Rallying

On May 1, 135 of the Pandora Era, Wei Keng's side completed the handover with the Desperate faction.

Inside the ship's midsection, forklifts had cleared a large space where containers had once been stacked, making room for the glowing wormhole to move. Through it, people and machinery on the other side could be seen moving slowly.

Wei Keng sat quietly at the spot that had been converted into a conference table. Once the review committee from the other side of the wormhole arrived, he began a brief account of his work.

Wei Keng struck just the right note. His tone was calm, and he spoke as though he had finally been waiting for his superiors to arrive. He opened with, "Thank you, comrades, for coming to pioneer a new world for xxxx." The people sitting upright with teacups in hand on the other side of the wormhole were left utterly bewildered. But Wei Keng soon got down to business and began reporting on his work since entering this world.

The transfer of a territory was an enormous undertaking. Wei Keng handed over the records he had compiled in the area over the past year: enough paper documents to fill a large safe. (The paper was coarse, with wood fibers still in it.)

Just seeing all that material being loaded onto the ship had amazed Captain Sun and the crew. They were especially struck by the survey points on the topographic maps, the daily rainfall records for an entire year, and all those numbers. He muttered, "Educated people really are different." By now, the crew thought of Wei Keng as "a cultured high-achiever."

Over the past year, Wei Keng had compiled detailed records on more than ten thousand square kilometers of land.

These covered hydrology, local customs, geography, minerals, and species, as well as the growth areas and conditions of edible medicinal herbs he had discovered.

He had also described the intelligence levels of Gene Colonies of different sizes across various regions during his three clashes with the local groups, along with information he had gathered in Jian City about several major cities along the Yangtze River.

The information was comprehensive, exactly the sort of report intended for senior bureaucrats.

Sun Xiangyang was clearly not equipped to handle it. To look busy, he had taken several people to unload industrial equipment and assigned the second mate to educate the local natives.

In the Desperate Plane, people worked through the night in the offices. The walls were painted green on the bottom half and white on the top. The leaders and clerks here could only keep themselves going through overtime with strong tea.

Printers churned out the records Wei Keng had sent over. The documents quickly gave the organization a detailed understanding of this plane.

The leadership team in the Desperate Plane also assessed Wei Keng. First, they confirmed that he had graduated from university. The Desperate Plane had yet to pass the Second Millennium, so Wei Keng's degree still made him one of the elite. A postgraduate degree, by contrast, meant advanced specialization in a particular field, which could not be put to use in an early-stage production economy.

They were also very interested in the equipment Wei Keng had "picked up" while fighting in this plane.

The Kevlar Helmet and Bulletproof Vest were marked with production and serial numbers that showed they had been manufactured in Shaanxi. But they were clearly more advanced than the Freedom Eagle's technology in the Desperate Plane. As for how Wei Keng had found brand-new equipment with matching serial numbers, the person in charge of the Desperate Plane knew there might be a story behind it, but did not press the matter.

At the Southwest High-Energy Laboratory, the wormhole was held within a metal containment structure.

Cheng Shitao, a military high-energy physicist, was testing it with particles. By observing how particles behaved near the wormhole, he was testing several theories.

Tests so far showed that they could transmit matter, but energy had to be sent from both sides in sync. The ratio was 65.6 to 1: the energy output from the Desperate Plane was equivalent to sixty-five times the energy input in the Pandora Plane. Both sides also had to prepare matter for conversion during transmission. Sending a kilogram of steel required one kilowatt-hour of electricity on the Desperate Plane side, but transmitting gasoline used very little energy. This was related to the rules of the Pandora Field, where the energy information of Organic Matter was easy to convert.

Of course, the wormhole could not transmit animals. Any living thing sent into the Pandora Plane became an inert object, its protein structures thrown into disarray.

Those were the parameters measured by scientists in the Desperate Plane. They were trying to find some bugs in the data that would let them expand this interplanar Traversal Channel.

In reality, however, this wormhole was the Main World's handiwork.

The Main World had not built a channel through which conscious life could travel. The transmission of material information between the wormhole's two sides was merely an information-transfer and processing station.

