"Where do I go from here?" After the war ended, discussions within the Wei Keng Collective on topics like this—on the connection between the self and the development of society and civilization—became increasingly common. Analyzing the logic behind each individual's thoughts was no less important than any of Wei Keng's wartime considerations of how to "eliminate the outside."
During the production and development that began in the spring of 2433,
with twenty ships opening routes along the Pearl River, Wei Keng's settlement pattern was no longer a single cluster. Instead, across a hundred-kilometer radius and along forty waterways, a series of isolated smokestack factories, residential areas, and defensive bunkers formed scattered integrated outposts.
During the near-modern Information Industrial Revolution—in other words, the 21st Century—industries could coordinate their supporting infrastructure through convenient transportation routes.
Some fellow who'd had a sudden urge to build himself a car realized he was short a few parts. He followed the transportation routes to look for them: Wang Village East of the River made screws, and Li Village West of the River made wrenches. He bought both, then decided he also needed welding. Oh, Boss Qian was two kilometers north, and his factory could do that. Then he realized he was short a bearing. No problem—there were still factories within the transportation network that could supply him. That was an Industrial park.
Wei Keng's Industrial Technology wasn't complicated at the moment. An entire Industrial park could fit inside one factory building! The late-nineteenth-century industrial model had been based on individual hubs. Once the Western powers had built one or two industrial cities around such hubs, they could establish colonies overseas to supply them with raw materials.
But Wei Keng didn't want a civilization model where a central Steam engine boiler sent pressure out to everything around it. He wanted a model of common development where every point in an electrical system was connected in parallel and powered up together.
From the original settlements to the new gathering points, boatloads of red bricks traveled along the network of waterways until they reached suitable plots of land. Then they claimed the land outright, built large compounds, and processed the local raw materials on site.
Each outpost had only twenty or thirty Wei Kengs. Of course, after merchants had tentatively started bringing in young men who'd gotten into trouble and were fleeing punishment, some factories had more hired workers than Wei Kengs.
In a way, this dispersed layout made it easier for the locals to get used to living alongside a small number of Wei Kengs. They wouldn't be surrounded by a large number of them in one place and develop the Uncanny Valley Effect.
This design also magnified Wei Keng's potential! More than a hundred outposts along the waterways could maintain a unified level of production through ship traffic between them, while also expanding far more easily than a single Industrial park.
At the very least, each outpost had just one building, with open land all around. Whenever people arrived, they could expand at any time!
Across the Yue Region, there were at least twenty large Human Civilization settlements and five hundred thousand survivors.
Now that Wei Keng had driven out the other Gene Colonies from the plains, the next step was to draw the humans of this era onto the plains and integrate them into a unified whole.
At every outpost, Wei Kengs organizing production now took up textbooks to reeducate the newly hired workers, teaching them Old Era production knowledge and helping them understand their relationship to the workings of society.
On the plains, Wei Keng was working hard to communicate with humans and establish a social order. But the Wei Kengs exploring the outskirts were wreaking havoc, acting without restraint and abandoning all limits.
When spring came this year, and the rain had just nourished all things,
Wei Keng, now fully equipped, once again charged into the slightly drier jungle. The Wei Kengs could now clearly sense the Life Radiation of the colonies, and they had Assault Rifles, light machine guns, and other weapons. So the Exploration Team had once again been reduced to groups of thirty. Following the areas marked on the map, they destroyed and slaughtered every living thing they came across, then set fire to the mountains after clearing them out.
The flames swallowed one mountain after another. Once the fires had passed, Wei Kengs standing at high points rebuilt the map, surveyed the rivers and hydrological data, and handed everything over to the system for modeling.
After conducting a detailed assessment, Wei Keng drilled blasting holes in the mountains at dozens of locations and planted explosives. With a thunderous boom, some of the mountainsides collapsed through the smoke, blocking gullies that were now little more than streams.
[While establishing order, they were also destroying it. This contradictory behavior led the Wei Keng Collective to feel the need for self-examination. Human beings are simply this complex. Once their actions exceed what traditional desires can explain, sustaining those actions requires a deeper core of thought—not the fleeting enthusiasm of a child.]
Tracing things back to their roots, Wei Keng first began defining how past societies had shaped them: when someone grew up as part of society, society instilled all kinds of rules and concepts in them, and they were expected to follow them by default. If they didn't, they would be punished.
