The Reason Behind the Dead Iron Straight Man Was Found

September 6, 1991, 1:31 a.m. Cursing non-stop under his breath, Liu Shiheng alternated cautiously between jogging and walking, pushing his way south. He had been on the move for nearly twenty hours. The situation ahead was completely unknown, and the danger was multiplying by the minute. Without a map, all he could do was pull out his squad communicator every so often to attempt contact. When nothing came through, he had no choice but to keep trudging forward. "I hope to hell I haven't drifted off course..." "I hope those old folks and kids stay safe in hiding. Once I notify 1777 to come out, they can go rescue them. And then as for me, sayonara, goodbye..." "Treasure life, stay away from Azure." "Lao Jian, you idiotic bastard, what kind of squad leader are you? Turn around! Come arrest me! Come catch your deserter!" "Han Qingyu, you son of a bitch, get your ass out here! Roll up right in front of your young master... If you don't show up soon, Qingzi, bad shit's gonna happen!" "Wu Xu, can't you get lost and somehow stumble over here to me? *Sigh.* I'm panicking so hard right now..." Hungry, exhausted, terrified... Liu Shiheng chalked all of it up to a single word: rotten luck. "Obviously, I'm just a deserter... I finally managed to run away after all that trouble, and then one damn problem after another gets dumped on me... and worse, I went and figured the whole conspiracy out. How great would it have been if I were an idiot? But no, I had to be smart. And now I can't even crawl into a hole and pass the buck to someone else." Under the faint moonlight of the vast plateau night, dressed in his grass-green camouflage, Young Master Shiheng walked on alone, looking as though he were shouldering a burden he hated with every fiber of his being. Around the same time, somewhere on an unnamed stretch of grassland along the route from Nganglaring Tso toward Zanda. "Here it comes! Get ready!" Shen Yixiu shouted. A black-armored Great Spike, its arms already severed, came stumbling and lurching toward them. Rusty Sister, clutching one of its severed arms to her chest, sprinted ahead of it. In the darkness, she skimmed smoothly over the gaping mouth of a massive, pitch-black pit dug into the ground. *Skrrrt—!* The black-armored Great Spike braked just in time behind her, halting right at the edge of the pit. The creature’s vision seemed surprisingly decent. At that exact moment, however, Han Qingyu had already circled around from its flank behind it. After a burst of rapid acceleration, he launched into the air and planted a solid kick—*thud!*—squarely into the black-armored Great Spike's center of gravity at the waist. The colossal form of the Great Spike did not topple over; instead, its back arched, and its entire body was shoved forward several meters in a straight plane. *Crr-crack!* The Great Spike plunged downward, landing perfectly inside the pre-dug pit, leaving only its neck and head sticking out. *Crash!* Wu Xu, who had been waiting at the edge, dove in. With both hands, he slammed a massive boulder down into the hole, temporarily wedging the Great Spike in place. Immediately dropping flat on the ground, he wrapped both arms from behind around the Great Spike's neck, locking it in a stranglehold so it couldn't budge. "Cover it!" Earth and stone went flying. Dust clouded the moonlight as the Great Spike's entire lower body was buried tight and solid under dirt and rock, leaving not a single gap. By all rights, the sheer weight of soil and stone should never have held a Great Spike. Past experience proved they could shatter giant boulders with casual ease. Under the present circumstances, however, it had no hands and couldn't even turn its head. Its feet kicked uselessly at the bottom of the pit, while Wu Xu and Rusty Sister pinned it down mercilessly from above, making it impossible to heave itself upward. "How is it?!" Han Qingyu waved away the dust before his eyes and asked. "N-no self-destruction!" Wen Jifei said, sounding somewhat excited. "Its strength is waning... it's barely moving now." Rusty Sister lay flat on the ground, pressing down on the mound of earth and stone. "Good. Wu Xu, keep it pinned. Let it exhaust its source energy completely. We'll see what happens in the end." "Mm." This was another of Han Qingyu's attempts to capture a Great Spike alive. And from the looks of it, there was a glimmer of hope. As the billowing dust settled, the Great Spike's furious shrieks and frantic struggles attracted an Azure squad that happened to be operating nearby. With their apparatuses revving and battleblades drawn, they charged over resolutely and anxiously, ready to join the fray and rescue their comrades. Only to stop in their tracks a hundred meters out, utterly baffled. "W-what on earth are they doing?!" one soldier from the squad asked, looking thoroughly lost. "Haven't you heard? Them... Major Qing and his bunch, they barbecue Great Spikes." A squad leader from another unit, who had likewise approached from the direction of Nganglaring Tso, stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck to watch for a moment. "Looks like they aren't satisfied with just roasting arms anymore." "Yeah, they've got its head pinned," a squad member beside him agreed with a nod. A collective silence fell over the onlookers. Some felt their skin crawl, some were caught between laughter and tears, and others broke out in goosebumps. It was simply too terrifying. To the majority