Through that processing station, the forces in the Desperate Plane supplied enough material information to help construct matter in the Pandora World. Since the Desperate Plane was "researching and exploring" during this process, Luo Hongxing could obtain supplies from it through manipulation. But in a sense, everything in this interplanar region seemed to hold no value for the Desperate Plane.

September, 135 of the Pandora Era. This was the year the newly established Xin Zhu Jiang was completely transformed.

The small, simple industrial production chain Wei Keng had built from an assortment of small machines underwent a major technological upgrade after the Space Gate arrived.

The cargo ship carrying the wormhole unloaded a great deal of equipment equivalent to the modern technology of the late Second Millennium in the Main World, as well as bulldozers and excavators. Wei Keng even spotted five round-headed War God Tanks. After hearing about Wei Keng's situation, the military chief in the Desperate Plane had even sent over a batch of equipment for producing biodiesel.

The mechanized equipment transformed the area around Wei Keng. They even filled in the outhouse.

With combined equipment for Ammonia Production, alkali production, and Acid Production, there was no longer any need to pile up manure to collect saltpeter. The organization in the Desperate Plane authorized the ship's cadres to establish a leadership structure here and continue to Liberate the Whole World.

The newly established organization in the Pandora Plane held Wei Keng up as a model of "a promising young man building xx-ism in the wilderness."

Wei Keng felt a little embarrassed by that description.

Wei Keng thought, During this time, I've only been looking out for myself. I don't have any grand ideals. I've always wanted to go home, and now they're holding me up as a model. This is really too much, too much... He could only say the people on the other side of the wormhole were too simplehearted.

Wei Keng had little in the way of ulterior motives, and collective praise sometimes made him work harder without thinking.

Wei Keng was a familiar sight at the Lime Kiln, the coke ovens, and the new machinery production center.

Even the natives of this plane could tell that Wei Keng had changed after the big ship arrived. He had become more cheerful.

No one gave Wei Keng a bonus. But once a string of targets was pinned to his desk, he worked overtime day and night, no longer showing any sign of his old tendency to lie low.

For now, Wei Keng seemed to have set returning home aside and begun doing his part to help build the magnificent development that would surely go down in history here.

When the giant steel ship docked,

merchants from several of the city-states in the Yue Region secretly took roll after roll of photographs with mechanical cameras. The flag on the ship's bow made even families with a little cultural heritage in the surrounding city-states feel that something was afoot.

Before the Pandora Field spread across the planet, the symbol had represented the united territory of ten thousand commanderies.

Now the East Asia Continent was divided into two states, but both still used versions of the flag.

The northern forces had added a horizontal line to the original flag. The southern forces had added a blue horizontal line.

But the giant ship that had appeared at Xin Zhu Jiang Dock flew the original flag! When they linked it to the sudden arrival of the Wei Keng Group near the mouth of the Pearl River in the Yue Region, it all seemed to come together into another new story.

The story went like this: an unknown Human Civilization had intervened in the Yue Region. Before arriving, it had sent out large numbers of people with identical faces to establish a foothold. Now that it had driven away most of the Gene Colonies in the area and learned the ins and outs of the city-states, including Jian City, it had begun sending in more forces and resources.

They had to admit, their guess was remarkably close.

June 1, 136 of the Pandora Era. The sun shone brightly, and clouds billowed across the sky.

At the largest settlement Wei Keng had established in Xin Zhu Jiang, more than two hundred Wei Kengs, all the crew members, and over a thousand natives of the plane stood in formation on the gravel field according to the event's organizational standards.

As the announcer's voice rang out over the loudspeakers—"Raise the xx! All personnel, salute!"—booming music began to play. The flag bearers raised the red flag, and the flag slowly climbed the pole in time with the music.

The ceremony was necessary, and the cause had to be proclaimed. The great affairs of a nation lay in ritual and war.

"Ritual" meant today's flag-raising ceremony. From now on, this same procedure would be promoted at every outpost.

And from this moment on, the armed forces here should no longer be a private army "carrying weapons and fighting for Wei Keng's personal survival." After the flag-raising, the organization announced the name of the only legitimate armed force: the Unified Punishment Army.

After the flag of the United Front fluttered from the metal flagpole, everyone remained standing on the parade ground as instructed.

Five tanks rolled across the field, followed by 70-millimeter artillery pieces pulled by tractors. By the standards of civilization after the fall of the Pandora Era, this was indeed a magnificent show of firepower.

