Chapter 597: Compassion

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 massive rocks or battlefield construction materials, rendering them weightless and airborne, then move them with engineering machinery.

Not long after, the drone unit landed on the ground with soil and mycelial samples from the Republican-era mansion; the lead cube drone, with the practiced grace of someone who had rehearsed it countless times, leapt from the aircraft cockpit and bowed respectfully to Li Cheng: “Report, General… Factory Master, mission accomplished.”

…You were about to say General, weren’t you?

Li Cheng’s eye twitched; he muttered “Well done” while taking the lead box, opening it, and using tweezers to pluck a strand of mycelium 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 aimed 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 tore through the tree trunk.

Wood chips flew; deep gouges remained on the three-man-wide trunk, and corrosive ghostfire spontaneously ignited, burning deep into the heartwood within half a minute.

“Only this little mycelium, yet the effect is 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 bringing it toward its abdomen.

The abdominal carapace split open, revealing a cavity leading directly to the backup stomach—a device that functioned as a chromatograph, mass spectrometer, and spectrometer, 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."

Grey Rain 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, unaware, is relentlessly hunted by these spirits, fleeing toward densely populated areas to further spread the curse and aid mycelial reproduction.

Grey Rain 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, Alcise, and others— their souls were only consumed by about 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 transmitting spiritual energy remotely.”

The drone unit leader corroborated: “Report, General, we discovered vast quantities of human bones, still undecomposed, buried extremely deep beneath the original site of the Republican-era mansion. Please inspect.”

The drone unit leader gestured; the rear cargo bay of the transport aircraft 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—Alcise and Ada could not detect it, and even the drone squad only found it using floating engines.

“Huh? This is…”

Among the bones, he spotted 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-stained 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 the origin of the plague.

“So the Red Spot Curse mycelium is not native to the Battlefield—it came from a lower-magic, lower-cultivation world. Like Alex’s dark-themed amusement park, it was teleported along with the Republican-era mansion into the Battlefield entity.”

Grey Rain clicked his tongue, glancing at the unnamed Daoist’s bones, his tone complex: “He still failed in the end.”

“…Bringing 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 bones and iron sword of the unnamed Daoist contained only trace amounts of transcendent components—his power ceiling wouldn’t exceed Level 10.

If Earth in the main world fell—human players utterly defeated, social order shattered by the gods spawned from the rifts, or worse, the entire planet conquered by players from another world—then Earth’s fate would be even more tragic than this nameless 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, was deliberately delaying Whale Song AI’s approval processes, openly and covertly.

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

Super skyscrapers built with special materials stood just one street away from slums choked with sewage. The world had sprinted fifty years ahead into the Cyberpunk 2077 timeline.

Bad news: you can only eat pagpag.

Good news: pagpag is unlimited.

Pagpag is a “food” in Philippine slums, made by reprocessing leftover food recovered from garbage. The GOC maintains vast agricultural production bases within the Battlefield entity, but the massive quantities of relief rations distributed through the Philippine bureaucratic system end up as nothing but this after filtering down.

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 universal AI models, there are ethical issues surrounding clones and gene-editing technology;

Issues arising from neural implant technology: declining birth rates, the collapse of family values, hacker risks;

The irreversible spread of transcendent power causing wealth disparity and class entrenchment—the mortality rate among transcendent practitioners shows a fluctuating downward trend; Level 30 players die less frequently than Level 20, and far less frequently than Level 10.

These people are terrified of death: they buy [Emergency Escape Cards] at exorbitant prices, upload their consciousness to Whale Song Guild, commission GS Biotech to create clones, hire the Evil Science Alliance to replicate their souls, and some even publicly recruit surrogates on social platforms, offering hefty hush money and tens of thousands of dollars monthly in child support, vowing to bear hundreds or even thousands of offspring to extend their bloodline into the “Post-Earth Era,” playing a real-life “Family Cultivation.”

One by one, piece by piece, today’s social order is like a balloon filling with water beneath a running faucet—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 casually asked the Horde: “The Red Spot Curse mycelium needs to absorb souls to reproduce, correct?”

At the same time, he took Grey Rain’s phone and browsed the livestreamed product promotions on the Evil Science Alliance’s official platform.

“79 game coins for a Strong Orc slave? Expensive? Don’t speak nonsense. Domestic brands are hard enough—this price has held for years. Think about whether your script mission score has improved.”

“Today’s livestream is themed around ‘Demon Slayer’ merchandise—clang clang clang, Lin Zhengying’s ink line, Zhong Kui’s sword, the broad-bladed knives from the War of Resistance—link 123!”

“Hi everyone! Today I’m eating a thousand-year-old Rehmannia root—grown by Evil Science Alliance using thousand-year spirit-milk hydroponics. Super tasty. Ugh, tastes like lychee, super sweet. Ugh.”

Players disliked AI livestreamers, so every livestream featured human hosts, each more bizarre than the last.

Grey Rain noticed Li Cheng scrolling through the livestream interface and realized: “You want to buy the Evil Science Alliance’s soul solution?”

“No, too expensive.”

Li Cheng said casually: even brothers must keep accounts clear. Though his relationship with the Side of Truth was decent, “I need corpses—the most vile, most heinous criminals from global prisons.”

Southeast Asian scam lords, South American drug cartels, African warlords who train child soldiers—those kinds. Wall Street elites and health insurance giants who exploit people can be included too.

If not in stock, pay extra—order them killed on the spot.”

Grey Rain looked puzzled; the Mechanical Horde’s electronic eyes flickered red.

The Red Spot Curse mycelium needs souls to grow, and undiluted soul solution is too expensive—why not…

Use the Glove of Compassionate Soul Infusion.

Infuse the corpses of scum with souls—use artificial souls as living culture mediums for the mycelium.

Indeed… Compassionate Soul Infusion.