Chapter Ninety-Four: Standing Upon the Missile

If the apocalypse has a color, it is surely the color of the Far South at this very moment.

What is an apocalypse?

It is the loss of all hope, where wisdom descends into bestiality, and a revelry ensues that cares nothing for the future or the boundaries of decency. There is not a shred of beauty left; these creatures, wearing human skin, have become demons in essence. They are indifferent to life and death, their faces marked with cross-shaped blood pustules, as they hunt and slaughter those who remain uninfected.

Hell is empty, and the devils are here on Earth.

It took only seven days.

The nation of Lanfang had its infrastructure—from sanitation to national defense—completely shattered. All ten of its major cities fell, and the presidential plane, the only entity capable of effectively coordinating resistance across the regions, crashed for unknown reasons.

Subsequently, any organized defense or refuge attempt was keenly detected by the infected and crushed. What followed was the grins of the infected, engaging in a debauched revelry that combined the cruelty of Khorne with the excess of Slaanesh.

The Far South lies near the equator, and there are no great powers here.

The survivors of Lanfang continue to resist in small pockets, desperately calling for aid from the outside world, hoping for help from the rivers or the oceans—even if it meant having nuclear bombs dropped on their own territory. Because the beings still roaming freely in the big cities and on the streets are no longer human.

Millions, perhaps tens of millions of infected, have formed the prototype of what they call the Demon Race.

Blood pustules.

After humans are infected by this virus, their temperaments change drastically. Their speech becomes extremely violent and vulgar, their behavior leans toward slaughter, and they commit terrifying, grotesque acts beyond human imagination, such as desecrating corpses. Their thinking becomes chaotic, like a brain fried by narcotics, yet they can naturally distinguish normal people and proceed to torture them.

They are very similar to zombies.

But they lack the horror of the undead.

The infected use weapons, drive vehicles, tanks, or fighter jets—the advanced weaponry of humanity. They even learn and evolve, employing schemes and strategies, and cultivating martial arts and Taoist techniques. Objectively speaking, they are still human, just humans who are utterly insane, devoid of boundaries, and wantonly venting their morbid desires.

If things had followed a normal course:

As part of the Great Plague, the blood-pustule infected would have begun to kill each other over the next two months as the supply of normal people dwindled. The brutality of the scene could only be described in eight words: a mountain of corpses, a sea of blood, rivers of gore!

During this process, some infected who could maintain a modicum of rationality would use the zombie virus, vampire curses, parasitic infestations, and fungal aggregations to welcome other Great Plagues into their territory, essentially "raising Gu" to create true monsters. To other Great Plagues with territorial consciousness, this seemed inconceivable.

The Far South already had a hellish population density.

Once it spiraled completely out of control, it became a natural sanctuary for "raising Gu"!

At the cost of millions of infected and all kinds of surface life, the infected achieved a metamorphosis, relying on the spontaneous psionic effects formed by their emotional states after aggregation. Their skin turned pale; they could derive energy from any source, and they would not die even if decapitated or shredded. They have a strict hierarchy and a gestalt-like consciousness. They believe they are the new humanity, boasting that they have discarded useless morality and have surpassed the Great Old Ones in every aspect.

They call themselves the Demon Race!

And they will ultimately replace humanity...

Chalenge is one of the few psionic cultivators currently resisting on the ground in Lanfang.

Other psionic cultivators have either died in battle, went missing with the president's plane, or were cowards who fled Lanfang and sought refuge elsewhere. As a martial artist who has mastered the internal energy of Qi but has made no progress in Taoist arts, Chalenge relies on an armed squad separated from the main force to protect the thirty or so elderly, weak, women, and children left in his village. They move in agonizing secrecy through the gaps in the torrent of the infected army, relying on hard-earned experience to successfully avoid the infected's unreasonable, acute senses.

Chalenge has not despaired, and he forces others not to despair either. The Buddha will surely come to save them.

Because if one falls into despair, one will soon become a devil.

In the terminology of the Reborn, this is the psionic effect.

Every infection in the Great Plague has a psionic effect. If your emotions collapse, even if you are hiding in a safe house or the depths of a bunker, you will be infected for no reason, or detected by the infected. This unreasonable effect leaves almost no survivors in the plague-stricken zones.

The Far South is a tributary of civilization, not the main trunk.

There are no Reborn here.

Chalenge only learned a little by communicating with the Xinghan rescue team via radio.

"Wu Qingsheng, prepare two more stink bombs. They don't like the smell of this herb."

"Ye Bo, stop crying. Your father and mother's souls have ascended to heaven; their bodies are occupied by devils. We will return sooner or later to purify them."

"Shaman, distribute the hot soup to everyone. Once finished, we depart."

After settling the emotions of the remaining survivors, Chalenge calculated the remaining supplies, which should be enough to last until they reached the rescue point designated by the Xinghan people.

There was no shortage of supplies at the beginning of the apocalypse.

"Zero-dollar shopping" allowed you to take whatever you wanted!

But obtaining supplies was risky—extremely risky. Those blood-stained devils were particularly fond of hiding in supermarkets or convenience stores; once a survivor went to get supplies, they would be captured.

The fate of those captured was too horrific to witness.

