The adjustments to ground defenses were slightly more complex than Su Wu had anticipated. He was busy until the next day, when he finally completed the initial planning.
Overall, the main decisions included strengthening the defenses of all surface units and maintaining the configuration of the Qinling Mountain war zone. Su Wu discovered that even though the Amethyst Crystal Entities had opened many other passages, their favorite gathering area was still the Magma Canyon in the Qinling Mountains, as if it were some strategic stronghold. This, in effect, gave Su Wu an efficient location to harvest the remains of the Amethyst Crystal Entities. With its existence, Su Wu found it easier to grow stronger with each battle.
After completing all the defense deployments, Su Wu also made minor adjustments to the daily patrol routes near the surface of Jianghe City. He redistributed the four special crystal detectors enhanced with Survival Points. Among them, the Farmhouse Shelter and the Qinling Mountain war zone each retained one special crystal detector to ensure that these two most critical and important areas would not be ambushed by Amethyst Crystal Entities from underground. The other two were transferred from two Pioneer-class Land Destroyers responsible for patrols to a Twin-Winged Helicopter and a sixth-generation fighter jet.
The Twin-Winged Helicopter was responsible for low-altitude patrols centered around Jianghe City daily. Once it detected a significant gathering of Amethyst Crystal Entities, it would directly call the Farmhouse Shelter to launch a remote strike with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy artillery. The sixth-generation fighter jet was tasked with escorting merchant trains outside Jianghe City and regularly inspecting various subsidiary shelters and mines. Since the routes the sixth-generation fighter jet needed to cover were too long, Su Wu's requirements for it were not high. It only needed to fly at an altitude of 1 kilometer above the ground to ensure that the merchant train routes and the areas within 4 kilometers underground of important ground facilities were free from large gatherings of Amethyst Crystal Entities. The remaining details were left to other aircraft and ground forces to handle.
Without the element of surprise, the Amethyst Crystal Entities were not too dangerous before they fully emerged from the ground and were relatively easy to deal with.
"But this way, we can no longer guarantee the absolute safety of the special crystal detectors. After all, no matter how advanced ordinary aircraft are, they still cannot match land destroyers for the time being. If they are hit by a couple of personal rockets, there is a risk of losing control and crashing." This was the price of wanting the best of both worlds. Su Wu was unwilling to spend Survival Points to produce more special crystal detectors but still wanted to protect the assets outside Jianghe City from significant losses. Thus, he had to take a slight risk.
That afternoon, the Twin-Winged Helicopter, on its first patrol mission, unexpectedly discovered a species covered in snow-like pale white sprouts about 200 kilometers east of Jianghe City. Upon receiving the news, Su Wu remotely operated a robot from a small shelter-turned-independent biological laboratory in the suburbs of Jianghe City to collect a sample from the Twin-Winged Helicopter. After a quick analysis and inspection, it was confirmed that they were the seedlings of the Underworld Flower, which had been studied before.
"They grow on ice. The exposed parts are, on average, less than a millimeter in length. Inside the ice is a nearly transparent root system, with the longest roots extending over a hundred meters, reaching into the frozen soil beneath the ice. It's truly a massive and intricate plant," Su Wu observed with some astonishment.
This root structure allowed it to easily absorb nutrients from the soil. However, it was strange that the nutrients absorbed by these Underworld Flower seedlings were not primarily used for their own growth but seemed to vanish into thin air. Evidence came from a control experiment. In a space sealed with a meter-thick layer of rapid-setting cement, the seedlings provided with ample nutrients naturally grew at a visible rate. In a normal space, under the same conditions, the control group, although absorbing no less nutrients, showed no changes.
"Interesting," Su Wu pondered, vaguely understanding where the raw materials needed for the evolution of the Amethyst Crystal Entities came from.
After some consideration, he casually ignited his spirituality to conduct deeper tests and research on these sprouts. Some useful targeted equipment was gradually drawn by him. Two hours later, a Multi-Wing Drone was quickly deployed by the sixth-generation fighter jet to the location where the seedlings were discovered, 200 kilometers away. The Multi-Wing Drone began to expand its reconnaissance range in circles at a height of 5 meters above the ground, eventually identifying an area of 7.5 square kilometers suspected to be similarly distributed with Underworld Flower seedlings.
"Even with a specially designed new detector, it is extremely difficult to find the Underworld Flower seedlings in the ice fields and snow. The success rate is at most one in a thousand. But this probability is sufficient. Discovering one seedling means discovering a whole area. The rest is just about indiscriminate destruction of them," Su Wu thought, sitting at the control console.
Looking at the images transmitted by the Multi-Wing Drone on the screen, Su Wu could not distinguish the area from an ordinary snow-covered valley if he had not known beforehand that Underworld Flower seedlings were indeed present there.
"Destroy them," Su Wu ordered after collecting enough data.
The Multi-Wing Drone hovering over the valley slowly extended a device resembling a honeycomb missile launcher from its underside. In the next moment, an invisible attack was launched from the device, colliding with the ground and resonating with the Underworld Flower seedlings, causing them to die silently along with their massive root systems in the ice and frozen soil. This was a specially designed infrasound weapon for the Underworld Flower, with a range of up to 100 meters in radius. It could penetrate thick layers of ice and frozen soil, delivering devastating blows to every part of the Underworld Flower while causing minimal environmental damage.
"This thing isn't very effective against Amethyst Crystal Entities. The cost-performance ratio is too low. But it's the perfect tool for clearing the more fragile Underworld Flower," Su Wu thought, observing the efficient cleanup speed of the Multi-Wing Drone in the images.
