Volume 3, Chapter 42 – Harvest (Double-Length)

With Elande’s death and the Aogu armor assigned to her smashed by Bai Xiang, the tactical command center on the other side of the planet descended into chaos.

“Lieutenant Elande… brainwave response gone!”

“What the hell happened?”

“No idea! The feed we got back is all blurry! It’s like some extremely intense magnetic field was interfering with it!”

“Signal B036 lost!”

“‘Orbital Guardian’ signal lost!”

Bang!

Listening to the confused stream of reports, the man at the main seat—a bespectacled officer with curly reddish-brown hair—slammed his fist hard onto the table.

Any single one of those reports would have dropped an Aogu God warrior’s survival rate by over ninety percent. Now they’d all come at once. He knew perfectly well Elande was as good as dead… most likely killed in a sneak attack by that “Bai Xiang” while trying to negotiate.

“Can we recover the last data packet?” Once he’d calmed himself, the bespectacled man asked the comms officer in a cold voice.

“We’re decrypting it now!” Sweat rolled down the comms officer’s forehead.

Everyone was on edge. Ever since Aogu God warrior tech had come close to maturity, it had been a long time since they’d been this humiliated.

It wasn’t like they’d never lost an Aogu God before—but never this fast, and never so bafflingly.

Because they were up against a Great Yu cultivator?

But then what was that inexplicable magnetic interference?

The power of the Aogu Gods and the power of Great Yu cultivators came from the same source; there shouldn’t be any strong interference between them. How could it disrupt data gathering?

“Results are in, sir!” The comms officer looked back, speaking quickly. “Decryption shows B036 used ‘Phantom-Spirit Field’ once before contact was lost, and there are also two recorded activations of ‘Phantom-Spirit Shock’, less than one second apart!”

“That makes three Phantom-Spirit uses.” The bespectacled man frowned, muttering, “That exceeds the limit I set for her, and the interval was that short… it means her will was nearly collapsing, that she was lashing out blindly at the enemy…”

“Sir?”

“Compile and archive every stage of this operation.” The bespectacled man gave the order. “Headquarters needs to know what happens when we’re exposed.”

The others snapped into even more frantic motion. The bespectacled man left his seat, walked down the corridor to a small single room, and pulled up the thin display on the desk.

The screen flickered, revealing a stunning blonde woman with blue eyes.

If Liandi’s soul were here, he would have recognized her at once as the woman in the blue suit who’d given him his final orders to wait on the tarmac.

She’d changed outfits by now, her neckline hanging wide open. Drink with ice in hand, she was mid-sip when she noticed the red indicator light flip to green, choked, and bent over coughing hard.

“You look terrible… cough, cough … the op failed? Already?”

“It was under three minutes from touchdown to loss of contact.” The bespectacled man’s tone was grim, both hands scrubbing his face. “…I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Isn’t someone awfully fond of calling himself the world’s number one analyst?” The woman smiled at him through narrowed eyes. “You look awfully deflated. That’s not the you I know.”

“You’ve actually fought a War-class.” The bespectacled man’s gaze locked on the screen. “Tell me, during battle, did you ever experience intense signal interference? Something like a magnetic field?”

“Never.” The woman’s expression grew serious. She knew he wouldn’t ask that sort of question without a reason—if he was asking, it meant he’d run into exactly that.

“That’s not right… Aogu particles don’t interfere with communications. They only react to organic matter. What did you people run into?”

“A person.” The bespectacled man laughed. “A woman we’re not even sure is of age.”

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“Are you screwing with me?” The woman snapped.

“I wouldn’t dare.” He leaned back, rubbing the dark circles under his eyes. “You’ll be getting word on your end soon enough anyway. Why would I lie to you?”

“An underage female War-class. Excluding New Or’s ‘Fisna’, that only leaves Great Yu’s ‘Bai Xiang’.” The woman pondered for a bit, then tried to console him. “Don’t be too down about it. You know every update to that sort of person’s file is incredibly valuable. The price of a B-class warrior isn’t that high… I mean, compared to the gains. At least you don’t have to worry about heavy penalties.”