The cruel devils might hack them to death with blades, tear them apart alive, pour gasoline on them to watch them dance in the flames, or drag them behind motorcycles with iron chains. If they were women, it was even worse; regardless of age, they were treated with double the cruelty.

Chalenge went to greet the armed squad, who were resting and recuperating.

"Captain Bawei."

"Warrior Chalenge." The captain, holding an assault rifle, nodded in return.

"Have the Xinghan people really sent a rescue team?" Chalenge's voice was very, very low; he kept the unknown and the despair for himself.

Their city was the furthest away.

Even with contact with survivors at the southernmost tip, they had not seen a shadow of the Xinghan people.

"They will. The Xinghan people keep their promises best." Captain Bawei did not know if this was genuine confidence or a desperate gamble, but his tone was firm.

"Then we shall storm the school and use desks, chairs, and fire to hold our ground."

Chalenge could only choose to believe.

Because besides Xinghan, no one would come to save them.

Lanfang's neighboring countries were currently overwhelmed themselves.

Beyond the blood pustules, the situation of their neighbors was even worse. Under the instigation of vampires, the "Ghost-Worshippers" created riots, established the Blood Cult, openly propagated heretical ideas, and used blood slaves and supernatural powers to recruit large numbers of people. As the surplus population flooded in, they were distributed guns and began to run rampant.

If the blood pustules were a heavy illness that arrived quickly and fiercely, the vampire's curse was a non-stop hemorrhaging.

The current number of survivors in Lanfang is roughly estimated to be fifty or sixty thousand.

In just one week.

From tens of millions of people, the population plummeted to this number. In the Far South, with its dense population, poor medical conditions, terrible living environment, and lack of hope for advancement, the blood pustules were a tool for de-urbanization.

At this very moment.

In the Karimata waters along the coast of Lanfang, to the northwest, a fleet flying the Xinghan flag was patrolling.

Fighter jets and helicopters were taking off and landing from aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships from time to time.

As a humanitarian rescue mission, they were working hard to cut the connection between the blood pustules and the vampires, while containing this part of the Great Plague within Lanfang. The psionic cultivators summoned by Commander Lan Yi were all holding "Hyper-Colonization Liquid" devices, using psionic input to create purification waves to drive away the infected and find suitable landing points.

Airstrikes and reconnaissance had already mapped out a shocking infection map.

In the dynamic map, the green survivors were almost drowned in a sea of scarlet. And this green light was vanishing every second; some had lost contact, some were discovered by the infected, and others, perhaps, had fallen into utter despair and had their mental defenses broken.

This is the cruelty of a chaotic era.

If you fall behind, you vanish for no reason, and you vanish without a sound.

Lan Yi was also in the fleet.

He did not interfere with the command.

He simply closed his eyes, waiting for something.

Cleaning up non-human races is the specialty of "Old Demon Lan." After all, one of the major crimes he would commit in the future was his heavy-handed strikes against non-human races.

How heavy-handed?

If, in the backyard of the Oceanic Civilization, Lan Yi still left a sliver of hope, not destroying them completely to leave a chance for reconstruction for the life of the Artificial God Realm, then in these Artificial God Realms dominated by non-human races, Lan Yi did nothing but exterminate them root and branch. He often guided the human race to crush the non-human races.

If these non-human races had backers in the Main World?

That was even better!

As long as they were lured out, he would finish them off cleanly.

Old Demon Lan would never look back at an explosion. You can pin whatever crimes you like on him; his reputation was already ruined, so he didn't care about that.

Lan Yi came to the Far South in person.

Besides getting a new toy and wanting the satisfaction of blowing things up, a more important reason was to completely eliminate this part of the Great Plague that could directly threaten the Xinghan mainland.

To Lan Yi.

This was like a surgical operation.

Cut out the lesion directly, rather than letting it fester and spread to the mainland.

To put it bluntly, if a war breaks out on your own territory, no matter how you fight it, you lose.

"Commander, the data has been compiled, and the strike is about to begin." A staff member in a white uniform stepped forward to report.

"Any movement in the west?"

Lan Yi opened his eyes. His gaze seemed to pierce through the obstruction of the ocean, shooting directly at the vampire clans hidden in Temasek, at the Southern Sub-Asian continent, and at those aggregating fungi.

"Fearing your power, they have stopped all movement." The white-uniformed officer's face showed admiration.

This is Commander Lan Yi!

His mere presence made the demons of the four directions tremble in silence!

It was not just the psionic radiation information of a top predator that exterminated all things, which fundamentally deterred the raging plague; it was also the image of Lan Yi walking out of a nuclear explosion that was too astonishing, scaring these scum who had just left the "newbie village."

"Prepare the missile linkage network."

"Taking a plane is too slow."

"I want to cleanse Lanfang while standing on a missile within half an hour."

As Lan Yi slowly stood up, his burly and robust figure was like a pillar supporting the sky, carrying boundless momentum as he slammed it against the waves. At this moment, facing the sunset and the crashing waves, his substantial "Thunder Phoenix Heart-Scene" unfolded, with thunder-feathered wings that shocked the demons into retreating, and the miasma of ten thousand miles dissipated with a roar!!