Chapter 144: The Bleeding Defensive Line
Twilight hung over the Bone-Dry Valley like a coarse cloth soaked in blood. The stench of gunpowder and alien beasts mingled with the scent of earth, drifting on the wind. Beside the high ground bunker lay the body of the fallen artilleryman, hastily covered with a white sheet, with only a section of his dust-covered military boots exposed.
The medical team's off-road vehicles arrived in a hurry. Stretchers were loaded onto the vehicles one after another. Several soldiers who had suffered psychic trauma had vacant eyes and uncontrollable, slight tremors throughout their bodies. They hadn't been dragged into a complete corridor, but having soaked in the resonance field of the illusion web for a long time, their Seas of Consciousness were repeatedly torn, leaving temporary damage. Whether they could recover depended on the next few days of care in the monitoring pods.
Lin Yan leaned against a rock, his hands hanging down, his fingertips trembling slightly. The solidified old wound deep within his Sea of Consciousness had been repeatedly stretched by the priest's assault just moments ago. Now, it continuously sent a dull, heavy ache, like a rusty nail driven steadily into the core of his consciousness. He didn't dare to forcibly mobilize his Sea of Consciousness; he could only slowly adjust his breathing, using the ancient martial arts method of calming the mind and gathering breath to gradually soothe the turbulent psychic waves.
Gu Shen walked to his side, his face equally pale and his eyes bloodshot. He had consumed a massive amount of energy while sustaining the joint barrier earlier, and there was still dark brown beast blood splattered on his forehead.
"Northern Front, confirmed no survivors," Gu Shen said in a very low voice, as if afraid to startle the priest lurking deep in the valley. "The search and rescue drones swept inside; there was nothing left but broken equipment and bloodstains. Not even a single intact body could be found. The illusion web at the bottom of the valley remains in standby mode. If anyone rashly steps in, the corridor will restart immediately. The rescue team doesn't dare to enter."
Lin Yan nodded silently. Ever since the northern communication was cut off, everyone had actually anticipated this outcome in their hearts. It was just that hearing the final confirmation still made their chests feel stifled.
"We held the warning line, but this can't be called a victory." Chen Ye walked over, still clutching his deformed shock baton. The baton was covered in dents left by the gnawing and ramming of scaled beasts. "The priest can awaken the illusion web again at any time, and the beast horde can regroup at any time. We cannot eradicate this place; we can only wait for it to strike again on its own initiative. The initiative has been in their hands from beginning to end."
Zhao Kai held the detector. The screen still displayed the final spectrum snapshot of the illusion web, with the dense node links still clearly visible.
"The intelligence group just sent word. The illusion webs in the north and south have also synchronously entered dormancy. All three massive webs have preserved their core nodes, abandoning only the outer anchor points destroyed by artillery. They are like three time bombs buried on the edge of the quarantine line. The priests can remotely awaken them at any time."
The group didn't linger. After a brief handover of the scene and marking the red high-risk coordinates, they boarded their vehicles to return.
Driving west toward the bastion, the cabin was terrifyingly quiet. No one chatted; everyone was immersed in exhaustion and oppression. Looking out the car window, the wasteland stretched endlessly under the hazy daylight. Those invisible illusion webs were hidden within the undulating dirt mounds, collapsed mining pits, and karst caves.
By the time they returned to the West Bastion, night had completely fallen.
The command center urgently opened a post-battle review meeting.
The large screen simultaneously displayed the spectrum records, casualty statistics, and aerial footage from the three battlefields. Today's simultaneous assault by the web and beasts had laid bare the upper limits of the matrix's attrition tactics for everyone to see.
"The conclusion is clear." Instructor Wen stood in front of the projection, her fingertips pointing at the priest's fluctuation graph. "A single priest's illusion web is already difficult enough to deal with. Once cross-regional linkage is completed, the entire Western Front will be covered by a continuous psychic curtain. At that point, no matter which direction we send a squad, they will fall within the coverage of the contiguous illusion web. There will be absolutely no safe route to bypass it."
