Chapter 406: The Swarm

Li Cheng set down the crimson beetle's corpse and slowly exhaled a breath of turbid air tinged with the smell of ionization,

then immediately squatted down with zero decorum, groping around the floor for his eyeballs.

This battle had been extremely perilous — Liang Yi Dao, the Vast Sea Soul-Locking Bell, the Skill-Moving USB drive, the Hover Engine, the Perfect Replenishment Pill, Xuanlei Qilin blood plasma…

every usable piece of gear and item had been thrown into the fight, and only by trading wound for wound had he barely managed to kill the opponent.

It was only because, before entering the secret realm, Li Cheng had used 【Death-Seeking Notes】 to predict that he had only a thirty percent chance of dying in the basement,

that he otherwise truly wouldn't have had the confidence to fight to the end — he probably would've just furrowed his brow, shoved He Sai in front of him as a shield, and decisively logged out of the kill zone to run.

Uh. Wait, that's not right — if this basement battle only had a thirty percent death probability, doesn't that mean the other areas of the secret realm are even goddamn more dangerous?

"Your eyeballs are here."

Gray Rain slid down off Li Cheng's body, picked up the two eyeballs still trailing wisps of nerve, blew on them, handed them back to Li Cheng, and asked with concern, "How is it, is your body still holding up?"

"Still manageable for now."

Li Cheng rubbed his eye sockets, activated the Assembled Puppet special effect, reconnected the optic nerves, and fully restored his vision.

He then hauled up the crimson beetle's corpse and, racing against the tunnel's total collapse, jogged out and leaned against the wall to rest for a while.

Only once his breathing had steadied did he straighten up and, as if picking grapes, peeled off the hyperplastic sarcomas that had sprouted across his body.

He didn't dare deactivate Liang Yi Dao right now — the Xuanlei Qilin blood plasma's intra-arterial push-injection effect was too savage; switching back to human form in haste would likely have him influenced by the Qilin's blood within minutes and fall into a berserk frenzy, just like Nie Feng.

Sanity, what do you want me to use for sanity. jpg

"Speaking of which,"

Gray Rain thought of something and pointed at the cartoon-style cherry tree and chili tree drawings on the broken wall. "Didn't we forget to ask that beetle who painted the pictures on this wall?"

"It's not too late to ask now."

Li Cheng first activated the Assembled Puppet special effect to crudely patch up the wounds on the crimson beetle's corpse and stop further blood loss,

then, using only his remaining left arm, inserted it into the beetle's corpse and spliced his own arm together with the beetle's ventral nerve cord.

He then directed Gray Rain to open the three-dimensional warehouse, take out a laptop and a pile of cables from inside, and plug a USB card reader and data cables into various parts of the beetle's corpse,

and finally booted up the computer and launched the DiskGenius hard disk bad-sector detection and repair software.

He was currently in his insect-form, with genetic base-layer encoding highly similar to the crimson beetle's; once the splicing was completed using the Assembled Puppet, the two could be approximated as a single whole.

The crimson beetle's main brain was already five-tenths cooked, but fortunately it itself used a distributed nervous system.

Every limb could think independently, which meant every limb stored a portion of memory backup. A forced repair could still salvage some memories.

"Selecting hard drive, hindlimb HD1, capacity 2150 TB, scanning for bad sectors."

As a Scion Abomination infected body, the crimson beetle had previously killed and devoured seventeen self-aware infected "kin." Its body stored a vast ocean of genetic data.

Li Cheng directed Gray Rain to ignore that massive volume of data for now, sort by modification date, and prioritize recent memories — the answer was soon found.

The crimson beetle's self-recognized name was 【Daqun】, and it had arrived at this secret realm roughly two months ago.

Like a player, it quickly realized that the secret realm harbored a large number of high-threat anomalous entities, as well as the possibility of a massive treasure hidden behind it.

To maximize its gains, it went into hibernation on the spot,

on one hand setting up and deploying teleportation traps elsewhere in the kill zone to abduct extraordinary creatures from the outside,

and on the other hand, using its own bio-modification technology, transforming itself into a Myanmar-style clinic, taking those extraordinary creatures apart piece by piece to manufacture a bio-electromagnetic cannon of tremendous power, in order to deal with the various threats in the secret realm.

