Chapter 569: Backup

In the virtual space, the battle continued.

The phase-shifting demon, like a rotting potato, continuously sucked in bubbles representing networked devices through the holes in its head; as they hurled toward Li Cheng, a white dragon’s phantom appeared above him, the insect-like faceplate sliding aside to reveal dark red lips devoid of skin.

“Roar———”

The frost breath exhaled by the demonic dragon froze the spinning turbine blades of a wind generator into ice blocks, then smashed through their connection with a single punch, clasped the heavy blades in both arms like wielding a Green Dragon Crescent Blade, and slammed into another approaching truck, sending it flying.

“Humans—especially ordinary ones—are exceedingly fragile.”

Dr. Noah spoke at breakneck speed: “Even without considering the divine aberrations or anomalies that escaped from the Killing Ground, a single viral plague, a single memetic contamination, or one undeniable anomaly is enough to shatter the current normalcy.”

What is normalcy? A state consistent with physical laws, linguistic logic, and human experience of survival and life—that is normalcy.

The chasm between transcendent beings (whether human players or Killing Ground anomalies) and ordinary people is too vast; the GOC, Special Affairs Bureau, Zhong Lou, and the Federal Investigation Bureau’s Anomalous Incidents Division must enforce high-pressure rule and strict law enforcement to barely maintain this fragile balance.

Otherwise, what if a player suddenly decides to disguise the Sadako video tape as an unreleased anime season, a high-definition photo collection, the latest season of Paw Patrol, or the in-game voice chat from the S8 RNG vs G2 finals, and uploads it online?

Can the Global Supernatural Alliance possibly manage it all?

What if a Lv37 or Lv38 player decides to pull off a grand stunt—fly to the moon and leave a clear pattern on its surface, visible to ordinary people with their smartphones?

Destroy all images, erase all witnesses’ memories?

And further—who defines normalcy? Who determines its boundaries?

Remember, the Killing Ground holds infinite possibilities; technology evolves daily. Theoretically, Prometheus’s mechanical cybernetic tech has already achieved preliminary mechanical ascension, allowing Paralympic athletes to effortlessly shatter all Olympic records.

GS Biotech’s ability-activation serum, one injection, can grant a newborn infant superpowers—flying, tunneling, spewing fire, exhaling ice.

The Node’s network data, tagged for key points, tracks Earth’s dynamic changes like an artificial neural network.

“Understood.”

Li Cheng rasped, no wonder so many kinds of bubbles floated in cyberspace.

The Realm Earth satellite is neither an AI like Skynet from The Terminator, nor a storage hub for all network data.

It resembles a dynamic, ever-changing neural network, recording in real time global ecological resources, population,

industrial, agricultural, and service production and consumption—even unquantifiable human thoughts and moods.

Imagine wildly: if a divine aberration escaped the Killing Ground and clashed with Earth’s top transcendent beings, accidentally erasing all of Iceland (103,000 sq km, roughly 1.7 times Tongliao), the Realm Earth Project’s data backups would allow Lv40s to reconstruct Iceland nearly intact, then drop in some clones, and afterward claim it was a sudden volcanic eruption with massive casualties.

As for panic…

Iceland has only about three hundred thousand people; the Sudanese civil war, raging since the 1950s, has claimed two million dead—and still sparked no global media storm.

“Therefore, my lord, you must utterly exterminate the phase-shifting demon,”

Dr. Noah said solemnly: “And it must be total annihilation—not a single fragment may break off and escape into any of the other eleven thousand satellites. The [Realm Earth] network links all global nodes; even if the phase-shifting demon perishes, its hidden force could exploit the residual spiritual energy fluctuations within Earth’s network to establish an anchor link to this world.”

Before Li Cheng could answer, Gray Rain, listening through his Bluetooth earpiece to the Ten Thousand Eyes communication channel, couldn’t help shouting: “Holy shit, this phase-shifting demon is that evil?”

Gray Rain’s upgraded brain, enhanced by [Silver Wing Path], wasn’t stupid—he understood: if Li Cheng failed to kill the phase-shifting demon, or even let its corpse fragments escape into other networks, the GOC would take over, willing to crash the entire global network just to replace countless devices and ensure the demon couldn’t return.

Global chaos, economic regression? Irrelevant. The key point was Gray Rain wouldn’t be able to freely access the internet for months—could he possibly tolerate that?!

“Lao Pi, use that move!”

Gray Rain roared, lunged forward, and pierced the oncoming tugboat with a [Destructive Death Beam], then leapt nimbly onto the phase-shifting demon’s head.

The phase-shifting demon itself was highly corrosive—any material approaching it would be rapidly assimilated—so Gray Rain didn’t swing his hammer directly, but…

Shh—

Li Cheng twisted his body like a discus thrower and hurled a massive bronze disc.

The disc was nearly two meters in diameter, convex on both sides, extremely heavy, and emitted a constant rustling sound inside, as if filled with granular matter.

The phase-shifting demon instinctively sensed danger and maximized its head holes, sucking in hydroelectric generator rotors.

In some literary works, due to authors’ laziness or ignorance, absurd scenes are often written.

For example, a warrior who shatters dimensions turns out, upon inspection, to be weaker than a road roller.

A god’s final, life-consuming strike, when calculated, proves less destructive than the ten-thousand-ton explosion at Lion Mountain.

Each hydroelectric generator rotor summoned by the phase-shifting demon weighed over a thousand tons; if a hundred-ton king could crush a Hakimi, these rotors could crush a hundred-ton king the same way.

Li Cheng drew a NFC card from his back and swept it across the Heat Death Corridor, summoning the Six-Armed Snake Demon.

The demon’s serpentine hair writhed wildly, flickering at high frequency—its first flash wrapped around the bronze disc, then darted nimbly between the thousand-ton rotors, finally landing before Gray Rain.

The fully charged Skull-Shattering Power Hammer slammed down, transforming the conical bronze disc into a Monroe-effect armor-piercing round, unleashing a liquid-metal jet exceeding 10,000 m/s, flooding entirely into the phase-shifting demon’s skull.

The hidden [Simulated Star Corridor] controlled by the Special Affairs Bureau truly holds infinite energy—capable of producing dozens or even hundreds of billions of tons of grain annually, permanently solving Earth’s food shortage.

But dare they?

If the general public widely learned of transcendent power and the existence of the Killing Ground, it would trigger unprecedented social upheaval.

Either panic would spread, leaving people in constant dread of being harmed by anomalies or replaced by conspiracy theorists’ clone technology;

Or the lower classes would turn on each other, hoping to gain the Killing Ground’s favor and be selected as players;

Or online mobs would incite public opinion, demanding the government share transcendent powers and miraculous pills;

Most players still consider themselves human—and humans are the sum of social relations. Once the foundational social order collapses, the moral compass of transcendent beings will inevitably plummet like a runaway train into the abyss.

Even becoming a social Darwinist dark forest would be better—because in black society cultivation or cyberpunk worlds, at least ordinary people still have some value.

But under the Killing Ground system, the four axes—artificial wombs, clone cultivation chambers, gene editing, and knowledge infusion devices—completely deconstruct the very concept of “human.”

“The reason Earth still maintains social order and this fragile balance is based on strategic negotiations and interest balancing between top transcendent beings and national governments.”

“None wish to see social order collapse—that’s why the [Realm Earth] Project exists.”

In the Ten Thousand Eyes earpiece, Dr. Noah rapidly said: “Using eleven thousand satellites, widely collect key