"If you were under my command and I wanted to forge you into shape, I'd toss you out and have Pure Purgatory hunt you down for two years."
That afternoon, when Qi Shantong whispered those words into Han Qingyu's ear, Han Qingyu found it hard to tell whether there was any lingering resentment behind them.
Yet one thing was obvious: after returning, the man had looked up Han Qingyu's dossier once again.
Only...
A combat legion major general with no ties to archives or scientific research lacked the clearance to access or review a file at the level of Sub-Sequence.
"That kid? Oh, his synesthesia rating is quite good, but other than that, there's nothing special about him."
At the same time, Han Qingyu had no idea his name was also being brought up before the Huaxia Front Azure Advisory Council. After all, he was the first combatant ever admitted into Sub-Sequence. Other combat personnel were assigned either to First Sequence or Second Sequence—none had ever been squeezed into Sub-Sequence.
The man answering the question was Chen Buer, though here, his codename was Goat.
"What was so urgent that you called me here out of nowhere?" The old man had arrived quite some time ago, and having endured nothing but idle chatter, he looked up, growing impatient.
"It's like this," another elderly man seated at the opposite end of the long table, dressed in a shirt and tie, said. "That young girl in the Research Institute's linguistics department who belongs to Sub-Sequence just submitted a report alongside her colleagues. They believe they have deciphered something..."
As the speaker of the Huaxia Front Azure Advisory Council, he officially opened today's agenda.
A document was projected onto the room's wall.
The first sentence read: *[I cannot go to your place (location).]*
"This was received by the Rejecters in control signals. It is the phrase uttered most frequently by the Great Spikes aboard the shuttle crafts," the speaker explained.
"Isn't that obvious? Isn't that what the Rejecters have been doing all along? If not for them, the Great Spikes would have landed in clusters long ago, escaping our kill zones or crashing straight into cities." Chen Buer paused, sighing with emotion. "Still, it's good to have confirmation at last."
"Yes. More importantly... by confirming the meaning of this sentence and analyzing its structure, we now have a path toward decoding the Great Spikes' pronunciation and linguistic logic—and from there, deducing much more."
This line hardly required much discussion, so the speaker gave a slight nod.
The display on the wall shifted.
The second sentence: *[Miwang will complete revenge (harvesting)?]*
"This is the string of sounds your sighting frontline has heard most frequently over the past decades when Great Spikes self-destruct," the speaker explained first this time.
"..." Chen Buer fell silent, frowning in thought for a moment before asking, "What is Miwang?"
"There is no majority consensus on that yet. However, Yaoqiao... Xin Yaoqiao... that girl—" The speaker cycled through three designations, avoiding only the words *my granddaughter*. "She made a conjecture. She believes Miwang most likely means... God of War."
Chen Buer: "...Absurd."
The next instant, despite the modest number of people in the conference room, an uproar broke out, loud and irritable. After all, the default assumption and primary line of thought nearly everyone held regarding an alien civilization was technological superiority. It was so in literature, in film, and in science...
To hear the title "God of War" suddenly thrown into the mix was difficult for anyone to stomach.
The speaker waited quietly for a while, and just as the commotion subsided and he was about to speak—
"Is that Red Shoulder?" Chen Buer concealed his tension well, but the anxiety in his eyes betrayed him.
As the first man to object with "absurd," and as the person in this room closest to the sighting frontline's combat, he had actually accepted—faster than anyone else after thinking it through—that it was quite possibly an accurate conjecture.
To date, the most formidable Great Spike the Sole Witness Legion had ever faced was the sort with a crimson streak across its shoulder—the kind that had forged the September 29 Monument Day. The allied forces called it Red Shoulder.
The speaker's gaze grew heavy at Chen Buer's question.
"It's merely a young girl's conjecture," the speaker said after a pause, attempting to adopt a lighter tone. "Here is something she and her colleagues deduced by synthesizing your sighting frontline's audio logs of the Great Spikes over all these years... Have a look."
The projection changed once more.
*[Falimiu: Primary Warrior; the Great Spikes we know; very likely the slave caste of their civilization;*
*Tuokouna: Intermediate Warrior; Red Shoulder?*
*Daie: Advanced Warrior; Red Shoulder?*
*Puda'er: Super Warrior;*
*Miwang: God of War.]*
The conference room fell into a long silence.
Eventually, the speaker broke it: "Merely a conjecture... an unbridled guess." He repeated his earlier words, even embellishing them in an attempt to make the notes seem less credible.
Yet Chen Buer said, "If this is correct—assuming it is correct—then..." His tone shifted abruptly, turning resolute. "Remove that question mark after Tuokouna regarding Red Shoulder. Replace it with a period."
*Boom.* The conference room erupted.
Even the scrape of shifting chairs and the sound of heavy breathing felt deafening, for the man who had uttered those words was the commander of the Sole Witness Legion.
