Chapter 577: Mercy

The dispatched drone units carried floating-engine fragments, allowing them to easily cross impassable terrain obstacles; if necessary, they could mount the floating engines onto giant rocks or battlefield construction materials, rendering them weightless and buoyant, then move them with engineering machinery.

Not long after, the drone unit landed on the ground, carrying soil and mycelial samples from the Republican-era mansion; the lead cube drone, with the practiced posture honed through countless secret rehearsals, leapt from the aircraft cockpit and bowed respectfully to Li Cheng: "Report, General… Factory Master, mission accomplished."

…You were just about to say "General," weren't you?

Li Cheng's eye twitched; he muttered "Well done," then took the lead box, opened it, and used tweezers to pluck a strand of mycelium, dropping it into the alchemical magic cannon.

The mycelium dissolved in the furnace core, turning into a shadowy mass.

Once loaded, Li Cheng raised the magic cannon and pointed it at a towering dead tree in the distant swamp—Boom!

The vaporized projectile shot out, coalescing midair into six ethereal, bloodied, charred spirits that slammed through the tree.

Wood chips flew; deep gouges remained on the trunk, thick as three men could embrace; ghostly flames of corrosive origin ignited spontaneously, burning into the tree's core within half a minute.

"With so little mycelium, the effect is still impressive."

Li Cheng set down the alchemical magic cannon and handed the iron box to the Mechanical Horde: "Analyze this."

The Mechanical Horde extended its massive pincers, gently gripping a strand of mycelium and directing it toward its abdomen.

The abdominal carapace split open voluntarily, revealing a cavity leading directly to the backup stomach—one that was essentially a chromatograph, mass spectrometer, and spectrometer combined, capable of identifying compounds, analyzing proteins, and detecting toxins in food beforehand.

The Mechanical Horde paused. "Based on molecular identification, the Red Spot Curse mycelium resembles Earth's Sordariomycetes—Hypocreales—Cordycipitaceae—Beauveria."

Hui Yu asked curiously: "Cordyceps?"

"Similar, yet different."

The Horde said: "The Red Spot Curse mycelium has three forms: dormancy, activation, and reproduction."

During dormancy, the mycelium can grow and survive in soil, wood, and plants, maintaining low activity.

Upon close contact with living organisms—especially if inhaled by intelligent beings or entering wounds—it activates, infiltrating host tissues and secreting compounds that induce low fever, inflammation, hyperexcitement, and hysteria.

During this phase, the host's soul is gradually consumed; the severed soul fragments are used by the mycelium to produce spirits.

The host, relentlessly pursued by these spirits and unaware of it, flees toward densely populated areas, continuing to spread the curse and aiding the mycelium's reproduction.

Hui Yu suddenly understood: "No wonder Wu Quan and the others looked so drained."

"Wait, something doesn't add up."

Li Cheng frowned: "I observed Wu Quan, Alci, and others' souls have been consumed by at most 20%. According to the law of conservation of energy, they shouldn't have produced so many spirits."

"Remote transmission."

The Horde explained: "The Red Spot Curse has, to some extent, become a spiritual energy organism, capable of storing, recovering, and remotely transmitting spiritual energy."

The drone unit leader corroborated: "Report, General, we discovered vast quantities of human bones, not yet fully decomposed, buried at extreme depths beneath the original site of the Republican-era mansion. Please inspect."

The drone unit leader gestured; the transport plane's rear cargo bay opened. Several cube drones rolled out a wheeled container, opened it, and inside, the soil was thickly mixed with human bones.

"Men, women, young, old—all present; skeletal morphology shows mostly East Asians…"

Li Cheng activated the scanning function of his Information Synthesis Glasses: the bone pile lay over three hundred meters below the surface—Alci and Ada could not detect it, and even the drone squad only found it using floating engines.

"Hmm? This is…"

Among the bones, he found a relatively well-preserved adult male skeleton, clad in a tattered Daoist robe, right hand gripping a rusted iron sword, left wrist tightly bound with a blood-written silk strip.

In the eighth year of the Republic, a plague erupted in a certain region of Shanxi Province; tens of thousands died. Despite all levels of government offices and hospitals distributing medicine, treating patients, and disposing of waste and corpses, the plague worsened until half the city became a dead city. Government offices were forced to evacuate.

An unnamed Daoist entered the city alone, walked through piles of corpses, and entered the mansion rumored to be where the plague first began.

"So the Red Spot Curse mycelium is not native to the Battlefield; it originated from a lower-magic, lower-warfare subordinate world—like Alex's dark-themed amusement park, transported together with the Republican-era mansion into the Battlefield entity."

Hui Yu clicked his tongue, glanced at the unnamed Daoist's skeleton, and said with a complex tone: "He still failed in the end."

