Tonight, Alice joins the hunt.

So, in order to keep it motivated to keep jumping...

"We need to make sure that nothing goes wrong with the following steps." Her gaze shifted upwards, landing on the sky. She then drew upon the few spare mental energies in her mind to connect with the Great Library at the top of the dome.

....................................

The gamma rays arrive at Earth at sunrise, and this cosmic storm will continue for a whole day until the ozone layer protecting the Earth's surface is completely destroyed, allowing all sorts of chaotic signals and high-energy radiation from the universe to freely touch the Earth's surface.

This is a continuous, catastrophic disaster, which means that the protective shield in the survivor base, constructed from countless force field generators, must remain operational indefinitely. Therefore, the density of buildings within the base must be further increased, and more protective measures and emergency response facilities must be constructed to ensure that the last remaining civilization on this planet can survive after the reincarnators depart.

Around noon, the Great Library descended from the sky. When it docked with the survivor base, it revealed a huge ring shape. The central command tower at the center of the base emerged from the inside of the ring and rapidly grew taller at a rate of several meters per minute. If someone could look down from the sky, the entire large base would resemble a giant metal target, and at the center of the target, the central tower would look like a dart stuck in the very center.

"It looks a bit like the fast food I used to eat when I was in a rush at work, it's called Pizza... something like that. Pizza?" Zheng Zha looked at the command tower erected in the center, stroked his chin, and came to this conclusion after a long while.

His position was high in the air, two thousand meters above the ground, parallel to the spire of the tower, and he could observe the entire scene on the ground from a direct downward view.

The group's current location was a result of Xiao Honglu's efforts—the veterans, after spending the entire morning running around, finally managed to settle the survivors in Greece and then gave themselves a short break. During lunchtime, Xiao Honglu used his authority to summon a flying vehicle, loaded them all inside, and then flew the machine to the same height as the tower. After setting the viewport to one-way transparency, they enjoyed the beautiful scenery of machinery and industry while filling their stomachs with high-energy food.

“Never tried it.” Xiao Honglu curled his lip. He had specially obtained two pounds of fried spiders from the supply department, and he was crunching them one after another. “And I have no interest in it.”

“Actually, I don’t really like it either.” Zheng Zha shrugged. Even now, he was still wearing that power armor that was several meters tall, so much so that his shrug was exaggerated. Just looking at his body outline, he looked like a giant ape eating a peach. “But it’s convenient, fast, and saves time.”

His gaze was fixed on the ground.

"I don't know how Norrell and Margot Lloyd managed to build such a city that houses billions of people and machines, it's like the entire Eastern country on this land is contained within this area of ​​tens of thousands of square kilometers, and there's not a single disturbance or abnormality... How did they manage to build it in just a few days?"

“Who knows,” Xiao Honglu swallowed the fried spider. “I’ve always been too lazy to think about things that are beyond my control. It’ll give me a headache, and even if I knew, it wouldn’t help. Brother Zheng Zha, you should take better care of your brain cells; thinking too much is bad for your nerves.” He thought for a moment and added, “Besides, it’s not suitable for you.”

He made a lot of sense, and Zheng Zha had no reply. So he had no choice but to give up thinking and concentrate on fighting the food in his hands.

However, his fight did not last more than a few seconds.

“Brother Zheng.” Sitting next to him, with one seat between them, Zhan Lan asked softly, “What’s wrong with Ying Kong? She’s been gone for so long without a word. Wasn’t the misunderstanding cleared up a long time ago? But why do I always feel like she’s avoiding us?”

Zhang Heng, sitting diagonally across from her, chimed in, "That's exactly how it feels. I was going to ask her to come over for dinner, but the robot I contacted told me she's currently working on a crucial research project and can't get away right now. I just wanted to ask for more details, but that 'tin can' guy used a bunch of technical jargon I couldn't understand at all, which left me completely bewildered!"

He angrily swung his fists, as if wanting to smash the imaginary robot tin can to pieces. Undoubtedly, the answer he gleaned from the robot was a devastating blow to his supposedly above-average knowledge, a blow that nearly drove him mad.

Of course, he didn't actually go berserk. Because before that, Zheng Zha had raised his hand and grasped his waving fist, forcibly bringing him back to calm.

"Yingkong's situation... is very complicated, we can't help her." Zheng Zha shook his head with a hint of sadness. On the way back to the base from Greece, Zhao Yingkong, the alternate personality, talked to him about many things. Although the assassin girl didn't tell him about her brothers and sisters who died in the 'Empty Project,' she carefully revealed some things about her primary personality.

He didn't say much, but he conveyed all the crucial information to Zheng Zha. After learning part of the cause and effect, Zheng Zha naturally understood what he could do at this time.

The answer is simple: do nothing. At this point, the only thing he needs to give is trust.