A staff officer spoke in a deep voice: "Our heavy firepower strikes have limitations. Artillery shells can only physically destroy local anchor points; they cannot eradicate the hyphae network that permeates the rock strata. As long as the priest is still alive, and as long as the main hyphae hasn't been blasted apart, the illusion web can continuously add nodes and reorganize its links."
The face of the war zone deputy commander, Zhou Chong, was even graver than it had been before the battle. He looked at the few remaining Sea of Consciousness cultivators sitting at the conference table, his gaze sweeping over Lin Yan and Gu Shen.
"Currently, the only third-tier Sea of Consciousness cultivators on the Western Front who can stably go out on duty are the two of you. Of the other two colleagues who rushed to the northern and southern locations yesterday, one suffered severe Sea of Consciousness trauma and will be unable to perform external duties for at least three months. The other has applied for a transfer away from the Western Front to become an instructor at a rear academy, no longer participating in frontline missions."
As these words fell, the meeting room fell into dead silence.
In just one short coordinated assault, the high-tier Sea of Consciousness combat power of the Western Front was nearly halved. The already stretched-thin manpower was now on the verge of complete exhaustion.
"The elimination rate for the crash course classes at the combat readiness academy has already hit seventy percent," another officer added. "Forcibly catalyzing the Sea of Consciousness causes many students to suffer complete mental breakdowns during cultivation. Those who are lucky enough to survive mostly carry irreversible Sea of Consciousness damage. Their upper limits are very low, making it hard for them to grow to the third tier. Even if we send them up in large numbers, they won't be able to fill the roles of the veterans."
Only one choice remained before everyone.
Zhou Chong took a deep breath and read the new war zone orders word by word:
"The Western Front will officially implement the second phase of the shrinking plan. The ten-kilometer warning line will be further compressed inward to five kilometers. Everything beyond five kilometers will be designated as a permanent quarantine forbidden zone. No reconnaissance or clearance missions will be arranged. Only long-distance early warning base stations and long-range drone patrols will be maintained. Once the illusion web is detected advancing toward the five-kilometer boundary, indiscriminate remote firepower coverage will be applied immediately, suppressing it at all costs."
This decision was even more brutal than the last shrinking order.
It meant humanity was voluntarily giving up half of its buffer zone, pressing its defensive line right up against the nose of the bastion.
Someone whispered an objection, saying that if they retreated any further, the alien beasts and phantom arrays would be too close to the city. Once the contiguous illusion web was laid out, the psychic fluctuations might even penetrate the city walls and disturb the minds of ordinary people inside. But no one could come up with a better plan. Without enough Sea of Consciousness combat power to identify traps and locate the priests, going out was simply a death sentence.
The meeting ended, and it was already the middle of the night when everyone dispersed.
Lin Yan didn't return to his dormitory to rest immediately. He walked alone to the city walls. The cold wind howled, and the searchlights swept back and forth toward the pitch-black wasteland. He rested his hand on the freezing concrete parapet, gazing into the distance at the quarantine zone merging into the darkness.
His mind replayed the entire process of today's battle over and over: the priest's agile jumping spiritual origin, the illusion web nodes that could be reorganized at will, the tactics of scaled beasts cooperating with illusions to harvest, the severed communications of the northern squad, the fallen artilleryman on the high ground.
He slowly realized one thing.
Patrolling, marking, remote artillery strikes, passive defense—all of these were merely treating the symptoms. As long as Rift No. 79 remained, as long as the matrix could continuously breed phantom seed embryos and dispatch priests to weave webs, the traps in the quarantine zone would never be completely cleared. Today, a batch of outer nodes was destroyed; after a while, the priests would bring new embryos and weave the web again.
As long as the source was not extinguished, the war of attrition would never stop. Humanity would only bleed out bit by bit, until it could no longer hold the defensive line.
"Thinking about how to end this once and for all?" Gu Shen's voice sounded from beside him. He had also walked up to the city walls, leaning against the parapet, standing side by side with Lin Yan as they looked out at the wasteland. "I've thought about it more than once. But Rift No. 79 is the core nest of the alien race. The depths are filled with hyphae networks, a large number of priests, high-tier scaled beasts, and even the matrix itself. For a few of us to go in would be no different from actively jumping into a slaughterhouse."