“I know.” The bespectacled man nodded. “What I’m worried about is this failed op leading to our existence being exposed.”

“The orbital laboratories.”

“The interstellar migration project.”

“The Dyson defense shell.”

“Project Doomsday Dusk.”

“The Aogu God Project.”

“If any one of those is leaked, we’ll be on the back foot.”

“You know as well as I do,” he lowered his eyes slightly, “we still have nothing that can contend with Terror-class.”

“Interstellar migration can go to hell.” The woman snorted. “Running before the fight even starts? As if humanity’s going to lose to those monsters.”

“As for exposure… wasn’t that already assumed?” She held up a finger and waggled it. “Our backing of Yao Qingyuan was never going to stay buried. Great Yu has long known we’re pulling strings behind the scenes. Just watch—they’ll arrogantly ignore it like they always do.”

“I hope so.” The man sighed. “That Bai Xiang doesn’t get on with Great Yu’s royal family. Best-case scenario, she helps cover it up.”

Having their support of Yao Qingyuan exposed was not the same as having any of those projects exposed.

Especially the Aogu God Project… If Great Yu found out that the ‘inferior bloodline’ they’d always despised had pooled the strength of all the federal states to research demonic power—that is, Aogu particles—and had even developed methods specifically targeting cultivators, the current balance would shatter. War would be inevitable.

The blonde didn’t see it that way. “She’ll definitely file a report. Letting us tear at each other is what benefits her most.”

The man fell silent, not answering.

“What’s your next move?” she asked again.

“I don’t know… I think I need some time off.” He shook his head, then seemed to remember something. “Oh, and I have to deal with another one… think of a way to coax her into accepting reality.”

“I suggest you try to get in touch with Evan.” The woman lifted a lock of golden hair.

“If he’s made further progress with the B2 containment target, we could just drop it and let it contaminate the surroundings. Wouldn’t that wipe them out?”

“Regional comms in Great Yu are cut. She’s hostile to those people anyway, so the report won’t go through all that quickly.”

The bespectacled man gave a helpless grin. “You do realize there are close to twenty million people piled up in southern Great Yu… They really did name you well.”

“The data Evan sent back through his agents is incredibly valuable,” the woman added. “Preliminary rating is A, possibly S… You were going to contact him anyway.”

“Fine.” The bespectacled man nodded.

“I’ll give it a shot.”

……

Meanwhile, Bai Xiang flipped open the silver briefcase.

The moment it opened, she shot into the air—turning into a streak as she rushed straight up. Only once she confirmed there was nothing unusual—no explosion, no toxic gas, no burning sensation from radiation, not even the slightest warning from her heart-aspect—did she relax and drift back down.

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When she opened the case for real, a curl of white mist floated out first.

It was just the frost-mist from the cold storage. In the middle of the case was a hollow, holding an elongated, silver-metal ovoid capsule—like a stretched-out metallic football. The white mist was seeping from the coolant filling the hollow.

So the main cargo was this capsule.

Bai Xiang poked it with a finger. Whatever this was, harmful or not, it was clearly extremely important to the federal people.

She thought about cutting it open—but the moment the idea arose, she had a heart-twitch, a sudden surge of bad premonition.

Then she couldn’t open it.

She shut the case again.

She could take it back for Hannah to look at. Hannah was from the Federation too; maybe she’d recognize it.

“Mm?”

At the same time, her body went stiff for an instant, a flash of surprise crossing her face.

While she’d been checking the wrecked machinery and the briefcase, she’d also been working in parallel, refining her enemies’ souls. And from the concrete information distilled by Jade Spirit, she’d learned that the girl she’d killed was named “Elande”, attached to a secret unit called “Aogu”.

That unit lived and trained in the sky all year round, exactly as she’d guessed—so Great Yu would have a hard time probing any information from them.

“Aogu God warriors…? Project Aogu?”