of ordinary squads, a black-armored Great Spike was still a horrific monster that had to be handled with extreme caution—a single slip could mean casualties. Yet here were people treating them like food on a spit. "Maybe they taste pretty good." "Must be packed with nutrients. Why else would those guys be so ridiculously strong?!" Amidst the chorus of bewildered murmurs, Han Qingyu caught the noise, glanced over, and saw the other soldiers. After a brief consideration, he simply waved them over and called out with a smile, "Perfect timing. I've had a recent finding I'd like to share with everyone." For a long time, Azure squads had focused their attacks on vital areas like the neck and chest, or joints like the waist and knees to impede a Great Spike's mobility. "I don't know if this batch after the Battle of Xilang Peak is different from the earlier ones, but over the past few days, we accidentally discovered that their shoulder joints—right here at the socket—are relatively fragile. If you strike here..." Han Qingyu crouched by the pit, pointing at the trapped Great Spike. "If possible, taking off one of its arms first will make the rest of the fight much easier and greatly reduce casualties. Comparatively speaking, its torso and head are much tougher to—" *Crack!* Han Qingyu stopped mid-sentence. He turned his head and gave Wu Xu a helpless look. Everyone on the scene stared blankly at Wu Xu. Wu Xu slowly stood up, head lowered... His hands were suspended before him, cradling the head of the Great Spike—a massive, severed head. Lifting his face, his eyes full of awkwardness and confusion, Wu Xu looked around at the crowd. After several seconds of silence, he muttered, "I'm sorry." Presumably, after wrestling and twisting it back and forth for far too long... he had just snapped the Great Spike's head right off. "Scatter, scatter...! Throw it away, Wu Xu!" A rapid cracking sound resonated from beneath the earth and stone. Wen Jifei yelled out suddenly, leading the others as they sprinted for distance. Upon death, the Great Spike initiated self-destruction. Even the severed head cradled in Wu Xu's hands began to break down into fragments. On this point, their arms appeared to be the sole exception. Soon, the rain of deadly fragments subsided, and Han Qingyu retrieved the metal block, bringing his personal count up to twenty-nine. "Speaking of which, have you guys noticed anything strange lately?" Off to the side, Wen Jifei was smoking and chatting with members of the two squads. "Lately, Great Spikes seem to get separated from the pack really easily. We've run into isolated ones three times already." "We have too—twice! Made the fights a hell of a lot easier." "We ran into one as well. It was like a free gift." Both squads confirmed they had experienced the same phenomenon. "Now that's bizarre! You don't think this batch had their brains scrambled when they squeezed through that botched traction array, do you?" Wen Jifei cracked a joke, drawing laughter from everyone. After chatting for about twenty minutes, the three groups prepared to part ways. Han Qingyu gifted each squad one Great Spike arm so they could hand them in for merit. "You guys heading southwest?" asked the squad leader surnamed Huang, whose unit had been patrolling this specific region, calling out from behind them. "Yeah. Heading to Zanda to look for our Squad 1777," Han Qingyu answered over his shoulder. "What? 1777 went to Zanda?" "Yeah, that's what we heard." "How come we didn't run into them? My squad has been holding a horizontal line across this whole sector." Captain Huang pondered for a moment, then smiled. "Maybe they passed through at night? What a shame we missed them. Otherwise, I could have caught up with your Captain Lao on old times." He waved his hand and added, "Give him my regards when you see him!" "Will do, I'll definitely pass it along to Captain Lao." "See you next time." "See you, Captain Huang." Han Qingyu and his companions waved back, then turned and vanished into the darkness of the night. "Damn it!" Once the four figures disappeared, a squad member beside Captain Huang smacked himself on the forehead. "I forgot to ask about the barbecue! Captain Huang, how do you roast this thing anyway? None of us know how!" Captain Huang spun around and whacked him over the head with the Great Spike arm. "Eat, eat, your grandpa's ass eat! Didn't you hear them say handing this in earns us military merit?! All you think about is stuffing your face!" *** The same day, 11:20 a.m. Office of the Linguistics Department, Research Institute 2 of the Azure Huaxia Front. Desks were arranged somewhat haphazardly in the various corners of the room. Section Chief Lao Zhang had just brewed a mug of hot tea and sat leisurely sipping it; Xiao Li paused during his work, using the tip of his pen to press against the leaf of a desk plant, wiping away streaks of dust; Sister Liang was on the telephone... Xin Yaoqiao kept her head bowed, her expression rapt with concentration as her pen moved relentlessly across the page. On her desk, a sheet of manuscript paper was already covered from top to bottom in dense, specialized symbols designed for deciphering the language of the Great Spike civilization. In truth, all the work in the Linguistics Department up to this point was based on speculation. Not a single person in the room dared claim absolute certainty in their conclusions. A single straightforward doubt was enough to topple their entire framework: What if the Great