Chapter 361 The Closed Loop of Using War to Sustain War

"Sizzle—click!"

Thirty-eight thousand kilometers away, the Guanghan Trial Zone.

Wei Qiang gripped the hilt of the Star Iron Heavy Sword tightly with both hands, while the thrusters on the back of his mech spewed intermittent orange-red flames. The broad blade was stuck in the anti-joint bone spikes of a mutated creature, leaving him unable to move forward or backward.

"Unit Two! Sidestep! Its magnetic field is about to self-destruct!" The squad leader's shout over the communication channel was mixed with extremely piercing static noise, making Wei Qiang's eardrums ache.

"I can't pull it open! The hydraulic system is locked!" Wei Qiang gritted his teeth, his eyes bloodshot. He watched as the mutated creature raised its scythe-like forelimbs, like a praying mantis, high in the air, dark purple corrosive liquid dripping from the edges of the scythes.

"I'll risk it!" Wei Qiang pushed open the safety cover on the control panel, his thumb hovering over the red [Extreme Yang True Fire - Overload Explosion] button.

Just as he was about to press the button.

"Stop it, all of you! Anyone who dares to blow it up, I'll skin them alive!"

On the public channel, the old man's hoarse voice, the zone guide, suddenly rang out, making the entire squad's heads buzz.

"Damn it? I'm about to get my cockpit cut off!" Wei Qiang cursed, but he still instinctively loosened his grip.

In that split second, a badly damaged mech suddenly crashed into the side. With a muffled thud, Old Ghost, piloting the mech, roughly shoved the mutated creature aside with his shoulder, and with a swift swing of his armor-piercing hammer, precisely smashed the monster's head with a "crack".

The mutated entity twitched twice, then its massive body slumped onto the cratered lunar soil, remaining motionless.

Wei Qiang was panting heavily and was about to thank him when he saw Old Ghost crouch down in his mecha. Instead of finishing off the corpse and burning it, he pulled a huge sealed folding bag, originally used to store highly radioactive waste, from the storage rack on the back of the mecha.

"What are you looking at? Give me a hand!" Old Ghost snapped irritably. "Use a melee weapon to chop this long-legged bastard into eight pieces and put them in a bag! Hurry up, don't let its blood spill on the ground!"

The channel went silent for a few seconds.

"Cut it into eight pieces? Bag it up?" Zhang Yifan's stammering voice came through. "Instructor, doesn't the regulation say that the corpses of void creatures are highly contaminated and must be burned to ashes with true fire immediately after being killed?"

"The rules have changed."

As Old Ghost directed several veterans to use robotic arms to cut up the monster's corpse, he sneered into the comms, "Just ten minutes ago, Earth's Supreme Command sent an urgent order. These bastard corpses are now all strategic-grade high-energy fuel!"

He pointed his armor-piercing hammer, stained with black blood, at the azure planet above.

"The higher-ups said military merit is calculated by weight! One ton of corpses, one vial of diluted Extreme Yang Liquid! Everyone get this. Collect and pack up all these slain bastards! Don't waste a single drop of blood, send them straight back to Earth via the interstellar teleportation array!"

Wei Qiang swallowed hard, looking at the mangled corpses of the mutated beings scattered all over the ground.

The void monsters, which originally inspired fear and dread at first glance, instantly transformed into a glittering mobile gold mine in the eyes of these desperate recruits after hearing the offer of "one ton for one vial of diluted Extreme Yang Liquid".

"Holy crap, what are we waiting for?!" Wang Meng's voice changed instantly. "Teams one and two, push the advance line forward! Don't use high-temperature weapons, don't burn the materials, use armor-piercing hammers! Leave them with intact corpses!"

……

Earth. New Chang'an City, Third Heavy Industry Ritual Instrument Casting Plant.

"Tick-tock".

A drop of pure white rain fell on Old Zhao's calloused and oily hand. It was cool, yet it carried a warmth that went straight to the heart.

The air raid siren has been lifted, and the blood-red holographic projection above the factory area has returned to a safe green.

The air was filled with a fragrance of grass and trees, similar to that after a thunderstorm, but a thousand times fresher. It was pure spiritual rain that the [Void Energy Conversion Array] had filtered out the poisonous rain from outside the atmosphere and fed back to the atmosphere.

"Master, look at my hands..."