The deeper she dug into the memories, the more astonished Bai Xiang became at these discoveries—because Elande’s memories held plenty of scenes proving that Aogu’s research sprang from the ultimate puzzle that plagued Great Yu cultivators: pollution and disorder.

They weren’t in a position to capture cultivators above Knight-class, but collecting scattered cultivation techniques, and using Demon Pools and demon beasts that had leaked out around Great Yu for imitation research—that they could do.

To uncover the secrets of pollution, these people would deliberately induce the target to break their seals during experiments, watching them turn into warped monstrosities, all while recording brainwave values in every possible condition, hoping to find the “switch” that triggered it.

“The experiment was a success.”

In the memory, a fuzzy cheer echoed.

“Fantastic! We used the twins’ telepathy as a crutch, sure, but this subject definitely pulled through! She can resist pollution at this frequency, while the pollution she triggers can easily interfere with those Great Yu people—even achieve mental control!”

“Keep it up! We have to truly seize that ‘switch’!”

“As long as we keep perfecting Phantom-Spirit power, we’ll definitely be able to create real gods!”

Lunatics.

That was the only verdict Bai Xiang had.

No… This was the sort of work you’d expect Great Yu to be doing. At the start, they hadn’t created a single Aogu God warrior yet, had zero defensive means, and they still did these experiments. What if a test subject broke loose? Then what?

Her confusion didn’t last long; she quickly reached the relevant part. What left her even more stunned was that their early containment protocol was “banishment”.

Every laboratory was in space, in orbital stations. Each lab was a little “egg-pod” hanging from the station. Once an alarm sounded and they confirmed things were out of control, the station would immediately seal the escape corridor leading inward, then fire that egg-pod off into deep space.

Why not blow it up?

Because they didn’t want too much trash and debris cluttering the orbital lanes.

By this point, Bai Xiang no longer had any comment to make.

She’d thought the old Great Yu types chasing immortality with taboo arts—Chan Master Wenluo and the like—were already pushing things as far as they could. She hadn’t expected the federal people to outdo them in playing with fire.

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What would become of those egg-pods launched into the void?

They’d even researched ancient demons like Hannah, some pods containing ancient demon genes and the “pollutants” born when those genes fell into disorder and broke their seals.

A single golden record had sparked so much debate and controversy; these people had better pray extraterrestrial civilizations truly didn’t exist.①

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①: The “golden record” refers to the record carried by the Voyager probe in 1977 in real-world history. Some have pointed out that an alien civilization could infer most of Earth’s civilization from its contents. This move is “extremely dangerous”.

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Of course, beyond all that, she’d also gained a few real benefits. The most striking of these was the set of cultivation methods for Aogu God warriors: God-Descent Calisthenics , the Vacuum Meditation Method , and the Phantom-Spirit Breathing Method .

The Vacuum Meditation Method was used to maintain sanity. Every Aogu God warrior had a monitoring chip embedded at the back of the skull, capable of judging their current state based on heart rate, blood flow, brainwaves, and other metrics, distilling those into a single sanity value.

A sanity value above 80 was normal.

From 60, there was a risk of losing control.

Below 60, loss of control was highly likely, triggering a berserk state.

This was tied to the so-called Aogu frequency—the frequency and number of times an Aogu God warrior could actively trigger Phantom Spirit.

Take Elande, for instance. Her Aogu frequency allowed a maximum of five activations in seventy-five hours, and three in twenty-four.

If she went beyond that, her sanity value would plunge to somewhere between 61 and 65, leaving her on the verge of a berserk state… Bai Xiang figured that “berserk” here meant exactly what cultivators called losing order and breaking seals—being polluted by demonic power and turning into a monster.

As for where that demonic power came from, that was where God-Descent Calisthenics came in.

Its main effect was to train the tendons and bones with eighteen sets of frankly inhuman poses somewhat reminiscent of yoga, which, paired with a secret fortifying agent, could enhance the body’s strength.

