War to Production, Vanquishing Demons

War to Production, Vanquishing Demons

On the 145th day since Wei Keng had arrived in the Pandora World, the second phase of conflict in this plane had ended as most of his collective returned downstream along the Pearl River.

When four hundred Wei Kengs returned from the dock, they sighed with relief at finally coming back to the ordinary life they had built.

Now, at this little dock, fifty percent of the Wei Kengs were soaked through. On the way back, the Wei Keng Collective had pulled a stunt: they'd inflated animal hides stripped during the battle to increase their rafts' buoyancy, hoping to transport some rusty but not yet corroded stainless steel parts from what might have been an abandoned parking lot.

But the big fish in the lake kept charging at them to take a bite, ignoring Wei Keng's bamboo spears. As a result, the air bladders on one hide raft after another—rafts he'd pinned high hopes on—burst. By the time they reached the port, all the rafts carrying supplies were half submerged, and some had gone completely under. So Wei Keng had to jump into the water and haul everything out himself.

The hide-raft plan had failed completely. In fact, organic materials weren't suitable for shipbuilding in this era. And if not for Wei Keng's Life Radiation, these wooden rafts and hide rafts might have been swarmed and decomposed by small fish, shrimp, and aquatic algae as soon as they hit the water. They had to use steel.

A large pot was set up on the dock. The big fish had been kept alive by being "bowed" with string, and they still had some energy after being taken off the poles. But their fate was to be gutted, chopped into fish paste with chisels, and tossed into the pot!

"Bow Fish" was made by passing a line through a fish's nostril and through the upper part of its head, then tying the other end of the line to its tail, near the anus. The fish was left curved like a drawn bow. This was a folk custom from Fujian and a genuine form of intangible cultural heritage. It helped oxygen reach the gills, allowing the fish to survive out of water for twenty or thirty hours. In the days before oxygen pumps, this was a skill every Chinese fishmonger knew. Wei Keng had found the information in the system and tried it out. It worked very well for keeping fish alive, so he'd treated all the big fish that had chewed on his rafts this way.

The fish paste was mixed with flour and starch extracted from tree seeds, rolled into Fish Balls, and dropped into the pot. Meanwhile, eggs from the Soda Ash mud were taken out, peeled, and chopped into little black cubes, then added to the pot with the fish balls. Scallions, ginger, and garlic were put into a small cloth bag and tossed in as well. Once the water came to a boil, bowl after bowl was ladled out. The Wei Kengs returning from battle began digging into their big bowls.

"After a bowl of preserved-egg-and-fish-ball porridge, even the emperor can't compare—mmm!" A few Wei Kengs huddled in a corner and basked in their own delight, putting on a "sleazy" tone of voice.

War meant tightening one's belt, because everyone in the collective had focused their efforts on handling external threats safely, leaving little time for much else. Even this one pot of preserved-egg-and-fish-ball porridge—with its huge pot, meat chopping, and the preparation of all sorts of seasonings—had required enough bustle to make it feel like New Year's. That would have been impossible during the fighting. On the front lines, Wei Keng had made do with Jing Blocks and salted roast meat.

Now, there would be more free time. If they could fight well, they could build well, too! It was all about working together as a group.

November 3, 132, in the Pandora Era.

At this time of year, frost had begun to settle in the Yellow River Basin in the north, and the highlands of the Southern Kingdom were chilly as well. But the Pearl River Delta remained pleasant. Well, in the Pandora Era, only the place Wei Keng had built could be pleasant.

Zeng Jiakan, a merchant and envoy from Jian City, looked out the window at an era transformed beyond recognition.

Farmland had been cleared in one plot after another. Aside from the grass, the plots stretched out in neat rows.

In plots of different sizes, plants stood in formation like soldiers. Two meters tall, they spread their vibrant leaves across the wilderness. Pollinating Insects of all sizes dotted their small blossoms. These plants bloomed all year, constantly producing new buds and attracting Flying Insects to pollinate them. After pollination, the flowers withered, and the vines fell to the ground and began to ripen. If they weren't harvested, the seeds would swell on the ground, float away in the rain, and take root somewhere new.

The plants resembled those on Earth, but they were no longer quite the same as the plants documented in the Main World.

Zeng Jiakan saw farmers working in the fields. Some had once been soldiers in Jian City, but after being captured, they had been organized into Production Teams. They used Single-Person Push-Type Harvesters to cut apart the fallen vines and gather the fruit. As they inspected each crop, they cut the leaves off plants that produced fewer fallen fruits and piled them around the roots of more productive ones, clearing the way for those high-yield plants. Because humans interfered with the Natural World in this way, the strongest in the Species Community grew ever stronger: the high-yield plants flourished while the low-yield ones became firewood.