【Daqun】 was well aware of what kind of beings kill-zone players were; it played the waiting game, quietly waiting for players to come knocking, its original intention being to let the players take point,

break open the secret realm's maze-lock, fetch the chestnuts from the fire for it, after which it would find an opportunity to harvest at leisure.

If players were slow to come, 【Daqun】 was probably prepared to "release" He Sai and let the latter help lure people over.

As for the children's crayon drawings of cherry trees and chili trees on the basement wall, they had existed on the wall in 【Daqun】's memory banks for as long as could be recalled — no one knew who drew them.

"Um."

Gray Rain, who had been carefully reviewing the system logs, noticed something and said with a slight change in expression, "It says here that 【Daqun】 isn't a single individual."

"What?" Li Cheng hurriedly leaned in and read the system logs carefully.

【Copy memory files to target backup body and preserve metadata】

【Number of recorded backup bodies: 10】

【Delete the path and timestamp information of backup bodies from the log file; retain the backup record document and genetic restrictions】

【Set time cycle to 7 kill-zone weeks; if no continued hibernation command signal is returned, activate the backup bodies】

【Update Daqun memory bank, backup complete】

Just five short lines of code, yet they revealed a staggering amount of information.

Daqun — or rather, the infected body named Daqun — would periodically back up its own body and memory using bio-modification technology and seal them somewhere in the kill zone.

The total number of backups was ten, and they had remained in hibernation the whole time.

Every 7 kill-zone weeks (converted to Earth time, sixty days), Daqun's main body would, by some means, issue a hibernation command to let all backups keep sleeping.

But once something happened to Daqun's main body and it could no longer issue commands, the backups would all awaken and become the new Daqun.

"One begets ten, ten beget a hundred?"

Gray Rain said, dumbfounded, "Whose Australian wild rabbit is this?"

"Not ten begetting a hundred."

Li Cheng clicked his tongue and pointed at the text 【retain the backup record document and genetic restrictions in the log file】. "Every Daqun knows which generation backup it is (this one is the twenty-first generation), and there are restrictions in the base-layer genetic encoding,

so it won't back itself up infinitely and degrade itself.

At any given moment, at most only one or two generations of Daqun are active in the kill zone."

He paused, then said, "These Daquns are both independent individuals and a single whole. Their shared goal is to devour all other Insect Lord Scion Abomination infected kin besides themselves, constantly evolving to become the sole Insect Lord.

For this goal, it would rather not become a player."

During the fight just now, Daqun could have fully remotely killed He Sai, stripped He Sai of his player qualifications, logged out of the kill zone, and fled far away.

It didn't do that, which proves two things.

First, the Swarm's backup resurrection plan is quite complete; the death of an individual does not mean the death of the whole. So it does not fear going to its death.

Second, the connections between the Swarm are extremely tight; when one individual becomes a player, the other backups share the same set of aptitude.

"Tch."

Li Cheng clicked his tongue in displeasure. The Swarm had deleted the path and timestamp information of the backup bodies from the log files—even it itself did not know where the backup bodies were buried,

so the other infected bodies had no way to follow the trail and kill it off for good.

No wonder the seventeen infected compatriots before had all been devoured by it. This ability to cling to life is on par with a cockroach—even if it can't win, it can still hang on.

Thinking about it this way, he felt he'd been swindled before. The Swarm only talked about how it had killed off several compatriots, never mentioning how many times it itself had been killed.

"Four crosstalk performers cursing each other out—whoever survives to the end has the right to speak, and whoever has that right is the old master artist."

Grey Rain muttered, scratching his head. "So does that mean we fought for nothing this time?"

"Not exactly for nothing. Although the Swarm has a backup resurrection system, to ensure the strength between generations doesn't decline, every backup has a complete genetic database. That's enough."

Li Cheng took a deep breath, the skin at his fingertips dissolved, and he silently began absorbing the flesh and blood of the bug corpse. "Hehehehehe, the entire gene vault accumulated over twenty-one generations—hand it all over."

(End of chapter)