Ji Hong spoke with Ai Liyuan alone in this illusory space. He had learned a great deal from the academician, giving him plenty of information to base his plans on.
Many of the dangers he had anticipated would never come to pass. The super-being also needed an orderly world; he wouldn't use his power to destroy Earth's entire ecosystem.
In any case, the worst-case scenario wouldn't happen. This wasn't a life-or-death war between alien invaders and humanity, but a clash of ideals.
A piece of information arrived through Hong. Ji Hong frowned slightly. The soldiers on the island, the organisms in the cultivation tanks, and all the other living creatures had undergone physical examinations and psychological screening conducted by Googol Tech. Although the Hong Alliance's ethical restrictions prevented it from experimenting on humans, keeping those brains alive was no difficult task.
Now, the human brains implanted with animal memories had been disconnected from the environment Li Heng had created. They had spent more than ten hours in a state of unconscious darkness, regaining their senses only when the Hong Alliance connected them to a virtual world again.
Researchers quickly learned what had happened from the brains in vats. The brains had been grown through accelerated cultivation, and the ones implanted with animal memories had spent more than a decade in that illusory, ruined city, while only a year had passed in the outside world.
However, these brains hadn't solved the problem of nerve cell regeneration either. The accelerated growth had greatly reduced their number of neurons, in proportion to the actual time they had spent in the virtual world.
Their lifespans hadn't been extended by proxy. As they processed an excessive amount of information, they had far fewer neurons than ordinary people with the same amount of memories. Their remaining lifespans were much shorter than average, and a few brains had even developed Alzheimer's Disease, an illness associated with old age.
By comparison, the soldiers had been much luckier. Only some of their visual and auditory signals had been obscured. They said that, over the past year, they had often dreamed of the friends and loved ones they'd been missing during the day, so they had actually been quite happy.
Googol Tech was now accelerating its research on the human brains implanted with animal memories. These brains could yield a great many new discoveries and help the Hong Alliance further understand how the human brain processed thoughts.
However, a few unexpected cases had emerged among the soldiers as well. The number of neural synapses in a soldier named Gu Qi's brain was clearly inconsistent with his age. His hippocampus, which processed short-term memories, was also markedly different from an ordinary person's. The researchers estimated that he might have five to ten years' more memories than an average person his age. This was likely a trace left by the super-being.
Such obvious information couldn't have been an oversight on the creature's part. It seemed more like a deliberate message to the Hong Alliance, using a soldier's memories as a channel for communication.
A soldier with memories from years in the future. An artificial Reborn.
At the Underground Base in the Southern Region, the soldier named Gu Qi waited in a completely sealed metal room for a decision from the higher-ups. The recent examination had revealed abnormalities in parts of his brain, leaving his situation rather delicate.
The unremarkable-looking soldier didn't pay much attention to his predicament. His head was still spinning. It felt as though he'd had an incredibly long dream, and the fusion of his future memories with his present self had left him with a splitting headache.
In the dream, he and his comrades had been deceived by the Immortal Demon on the island, their sight and hearing obscured as they sank unknowingly into an illusory peace. It had taken a war a year later to drive the monster back temporarily, and he and his comrades on the island had been rescued as well.
However, merely driving back the Immortal Demon had cost the Hong Alliance tens of thousands of hypersonic unmanned combat aircraft and ten percent of its navy. Even its final trump card, ten strategic nuclear warheads, had failed to kill him.
That very night, the event known as Starfall had marked the beginning of a world war. This time, it was no longer an internal conflict among humans, but a war against the Immortal Demon and his extraterrestrial forces invading Human Civilization.
Communications across the world had been largely destroyed, and in a short time, huge numbers of New Humans fused with Symbiotes had appeared. When emotionally agitated, these people transformed into monsters that lost their self-awareness and indiscriminately slaughtered the humans around them.
