The Great Flood

The Great Flood

On Earth's Main Plane, the Gravity Equilibrium Point at the planet's center was busier than ever. Information from the surface kept pouring in, then was extinguished as it penetrated the Space Membrane, only to return from within it. Perhaps too much information was being sent, because the quantum field at the center of Earth's gravitational field had also undergone a unique change.

Throughout the entire planetary core, the rules governing information's back-and-forth reverberation had altered the microscopic structures formed by nickel-iron atoms.

The great technological revolution continued!

A large number of High Minister Transmigrators had now made new breakthroughs within the plane system. To obtain support from Information Enthalpy more conveniently, they simply began crafting Energy Chips near the planetary core.

In other words, iron-nickel atoms were arranged into structures that absorbed energy through iron fusion in nuclear reactions, as well as through the absorption of energy by other Heavy Elements. During this process, the Quantum Birth-Death Field at the planet's core recorded the Main World's Mass-Energy Conversion and processed information for the various planes across dimensions.

The war had enabled the first Shuttlers to go without relying on Information Enthalpy from Earth, at least in the short term.

Economic independence was true independence! These first Shuttlers were the ones who had made the greatest progress during the war. They were gradually gaining a stronger voice in the Time-Space Management Department's plane policy decisions.

Wei Qiang was one of the first wave of Transmigrators from Earth.

He wasn't the strongest. The Energy Chips he had made at the planetary core were only enough for him to carry out three independent transfers through space-time.

Some people stronger than him had even built nuclear-powered information-tunneling facilities near the planetary core, capable of establishing an Information Tunnel directly between two planes.

Still, Wei Qiang had access to this technology now, and as it developed, he was destined to become a veteran of the Time-Space Administration Bureau.

Wei Qiang was looking at two files.

One of them concerned Wei Keng. The space-time tunnel to Wei Keng had already been connected. Because of the High Time-Space Flow Rate Effect, the Pandora Plane had been treated like a "mine," its high time flow rate continuously extracted to accelerate decisive battles on planes with slower time flow rates.

Oh, extracting the flow rate of space-time to accelerate it on another plane was also a new technology developed by the Time-Space administrators during this Plane War. The concept had first been proposed by a Transmigrator on this plane named Su Jie, and was later successfully developed. This Plane War had brought forth prodigies and eccentrics in every field.

As for Wei Keng's experiences on the Different Plane, of the 1,567 Initial Individuals, 57 had died for various reasons. When three of them perished on the plane, the system hadn't yet fully saved their consciousness and thoughts, and they seemed to vanish into thin air. In a sense, this meant that a part of Human Consciousness had died.

When Wei Qiang had first seen this, he'd been furious! Ultimately, the Time-Space Management Department still hadn't kept his foolish older brother safe. But after thinking it over, he'd let it go. After all, they were in the middle of a Plane War. Even if he himself were in the Time-Space Administration Bureau, he wouldn't be able to devote enough attention to people who weren't in immediate mortal danger.

Now Wei Qiang could also see how the Wei Keng Collective had reacted after repeatedly finding themselves in danger.

When the sky fell, he didn't flinch; under cruel oppression, he wouldn't bend; through hardship and suffering, his spirit never faltered; faced with threats and temptation, his resolve never wavered. My older brother's finally become a Man of Integrity.

Wei Qiang turned to the other file. It had been sent by Luo Hongxing, a veteran High Minister Transmigrator. On one of the Timelines in Wei Qiang's Space-Time Region, a major confrontation with the Space-Time Bureau in the western part of the Main World was about to begin. They needed his help in this conflict.

May 19, 2433, Pandora Era.

Inside an earthen house, Wei Keng stood before an elaborate sand table, conducting a Military Wargame. Of course, while the wargame was underway, a few of his own units were conducting drills to provide realistic data.

How far could they march while carrying their supplies? How much Forced March could their stamina endure? How long would their bodies need to recover afterward?

And once they faced the enemy and charged, would the coordination between the Fireteams be enough to mount an effective defense against the enemy's current organization? The data from these drills was essential for establishing a Tactical Norm.

Wei Keng even practiced crawling forward while machine guns fired at a height of half a meter.

Since Wei Keng was trying to understand himself, he couldn't describe it from the one-sided perspective of an instructor. This was a test of the Wei Keng Collective's Psychological Quality under Fire Suppression.

According to Wei Keng's notes, this was a way to prepare himself—to understand what it felt like to crawl forward under machine-gun fire. That way, when the time came, the whole group wouldn't panic and lie on the ground, unable to do anything.

