Chapter 1345 — Fighting Takes Brains
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
At the northern frontline, where the living forest and the dark root network clashed most fiercely, the entire battlefield had been transformed by the bitter contest between the two sides into a form wholly beyond ordinary common sense—one that exceeded anything in any historical record. Colossal aberrant lifeforms warred in the depths below; above them lay heavy rock and soil, and above that, the white-hot battlefield between the mortal empire's mechanized legions and the Dark Church's bio-army. Between these two layers of war swarmed a vast array of biomass factories and pipe systems built by the Cecil Empire, along with the Dark Church's treant priests and creeping vine colonies—war machines far beyond anything seen before, locked in mortal combat like titanic beasts. The pressure of this war not only made the mortal empire's armies grow at breakneck speed, but also greatly accelerated the refinement and evolution of the dark creatures cultivated by the Order of the End of All Things.
Tough vines tore through thick strata; seemingly soft mimetic rootlets propped up rock and soil; the fluid flowing through plant vasculature gave off a faint glow, illuminating passages down into the depths. Bertlem's roots squirmed and raced between slick stones and vines, while the vast root network continuously channeled information gathered from the surrounding environment directly into the depths of his consciousness, letting him clearly grasp how the "battle situation" ahead was unfolding.
The encirclement was gradually taking shape; the root network's "immune barrier" had seized a clear upper hand. His "fangs and claws" had now succeeded in blocking a portion of the hostile roots spreading out from the living forest inside an underground cavern, and had severed a great many of the biomass supply pipes around the target—and at the deepest point of this steadily tightening net, that vast thought-pulse blazed like a lamp in the dark.
In this war between "plant" and "plant," it was rare for the root network to gain such an advantage. One of the chief reasons was that the terrible living forest possessed higher operating efficiency and adaptive intelligence than the root network, and for a long time Bertlem and his subordinates had been searching for a way to crack that secret. Only after considerable effort and sacrifice had they finally made progress.
They had learned that the reason Beiyila, far away on the Holy Spirit Plains, could easily command the vast living forest on the southern slopes of the Dark Mountains—and even maintain its extraordinary efficiency as the forest grew ever larger—lay in a kind of "auxiliary thought organ." These thought organs expanded and multiplied along with the forest; they were effectively Beiyila's "auxiliary souls." They could unite into a whole to handle macro-level problems, and in local areas could use their own formidable intelligence to operate and fight autonomously.
Once they understood this, one of Bertlem's greatest goals became capturing one such "auxiliary thought organ," in order to find a way to defeat Beiyila once and for all.
This was naturally no easy task—the significance of the auxiliary thought organs to the living forest was obvious. Beiyila could not possibly leave such vital body tissue exposed to danger; normally these thought organs were surrounded by vast root systems and biological combat swarms, and sometimes were even hidden inside the Cecilians' steel fortresses. Bertlem had tried several times, all without success.
But nothing in this world is absolute. Those "thought organs" were not always in a state of perfect security. Since the living forest had to keep spreading deeper into the wasteland, its scale grew every day, and Beiyila had to keep producing new thought organs and deploying them to the front. These organs—and their "guards"—could not complete their growth and deployment in an instant. Like all biological units, they needed time to mature.