Su Wu was quite satisfied with this newly designed weapon and planned to popularize it as a standard component in some combat drones. With such a useful weapon, many places could even skip the reconnaissance step and directly send drones to fly over them. After all, the entire process would only consume a small amount of electricity and not take up many drones, with the overall cost being almost zero.
In the following days, as the Multi-Wing Drones equipped with infrasound weapons conducted large-scale indiscriminate sweeps within a few hundred kilometers around the Farmhouse Shelter, from the Magma Canyon to other exits dug out by the Amethyst Crystal Entities, the number of evolved Amethyst Crystal Entities significantly decreased.
On Qinling Mountain, the nearly incessant roar of heavy artillery that had persisted for some time became sparse again. Sometimes, there would only be an occasional shot every half hour. The rest of the work was completed in advance by the Spider Robots on the ground and the combat drones in the air.
Limited by the number of evolved entities with active mobility and combat capabilities, the large-scale fall of human shelters into the hands of Amethyst Crystal Entities, as Su Wu had once predicted, did not truly occur. More often than not, as long as they dared to appear brazenly on the surface, they would soon be met with high-altitude bombings from Su Wu's sixth-generation fighter jets. If they invaded the interior of shelters, as long as the people inside had the opportunity to send out a distress signal, they could generally receive rescue from Su Wu's Spider Robots before the entire shelter was annihilated.
However, after being beaten many times, the Amethyst Crystal Entities gradually learned how to respond. More and more Amethyst Crystal Entities, after plundering initial resources from human shelters, successfully dispersed into the wilderness before Su Wu's Spider Robots could arrive. As they moved further away from the Farmhouse Shelter, the intensity of Su Wu's strikes and the frequency of his patrols decreased. In a vicious cycle, the Amethyst Crystal Entities began to gradually strengthen on the surface.
Some fortunate Amethyst Crystal Entities that obtained sufficient resources began to evolve into the size of elephants and grew more destructive remote weapon organs. Thus, the entire East Continent gradually entered an era of turmoil.
On March 15th, just as the East Continent was gradually getting used to the existence of the dangerous Amethyst Crystal Entities, a disaster caused by them broke out in the distant Far West. A super shelter in central West Continent with a population of 8 million became the first casualty of this disaster.
Two days later, traces of Amethyst Crystal Entities appeared simultaneously on the southernmost peninsula of Black Continent and in North America, where the federal central government was located. At this point, the federal government, which had once coldly watched the East Continent fall into chaos, was forced to be drawn into the quagmire of war with the Amethyst Crystal Entities. The situation of all humanity worsened further.
On March 20th, in the underground control center of the Farmhouse Shelter, the overall area of the control center had expanded by nearly double, with the addition of two smaller holographic projection platforms and more screens. At a glance, except for the fact that only Su Wu was present here, making it seem somewhat empty, it looked like a military command center or the bridge of a massive warship.
Indeed, it was so. The new screens and the two small projection platforms almost always displayed the defense forces at various important strongholds and ongoing battle scenes, commanded by artificial intelligence and a large staff team located in the residential area of the second underground floor.
Being here, even without doing anything, one could easily feel a tense and busy atmosphere.
"The society inside the shelter is becoming increasingly isolated from the outside world," Su Wu thought, standing beside the only large metal platform. Without paying attention to the ongoing battles, he first looked at the projected scenes of the shelter's internal residential area. From the children playing and laughing on the streets and the pedestrians chatting with each other, he could clearly feel an atmosphere that was completely out of place in this post-apocalyptic world.
Casually checking the management logs of the artificial intelligence, Su Wu even saw an application signed by many people, hoping to hold a concert. At this moment, outside, almost every day, shelters were being completely annihilated by Amethyst Crystal Entities, with thousands or tens of thousands of people dying. These messages were not secrets on the internet. But it was as if an invisible firewall existed, isolating the ordinary people inside the Farmhouse Shelter from these events, making them turn a blind eye to it and even have the mood to chase stars and revel.
"Currently, the entire network, the mentality closest to the pre-apocalyptic times, is the population of the Farmhouse Shelter, which has slowly grown to 62 million. Next is the underground shelter complex of the East Continent capital, followed by various super cities. Below the super cities, including the official shelters of second-tier cities and large private shelters, the mentality is completely different, more in line with the normal reactions in the post-apocalyptic world, being quite uneasy about various external messages," Su Wu analyzed.
The different mentalities of the shelter residents also corresponded to the scale and strength of their shelters. The stronger and more secure they felt, the more relaxed the residents' emotions were, even if this sense of security might just be an illusion.
Su Wu was not particularly averse to this phenomenon and even somewhat welcomed it. To put it more clearly, Su Wu's original intention in building an internet after the large-scale breakdown of post-apocalyptic communications was out of nostalgia for the prosperous society before the apocalypse, not to create a place filled with despair and chaos. Moreover, for the ordinary people living in the Farmhouse Shelter, Su Wu mainly regarded them as labor and tools for producing resources. In essence, they were no different from the wheat and vegetables carefully cultivated with ample fertilizer and a warm environment in the plantation, or the flowers thriving and blooming splendidly in the greenhouse.
Su Wu did not need them to feel the storms and cruelty of the outside world. They only needed to focus on producing resources for him and providing him with a good mood.
"Best of all, they should always keep a happy mood until one day, when a terrifying disaster even I cannot withstand comes, the entire shelter is destroyed, and everyone dies with the cognition of the peaceful era," Su Wu's eyes were calm to the point of indifference at this moment, like a deity weav
ing the fate of these tens of millions of people under his control.