Among the neat ranks of plants in these plots, there were always a few gaps. The plants that had once grown there had been cut up for firewood because their yields were too low. Wei Keng's plan was to fill each gap with plants pulled from the plot that had lost the most plants after every growing cycle. A new row would be planted in the empty plot, while the plots that had been replenished began another round of cutthroat competition.

The Pearl River Delta had good sunlight and water, making it suitable for growing Leeks? Mm, it was a great place to develop agriculture.

Wei Keng said, "Three harvests a year? Not enough, not enough. Young crops have to work harder. They should strive and embrace the Wolf Spirit. Other fields can drop a pound of fruit every week. Why can't you?"

With Wei Keng and the other farmers tending to them, the crops kept dropping fruit once they had matured.

Mm, the fallen fruit tasted like peanuts. The people who had settled here happily gathered it all up and sent it to the Oil Press Workshop to extract Peanut Oil and separate out the dregs.

To get more fruit, these former prisoners squatted in their plots wearing big straw hats, counting the fallen fruit on every plant from the moment the sky began to lighten. This miserly landlord's approach left the crops no chance to evolve toward slacking off. The sharp eyes of the farmers caught every fruit that fell empty—every one lacking oil and starch. They might never improve much in complicated cultural subjects, but perhaps the attitude they brought to farming really was ingrained in their genes.

After reaching the city, Zeng Jiakan ate a meal at the Brick House inn. A steaming, fragrant pot of Jing Zi was brought out.

Jing Blocks! In Jian City, they were a staple food. Zeng Jiakan's family had lived on them when he was young. But once he'd joined Jian City's commercial companies, he'd come to despise such cheap food. Yet now? The mushrooms, cut into decorative shapes and seasoned, made him pick up the bamboo chopsticks beside him. He roasted them over the charcoal fire provided, then eagerly dug in.

Ten minutes later, the pot was empty! He'd also drunk three bowls of Flour Paste Soup, and there was a plate of stir-fried vegetables, too. What kind of vegetables were they? Wei Keng couldn't say. When he'd found the plant in the cultivation area, he'd thought it looked tender, so he'd set aside a vegetable garden for it.

Any excellent ingredient! It needed salt to taste good and oil to smell delicious! That was an unchanging truth.

After setting down his plate, Zeng Jiakan thought it over. He decided not to open the toothpick box on the table like the commoners here. He stood and looked out at the street. At first, he'd watched the bustling crowds with ease, but then he suddenly realized that many of them had the same appearance. Only then did he remember that this was no ordinary city. Just a few months ago, people in Jian City had regarded it as a Ghostly Realm occupied by strange beings.

He stared blankly at a place he should have found strange and remained wary of. But the merchant and envoy had to admit that he felt more at home here.

The transformation in productivity at the settlement Wei Keng had built could be traced back to a discovery he'd made during the fighting in the north:

When Wei Keng had swept through the area, he captured a Node Creature that had dared to carry its own severed head. It had been in an extreme emotional state, and Wei Keng had started thinking about how to damage its Regenerative Ability and life functions. He hadn't just burned it with charcoal; he'd also stabbed it with a piece of wood.

But a Node Creature was a Node Creature. When plant-based organic matter was inserted into it, it didn't swell up like a human hand after a splinter was stuck in it, only to have the splinter pulled out. Instead, the wood fused directly with it. At the time, Wei Keng had been at the peak of his darkened state. The system's prompt had finally brought him back to himself, and he'd begun to study what had happened.

Before the Pandora Era, plants in the Natural World could be cultivated through Grafting Technology. A Master Gardener could make one tree bloom with seven or eight kinds of flowers and bear three kinds of fruit!

But in this world, the information of countless weak, individual life forms spread freely through the Natural World. Grafting Technology no longer existed. Insert a branch from any plant, and within a week, the genes in all its cell nuclei would become the same as those in the main plant.

Grafting didn't work, but direct hybridization did. The genes of two species could mix within a Node Creature in a Gene Colony and produce a new species.

There was precedent for this. The Mechanical War Beast varieties found in the surviving human city-states around the world could be counted. There were six hundred and seventy of them. Most had been created before the Pandora Field spread across the globe: humans had taken Node Creatures from the Pandora Field with their Automated Combat Machines, brought them to laboratories on its outskirts, and implanted them with genes to induce the evolution of the hybrids they wanted.

