Chapter 789.2: Beat Down

Low black smoke curled through the air, while shattered clouds were traced with the scars of shellfire.

Standing on the bridge of the Heart of Steel, Chu Guang looked down over the battlefield that had been plowed over again and again by artillery, much like Human Emperor floating somewhere unknown.

Compared with the madman from the Torch Church, however, his expression and emotions were clearly far calmer. There was barely any fluctuation to be seen in his cold, stern face.

Beyond the bridge’s floor-to-ceiling windows, the outline of the coastline could already be faintly made out. If things went quickly, the landing force would link up with the main force in the Northern Front in a week. Even if progress was slow, it would take no more than half a month.

After that, all that remained was to search out the Torch Church’s facilities and destroy them.

There was little worth paying attention to in the details of the local engagements. At the moment, Chu Guang was reading the investigation report on Shelter 182 that Ample Time had sent through the holographic screen.

It had been a shelter abandoned for a century. After the Torch Church restarted it, they converted it into a research facility, mainly conducting research related to Project Complete Human.

Most of the research and production facilities controlled by the Torch Church were in similar situations.

According to the investigation report Ample Time provided, besides some modified production machinery and three black boxes discovered on the fourth underground level of Shelter 182, they had also found 120 cylindrical nurturing tanks used to immerse experimental subjects on the fifth underground level, along with a gigantic glass vat occupying 100 square meters and filled with genetic-modification solution.

There was also a large cold-storage room containing more than 1,000 corpses that had either not yet been processed or were considered valuable for research. Those corpses hung like meat in a freezer. Some had three arms, others two heads. Almost none still retained a basic human form.

According to confessions from staff inside the facility, Apostles from the Torch Church would screen captured survivors for those who showed no obvious rejection reaction after being injected with the genetic-modification solution. They would then throw the suitable subjects into nurturing tanks filled with that same solution and soak them for three to seven days, after which a portion of them could be transformed into Mutant Humans.

Of course, even after eliminating those who showed rejection reactions, only a portion of the remaining subjects could successfully complete the transformation. After all, Mutant Humans themselves were an unstable technology that had never been fully perfected. There were enormous risks inherent in the technical principle alone.

And forcibly re-embryonizing a fully developed adult, replacing their genome with a new one, and compelling that genome to express itself was about as difficult as stuffing a person back into their mother’s womb and making them be born all over again. It was far more difficult than replacing blood.

Even with the Torch Church’s advantages in biotechnology, they could only achieve a 67% yield.

And even among that 67% of successful products, more than half lost their minds completely during the transformation because they could not endure the torture, degenerating into animal-like beings.

As for those who did not become animals, their minds still became distorted to varying degrees. The most common outcome was schizophrenia. For example, believing that several people lived inside a single body, or memory loss, or imagining themselves to be a cook or some other similar identity.

The relevant research was all recorded in the experimental logs, and every line seemed soaked in shocking amounts of blood.

The Torch Church apparently realized that this material was not suitable for public disclosure, so they had planned to destroy the originals while backing up the data. Fortunately, his little players had arrived in time and intercepted the Apostle who was preparing to evacuate.

After finishing the report, Chu Guang let out a soft sigh. “Just from the contents of this one investigation report alone, the crimes committed by these people are already too numerous to record.”

Standing behind him, Hyrja, who had remained silent for a long time, lowered her head with an expression of guilt so deep she seemed ashamed to show her face. “Sorry...”

“You don’t need to apologize for mistakes you never committed.” Chu Guang lightly swept an index finger through the air, gathering the pale-blue beams of light at his fingertip before letting them dissipate. Then he turned to look at her. “Besides, your research has made an enormous contribution to us, and to humanity as a whole. You should be proud. Raise your head.”

Hyrja raised her head, but the complicated emotion in her eyes still made her gaze evasive.

The people who had committed those crimes had once been her neighbors. They might even have eaten at the same table in the same cafeteria. Some of them might even have been her teachers.

“But they were still residents of Shelter 117...”

“Only some of them. Even if just one person made a different choice, that’s still a different choice.” Chu Guang interrupted her and continued while looking directly into her shifty eyes. “Besides, there are plenty of Shelter 117 residents in the New Alliance’s Biological Research Institution. They’re good people. You should know that better than anyone.”

Those bluecoats had been rescued by the New Alliance from Shelter 401. There were not many of them, but their contributions to the New Alliance’s advances in biotechnology had been considerable. They, too, had played a part in the New Alliance’s prosperity.

Hyrja’s eyes reddened slightly. “Thank you...”

“You don’t need to thank me. I’m pretty sure I’ve said something similar before.” Chu Guang smiled. “And I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Yaya, who pulled you out of that hibernation pod, thinks the same. So do the other residents who helped you collect research materials... All of us do.”

The New Alliance did not practice identity politics. It never had. Besides, not every resident of Shelter 117 had joined the Torch Church, and some who had joined had later regretted it.

That said, there was one thing he had always found strange. All available intelligence indicated that the Torch Church’s Pathfinders numbered only 13 in total, and that count even included the Chosen One named Wang Yi. Yet according to intelligence gathered through investigations and interviews by the Guards Corps, far more than 13 residents had left Shelter 117 back then.