Some more selfish Wei Kengs began to criticize these rules further: for an ordinary individual, some rules benefited them more than they harmed them in the social cooperation they participated in. But other rules weren't much help to them at all. They existed merely to help rulers maintain their rule through ritual and moral codes.
As Wei Kengs pored over historical records in their memories, they tried to summarize the laws of history. Since two key aspects stood out in this analysis, the Wei Keng Collective split into two lines of thought.
The forward-looking Wei Kengs: As society developed, more and more things required cooperation. So many new regulations came into being. For example, ancient people had no need to build roads and bridges across mountains and great rivers. A civilization that took a hundred years to build a single palace could afford to lose some slaves during its construction; the human species as a whole could bear the cost. That was why ordinary people in ancient times had no workplace safety regulations.
The self-reflective Wei Kengs: Society's interests also increased the ruling class's need for control. For example, in the internet age, software companies facing rampant piracy amid the unlimited spread of information would file lawsuit after lawsuit, and repeatedly work with legal teams to carry out real-world enforcement against those "chivalrous thieves making pirated online games."
After that, the two viewpoints in Wei Keng's thoughts converged by different paths, then branched out again into several more!
The indignant Wei Kengs: So rules and regulations were instilled in "people of average ability" through a constant barrage of information and basic education. But ordinary people? They rarely had the time or energy to question whether the things they assumed were right or wrong were actually rules that helped social cooperation and, in turn, benefited them—or dogmas that helped keep the ruling order stable!
Some things weren't right simply because they were right. Maybe other people had repeated them a thousand times, crushed every dissenting voice, and worn down the arguments of the masses too busy working to produce. And so they became the only truth!
And some things weren't wrong enough to be crimes! They simply spread widely, gathered enough public resentment online, and were eventually condemned in an emotional frenzy! Laws made up on the spot!
[For example, people gather the resentment caused by mischievous brats making trouble for others, then distill it through public opinion until the brats are condemned to deserve death.
Or, for example, people gather sympathy for neglected small animals, then keep stirring people's emotions as the sentiment spreads until it becomes supreme and begins to claim resources as its rightful due.]
With their logic clear, the Wei Keng Collective pursued its past confusion relentlessly: So at that time, many things in society that were useless to "me" and "most ordinary people"—things like "kindness, justice, and even the law"—were imposed on us.
As the Wei Keng Collective gradually gained clarity, it began to divide history according to this principle: If most of the rules newly created in a country's society benefited most people through social cooperation, then that society was in an upswing. On the other hand, if social rules were mixed with a great many dogmas unrelated to the interests of the general public, yet everyone was expected to obey them, then decline was inevitable.
The Wei Kengs who thought more deeply: During a historical cycle, when decline sets in, we can't tell which of the old rules are necessary and which are useless. So we might as well abandon them all completely, then choose again!
As their thoughts grew clearer, the Wei Kengs began to defend themselves openly: "So I'm not turning evil now. Right, I'm not turning evil. Definitely not.
"As an ordinary person, I can't understand all the rules of society.
"And the social organization I belong to can't patiently educate me at the grassroots level. So me! Abandoning a lot of rules I don't understand is perfectly normal. Right, there's nothing special about it."
And so Wei Keng began to hold their heads high. At that moment, they were like a hot-blooded youth who'd just crawled out of the confusion of adolescence and found a "reason adults would call rebellious."
"Nature conservation? Screw that!"
"Respect life? Fuck that!"
"Animals have feelings, so you mustn't abuse them? Who's going to tell me what to do now?"
Wei Keng said, "I only need to know what's good and bad for me. I don't need to know my place." Breaking free from the darkness brought a reckless vitality!
Originally, turning evil meant hurting others and yourself. As you destroyed the world, you also destroyed the things your mind believed to be right, and with them your sense of good and evil, right and wrong.
But now! Wei Keng simply rejected many of those standards of right and wrong and went straight back to the basics.
Wei Keng stubbornly began to believe: Labor was right. Communicating and cooperating with their own kind was right. Supporting themselves through their own efforts was right. Fair exchange was right! But beyond that?
Starting over from scratch, did they need to care about right and wrong when its connection to their interests was unclear? Feel guilty over things unrelated to their survival? Regret offending the solemnity of those who had once stood above them?
The Dynastic Cycle Law!
When an era ended, the rulers who wielded its many scepters of power could go die. But ordinary people like them could simply discard what they hadn't understood in the past and keep moving forward.
Palaces turned to scorched earth in the flames, while those digging the soil in the fields remained full of life.