This was Guangfu, a name that fit whether one looked to the past or the future. Although most of the armed forces were still built around Wei Keng, and he would remain their backbone for a long time to come, the true strength of an army ultimately depended on its core.

Of course, from the Wei Kengs' personal perspective,

the music during the march-past was a little... Sun Xiangyang had picked "March of the Athletes" as the background music for the tanks. It made Wei Keng feel as though he were back in elementary school, wearing a red scarf and swaying around on his assigned square to slack off. Even the tanks' clattering, grinding tracks passing right beside him could not drown out the feeling.

He had heard "March of the Athletes" from childhood in both his lives, so it had been drilled into his head. As soon as he heard the tune, he fell into its rhythm, and he could not even imagine replacing it with "March of the Steel Torrent."

There was a long way to go before the Unified Punishment Army could live up to its name. For now, the new organization in Xin Zhu Jiang still faced many pressing internal problems.

At the temporary clinic, the only medic, Old Li, was in a frantic scramble over people who were vomiting and suffering from diarrhea. The unlucky patients insisted they had not eaten anything they shouldn't have.

But the friends who had brought them in told the truth: one of the patients had eaten red raspberries from the roadside.

The local interns stared in disbelief. That stuff was edible? If berries were safe to eat, Human Civilization would not have collapsed so quickly. Whenever flowers with a natural fragrance opened, little insects flew into them at once. And in this plane, every fruit became covered in spores before it ripened and developed a high sugar content. The only creatures that ate them were simple organisms with life cycles of just a few weeks. These high-sugar, high-water fruits no longer belonged to humanity's Ecological Niche. They had to be heated above one hundred degrees Celsius in a pressure cooker to sterilize them.

All Wei Keng could do for the patient was inject him with several tubes of blood, letting the sudden burst of Life Radiation wipe out the microbes' genes.

The incident taught the organization a lesson: logistics had to be sorted out. When Wei Keng had explored the Pandora Plane alone, he had lived off the land, taking in Life Radiation wherever he found it. He was in good health, and his reverse radiation damaged nearly every organism around him. He ate everything that flew in the sky, swam in the water, ran on the ground, and could be eaten by people in Guangdong.

But as the team grew, they could not just wait like characters in an American action movie for poor people to evolve into Supermen in this somewhat fantastical world of biological mutations. Instead, they needed to build a comprehensive industrial logistics system on scientific principles.

The microbes in this world were formidable. Bacteria could even break down plastic bags. The only effective preservation method Wei Keng had found was to salt the food, smoke and dehydrate it, wrap it in lotus leaves, coat it in yellow mud, dry it with hot air from the Lime Kiln, then store it in an oxygen-poor cellar. Even then, nitrifying bacteria were still active. As for the cargo ship crossing the ocean, the freezers aboard could not preserve food either. The only usable supplies were Canned food and various vegetables.

Those idiots who compared themselves to Wei Keng finally accepted reality after seeing him rub a little spit on a scrape at work and watching the wound heal rapidly.

At a work organization meeting, Wei Keng recorded the needs collected from below. They definitely needed glass bottles, sealed with Tinplate Lids. They also needed a batch of food-processing equipment. All bottled drinking water had to be carbonated. He sent the list of requirements to the people on the other side of the Space Gate aboard the ship. Everything arrived soon afterward.

Once the supplies from the other side of the Space Gate had come through, Wei Keng gazed at the wormhole, lost in thought.

Wei Keng wondered, So what can I do for them over there?

As a member of society, Wei Keng cared deeply about the idea of "exchange." He could not contribute indefinitely to certain people, and likewise, others could not contribute indefinitely to him. Whatever the arrangement, he was fixated on making it "sustainable." A process in which only one side contributed could not last.

Regarding this matter, Wei Keng's system prompt read: "Double-Sided Travel is possible, allowing you to travel back and forth between the Desperate Plane and the Pandora Plane. You can exchange resources between the two planes."

Wei Keng thought, I absolutely won't travel to the Desperate Plane to make a contribution. I hear the plane war there is raging. I'm just an average person without exceptional intelligence. I might not survive even one episode. At most, I can do things in the Pandora Plane that benefit the Desperate Plane.