"…Getting the Republican-era mansion and the Red Spot Curse parasitizing it out of its original world isn't failure."

Li Cheng shook his head; the unnamed Daoist's bones and iron sword contained only trace amounts of transcendent components—his power ceiling could not exceed Lv10.

If the main world's Earth fell, human players were utterly defeated, social order destroyed by the Abyss's divine abominations, or worse, the entire planet conquered by alien-world players, Earth's fate would be even more tragic than this unnamed Daoist's…

Li Cheng's thoughts drifted; the GOC, as the most official institution, had been straining to maintain global order, but signs of strain were emerging in certain areas.

For example, the Whale Song Guild's universal AI model—already seizing vast swathes of manufacturing and service industry jobs—the Domestic Special Affairs Bureau, to stabilize employment, openly and covertly delayed Whale Song AI's approval procedures.

But abroad—especially in South America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa, already divided among major guilds as their territories—the universal AI model, combined with drones, autonomous trucks, and unmanned factories, swept everything aside; unemployment rates in some major cities soared to terrifying 40–80%.

Super-skyscrapers built with special materials stood just one street away from sewage-choked slums; humanity had leapt fifty years ahead into the Cyberpunk 2077 timeline.

Bad news: you can only eat pagpag.

Good news: pagpag is abundant.

Pagpag is a "food" from Philippine slums, made by reprocessing leftover food recovered from garbage; the GOC maintains vast agricultural production bases in the Battlefield entity, but when massive relief rations are distributed through the Philippine bureaucratic system, what reaches the poor is only this.

At this point, the GOC neither wishes nor can directly eliminate national organizational structures; it still relies on the backward bureaucratic systems of underdeveloped regions.

Besides unemployment caused by the universal AI model, there are ethical issues with cloning and gene-editing technologies;

Issues from brain-tube implantation: declining birth rates, the collapse of family values, hacker risks;

The irreversible spread of transcendent power causing wealth disparity and class solidification—the mortality rate among transcendent practitioners shows a fluctuating downward trend; Lv30 players' mortality is lower than Lv20, far lower than Lv20 and Lv10.

These people are terrified of death: they buy 【Emergency Escape Cards】 at exorbitant prices, while simultaneously uploading their consciousness to Whale Song Guild, commissioning GS Biotech to create clones, hiring the Evil Science Alliance to replicate their souls; some even publicly recruit surrogates on social platforms, offering each a hefty hush money and tens of thousands of dollars monthly child support, vowing to bear hundreds or thousands of offspring to extend their bloodline into the "Post-Earth Era," playing a "real-life family cultivation" game.

One by one, piece by piece, today's social order is like a balloon filling with water under a running tap—it might burst in twenty years, or in ten, five, or even less.

"Sort and collect all the bones, boil them at high temperature to sterilize, then bury them somewhere."

Li Cheng pulled his thoughts back, shook his head, and idly asked the Horde: "The Red Spot Curse mycelium needs to absorb souls to reproduce, correct?"

At the same time, he took Hui Yu's phone and browsed the livestreamed product promotions on the Evil Science Alliance's official platform.

"79 game coins for a Strong Beast slave? Expensive? Don't speak nonsense with your eyes closed—domestic brands are hard enough; this price has held for years. Think about whether your script task score has improved."

"Today's livestream is 【Demon Slayer】 themed merchandise—clang clang clang—Lin Zhengying's ink line, Zhong Kui's sword, the broad-bladed knife from the War of Resistance—link 123!"

"Hello everyone! Today I'm eating a thousand-year Rehmannia essence—cultivated by Evil Science Alliance using thousand-year spirit-milk hydroponics, especially delicious—puking, tastes like lychee, especially—puking, sweet."

Players disliked AI livestreamers, so all hosts were real people—each more bizarre than the last.

Hui Yu saw Li Cheng scrolling through the livestream interface and realized: "You're going to buy Evil Science Alliance's soul solution?"

"No, too expensive."

Li Cheng said casually that even blood brothers had to keep clear accounts; although his relationship with By the Truth's Side wasn't bad, "I want corpses — the most despicable, most heinous scum criminals from prisons all over the world.

Southeast Asian telecom-fraud kingpins, South American drug lords, African warlords who raise child soldiers, that sort. Wall Street elites and medical-insurance giants who set the beasts to devour men are fine too.

If you don't have them in stock, pay a bit more — order now, slaughter now."

Grey Rain's face showed puzzlement, while the swarm of electronic eyes flickered with red light.

Red Blotch Curse Mycelium requires souls to cultivate, and undiluted soul solution is too expensive, so instead...

Use the Merciful Soul-Bestowing Gloves.

Bestow souls upon the corpses of scum, using artificial souls, as living culture vessels for the mycelium.

Now that really is... Merciful Soul-Bestowing indeed.