The apprentice, who had just been bleeding from his nose, stood there dumbfounded, raising his hands. The area between his thumb and forefinger, which had been burned by the high-energy copper wire and bore an unsightly scar, was now visibly peeling off a layer of dead skin, revealing the new skin underneath, which even had a hint of jade-like luster.

Old Zhao ignored him and instead took a deep breath.

"Hiss—whoosh—"

With just this one extremely simple deep breath, Old Zhao felt an extremely pure stream of air rush through his nasal cavity and directly into his lungs. His lungs, which had been riddled with holes from thirty years of working as a blacksmith in a heavy factory and were riddled with holes from metal dust, felt like parched land receiving rain, producing an extremely comfortable, tingling sensation.

"Click."

Old Zhao twisted his neck, and a series of popping sounds, like popping beans, came from his body. His Qi Sea, which had been stuck at the third level of Qi Refining for two whole years without any movement, broke through to the fourth level of Qi Refining with extremely smoothness the moment that wisp of spiritual energy entered his body.

"This is damn weird." Old Zhao looked at the spiritual rain falling from the sky, and then at the ordinary mortals on the street in the distance who were shouting with surprise because they had inhaled the spiritual energy.

"Buzz—Boom!"

Just then, the main tower of the inter-star teleportation array above New Chang'an City suddenly burst out with a blinding light.

Immediately afterwards, dozens of heavy military cargo ships, their surfaces covered in frost and bearing obvious signs of battle damage, emerged directly from the ripples of the teleportation array and hovered five thousand meters above the city.

"Old Zhao! Look at the sky!"

The factory manager, wearing a raincoat and scrambling through puddles, came running over, waving a communication terminal in his hand, his voice almost cracking, "The first batch of 'extra food' just arrived from Guanghan Base!"

Following the direction the factory manager pointed, dozens of cargo ships opened their massive physical cargo hatches at the bottom in mid-air.

Without any parachutes or any cushioning, thousands upon thousands of black body bags filled with the severed limbs of void monsters were simply and brutally dumped out of the capsule!

"Holy crap! Are they crazy? Throwing corpses right into the city?!" Old Zhao felt a chill run down his spine and instinctively grabbed a crowbar.

However, the next second, an extremely spectacular and absurd scene unfolded.

Those limbs, emitting a pungent, acrid stench and extremely yin energy, were like extremely fragile ice and snow being thrown directly into boiling molten steel the moment they were separated from the spaceship and fully exposed to the Earth's atmosphere!

The internal refining mechanism of the [Void Energy Conversion Array] is automatically activated the moment it comes into contact with the void.

In mid-air, those high-dimensional shells known for their hardness and their highly corrosive black blood, before they even had a chance to fall fifty meters, were suddenly engulfed by a layer of pure white array flames that had no temperature.

"Sizzle sizzle—!"

Accompanied by a tooth-grinding decomposition sound, thousands of tons of monster corpses were forcibly dismantled and vaporized in mid-air by the extremely domineering array.

Without any mechanical assistance, the laws of heaven and earth contained within the grand formation were automatically activated the moment they came into contact with the physical entities. The negative will remaining in their physical bodies was instantly crushed by this invisible rule, and their massive mass was directly transformed into an extremely dense cloud of white spiritual energy, which then turned into a torrential downpour of spiritual rain, crashing down upon the new Chang'an City below.

"Are you stunned?"

Old Zhao slapped the stunned apprentice on the back of the head and wiped the rain from his face. He grinned, feeling his internal energy growing stronger from absorbing the high concentration of spiritual rain.

"Disciple, do you understand now? This is what real cultivation is all about! Other people's alchemy furnaces refine herbs, but our Earth's grand formation uses the corpses of alien monsters as food!"

……

Seven hundred meters underground in Kyoto, in the joint control room.

"Slurp—"

Lin Feng held a cup of now-cold instant coffee, took a big gulp, and then grimaced from the bitterness, quickly grabbing a tissue to wipe his mouth haphazardly.

"Professor Wang, the first batch of physical debris collected on the moon was automatically decomposed at full power the moment it entered Earth's atmosphere through the teleportation array."

Lin Feng turned around and slapped several steaming printed documents onto the titanium steel table, his fingertips trembling uncontrollably.

Wang Mingyuan was squatting on the ground, laboriously retying the knot of his broken tie around his neck. He stood up, leaning on the table, his voice hoarse: "Nian."

