After hearing Nie Chang's report, Lin Yi wasn't particularly surprised.
In fact, given the crisis caused by territorial expansion from a high-level Nest near a large settlement like Jinling City, it had happened later than he'd expected.
Lin Yi couldn't help recalling the chaos of the early days of the apocalypse.
Back then, faced with the nearly unstoppable expansion of high-level Nests, humanity had been almost powerless to respond and could only adapt passively.
The stronger survivor groups huddled deep in the "Gap Zone," struggling to survive amid constant danger, where only a few gaps remained.
Those with more ordinary strength could only cling to life along the edges of the Gap Zone.
And countless other, weaker refugees were even forced to flee into the territories of low-level Nests just to eke out a living.
The expansion pressure from high-level Nests had, in turn, created a distorted kind of "safe zone" around certain low-level Nests.
The root cause was the terrifying "production capacity" of the Abyss Beasts spawned by high-level Nests.
A mid-level Nest could steadily produce Abyss Beasts with a combined Source Energy value of 25,000 points every day, while a Large Nest could churn out an astonishing 125,000 points.
That meant that, to effectively contain or even shrink a Nest's territory, a settlement had to eliminate Abyss Beasts with at least that much total Source Energy every day. Only if the Nest's "losses" exceeded its "replacements" could it possibly work.
In the early days, that had been practically impossible.
Never mind the enormous manpower and resources needed to kill Abyss Beasts worth tens of thousands of Source Energy points every day—or the heavy casualties that would entail. The fact alone that a Large Nest's daily output inevitably included a substantial number of Stardust Rank and higher Abyss Beasts