Spike civilization, like Azure's diverse world, possessed multiple languages, or even countless dialects?! Just thinking about the myriad of dialects across Huaxia was daunting enough... If that were indeed the case, many of the intercepted syllables would have to be filtered, selected, and analyzed all over again. Moreover, certain words were genuinely bizarre. For instance, the word "Yanxiu," which Han Qingyu had mentioned to Xin Yaoqiao during the All-Army Conference. This term had never appeared before. What was more, it clashed completely with the vast majority of syllables and phonetic units accumulated by Azure over the years, as if it didn't even belong to the same linguistic system. For a time, Xin Yaoqiao had suspected it might just be some odd dialect within the Great Spike civilization—perhaps a regional curse word. At the same time, because Qingzi believed the word had very likely been addressed to him, Xin Yaoqiao had refrained from involving her colleagues in the decryption process out of an abundance of caution. She had thrown herself into it entirely. Since returning on September 2, she had slept less than six hours in total. She had filled an entire notebook of manuscript paper just like the one before her... until finally, by cross-referencing frontier discoveries from other research branches, she managed to uncover a few conceptual links. *Clack!* Her fountain pen was suddenly slapped flat against the desk. "What's wrong, Qiaoqiao?" Sister Liang turned around, looking at her with concern. "Huh? N-nothing." Xin Yaoqiao placed both hands somewhat awkwardly over the bottom of the page, sitting upright like an elementary school student, and looked up. "I'm just a little tired. I dozed off for a second." "I told you not to stay up like this. Even if the situation is getting more perilous, you can't push yourself this hard," Sister Liang chided gently, glancing down at her watch. "Perfect timing, let's head to the cafeteria for lunch. After you eat, take half a day off and go home to sleep." With that, she stood up and gestured for Xin Yaoqiao to come along. "Ah, thank you, Sister Liang, but I... I'm eating at home today. You guys go ahead. I'll catch my breath and head home in a bit." Xin Yaoqiao waited until all her colleagues had left. After pausing for another moment, she slowly moved her hands away from the bottom of the manuscript page... There was no definitive, complete decryption there. Instead, there were only a few directional deductions and conjectures: *Vocabulary of a mythological nature.* *Not used to refer to fellow Great Spikes, nor a self-appellation.* *Non-human? (Uncertain), but completely distinct from every known appellation the Great Spikes use for humans.* *So, what on earth is Qingzi?* Connecting this with the "Great Spike Mothership Command Log" retrieved from the battlefield of Xilang Peak, there was reportedly an order that mentioned: *"Core is under direct assault by a source energy beast."* *The one issuing commands inside the mothership back then must have been that small Red Shoulder who spoke, right?* *Does that mean it knew what Qingzi was to some extent, yet wasn't entirely certain?* In terms of context and logic, its form of "knowing" was similar to our concept of "having heard of." Just as we have heard of dragons and phoenixes, or the Yellow Emperor and Chiyou, or the Monkey King and Pigsy... *Pah.* *Hypothesis: Qingzi is a... a non-human, non-Spike source energy beast that only exists in the legends heard by that small Red Shoulder.* *Simplified: Qingzi is a specific type of source energy beast with a distinct title.* *Further simplified: Qingzi is a beast... Pah.* *Wait, that actually makes some sense! Otherwise, why would Qingzi always act that way around girls... like such a dead iron straight man? Plague Chicken said he's never once been romantically moved by any girl.* *Because it—* Xin Yaoqiao unconsciously thought the pronoun *it*, before immediately catching herself. *Pah, because he can't feel attraction toward another species... just like a tiger wouldn't fall in love with a mouse.* *No, no, that analogy is too absolute, too specific. It would probably be more accurate to say... he hasn't encountered an existence on the same level as him. That's a better fit.* *Wait, what if he suddenly meets a female super combat power and falls for her?! That definitely won't do! Absolutely not!* Xin Yaoqiao fought to rein in her emotionally driven rambling thoughts, pulling her logic back to the step where "Qingzi is a beast." According to findings from Azure's other research departments, there was a very strong probability that massive reserves of source energy had once existed in this planet's ancient history. So, before humanity emerged, what had consumed all that source energy? Beasts. Then what happened to the beasts that swallowed up all that source energy? Where did they go? Did they leave? Did they die out? Xin Yaoqiao tore off the conclusion section of the manuscript sheet, slipped it into the document shredder to reduce it to tiny scraps, and then burned them. She didn't want Qingzi to be dragged off to a laboratory for study on account of her, all because of an entirely unsubstantiated hypothesis. Qingzi wasn't the only genius in the world either. Xin Yaoqiao had heard that Mitli had a newcomer who had advanced to top-tier rank even faster than Qingzi. In that case, was that person a beast as well? She decided she would request some files on that person first to see.