The wargame's target was the Human City-States, including Jian City.

In the past, their three-meter-high Cement City Walls, outward-facing two-meter-long palisades, and cannons and machine guns in their blockhouses had made them impossible for Wei Keng to attack. Now, though, the newly arrived cannons and the explosives his chemical plant could produce both gave him some ability to breach fortifications. Breaking through those walls had become possible.

Of course, the current strategy was to integrate the people in the region economically, so the chances of a hot war were very low. Wei Keng's policy toward humans was also aimed at avoiding a hot war as much as possible.

The reason he was meticulously practicing for an unlikely scenario was that the loss of ten Self Individuals during the second clash with the Yue Region Gene Colony had made him prepare contingencies for every outcome with severe consequences, regardless of how likely it was.

June arrived, and so did a typhoon. Wei Keng hadn't set up a Weather Station out at sea, but his perception of Life Radiation had detected an abnormality in the life radiation over the ocean, so he guessed a typhoon was coming.

When he'd first arrived in this world the year before, he'd only been living at one settlement and had merely noticed a few heavy rainstorms.

Typhoon paths often looped around. Treasure Island was hit year after year, scoured like a patch of ground, while the mainland's other regions were affected only by the outer circulation.

This year's typhoon was clearly a major one. Its center was right over Wei Keng's territory.

Torrential rain swept across the entire Pearl River Delta. Watching the awesome power of nature, the bare-chested Wei Kengs in their rain capes couldn't help sighing in awe.

At the same time, they were glad they'd acted wisely!

One Wei Keng was extremely pleased with himself. I really am Yanhuang Race. I was born knowing how to control floods. It must be a genetic talent, right? Yes, it has to be.

With no Historical Climate Data, Historical Precipitation Data, or records of water levels in the various regions, Wei Keng couldn't estimate annual rainfall or the volume of water in each river. So he couldn't use the strategy of reinforcing key River Embankments to guide the water effectively. He could only focus on protecting his own territory.

In other words, he blasted and blocked places upstream that might be hit by a massive flood, diverting the water to either side. It was like a slope: if you put your hand in the way, the water would pour around it in large volumes from the other sides. Wei Keng hadn't even used much labor. He'd simply built a few dams on seven rivers upstream. He'd needed to move less than a thousand cubic meters of earth, and he'd successfully slowed the upstream flow for dozens of kilometers. Forty percent of the water was diverted through hundreds of smaller tributaries, filling waterways that hadn't run full in previous years to the brim.

Wei Keng's Residential Areas were mostly on higher ground. As long as the water level in the nearby waterways didn't rise above the marks carved into the large rocks, there would be no flooding.

But from an outside perspective, this approach had a historical precedent and even inspired a famous idiom: "To make a neighbor's land a reservoir." If Yu the Great saw Wei Keng managing the flood this way, he'd definitely grab a pair of Straw Shoes and beat the unworthy descendant with them.

Wei Keng's flood control was absolutely maxed out on the depravity scale.

Wei Keng's Residential Areas and Farmland had been saved, but the Jungle Areas—well, those regions were possibly even higher than the farmland, and they were all hit by disaster.

In the stricken areas, the tops of whole clumps of trees were swallowed by the rushing floodwaters. Animals huddled together on a few tiny patches of high ground, only to watch in despair as the water rose around them.

Across the lands submerged by the flood, seven or eight strange Herbivorous Animals sometimes clung to the branches of a single tree with their tentacles, watching the terrifying scene of a Vast Marshland in abject fear. But eventually, the soil around the tree's roots was swept away. Dozens of animals plopped into the water and struggled in the raging current.

Chinese civilization had recognized the power of natural disasters from very early on, and had even coined the saying "Water and Fire are Merciless."

Wei Keng's arrival on this plane had been like the Disaster Legion descending. A few months earlier, he'd set fire to the mountains on a massive scale, and now he was letting a Great Flood wash over the land.

Oh, and while the mountains were burning, countless massive trees had been destroyed. With no vegetation to hold the slopes in place, vast quantities of mud and sand had flowed into the rivers. That was another reason this flash flood had been so terrifying.

In other words, landslides had also occurred on the slopes across many upstream areas, burying animals that had been sheltering in caves without them even understanding what had happened.

But in this disaster, Wei Keng had had the advantage of his surveys and hadn't suffered nature's retaliation. Perhaps this was the advantage that came with mastering knowledge and being able to anticipate the workings of fate.

