The plunder of the heavens begins with the Spirit Cage.

"Who are you?" Several young men carrying long-haired wooden sticks asked warily, speaking fluent English as they surrounded Lu Qianwei.

Looking at Lu Qianwei's clothes, their faces were full of amazement or greed.

"Where is your chief, village head, or whatever leader here?"

"You still haven't said who you are? What do you want with our leader?" asked a relatively robust young man on the right.

"I...I'm a businessman, here specifically to trade." Still not quite understanding what was going on, Lu Qianwei could only answer like this.

"trade?

"You don't have anything on you or around you. What do you want to trade?" The disheveled young man looked Lu Qianwei up and down suspiciously.

If he's wearing nice clothes... well, it might not be a bad idea.

Are you short of salt?

"I can get ironware or anything else here in exchange," Lu Qianwei said confidently.

Upon hearing about salt and iron,

"You really have these things?"

"Of course, I can make a deal with your leader as long as I get to see him."

What do you need?

"I...I want to know about you."

"Is this the person who came to our Deer Antler Tribe to trade?" The chieftain, having received the news, emerged from the dense forest.

He was a middle-aged man whose clothes, though worn, bore obvious signs of modernity.

Well, Lu Qianwei has confirmed it; this is probably another unfortunate world.

The chieftain's gaze fell on Lu Qianwei, sweeping over his neat and clean clothes. He raised an eyebrow, thinking that he really was someone from a large tribe.

"I am Kajinov, the chief of the Deer Antler Tribe. May I ask your name?"

"Lu Qianwei!"

"They said you have salt and iron to trade?"

What do you want to exchange?

We can only offer furs and medicinal herbs at most; we can't offer anything too valuable."

Lu Qianwei shook his head: "I don't want your things."

I just want to understand—why are you hiding in these deep mountains and forests?

Is something wrong with this world?

The middle-aged leader was stunned, somewhat not understanding what he was saying.

The main issue is that it seems like almost everyone who is born knows about this, right?

He looked at Lu Qianwei suspiciously for a long time, thinking that the other party probably wanted to know more details.

He then scratched his head and said, "If you want to know the specific details, come with us."

“Our tribe has an old priest who is almost a hundred years old. He was there during that glorious era when the cataclysm happened.”

"But what about the salt and iron you mentioned?"

Without these, I wouldn't have taken you there.

Lu Qianwei thought for a moment, then waved his hand, and many items appeared on the ground, leaving everyone stunned.

Some even knelt down and shouted "God!"

"I don't have salt or iron, but these should be enough, right?"

The leader snapped out of his shock and nodded repeatedly as he looked at the exquisite food.

"Now please take me to see your high priest."

"well!"

After saying that, he eagerly led Lu Qianwei deeper into the dense forest.

After navigating three narrow passes riddled with sharp stake traps and turning through a mountain hollow completely obscured by dense canopies, the hidden settlement deep in the mountains and forests finally came into view.

A sharpened oak fence surrounds dozens of houses, half of which are treehouses built against century-old trees, and the other half are mud houses made of stone and mud, with thick thatched roofs for waterproofing. The entire settlement is hidden in the embrace of the mountains and forests, and can not be found from a distance.

The tribe has only about a hundred people. The women sit in front of their houses drying wild vegetables and tanning animal hides. The teenagers, barefoot, peek out from behind the adults, speaking in hushed tones, revealing a cautiousness that suggests they are hiding and trying to survive.

The chief led Qianwei directly to the treehouse under the ancient maple tree at the deepest part of the settlement. An old man, so thin that he was just skin and bones, was dozing against the wooden wall. His hair and beard were all white and stuck together, but his eyes were surprisingly bright when he opened them.

After the leader explained where he came from, the old man tapped the wooden base with his withered fingers and spoke in a hoarse voice: "That was almost eighty years ago. Originally, this world was still human. People were crowded in big cities and airplanes flew all over the sky. There was no need to hide in the mountains and eat wild vegetables."

Later, a man-made virus was developed, originally intended to treat diseases, but somehow it went awry.

It is a deadly plague for humans; those infected will cough up blood and die within three days.

Large numbers of people in big cities died, but the virus had no effect on chimpanzees; instead, it seemed to have enhanced their intelligence, making them as smart as humans, and even more powerful.

"Many areas are now dominated by gorillas!"

Does this sound familiar?

Lu Qianwei frowned and asked, "Is their leader named... Caesar?"

"Caesar... Caesar..." the old man coughed twice, "I think there was one like that."

Okay, it's basically confirmed. The only thing about gorillas becoming intelligent is the movie "Rise of the Planet of the Apes".

Regardless of whether it is true or not, Lu Qianwei is not too willing to think that gorillas will dominate and become the overlords of the planet.

virus?

That's easy, just catch one and study it carefully.