"I know how hard it is," Lin Yan said softly. "But if we keep staying here, watching the defensive line retreat and our comrades fall, we will never have a chance to turn the tables. The matrix isn't in a rush to launch a strong assault on the bastion. It has plenty of patience to slowly bleed us dry, exhausting all our Sea of Consciousness power. Once we no longer have anyone who can withstand the psychic erosion of the illusion web, the bastion will be an empty city without a shield."
Gu Shen was silent for a long time before slowly nodding. "I understand what you mean. It's just that this idea is too heavy. Right now, on the Western Front, no one dares to bring up a plan to proactively penetrate deep into the rift. The high command would only think it's a suicidal charge."
The two stood on the city walls for a long time, until a faint, gray-white fish-belly white appeared on the horizon, before parting ways to rest.
Over the next few days, the Western Front fully implemented the new shrinking orders. The new five-kilometer warning line was quickly demarcated, and the outer early warning outposts were dismantled and withdrawn. On the wasteland, the traces of human activity converged inward in concentric circles.
Inside the bastion, the atmosphere was suppressed to the extreme. Wounded soldiers with psychic damage and slow movements could be seen everywhere on the streets. On the training grounds of the combat readiness academy, the shouts of the youths sparring also carried a layer of inescapable heaviness.
Deep within the quarantine zone, the priests did not stop their movements.
In the Bone-Dry Valley, the abandoned mining city, and several other hidden locations, one illusion web after another continued to be perfected. Following the instructions transmitted by the matrix, the illusion web nodes in different regions began to adjust their cross-regional resonance frequencies. The originally independent three massive webs slowly established hidden psychic links.
They no longer fought individually.
The moment the cross-regional resonance links were completely connected, the entire Western Front would be shrouded by a continuous, giant psychic curtain. By then, beyond the five-kilometer mark, the entire wasteland would turn into an endless, massive cage.
At the core of Rift No. 79 deep underground, the massive fungal carpet writhed slowly, receiving the web-weaving progress reported by the priests.
It had already tested the killing efficiency of the web-beast coordination, witnessed humanity's two voluntary defensive line shrinkages, and figured out the attrition rate of humanity's high-tier Sea of Consciousness combat power.
The attrition phase was nearing its end.
The next phase was blockade, encirclement, and the slow tightening of the net shrouding the West Bastion.
The medical team's off-road vehicles arrived in a hurry. Stretchers were loaded onto the vehicles one after another. Several soldiers who had suffered psychic trauma had vacant eyes and uncontrollable, slight tremors throughout their bodies. They hadn't been dragged into a complete corridor, but having soaked in the resonance field of the illusion web for a long time, their Seas of Consciousness were repeatedly torn, leaving temporary damage. Whether they could recover depended on the next few days of care in the monitoring pods.
Lin Yan leaned against a rock, his hands hanging down, his fingertips trembling slightly. The solidified old wound deep within his Sea of Consciousness had been repeatedly stretched by the priest's assault just moments ago. Now, it continuously sent a dull, heavy ache, like a rusty nail driven steadily into the core of his consciousness. He didn't dare to forcibly mobilize his Sea of Consciousness; he could only slowly adjust his breathing, using the ancient martial arts method of calming the mind and gathering breath to gradually soothe the turbulent psychic waves.
Gu Shen walked to his side, his face equally pale and his eyes bloodshot. He had consumed a massive amount of energy while sustaining the joint barrier earlier, and there was still dark brown beast blood splattered on his forehead.
"Northern Front, confirmed no survivors," Gu Shen said in a very low voice, as if afraid to startle the priest lurking deep in the valley. "The search and rescue drones swept inside; there was nothing left but broken equipment and bloodstains. Not even a single intact body could be found. The illusion web at the bottom of the valley remains in standby mode. If anyone rashly steps in, the corridor will restart immediately. The rescue team doesn't dare to enter."
Lin Yan nodded silently. Ever since the northern communication was cut off, everyone had actually anticipated this outcome in their hearts. It was just that hearing the final confirmation still made their chests feel stifled.