Based on what Wei Keng had seen, the system estimated the extent of the flooding: after what Wei Keng had done, if this region were in the Main World, its ecosystem would be devastated for at least ten years. The flood would have swept away the populations of almost all the native large species. They were practically finished!

After all, the slopes were covered in shrubs, and the ecosystem could support only small and medium-sized predators like lynxes and leopards. Everyone hunted in the rich lowlands. For these species, the flood had come so suddenly. It wound through the low-lying areas, encircled them, and wiped out one population after another completely.

The ancient flood myths of Eurasian Civilization were often not really about climate. Once Agrarian Civilization began settling in the fertile basins of great rivers, people unknowingly damaged nature, yet lacked the experience in water management to deal with the consequences. After suffering enormous losses, they recorded in their literature floods that may not have seemed very large, but were devastating to settled communities.

Humanity's development would inevitably offend nature. But Wei Keng, who had some knowledge and experience, was simply following the principle of "better them than me."

Thunder cracked overhead, but it never managed to give Wei Keng an effective warning!

Far away on the East Ocean, five-meter-high Waves stretched endlessly across the sea. If a ten-thousand-ton ship were sailing in such conditions, its bow would keep rising before crashing back down into the waves.

Yet a small island floated steadily on the surface, with not even the Waves breaking over it. A closer look revealed countless tentacles, like strands of sargassum, drifting all around it. No wonder the waves weakened into rippling water when they reached the island.

Looking more closely at the sargassum-like tendrils, they seemed to extend from the "island's" underside.

Suddenly, what looked like an eruption appeared at the island's front. No, it seemed more like a whale spouting.

After a two-second burst of mist, a python's head as large as a bus emerged. Perhaps it was too heavy to lift, because it couldn't raise its head and had to crawl along the island's ridge until it reached higher ground, where it surveyed the surroundings.

This was an Apostle Level being, the Node Creature of a vast Gene Colony.

Humans called it the Mysterious Iron Black Tortoise. Of course, one couldn't assume it resembled the giant turtles in human imagination.

A turtle's head was a forward-projecting, retractable part, and its shell rose in the middle and sloped down at the edges.

This creature had a raised outer rim of peaks and a hollow middle, like a washbasin. Its head emerged through a hole in its back, like a whale spouting.

In any case, most contemporary Node Creatures hadn't developed according to human standards of beauty.

A Gene Colony like this could even interfere with ocean currents. To some extent, the typhoon heading toward the Yue Region had been influenced by it as well.

The enormous python's head looked out from the mountain peak toward the Yue Region. A hint of confusion seemed to appear in its algae-covered eye sockets.

From what it sensed, the typhoon had inflicted more damage than expected on the life-forms on the land over there. But the new colony that had made it feel threatened enough to use its power to interfere didn't seem to have suffered any losses.

The giant python withdrew into the cave inside the mountain peak, and a thick, rock-colored layer of horny material sealed the entrance. It was like the lid that covered a snail's shell after it retreated inside.

For now, the Black Tortoise had no intention of continuing to focus on the southwest. For more than a decade, it had been fighting the Gene Colony on the Yellow Sea Continental Shelf to the west. To put it in human terms, an Apostle's enemy was another Apostle. Only this year had Wei Keng drawn its attention, prompting the Gene Colony represented by the Mysterious Iron Black Tortoise to spare a little effort to intervene.

Meanwhile, to the north of the Yue Region, large numbers of Gene Colonies were fleeing north. They caused quite a disturbance to the ecosystem in Northern Huguang, and the vegetation along their route also developed strange, chaotic forms in its leaves and fruit under the impact of the Gene Colonies from outside the region.

The Node Creatures fleeing from the south were terrified, because this time Wei Keng had truly shown them extinction.

At the end of the Fourth Era—the Human Era—before the Pandora Field had appeared, species had already been disappearing from the Natural World at a rate that amounted to a Mass Extinction. Humanity's occupation of natural areas had cut off vast swathes of habitat for other creatures.

Humanity's rise had represented a natural disaster for the entire world from the start.

Once humanity entered the Civilization Era, people became aware of this, yet they still couldn't change the contradiction. They could only hope to develop quickly, to obtain their material resources and energy without relying on the Natural World, and to end their competition with other living creatures as soon as possible.

But the Pandora Era had destroyed humanity without wiping it out completely. And now, someone had returned to humanity's most primitive attitude toward nature!

Far to the north, the consciousnesses in Yu City had also been forced to shift some of their attention away from their traditional rivalry with the Old Human City-States on the eastern plains of the East Asia Continent, and toward the "extreme" presence in the south.

Floods.