“God-Descent” meant guiding a god into the body. The “god” here wasn’t a target of faith, but the Demon Pool.

More precisely, it was a Demon-Pool-like power distilled from their research, which they called “Aogu particles”. The name came from the Aogu mythos on the northwest continent, whose gods were also called Aogu Gods.

Dr. Hannah had named her little pet “Samsis X”, saying “Samsis” was an ancient god worshiped by the Sami people, with a lizard-like body and a divine power that absorbed all filth. The Sami revered it as the “World-Purging God”.

That Samsis was one of the Aogu Gods, part of the larger Aogu pantheon.

Normally, drawing Aogu particles into the body meant a one hundred percent chance of your sanity being shaved down below 60—in other words, being polluted. To control that power and become a qualified Aogu God warrior, you also needed the Phantom-Spirit Breathing Method and “Aogu potion”.

That was the part that really pleased Bai Xiang.

According to the memories, the essence of the Phantom-Spirit Breathing Method was to use machine assistance to form a specific frequency inside the body through vibrational breathing, then use that frequency to suppress Aogu particles.

Bai Xiang obviously didn’t have the support machinery—but with Vibration Art, she could do it herself.

The frequency was in Elande’s memories; that was the easy part.

As for the Aogu potion…

Following the memories’ hints, she returned to the armor’s cockpit and rummaged around for a good while, finally discovering a metal box at the end of a bundled needle-and-tube assembly. Inside the box, she found a single vial of concentrated serum.

Just one dose, meant as an emergency reserve for Aogu God warriors.

She’d take that to Hannah as well.

With utmost care, Bai Xiang stowed the vial away.

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She’d been lacking a guidepost for her next steps. After the Five Worms Theory had inspired her, she’d wanted to continue honing her flesh, but had no other body-tempering arts to work with.

She couldn’t exactly call down lightning to strike herself, could she?

Now, though, she had a new direction—if Hannah could reverse-engineer the formula for the Aogu potion, she could attempt to cultivate using God-Descent Calisthenics and the Phantom-Spirit Breathing Method .

As for whether it would work, that couldn’t be judged from surface analysis alone.

The final results would hinge on a complex web of factors. Beyond each person’s natural physique, there was also the Demon Pool being drawn into the body.

That, at least, was similar to Sword Dao. The Federation had clearly innovated atop the Sword Dao system, and you could just barely call it an “improvement plan”.

No one else would be crazy enough to try such an idea right out of the gate.

After all, drawing a Demon Pool into your body… just saying it sounded insanely dangerous.

But Bai Xiang—when it came specifically to “drawing something into her body”, she alone didn’t need to hesitate.

So far, nothing could withstand her soul powers. The hardest step for others was, for her, the easiest.

With no real risk, why not give it a try?

By comparison, the value of the meditation method was much lower. Bai Xiang had no need to kindle Aogu particles to counter Sword Dao; Demon-Pool power barely worked on her to begin with.

Once she’d roughly digested Elande’s memories, Bai Xiang let out a long breath, a very satisfied look on her face.

If she’d tried to interrogate her alive, there was no way she’d have pulled out such classified intel. The refining effect produced by pairing Feixiang Heaven with her soul arts really was incredible.

She’d have to thank the federal people for sending down this air-dropped gift pack.

She tipped her head back, glancing up at the sky.

They’d gone to all this trouble to drop someone down, only to have all their secrets fall straight into her lap. She wondered how they’d take it.

Right—could this be that B2 containment target?

Looking at the case, Bai Xiang’s heart suddenly gave a thump as she recalled that Dr. Evan had escaped with this very item.

The intel from those two bio-humans said Evan was coming here to rendezvous with Liandi. Would he hand the B2 containment target over to Liandi?

Highly likely.

Liandi could just as easily have used it as leverage to force the federal people to extract him.

Mm.

That tied all the clues together.

“Good thing it didn’t leak.”

Bai Xiang hefted the case in her hand.

A demon disaster was looming.

If something like this got out, the impact would be far too terrifying.