With society plunged into massive internal chaos, the Immortal Demon launched a fierce assault. The navies of the Hong Alliance and the Commercial Alliance lost more than eighty percent of their forces within a week. The remaining ships could only retreat to coastal waters, relying on coastal artillery and air power to barely hold off the seemingly endless blue creatures.
Then came the giant Biological Weapons, their bodies wreathed in white steam. Their scales could withstand most Electromagnetic Cannon shells, while their green, crystalline eyes could fire high-energy lasers. Most high-speed missiles were shot down by them in an instant.
The armies of the Hong Alliance and the Commercial Alliance could still temporarily hold them off, but the armies of other nations were utterly powerless against these giant creatures. They were faster than the quickest tanks, and the red bombs launched by their whipping tails could reduce several hundred-meter-tall buildings to rubble in an instant. Within just three months, the rest of Earth had fallen, and the Immortal Demon had become the strongest power on the planet, ruling over seventy percent of humanity.
Under such immense pressure, the Hong Alliance unleashed a strength it had never shown before. Researchers at the Academy of Sciences gained many new biotechnology breakthroughs from the Symbiotes, and the Hong Alliance's military strength multiplied several times over in a short period. The Hong Alliance also managed to suppress the physiological hormones of the humans who mutated into monsters. The Symbiotes intended for use against humanity instead became the Hong Alliance's greatest asset.
The Commercial Alliance, with its smaller population, wasn't so fortunate. Blue creatures completely cut off the waters around Europe and the Americas, and the Immortal Demon's forces occupied the western part of the Eurasian Continent within a year. The Commercial Alliance in the Americas was the only part left, but it couldn't find a way to suppress the Symbiote-infected humans. Internal chaos and infighting gradually stripped this behemoth of its ability to resist the alien forces.
Three years later, more than eighty-five percent of the world's land and all its seas had fallen under alien control. Only the Hong Alliance continued to resist the Immortal Demon's forces, fighting desperately.
The last two great powers on Earth, oddly enough, never used nuclear weapons against each other. The Immortal Demon didn't fear nuclear arms, and his Jelly army lurked in the depths of the sea. If the Hong Alliance used nuclear weapons, he would unleash them on a massive scale as well. The Hong Alliance's human organizations would inevitably collapse first, and without an intact industrial system, humanity couldn't possibly stand against the extraterrestrials.
Fortunately, the Immortal Demon needed humanity to survive. During his past wars of conquest, many small countries had chosen to surrender en masse to the extraterrestrials, and the Immortal Demon had treated them quite well—at least better than being killed or turned into slaves.
As a result, many among humanity had become advocates for surrender. They claimed that resistance would only bring destruction to everyone, and that surrender was a viable option for preserving Human Civilization.
Over the course of those three years, Gu Qi had risen from sergeant to colonel. He was among the first batch of genetically enhanced soldiers created after the Hong Alliance obtained biotechnologies from the Symbiotes. They were all equipped with Fourth-Generation bio-mechanical exoskeletons, making them at least ten times stronger than soldiers equipped with Third-Generation Exoskeletons.
To fight the extraterrestrial creatures swarming across the land, the Hong Alliance had abandoned natural reproduction through unions between men and women. With artificial wombs and cell-division acceleration technology now mature, humanity had gained the power to create life. Genetically enhanced New Humans could grow from newborns into healthy adults in just one year. Combined with education in virtual worlds, it took only eighteen months to train a competent soldier.
The Hong Alliance and the extraterrestrial creatures had become locked in an endless war of attrition. The two forces seemed to have reached a stalemate, but the Immortal Demon, who possessed most of Earth's resources, could surely hold out longer than the Hong Alliance. The war machines under his command all shared a single will, and unlike human soldiers, they didn't fear death.
The Hong Alliance's leaders recognized this as well. They threw themselves into developing a new type of deep-sea submarine. The monsters spread throughout the oceans never left corpses behind on land, and that made them realize the secret to defeating them might be found in those blue creatures.