“She… has some psychological issues that need treatment,” Zheng Zha carefully chose his words. “Margot Royd has already arranged a treatment plan for her. I believe it should be effective in the next couple of days. Once she’s better… let her tell us herself then.”

"Is that so?" Zhan Lan lowered her eyes, looking slightly dejected. Her mental scanning ability was not enough for her to find Zhao Yingkong, who was intentionally hiding in this densely populated survivor base—she did not know that Zhao Yingkong and Alice had gone to the border battlefield, but thought that Zhao Yingkong had concealed her aura and did not want to see her—so she had no choice but to give up.

The conversation ended, and the atmosphere inside the aircraft immediately became quiet. The group silently ate their food, and within minutes, their plates were empty.

"Brother Zheng." — Zhan Lan's voice suddenly rang out from the depths of Zheng Zha's heart.

[Zhan Lan? What is it?] Zheng Zha's eyebrows twitched, but he immediately suppressed his physical reaction with superhuman willpower. [Is there something you can't say in front of everyone?]

"This isn't a secret, nor is it related to the team's stability; you don't need to worry about any conspiracy. But telling everyone directly might affect morale. After all, everyone's under a lot of pressure and very tense right now. Therefore, I've decided to tell you this first."

What exactly is the situation?

'When I was searching for Sakura Sora earlier, I scanned the entire base with my mental energy and... discovered something not so good.'

Was it some kind of strange magical experiment?

"Unfortunately, that's not the case. While the two witches' methods were somewhat ruthless, they weren't so depraved as to use innocent civilians as experimental subjects. What I saw... was something else."

The people of this city worship you with fervor; they regard you as a hero. And it's not just you; we veterans are also among those worshipped. I see them devoutly venerating our statues in the hidden temples beneath the earth, calling out our names… even prostrating themselves before our statues until they faint.

'Doesn't Norrell care...'

[She doesn't care, and the patrolling robots seem to see nothing. This is something she tacitly approves of, even secretly pushes forward. She's going to great lengths to carry out the enhancement ritual; I suspect that in another day or two, we'll have those religious fanatics among our followers.]

"...I don't think we have any reason to stop this, Zhan Lan." Zheng Zha's gaze seemingly casually swept over the others, then he pessimistically noticed that everyone, including himself, was somewhat tense. Undoubtedly, their latent premonitions were warning them, indicating the immense power of the enemy they were about to face. And the two witches were sparing no effort in preparing this impending battlefield to ensure their chances of victory.

No one got hurt anyway, right? The witches were just providing a source of comfort for the survivors, while we, in turn, paid the price of protecting these mortals. It was a fair trade, and there's no need to be overly critical.

Zhan Lan did not raise any objections.

[That's not my main point, Brother Zheng. What I want to tell you is... the people of this underground kingdom worship us as much as they hate Miss Alice and Miss Norrie.]

"What?!" Zheng Zha almost screamed out loud.

[You should be able to guess, Brother Zheng. You've had management experience before, so you should know how difficult it is to forcibly unite hundreds of millions of people. Then, in this apocalyptic world, how much sacrifice and death is required to force them to cooperate through order and law, and to build such a massive base in such a short time? Although it's for their own survival, taking out one's anger on others is a skill that humans learn without being taught.]

Those two used themselves as a foil to ensure the smooth progress of our enhancement ceremony. They deliberately manipulated public opinion behind the scenes, taking all the blame and evil upon themselves to highlight our noble image. Although this noble image was entirely constructed by them.

[I heard it…the survivors hated them, cursed them. Cursed them to die by the sword of angels, cursed them to be condemned to hell, to suffer endless torment. But these people…these people survived only because of those two witches! These people…they disgust me!]

"Zhan Lan... calm down. This must have been an arrangement Margot and the others made beforehand. Have you forgotten? Margot's source of power is a curse; perhaps she's using this method to accumulate her power."

[I haven't forgotten, but I also remember that the first thing Miss Alice did after returning to the Main God Space was to heal the curses on her and Miss Patchouli. This shows that there's a limit to the curses she can withstand, and I feel... she's very close to that limit!]

Zheng Zha took a deep breath and suddenly said to the others, "I think we should go down now, everyone. Margot Lloyd and Norrell have been busy while we were resting, so we should go and relieve some of their burden."

"Zhan Lan, I don't know how to tell you this, but... just trust them. Trust them as much as you trust me. Since they're confident in doing this, they must have prepared the necessary measures afterward. They're the experts in this area; we should trust their professionalism. After all... we're partners!"

【……Yeah.】

Zhan Lan cut off the communication, and with a smile, she was the first to stand up and agree with what Zheng Zha had just said.

“Brother Zheng makes a lot of sense. Let’s go and help out.”