Once the desired hybrid had evolved, it was, in theory, part of the new Species Community the Node Creature was trying to build! So after the hybrid was born, the original Node Creature had to be destroyed to fix the hybrid's genes and free it from the constraints of its original community. Then, generation after generation, it adapted to human Mechanical Modification, becoming a Companion Species that was malformed by Natural World standards but suited to human needs. Just before the Pandora Field spread, Earth's technology had been at its peak, and the varieties of Mechanical War Beasts had been at their most numerous. Now, capturing a Node Creature was extremely difficult, and this technology had vanished from the small city-states for lack of opportunities to practice it.

Strictly speaking, the crops Wei Keng had developed after the war ended last month were simply the most basic version of this technology. The principle was the same, but why was it the simplest? Plant hybridization was much easier than animal hybridization. An animal deformity could be fatal, but even the most deformed plants could sprout. In the Pandora Field, hybridization could even happen without the Life Field of a Node Creature. But out in the wild, anything that didn't belong to a Gene Colony would quickly deteriorate.

Even so, using a Node Creature to rapidly cultivate plant species seemed far too extravagant. For the human city-states that remained, the conditions needed to confront and capture a Node Creature were too demanding. As for Wei Keng grabbing one alive with his bare hands, people of this era couldn't even imagine it.

The harm from the Life Field radiated by the creature Wei Keng had captured was, to ordinary people, just like that of a nuclear reactor. It represented the point where the life activities of an entire community converged, carrying vast amounts of Carbon-Based Life information that could directly insert itself into the Gene Sequences of nearby individuals. That was far more severe than the chromosomal abnormalities caused when simple Neutron Radiation from a reactor shattered genes.

If modern humans were lucky enough to obtain a Node Creature, they would certainly use it to cultivate stronger Mechanical War Beasts! That would let them control more territory and open up more Transportation Nodes between cities.

The Transmigrators who had come to this world before had all reached the same conclusion: war beasts were the core of this world! If you could defeat an Apostle Level Node Creature and create a powerful war-beast species while it was weakened, you could raise your city's influence to the highest tier. And so, their way of thinking had been led along that path.

Wei Keng, by contrast, was a blank slate. He had no Transmigration Experience, but his thinking was independent: planting crops mattered. His land had to be planted with things he'd grown himself!

That Node Creature still hadn't died. But what about the rest of the community it represented? Wei Keng had wiped out every other species in the war. When all its Subordinate Species had gone extinct, the Central Node of a community would also perish. Yet it was still alive, which meant that its Lower Hybrids had claimed enough energy in the Natural World to support a community.

Five kilometers from the settlement, they had dug out a large pond and lined it with Blue Brick. Several channels fed into either end. The enormous, plump Node Creature that had once swallowed Wei Keng now lay in the pond. It had begun to turn into a plant: countless former Flesh and Blood Veins had become water-absorbing tendrils, and now it hid in the middle of the pond like a fresh, juicy radish.

Of course, wherever it hid, four cement walkways reached into the center of the Artificial Pool. Every attempt to escape was futile.

The administrators here were all Wei Kengs. Every day, they used Large Iron Pliers to hook the creature and inserted steel-pipe-like tubes inside it to collect tissue and observe its vital signs!

The community that had once spawned countless animals had been suppressed by Wei Keng. Now it was being observed and controlled here, step by step, as it transformed into the Central Node of a Plant Gene Colony.

If it wouldn't transform, Wei Keng would help it transform.

Every day, excellent crops gathered from the Farmland were brought here. The entire life forms were inserted into the creature, physically transmitting their Gene Information. Wei Keng patiently taught it that photosynthesis was good, and that photosynthesis contributed to the world.

Now, the Gene Colony had more or less accepted its role as a producer within the Farmland Ecosystem Wei Keng had built.

By the pond, the Wei Kengs finished their collection work for the day and returned the Long Rod Iron Hook to the Card Slot at the pond's edge. They wheeled the Small Cart loaded with glass sample tubes back to the laboratory, leaving four Wei Kengs to carry out the final inspection.

One Wei Keng clapped his hands and looked at the pond, its surface floating with leaves above a mass of roots. Suddenly, he was overcome by a bout of romanticism. "This scene makes me want to recite a poem called Pond Moonlight."

Another Wei Keng crouched beside the pond, addressing the Super Large Radish as it slowly fled from him. "You've been enlightened by me. Abandon evil and embrace goodness. Offer yourself to all living beings, and your merit will be immeasurable, immeasurable. Come on, I'll chant the Great Compassion Mantra for you. Try to understand it."