In the sixth year after Starfall, Gu Qi led a squad through the front lines. They boarded a new deep-sea submarine and headed underwater. Their mission was to bring back a Jelly corpse so that the Hong Alliance's scientists could uncover its secrets.
After overcoming countless obstacles, they successfully brought back the corpse of a Jelly creature. A thorough study of the extraterrestrial organism revealed a major flaw in its genes: a certain bacterium could attack its brain, making its memories distorted and chaotic.
When Jellies encountered one another, they synchronized their memories with each other. This made them act as one, but if the memories of even a single Jelly were distorted, the entire species could be infected by those corrupted memories.
This united species was immensely powerful. Yet all it would take was a bacterium tailored to target it, and the hundreds of millions of intelligent extraterrestrial creatures in the oceans would become more foolish than single-celled organisms within days. They would even lose their most basic appetite!
The blockade of the oceans was broken. The Hong Alliance made contact with resistance movements among the people living under alien rule around the world. They rose up in revolt and destroyed all the giant Biological Weapons on land within a year. At last, the light of victory shone upon Human Civilization.
"However, it was then that the Immortal Demon, who had seemed to disappear, reappeared. He used Symbiotes to infect humans and study their brains. Now, he finally had the power to manipulate human memories. With the strongest individual fighting power on this planet, he gradually took control of every human leader. Humanity would no longer even be able to conceive of resistance. Everyone would become an eternal slave!"
Gu Qi told Ji Hong everything he knew. This old man was the only person he had ever trusted in his past, present, and future.
At the end of his memories, the old man had had his memories altered and been turned into the Immortal Demon's accomplice. Only then had countless Hong Alliance leaders taken their own lives in despair. The entire Hong Alliance had collapsed within days, and Gu Qi had been killed by the Immortal Demon himself in the final moments of the resistance.
Ji Hong committed the entire script to memory. He now understood the Immortal Demon's entire plan. If the Hong Alliance refused to cooperate with his campaign to unite Human Civilization, he might truly choose to slowly alter all of humanity's memories until they matched his preferences.
The old man let out a long sigh. This was a checkmate. The humans of this era truly had no way to resist his power. No matter how powerful nuclear weapons were, they couldn't compare with the power to alter people's minds.
The soldier named Gu Qi wasn't entirely a false Reborn. The process might differ somewhat, but the ultimate outcome would indeed match what his memories foretold. The Immortal Demon was using this Reborn to deliver a script to him, as well as a veiled warning.
Ji Hong looked at the soldier who had transformed overnight from an ordinary trooper into a resolute commander and asked:
"Have you ever considered that all of this might be fake? Perhaps the Immortal Demon has already mastered the power to manipulate memories, and your memories are nothing more than a smokescreen he's thrown out?"
Gu Qi froze at the old man's words. His memories were still stuck on the final battlefield. The demon, with the appearance of a small child, stood before him. That terrifying creature had only glanced at him, and he'd lost consciousness in an instant.
Taking the old man's warning to heart, he considered the possibility carefully. In the end, he still shook his head and rejected it.
"I still believe my memories are my own. If I truly am a Reborn, then the events in my memories should come to pass. We'll defeat that demon and win the final victory. The truth will prove everything."
Even though the old man's words had planted a seed of doubt in his heart, the soldier named Gu Qi still believed in himself. He didn't want to believe that the version of himself who'd fought so bravely on the battlefield had been nothing more than a dream.
He stubbornly clung to his memories of the future. He believed he was the chosen one who could defeat the Immortal Demon. Even though it was far more likely that his memories had been manipulated than that he'd somehow been reborn, he'd rather believe they came from his future self in a parallel world. He couldn't possibly be a puppet under someone else's control.
Ji Hong nodded and said, "Good. The information you've brought is crucial to turning the future around. I'll raise your clearance level, and the Hong Alliance will build a plan around it. We'll achieve the final victory."
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