She smiled and adjusted the control panel inside the aircraft, causing it to descend. However, as she landed, she kept thinking while gazing at the metallic city below.

A fleeting thought suddenly surfaced in her mind.

Even if Miss Patchouli was secretly fueling this hatred, there's no smoke without fire. If these people hadn't hated her...hated us in the first place, she wouldn't have needed to incite this hatred.

So, are these ungrateful bastards... really worth all the effort we put into saving them?

..................................................................

Ten minutes later, the veterans were assigned some slightly easier tasks by Patchouli. Their main task was to monitor the construction of the central command tower—under the witch's will, the tower was growing upwards at a rate of about five meters per minute. Meanwhile, the underground metal structure was gradually thickening and deepening, and by the eleventh day, the entire base had transformed into a sealed spinning top.

The central tower soars into the sky, losing its comparative significance once it reaches a height of ten thousand meters. This is the Jianmu tree, the Tower of Babel, and Mount Buzhou. It itself represents the concept of reaching the heavens. And at its base, a tight metal protective layer completely envelops the entire base.

The strongest wall had been constructed. When the eleventh day arrived, and the fifth horn of the Doomsday Judgment sounded, countless powerful mutated creatures emerged from the waters contaminated by 'Fungus Chrysanthemum'. They were incredibly strong and agile, each possessing the power to easily annihilate an army without suffering any damage. However, all of this was within Alice's expectations; the pre-prepared precautions allowed the Reincarnators to easily deal with these monsters.

It wasn't really anything special, just a simple barrage of firepower. Patchouli drew five percent of the energy from the stellar extraction tower, an amount equivalent to a small solar flare. And naturally, these mutated creatures had no chance of surviving a flare.

Thus, the world witnessed the twelfth day of the Zhongzhou team's existence in this world.

................................................

The Bleach arc will be resolved around chapter 40.

Chapter Thirty-One: 'War'

The last day, the very last day, the very first second of the morning.

From the heavens above, incredibly fine threads of light, as thin as the tip of a hair, silently descended. These threads pierced the atmosphere, tore through the clouds, and annihilated all dust and ash in their path. At the very end of this path, ten thousand meters above the top of the central tower, they abruptly stopped atop an invisible barrier constructed from thousands of force field generators.

Colorless flowers of the sky bloom here, their cracked petals resembling fragments of a shattered shield. The exuberant stamens are streams of fire spraying through the air. The endless, boundless light and heat, confined within threads of light, are completely released within the few femtoseconds of this sky-colored flower's bloom, the atomic clock trembling slightly. Then, the flowers wither, and fruit is formed.

That fruit was a miniature star with an instantaneous core temperature of up to ten million degrees!

Night turned to day in an instant, dazzling and brilliant. Within a mere two milliseconds, the air within a radius of several kilometers was transformed into a dense plasma cloud by the rapidly released high temperature. Plasma emerged from the cloud and rained down like a storm, piercing through the remnants of the already collapsed and destroyed first layer of defense, carrying with it the rapidly expanding miniature star, and a torrent of scorching white heat capable of vaporizing any organic molecule upon contact, relentlessly battering the base's second wall!

The wind and rain poured down.

The rain was blue-purple plasma, the wind was millions of degrees of heat. Even the second layer of shield, specially insulated and designed to maximize the absorption of heat radiation using the blackbody effect, trembled violently. Shield generators within the base were destroyed one by one due to overload, and flames from explosions and flashes of electricity from short circuits raged through the steel structures, spreading death amidst the screams and fear of mortals.

The second protective shield is destroyed.

In mere seconds, that tiny star expanded billions of times from the size of a fist, less than a cubic decimeter. Within that brief timeframe, it underwent the entire process of transformation from a protostar to a main sequence star, and then to a red giant. Its initially exponentially hot core, reaching tens of millions of degrees Celsius, rapidly cooled to tens of thousands of degrees Celsius, and then began to collapse.

A primordial star, initially only the size of a fist, should not have been eligible to collapse. However, the second ray of light descending from the heavens forcibly endowed this star with the qualification for stellar sequence evolution. The wall of fire that pressed down from the heavens, shattered the second protective shield, and stopped before the third protective barrier, contracted back at a faster speed than when it descended, absorbing the plasma rain that filled the sky and the scorching jets that spread everywhere. In the instant the second ray of light disappeared, it completely converged into one, transforming into a colorless dot that could only be barely discerned at the molecular level.

Formation, existence, decay, emptiness. All things cycle through this. What follows the great rise is the Great Annihilation, where all things vanish. Even a supernova the size of a single molecule is still a supernova, and when its brilliance shines upon the world, all things must submit to its power!

The third layer, primarily composed of chaotic energy turbulence, served as a protective shield against heat rays and high-energy radiation; it was destroyed.