"We held the warning line, but this can't be called a victory." Chen Ye walked over, still clutching his deformed shock baton. The baton was covered in dents left by the gnawing and ramming of scaled beasts. "The priest can awaken the illusion web again at any time, and the beast horde can regroup at any time. We cannot eradicate this place; we can only wait for it to strike again on its own initiative. The initiative has been in their hands from beginning to end."
Zhao Kai held the detector. The screen still displayed the final spectrum snapshot of the illusion web, with the dense node links still clearly visible.
"The intelligence group just sent word. The illusion webs in the north and south have also synchronously entered dormancy. All three massive webs have preserved their core nodes, abandoning only the outer anchor points destroyed by artillery. They are like three time bombs buried on the edge of the quarantine line. The priests can remotely awaken them at any time."
The group didn't linger. After a brief handover of the scene and marking the red high-risk coordinates, they boarded their vehicles to return.
Driving west toward the bastion, the cabin was terrifyingly quiet. No one chatted; everyone was immersed in exhaustion and oppression. Looking out the car window, the wasteland stretched endlessly under the hazy daylight. Those invisible illusion webs were hidden within the undulating dirt mounds, collapsed mining pits, and karst caves.
By the time they returned to the West Bastion, night had completely fallen.
The command center urgently opened a post-battle review meeting.
The large screen simultaneously displayed the spectrum records, casualty statistics, and aerial footage from the three battlefields. Today's simultaneous assault by the web and beasts had laid bare the upper limits of the matrix's attrition tactics for everyone to see.
"The conclusion is clear." Instructor Wen stood in front of the projection, her fingertips pointing at the priest's fluctuation graph. "A single priest's illusion web is already difficult enough to deal with. Once cross-regional linkage is completed, the entire Western Front will be covered by a continuous psychic curtain. At that point, no matter which direction we send a squad, they will fall within the coverage of the contiguous illusion web. There will be absolutely no safe route to bypass it."
A staff officer spoke in a deep voice: "Our heavy firepower strikes have limitations. Artillery shells can only physically destroy local anchor points; they cannot eradicate the hyphae network that permeates the rock strata. As long as the priest is still alive, and as long as the main hyphae hasn't been blasted apart, the illusion web can continuously add nodes and reorganize its links."
The face of the war zone deputy commander, Zhou Chong, was even graver than it had been before the battle. He looked at the few remaining Sea of Consciousness cultivators sitting at the conference table, his gaze sweeping over Lin Yan and Gu Shen.
"Currently, the only third-tier Sea of Consciousness cultivators on the Western Front who can stably go out on duty are the two of you. Of the other two colleagues who rushed to the northern and southern locations yesterday, one suffered severe Sea of Consciousness trauma and will be unable to perform external duties for at least three months. The other has applied for a transfer away from the Western Front to become an instructor at a rear academy, no longer participating in frontline missions."
As these words fell, the meeting room fell into dead silence.
In just one short coordinated assault, the high-tier Sea of Consciousness combat power of the Western Front was nearly halved. The already stretched-thin manpower was now on the verge of complete exhaustion.
"The elimination rate for the crash course classes at the combat readiness academy has already hit seventy percent," another officer added. "Forcibly catalyzing the Sea of Consciousness causes many students to suffer complete mental breakdowns during cultivation. Those who are lucky enough to survive mostly carry irreversible Sea of Consciousness damage. Their upper limits are very low, making it hard for them to grow to the third tier. Even if we send them up in large numbers, they won't be able to fill the roles of the veterans."
Only one choice remained before everyone.
Zhou Chong took a deep breath and read the new war zone orders word by word:
"The Western Front will officially implement the second phase of the shrinking plan. The ten-kilometer warning line will be further compressed inward to five kilometers. Everything beyond five kilometers will be designated as a permanent quarantine forbidden zone. No reconnaissance or clearance missions will be arranged. Only long-distance early warning base stations and long-range drone patrols will be maintained. Once the illusion web is detected advancing toward the five-kilometer boundary, indiscriminate remote firepower coverage will be applied immediately, suppressing it at all costs."
This decision was even more brutal than the last shrinking order.
It meant humanity was voluntarily giving up half of its buffer zone, pressing its defensive line right up against the nose of the bastion.