"The Earth's average spiritual pressure has increased fortyfold in the past hour!"

Lin Feng switched the large screen to a global topographic map. At this moment, the Earth on the holographic projection was no longer a dull blue, but was tightly enveloped by an extremely dense layer of pure white light, representing high-purity spiritual energy.

"It's not just cultivators. The South China Military Region just reported that three of their veterans, who are usually in wheelchairs, got up and went to the canteen to eat two large bowls of rice after being soaked in spiritual rain for ten minutes!"

Lin Feng swallowed hard, pointing to the ever-increasing curve on the screen. "This is no longer a blessed land. With this concentration of spiritual energy, in a classic cultivation novel, even the pillars of the main hall would become sentient!"

Wang Mingyuan walked to the screen, took out a flattened cigarette from his pocket, and put it in his mouth. He didn't light it, but stared intently at the value representing the concentration of spiritual energy.

"Old Li," Wang Mingyuan suddenly called out, addressing the military representative beside him.

"Hey, Lao Wang, what are you saying?" The military representative was holding a thermos, drinking water while watching the screen with a smile, even the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes were smiling.

"Didn't you always complain that Earth's resources weren't enough to feed all those new reserve soldiers?"

Wang Mingyuan turned his head, biting his cigarette butt, a somewhat ferocious smile tugging at his cold, hard face.

"Now, this planet has been completely transformed into a super digestive system by the Dao Lord. We are no longer passive punching bags."

Wang Mingyuan rested his hands on the table, his gaze sweeping over all the tired yet excited faces in the control room.

"This is called using war to sustain war. When monsters in the sky poison us, the great formation filters it; when monsters in the sky send troops, the front lines kill them. The corpses are thrown directly into the atmosphere, saving the trouble of covering them with soil, instantly turning into spiritual energy to feed the entire world. As long as the great formation continues to operate, this strangulation loop will not be broken!"

The military representative slammed the thermos shut with a "snap," his military boots slamming heavily on the ground, a chilling glint in his eyes.

"Then what are we waiting for? Immediately issue the order to have all the reserve forces in each military region bring out their best reserves for a breather! With such fertile spiritual energy, I want to see 100,000 more Foundation Establishment stage cultivators in the defense force within six months! Double the number of logistics transport ships on the moon and go shovel the Aitken Basin clean!"

"drop--!"

Just as the atmosphere in the control room reached its peak.

Suddenly, a sharp, piercing single-tone alarm blared from Lin Feng's control panel, jarringly interrupting all the laughter.

Lin Feng's smile froze on his face. He suddenly looked down at the secondary screen, his pupils instantly contracting.

"Professor..." Lin Feng's voice suddenly turned cold, carrying a hint of disbelief, "The Nine Provinces Barrier... is leaking."

Wang Mingyuan whirled around, the half-smoked cigarette falling to the ground: "Explain yourself!"

Lin Feng frantically typed on the keyboard, bringing up the near-Earth orbit monitoring footage of the East China Sea theater.

"The exact reason is unclear. It could be that there was a clash of forces when the grand formation was operating, or that the space in that area was too fragile. Tiny spatial cracks appeared on the outer edge of the barrier."

Raymond Lam zoomed in on the image to its maximum.

At an altitude of 15,000 meters above Donghai City, on the bluish-gray light screen, there were indeed inconspicuous, pitch-black spatial cracks. The formation was slowly mobilizing spiritual energy to repair itself, but this would take time.

"These spatial rifts are extremely small, and they are filled with violent spatial turbulence. High-level void behemoths or slightly larger monsters simply cannot squeeze in; attempting to break through would only result in them being torn apart by spatial forces."

"However... those extremely small void parasites with very weak energy fluctuations can still squeeze in through this gap!"

In the image, along the edges of those dark cracks, some gray-black spores, almost invisible to the naked eye and resembling willow catkins, silently seeped into Earth's atmosphere from space, carried by the intense convection of hot and cold air.

Their size was so small and their energy level so weak that they perfectly avoided the passive triggering and locking of the energy conversion array that targets "void entities".

At this moment, these gray-black spores, carried by the howling wind, are mixed with the pure white spiritual rain falling from the sky, and slowly drift down towards the brightly lit Donghai City below.

Everything seemed so quiet, yet it exuded a chilling stillness.