The fourth layer is mainly composed of a strong gravitational and repulsive composite field, which is used to protect against the destruction of ultra-high-speed solid projectiles.

The fifth layer, woven from ordered information, is a protective shield against curses and information pollution; it has been destroyed.

The sixth layer is a protective shield made primarily of pure magic, designed to withstand various energy and physical attacks. It is destroyed.

The energy surge generated by the supernova explosion—a convergence of neutrinos, gamma rays, and X-rays—instantly shattered six of the seven layers of the witch's barrier. It only barely stopped when the seventh layer, a wall of civilization constructed from rewritten mythology, was touched. Then, the world welcomed its third ray of light.

The third ray of annihilation light.

"I once set forth a tree, a hundred fathoms tall without branches, with nine saplings above and nine branches below, its fruit like hemp, its leaves like awns, which the Great Deity once traversed; thus I constructed my imperial empire." Atop the tower, Alice stretched out her hand toward the third ray of light. Thousands of emerald green rays simultaneously materialized around the tower, covering the central tower, which had already reached ten thousand meters in the air, at the same speed as the third ray of light descending from the heavens. The intricate and magnificent blocks of color gradually appeared, swiftly transforming into tangible shapes.

There were branches and leaves, flowers and fruits, birds and beasts, dragons and divine bells. They were interconnected and instantly became as vivid as living things, while the emerald green light also increased greatly, immediately gushing upwards from the top of the tower, quickly scattering and falling, transforming into a huge canopy that covered the sky and the sun!

"Therefore, its name is Jian, and its duty is... to support the heavens!"

A vibrant green glow enveloped the entire eastern sky, and the third ray of light descending from the heavens was no exception! The instant the wooden structure was completed, the starburst above the canopy could no longer damage the outer shell of the base below. Countless machines and mortal workers immediately sprang into action, repairing the damage, recovering the debris, and replacing or repairing the overloaded force field generators one by one.

Construction resumed after a halt, and the damaged shields were re-erected. The sudden alarm of the attack also rang throughout the base. All pre-prepared contingency measures activated simultaneously. The entire base instantly transitioned from a pre-war critical state to a full-fledged state of war. All turrets were activated at once, all legions were mobilized, and only one minute had passed since the dawn of the twelfth day.

The sixth horn of the Doomsday Judgment sounded. From the moment the third ray of light was blocked in the upper troposphere by the 'Ritual Tree', the fourth, fifth, and sixth rays fell one by one. Miniature stars appeared above the canopy of the 'Ritual Tree', but the canopy restrained them, forcibly halting the eruption of these 'Fruits of the Sun' with its emerald glow. And when the ninth ray of light was restrained, forming the seventh 'Fruit of the Sun' within the canopy, the archers from the upper heavens finally ceased their futile attempts.

First wave of attack, over.

“Extraordinary divine power…undoubtedly fourth-tier power.” Alice stood on the top platform of the central tower, her gaze seemingly piercing through the emerald canopy at the top of the sky and looking directly at the archer at the highest point of the heavens.

"Is this the God's Bow of 'War'?" the witch murmured, as descriptions of the Sixth Horn of the Last Judgment immediately came to mind.

"I looked, and there before me was a white horse, and its rider had a bow. And a crown was given to him. He went out, and won and wanted to win again."

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are destined to appear one after another, amidst war, slaughter, famine, and death… War is the first, representing the conqueror, the son of the devil, the Antichrist, displaying divine rebellion in pure white. He will wield a bow and arrow, wear a crown, and then usher in victory after victory.

Therefore, its defeat is its demise; once it loses, it dies, with no option to linger and hope for a comeback.

"Patch." Alice's thoughts occupied only a very brief moment in the real world. "How is the damage now? Just a general overview is fine."

Patchouli's voice immediately rang in her ears: "The energy stored in the Stellar Extraction Tower has a loss rate of seven percent. The mass of the base does not need to be included in the loss at present. Ninety-four thousand machine craftsmen were destroyed, and about twenty thousand workers died."

"About 10,000 kilometers above us, an energy source of undetectable magnitude is descending at about ten times the speed of sound per second. If there are no surprises, this is 'War'. It can be confirmed that it is at the extraordinary level, or rather, a powerful being at the initial stage of the fourth level of the gene lock. Moreover, its energy reserves are very abundant; at least after those nine 'arrows' were fired, its energy reaction did not show a significant reduction."

“Understood.” Alice nodded. “As expected. Let’s continue with our pre-prepared plan. Now, transfer me to Zheng Zha.”

The voice in her ear paused slightly, and soon, accompanied by a burst of static, her communication link with Zheng Zha was established.

“This is Alice,” the witch said softly. “Zheng Zha, the sixth horn has been sounded. We have a minute or two to prepare before the second wave of attacks. You should set off.”