We'll do the opposite then and give them a kind of regression to ancestral intelligence.

"Chief, do you know where there are those kinds of gorillas?" Lu Qianwei asked the chief.

Upon hearing this, Kakinov immediately shook his head, "How dare we get close to them?"

These ominous apes could easily kill us all!

"..."

Having roughly understood the reason, Lu Qianwei stopped pressing the matter and turned to leave. Staying there any longer would not yield any further information.

He also doesn't have the habit of experiencing primitive living, and there's a chance someone might crawl into his bed in the middle of the night... Just thinking about it makes me shudder!

As the tribesmen knelt down and shouted, Lu Qianwei had already left the place in a spaceship.

"Where should we find gorillas?" Lu Qianwei tapped the control panel with his fingertips, and finally decided to leave it to fate.

With a few random button presses, Lu Qianwei activated the spaceship's automatic cruise mode.

It drifted slowly southeastward, skimming the stratocumulus clouds, choosing its flight path entirely based on the terrain it scanned.

Over the course of half an hour, we passed several ruins of human cities swallowed up by giant vines and trees.

For half a century, no one has maintained it, and the reinforced concrete has long been corroded by wind and rain, leaving it riddled with holes.

The tallest skyscrapers have been cracked by centuries-old trees, becoming dens for birds of prey and wild boars; there is no trace of human civilization to be seen.

After flying for almost another hour, the sun on the horizon gradually sank behind the mountains.

The orange-red twilight bathed the boundless forest in a warm glow. Lu Qianwei was just about to find a place to stop and enjoy the view when the scanner suddenly buzzed softly.

In a mountain valley three kilometers ahead, low-intensity combustion was detected, along with human biosignals.

He steered the probe slightly off course, lowered the altitude, and approached. In the distance, he could see pale blue smoke rising from the dense forest, wisps of it mixed in with the evening mountain mist, almost invisible unless one looked closely.

"It's...quite difficult to spot." Lu Qianwei said in a low voice, not daring to land rashly, but maintaining his high-altitude invisibility and looking in that direction.

It was a small, partially hidden clearing in a mountain valley, where seven or eight raggedly dressed people were gathered around a blazing bonfire.

Roasting freshly hunted wild rabbits over tree branches, the sizzling sound of dripping oil on the fire filled the air with a fragrance that could be smelled from afar; the wisp of smoke rose from this bonfire.

Judging from their appearance, they don't seem to have come from a tribe.

They carried several cloth bags filled with grains with them, and each of them was so thin that their cheekbones protruded, with only their eyes still showing a bit of... vitality.

Lu Qianwei was wondering whether he should go down and ask if there were any gorilla tribes nearby.

Suddenly, a loud crash came from the dense forest nearby, and a branch as thick as a bowl snapped off.

Three large, robust chimpanzees burst out from the shadows of the trees.

The leader was carrying a blood-stained machete in one hand and a gleaming AK-47 on his back.

The people around the campfire saw them, grabbed a rock at their feet and a chipped hunting axe, and shouted threateningly, "Don't come any closer!"

The lead gorilla sneered expressionlessly, then raised his hand and pulled the trigger.

A burst of bullets swept across, and the three humans blocking their way fell directly into pools of blood.

The remaining few were so frightened that their legs went weak. Before they could run two steps, the gorilla pounced on them, pinned them down, and tied them with oil-soaked cowhide ropes.

The gorilla squatted by the campfire, snatched a half-cooked rabbit, devoured it in a few bites, then grabbed a human's cloth bag, rummaged through it, stuffed some grains into its bosom, and then dragged its tightly bound captive, swaying as it walked out of the mountains.

Lu Qianwei raised an eyebrow. This seems to be a slave?

This is truly a reversal of the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches.

However, these humans and chimpanzees are still alive despite living together, so it seems they have developed immunity.

Lu Qianwei wasn't in a hurry to rescue anyone; he was currently worried about not being able to find a habitat for the gorillas, and now a guide had been conveniently provided to him...

Piloting the spaceship far behind the gorilla team, Lu Qianwei followed them quickly through a valley covered with bushes.

The sight before him immediately confirmed that this was the gorilla tribe he was looking for.

It turns out that the highway that runs through this area was abandoned long ago.

The gorillas smashed open the asphalt on the road and dug out steel bars mixed with the felled century-old giant trees.

They built a circular fence more than three zhang high and more than ten kilometers long along the roadbed, enclosing an entire river valley basin as their territory.

Every few dozen steps along the fence stood a watchtower, with gorilla sentries on the towers carrying rifles left behind by humans.

The view was so wide that it covered the woods half a mile away. On the wooden pole at the entrance of the fence, there were more than a dozen human heads in varying degrees of decay. They belonged to escaped slaves or other human survivors who had broken in, and were displayed openly as a warning.