Every eye turned toward Chen Buer.
"Don't forget... Great Spikes have rank insignias of their own," Chen Buer reminded them, bringing up a detail that was easily overlooked simply because the creatures had remained unchanged for so long, though it was hardly a secret. "We call it the Shattered Star Insignia... corresponding to our Star Insignia." Chen Buer continued, "The mark of an ordinary Great Spike is a single shattered star... Red Shoulder has two..."
That was the basis for Chen Buer's conclusion that Red Shoulder was a Tuokouna, an intermediate warrior. Rough and simplistic as the reasoning was, it appeared unassailable.
"Doesn't that mean..." Someone started to speak, then caught himself. He had likely wanted to ask how they were supposed to resist, but such defeatism was forbidden here.
"Let me speak," a "young man" in his forties said, standing up. In this room, forty was considered young. "If we deduce it this way, does that mean the Great Spikes aren't the advanced technological civilization we've always assumed... but rather an individual martial civilization?"
*Absurd.* That was the first thought in the minds of nearly every scientific council member present, yet none of them could formulate an immediate counterargument.
"Is that not the case?" the young man pressed, answering his own question. "Aside from source energy and dead iron, have they shown anything else significantly more advanced than ours? Have they?"
"Through those two things alone—their volume and application—they already overpower us completely," someone interjected.
With that single remark, silence returned. No one had a response for him.
Until Chen Buer spoke: "Then why did they come?"
"Why? How would I know... Maybe their home planet became uninhabitable? So they've used source energy to embark on an expedition, an exploration spanning light-years..." Turning around, the young man realized the one questioning him was the old commander, and his tone instantly softened. After stammering for a moment, his eyes suddenly lit up. "Could it be that dead iron and source energy actually exist on Azure?"
*Thump, thump, thump...* Hearts raced.
This was the very question that Azure-affiliated research institutes across the globe had been assuming and chasing for more than eighty years...
Yet where were they?
They had even dug a borehole over ten thousand meters deep in Xiong Zhanli, but where was it?
Silence reigned.
"Let's do this. Debating further won't lead anywhere, so let's put it directly to a vote," the speaker said, clearing his throat and raising his voice. "All those in favor of submitting this inference along with the two decoded phrases to the Azure Alliance International Council, raise your hands."
With that, he slowly raised his own hand.
This was by no means an attempt to sway them; over the past decade or more, the speaker's own proposals had been voted down countless times. Such were Azure's rules.
Then, with a grim expression, Chen Buer raised his hand.
The young man, who could barely hold back, finally brought his arm up, his hand striking the tabletop with a sharp *thwack*.
More and more hands rose in agreement.
"Twenty-one to nine. The votes in favor exceed two-thirds... I declare the motion carried. All the aforementioned materials will be submitted in full to the Azure Alliance International Council."
As a member of the International Council's presidium himself, the speaker delivered the closing remark and concluded the meeting.
***
Out in the hallway after the adjournment.
The old man named Qu Zhongshi stood by the doorway, watching Chen Buer's silent departing figure from afar for quite some time... That stubbornly upright old peasant, whose spine had always remained straight, seemed to stoop ever so slightly today for the very first time. The weight on his shoulders was simply too crushing.
Why did the Sole Witness Legion have to enforce "I see, I destroy"?
Even across vast, barren wildernesses, where they knew no civilians would witness the creatures in the short term, they still had to see it through—even if it cost countless lives.
Fear of leaks causing public panic was only a secondary concern.
The fundamental reason was that the true mission of these Great Spikes had long since been discovered: if granted sufficient time and space, they would erect signal transmitters to relay back precise coordinates and other data.
Thus, their sporadic, seemingly foolish landings over the past decades were not foolish at all. In the vastness of the universe, they were essentially worker ants scattered to the winds...
The current deduction regarding that civilization: they possessed only a general direction, with no precise coordinates.
And in interstellar travel, the slightest deviation would result in missing the mark by millions, or even billions, of li.
***
"What if the true military force of that civilization is currently engaged in a massive migration—or perhaps a grand conquest—spanning light-years across the depths of space?"
A teacher in his fifties, who certainly had no clearance for high-level state secrets, was smiling as he spoke to his new students in the classroom.
The time was forty minutes before dinner.
"So, maybe it will fall to your generation to fight them off, haha." Having said that, he chuckled and waved a hand. "Just a digression, just a digression... But it's not impossible, is it? Of course, it's also possible that by the time you're all old and gray, they still won't have arrived... After all, that's the cosmos for you."
Among the students seated below listening to his lecture were Han Qingyu, alongside all the recruits in this Ninth Army training cycle who possessed a high school education or above.
Yes, they had general studies, such as the course they were currently attending.
The course bore a rather peculiar name: *Violating Physics*.
Chapter 52