Someone whispered an objection, saying that if they retreated any further, the alien beasts and phantom arrays would be too close to the city. Once the contiguous illusion web was laid out, the psychic fluctuations might even penetrate the city walls and disturb the minds of ordinary people inside. But no one could come up with a better plan. Without enough Sea of Consciousness combat power to identify traps and locate the priests, going out was simply a death sentence.
The meeting ended, and it was already the middle of the night when everyone dispersed.
Lin Yan didn't return to his dormitory to rest immediately. He walked alone to the city walls. The cold wind howled, and the searchlights swept back and forth toward the pitch-black wasteland. He rested his hand on the freezing concrete parapet, gazing into the distance at the quarantine zone merging into the darkness.
His mind replayed the entire process of today's battle over and over: the priest's agile jumping spiritual origin, the illusion web nodes that could be reorganized at will, the tactics of scaled beasts cooperating with illusions to harvest, the severed communications of the northern squad, the fallen artilleryman on the high ground.
He slowly realized one thing.
Patrolling, marking, remote artillery strikes, passive defense—all of these were merely treating the symptoms. As long as Rift No. 79 remained, as long as the matrix could continuously breed phantom seed embryos and dispatch priests to weave webs, the traps in the quarantine zone would never be completely cleared. Today, a batch of outer nodes was destroyed; after a while, the priests would bring new embryos and weave the web again.
As long as the source was not extinguished, the war of attrition would never stop. Humanity would only bleed out bit by bit, until it could no longer hold the defensive line.
"Thinking about how to end this once and for all?" Gu Shen's voice sounded from beside him. He had also walked up to the city walls, leaning against the parapet, standing side by side with Lin Yan as they looked out at the wasteland. "I've thought about it more than once. But Rift No. 79 is the core nest of the alien race. The depths are filled with hyphae networks, a large number of priests, high-tier scaled beasts, and even the matrix itself. For a few of us to go in would be no different from actively jumping into a slaughterhouse."
"I know how hard it is," Lin Yan said softly. "But if we keep staying here, watching the defensive line retreat and our comrades fall, we will never have a chance to turn the tables. The matrix isn't in a rush to launch a strong assault on the bastion. It has plenty of patience to slowly bleed us dry, exhausting all our Sea of Consciousness power. Once we no longer have anyone who can withstand the psychic erosion of the illusion web, the bastion will be an empty city without a shield."
Gu Shen was silent for a long time before slowly nodding. "I understand what you mean. It's just that this idea is too heavy. Right now, on the Western Front, no one dares to bring up a plan to proactively penetrate deep into the rift. The high command would only think it's a suicidal charge."
The two stood on the city walls for a long time, until a faint, gray-white fish-belly white appeared on the horizon, before parting ways to rest.
Over the next few days, the Western Front fully implemented the new shrinking orders. The new five-kilometer warning line was quickly demarcated, and the outer early warning outposts were dismantled and withdrawn. On the wasteland, the traces of human activity converged inward in concentric circles.
Inside the bastion, the atmosphere was suppressed to the extreme. Wounded soldiers with psychic damage and slow movements could be seen everywhere on the streets. On the training grounds of the combat readiness academy, the shouts of the youths sparring also carried a layer of inescapable heaviness.
Deep within the quarantine zone, the priests did not stop their movements.
In the Bone-Dry Valley, the abandoned mining city, and several other hidden locations, one illusion web after another continued to be perfected. Following the instructions transmitted by the matrix, the illusion web nodes in different regions began to adjust their cross-regional resonance frequencies. The originally independent three massive webs slowly established hidden psychic links.
They no longer fought individually.
The moment the cross-regional resonance links were completely connected, the entire Western Front would be shrouded by a continuous, giant psychic curtain. By then, beyond the five-kilometer mark, the entire wasteland would turn into an endless, massive cage.
At the core of Rift No. 79 deep underground, the massive fungal carpet writhed slowly, receiving the web-weaving progress reported by the priests.
It had already tested the killing efficiency of the web-beast coordination, witnessed humanity's two voluntary defensive line shrinkages, and figured out the attrition rate of humanity's high-tier Sea of Consciousness combat power.
The attrition phase was nearing its end.
The next phase was blockade, encirclement, and the slow tightening of the net shrouding the West Bastion.