Wei Keng had grown more cheerful, but in the consciousness of the many life colonies in the Pandora World, disaster had truly awakened in that moment!
Before, Wei Keng had wreaked havoc in this world by violating the shared sense of right and wrong held by both sides. The colonies called Wei Keng a natural disaster, and for a while, Wei Keng couldn't find evidence to prove otherwise.
But now, Wei Keng could stare them down without blinking and say, "That sense of right and wrong is yours. I don't think I need to be responsible for it. You call me a Fourth Calamity, and I'll sue you for libel. Your deaths are only natural—what gives you the right to call me a disaster?"
The defiant attitude Wei Keng ultimately settled on was this: You—the consciousnesses of the life colonies—refuse to communicate or show mutual respect. You keep insisting that only your own side is righteous, and when you use cruel methods against me, you have no moral standards at all! So why should I follow moral standards when dealing with beings like you?
With this mindset, Wei Keng now dealt with the entire northern ecosystem without any feeling.
This destruction peaked in April. After confirming the presence of three Gene Colonies in the northeastern Yue Region, Wei Keng sealed them off from four directions at once, then started fires upwind. If this fire had been set in the Main World, it wouldn't just have meant a life sentence. They'd have been mowed down by machine guns on a firing range.
Because setting fires back then meant destroying collective property and endangering the lives of the public, and that had to be punished. But in this era, the natural environment didn't belong to the collective they were part of, so it held no sanctity.
Burn!
An eight-meter-high wall of fire, driven by strong winds, swept forward at thirty meters per second. From a mountaintop, Wei Keng gazed at the towering curtain of billowing smoke ahead of the flames they'd set. Under its shadow, strange creatures of every size fled north in panic.
The scene formed a "World Famous Painting!"
When Wei Keng began treating this world with the same attitude they would use to kill rats, they no longer felt "resentment" over their past casualties. Instead, they objectively reflected that their earlier preparations had been inadequate and that they hadn't fully understood the nature of their targets: "nonhuman, incapable of communication, impossible to influence emotionally."
In this Pandora Field, something in Wei Keng's genes seemed to have been unlocked!
One branch of Earth's four-billion-year-old top evolutionary species, humanity's distinctive trait was its Intelligent Thought. But what was intelligence?
Intelligent Thought was neither kindness nor evil, nor did it appear out of nowhere in contrast to all other life.
Intelligent Thought was a high-level life trait developed on the basis of animal instincts, one that could weigh the pros and cons of more complex matters further into the future.
And in the Cambrian, successive generations had used genetic records to select which directions were advantageous,
while the species of the Jurassic might already have had their dimly developed brain and nervous systems take part in evolutionary selection, but their choices were still determined by whether genes built proteins that strengthened their muscles.
By the Fourth Period, the brains of a whole host of top mammals had grown more capable! The primates had surged ahead, distinguishing themselves above all others. Animal instincts underwent a transformation at this point.
When the cerebral cortex evolved specialized functions for identifying others of its own kind, understanding their behavior, and imagining what they might be thinking,
concepts like kindness and evil appeared among humans. From then on, complex animal instincts were constantly packaged and explained to one another by humans, thinking beings gifted with the ability to deceive. Thus, human nature was described and interpreted.
Human nature was essentially animal instinct weighing things from a longer-term perspective.
This was a direction already present in the evolution of life on Earth. But now, with the arrival of the Pandora Field, it had become muddled. Even Human Civilization itself hadn't had time to understand it, let alone take up the part of itself that was its greatest advantage as a life-form.
If a living thing couldn't use every means at its disposal, without regard for the cost, to pursue a direction that helped it survive, then it would be eliminated.
Now Wei Keng had begun to compete with all their might! They were doing so with the uncompromising thoroughness of a dominant species. That was never good news for other species.
Across the East Asia Continent and the West Pacific, countless life colonies had stolen genes capable of supporting higher thought from humans. Though they'd only been conscious for less than a hundred years, they suddenly felt it!
At 113 degrees east longitude and 22 degrees north latitude, the Life Radiation of the Wei Keng Collective in that region grew increasingly selfish and hostile.
The total amount of Life Radiation emitted by Wei Keng hadn't increased significantly. They hadn't done as other Gene Colonies did—constantly merging with all kinds of new genes to expand their territory, like poor people in Marvel.
But! The degree to which the Wei Keng Collective influenced the genes of living things across a vast area was gradually approaching this world's "Apostle Level."
Fire
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