Where had the others gone?

Including Hyrja’s mentor Karen... where had all those bluecoats who had once joined them gone?

Chu Guang was not the only one puzzled by this. Sun Yuechi, the former administrator of Shelter 70, had once expressed similar doubts.

Shelter 70 and Shelter 117 had maintained regular contact for more than a century, including exchanges on research into Mutant Slime Mold and other subjects. After all, Shelter 70 sat right beside an enormous Hive, while its residents happened not to be experts in biology.

In Sun Yuechi’s memory, the residents of Shelter 117 had never seemed like the sort of lunatics capable of doing something so deranged, nor had they possessed the capability.

Most bluecoats actually lived miserable lives on the wasteland. Kinder wastelanders simply ignored them, while harsher ones treated them like fat sheep waiting to be slaughtered.

Of course, that did not excuse Shelter 117’s mistakes.

He simply always felt as though an invisible hand had been manipulating things from behind the scenes, much like how the New Alliance indirectly manipulated the situation in the Poro Province through the Baiyue Strait Development Company as a chess piece.

Chu Guang did not particularly like the man’s sarcastic analogy, since the two situations were completely different.

However, he had to admit that he had felt something similar himself. The Torch Church’s development during the ten years after leaving the Brocade River Province and moving to Ocean Edge Province had been bizarre in more ways than one. The Iron Tower organization had at least been a discount version of the New Alliance. Local survivors had spontaneously organized themselves into a mutual-aid alliance.

That should have been far harder to break than Boulder Town. Yet, unbelievably, Torch had dismantled the Iron Tower in a very short time and enslaved the survivors of an entire province.

The number of black boxes they possessed far exceeded what Shelter 117 should theoretically have had in reserve.

And with astonishing equipment, they armed one special-operations force after another, units that even the New Alliance’s most elite soldiers found difficult to deal with.

Chu Guang was not only curious about where the other residents of Shelter 117 outside the 13 Pathfinders had gone. He was even more curious about what exactly had happened during the years after the Torch Church arrived on the land beneath his feet...

Just then, Lu Bei of the Guards Corps came through the access door and entered the bridge, snapping off a crisp military salute. “Respected Administra... Sir, our investigators operating on the front have received a signal from within the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Recently, the kid had finally managed to correct his habit of addressing him, and Chu Guang was quite satisfied with that progress. The only thing he still wasn’t completely satisfied with was that although Lu Bei frequently repeated things Chu Guang had said, he rarely seemed to truly listen to them.

Seeing Lu Bei suddenly stop speaking, Hyrja tactfully prepared to leave the bridge, but Chu Guang called her back. “Stay and listen.”

Then Chu Guang looked at Lu Bei and continued, “The New Alliance hasn’t reached the point where it needs to hide its condition from our doctor. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before. All intelligence the Guards Corps gathers regarding the Torch Church is transparent to the New Alliance Biological Research Institution. You don’t need to ask me first.”

Lu Bei lowered his head and muttered, “Yes, sir...”

Knowing the young man had only meant well, Chu Guang did not criticize him further. He simply gestured with his eyes for him to continue.

Lu Bei paused, then gave the report in full.

Simply put, it wasn’t only the coalition that believed the Torch Church was finished. People from the Torch Church itself thought they were screwed as well. Although the Torch Church nominally had the word “Church” in its name, those doctrines were mainly used to fool ordinary people. Their upper leadership did not really talk about that stuff among themselves. They relied far more on science and practical methods.

There were certainly steadfast idealists among them, but there were also plenty of opportunists and plenty of people whose attitude was to ignore the problem entirely.

Yore, who now worked for the New Alliance, was the most typical example of the latter. The guy himself barely knew what he actually wanted. Before the war, he had simply been an overworked employee at a pharmaceutical company. Then war broke out, so he moved somewhere else and continued doing research. His colleagues somehow talked him into taking a nap, and when he woke up, it was already the Wasteland Era. The Torch Church beckoned, and without thinking too much about it, he followed them.

Some other researchers had simply been attracted by their resources, hoping to use those resources to continue unfinished research from before the war.

In any case, there was now one such researcher among the Torch Church’s senior ranks.

Seeing that there was about a 90% chance the insanely self-destructive tree called the Torch Church was about to fall, the researcher wanted to defect to the Mutant Slime Mold Research Committee with intelligence and research data in exchange for lenient treatment.

More interestingly, according to this senior researcher, the Torch Church’s upper leadership apparently intended to escape using some secret device located inside the facility where he worked.

Clearly, he was not on the list for the strategic relocation, so he had taken the opportunity to leak the information.

“What is that researcher’s name?!” Hyrja anxiously interrupted before Lu Bei could finish.

Lu Bei hesitated and glanced at Chu Guang and was met with an impassive gaze.

In the end, Lu Bei sighed in resignation and stopped trying to conceal it. “The name that person gave us for identification was Karen... I was surprised at first too, but I don’t think that person is the one you’ve been searching for.”

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