oh, I'll go open the door. Loyalty's come home.
Before you continue