Seeking Truth with a Sword-Chapter 644 - 583: Counterattack

Li Ang fell silent for a moment. He then suddenly raised his palm and pointed at his pitch-black eye sockets. "I can see you."

"...What?"

The statement, coming out of nowhere, left the Martial Artist frozen in place.

"I can see you."

Li Ang repeated, slowly saying, "Eyes correspond to sight, ears to hearing, nose to smell, and skin to touch. Humans need to rely on various organs, on the tips of neurons, to perceive everything in the world. But for me now, organs are mere decorations."

He lifted his arm, and the five fingers of his hand dissolved into individual strands of flesh and blood. These peeled away inch by inch, revealing the pure white bones underneath.

"These strands have become an extension of me. They’re like a gigantic neural network, spreading out beneath the city district."

Li Ang rotated his wrist, and the flesh-and-blood strands swayed like the pistil of a flower. "I can feel the rain striking the soil, see the roots of plants meandering underground, and hear the beetles crawling and the Dark River flowing. Even the radio waves in the air."

No sooner had he finished speaking than the military headset at his feet blasted with noise, as if thousands of people were talking at once.

Amidst the noisy and disordered Japanese, one could barely make out a few sentences in foreign languages.

"Yu Mei, are you okay over there? I’m taking shelter in Fujitsu’s underground parking lot. There’s no danger for now, but the rain is getting heavier..."

"This is Cihui Medical University Hospital. We have too many casualties and we’re running out of type O blood. Requesting support..."

"According to the meteorological forecast, the rain in the Tokyo area will intensify over the next two hours, shifting from a blue to an orange rainstorm warning. Residents in low-lying areas should move to higher ground as much as possible..."

"Fuck! Why hasn’t the rescue helicopter arrived? Do you know who my father is?"

The Superpower Users on the ground were initially unable to make out the words. But as time passed, they gradually understood the conversations and widened their eyes in astonishment.

The headset was playing a minuscule fraction of the phone calls made by the millions of inhabitants of Tokyo City.

WHOOSH—

A torrent of lights plummeted swiftly from the sky dome. After losing all communication with the front lines, the United States military had decisively continued launching rocket barrages to saturate the ground.

Li Ang sighed imperceptibly. The threads on the surfaces of surrounding buildings came to life, connecting and forming a massive spider web.

The rockets rained down furiously. The web, regenerating at an incredible pace, barely held up against the onslaught.

The downpour continued unabated, and the fiery light of the explosions was as dazzling as fireworks.

"Not just my senses, but my thoughts are also continuously expanding, accelerating, and diverging," Li Ang went on.

Countless strands spread and extended, covering man-made structures, including universities, research institutes, and libraries. The strands layered over pages of books, and in that instant, it was as if two thousand Li Angs were reading simultaneously.

But even that was not fast enough.

The strands flowed through ceilings, walls, and floors, reaching the server rooms of the university research institutes.

They, or rather Li Ang, extended a slender strand. Like Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, painted in 1511 on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, it touched the servers flickering with yellow-green lights.

ZZZT!

The server lights flashed wildly, and all fans stopped at once. Elemental Material actively dispersed the heat, so there was no need for the inefficient aid of airflow for cooling.

Elemental Material immersed all electronic components, assimilating the integrated circuits that symbolized humanity’s third technological revolution.

HUM—

Like lightning cutting through the night, his thoughts began to accelerate significantly, and everything around him seemed to slow down. The consciousness known as Li Ang continued to ascend, peering down on the Human World from on high.

The ground below lit up with stars, bright and dim, each representing a computer he had absorbed and utilized.

American soldiers driving through the streets of Tokyo stared in astonishment at the scene before them. All the personal computers in the stores along the street had inexplicably turned on, their screens flashing through different images like a horse galloping past flowers.

The original two thousand Heart Thoughts had expanded to twenty thousand, then two hundred thousand, then two million.

Each Heart Thought soared freely in the brand-new world known as the network, voraciously absorbing all knowledge accumulated since the birth of human civilization.

Literature, art, education, science... From the cuneiform script of the Two River Valleys to the human genome sequence; from classical drama to aerospace engineering material formulas.

BOOM!

The ruins of the building behind Li Ang suddenly exploded. Elemental Material, rushing in from all directions, gathered like sand into a tower, forming a metal tree amidst the horrified gazes of the Superpower Users.

The metal behemoth grew at a dizzying speed, quickly surpassing the adjacent high-rise buildings.

Intricately intertwined power cables, like luxuriant vines, wound around its branches, connecting to energy sources. Integrated circuits flickered like leaves and flowers, carrying out trillions of calculations per second.

Greater computing power, more Heart Thoughts, higher efficiency.

Mo Si’s expansion rate accelerated again. It destroyed buildings, extracting their steel bars, and bored into rock layers, directly absorbing trace metals.

The second volley of rocket fire arrived on schedule. Li Ang closed his eyes and began his counterattack.

The metal tree bloomed and bore fruit, giving rise to a swarm of unmanned drones that flew into the night sky, while the Mo Si on the rooftops of surrounding high-rises transformed into anti-aircraft batteries.

These unmanned gun emplacements slowly rotated, firing shells and weaving a web of anti-aircraft fire in the sky.

The advance reconnaissance from the drones, combined with the powerful computing power of the thought network, allowed the anti-aircraft guns to achieve a level of air defense far exceeding that of any human military.

The vast majority of rockets were intercepted and destroyed. The few that managed to get through exploded harmlessly on the perimeter of the tree—these warheads, after all, had been allowed to pass only after careful calculation and a cost-benefit analysis confirmed they posed no significant threat.

"...Found you."

Li Ang opened his eyes. Ten anti-aircraft guns melted like candles, recasting themselves into a single cannon almost as tall as the building beneath it.

BOOM!!

The cannon fired with a roar. The shell pierced the night sky and entered the clouds, flying gracefully through the stormy gales above.

In the mountains north of Tokyo City, a US Army Field Artillery Battalion was stationed. It consisted of three Artillery Battalions, a Rocket Artillery Battalion, and an Anti-Tank Company.

The vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft radar detected signals in the sky and sounded an alarm. The artillerymen had assumed they would just be shelling a target dozens of kilometers away in the mountains, a target incapable of retaliation. They had never considered they would face an attack and now scrambled to prepare their air defenses.

Four Striker Armored Vehicles frantically fired Stinger Missiles at the aerial target.

BOOM!

The Stinger Missiles flew into the night sky, and a bright fireball erupted high above the mountaintop.

Seeing no further activity on the radar, all the soldiers instinctively breathed a sigh of relief.

An official wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. While ordering a reconnaissance team up the mountain to observe the situation, he picked up his radio to report, "We’ve been struck by an unknown aerial force. Could it be friendly fire, or that country across the sea...?"

"O-Official?..."

The startled voice of a subordinate interrupted the official’s communication.

The latter put down the radio in annoyance. Following his subordinate’s gesture, he looked up, only to see a tidal wave of black material surging towards them from the mountaintop.