Chapter 1 How Are Things Now?

"How are things now?"

"According to satellite imagery...the terrain at the electromagnetic cannon impact site has subtly changed. The optical array that originally obscured the camera system has been broken, and we have discovered the Descending Spirit Society's camp."

"What's the damage?"

"Not significant, but they are clearly very apprehensive. They are scattering, seemingly planning to find another location to build their camp."

After a brief exchange with the intelligence officers, the director let out a long breath. This Harmony Bureau cadre, responsible for coordinating matters in Southeastern Europe, revealed a rare smile. He turned to Su Zhou and bowed sincerely, "A complete victory, Professor Su. Whatever the Descending Spirit Society is planning, their progress will be greatly delayed."

However, his brow furrowed slightly. The director raised his terminal and displayed the camp's photos for Su Zhou and Raphael, "But look, the Descending Spirit Society's camp is very high-level, even by our highest standards...it's hard to imagine that this kind of underground organization has such cutting-edge technology."

"That's not surprising."

Raphael, however, was not surprised by this. He shrugged and said, "Gron, you've always been a director in Eastern Europe, haven't you? You haven't been on any missions, have you? Don't think the Descending Spirit Society is just an underground terrorist organization. In reality, they have a history of nearly a thousand years and even effectively rule some remote areas and small countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, with members all over the world."

"They also have a dedicated research department...Although the Descending Spirit Society is a gathering place for vicious and cruel scum, it is precisely because of this that all the members are scum, and they have a wealth of human experimentation data. In some extreme areas of research, such as various spiritual energy viruses and biochemical weapons, their progress is faster than ours."

"Huh? But where do they get their scientists?"

Serros had been following behind, listening to the big shots talking to each other—she even used her phone to film the process of Su Zhou launching the electromagnetic cannon, and since Su Zhou didn't say it was forbidden, Raphael and the director named Gron naturally wouldn't stop her.

But when she heard this, she subconsciously asked strangely, "Generally speaking, no normal researchers would join them, right?"

Su Zhou also nodded slightly. This question was also what he wanted to ask...You know, front-line technicians are such respected professions in Zheng Nation. If they have the strength, why not work for Zheng Nation and other major organizations? It's not like their brains are filled with water.

"Mind alteration." Raphael patted his wheelchair, his tone becoming cold, "Among them, there is a guy named 'The Broker'. That woman has strange mental abilities that can freely manipulate people's memories, minds, and souls."

"As we all know, most of human memories, emotions, and empathy are shaped after birth, and the same goes for loyalty and an iron will—those sacred and respectable things are not so indestructible in reality."

"And what determines whether a person is good or evil, whether they are a good person, also comes from postnatal education and memory."

"However, The Broker can instill consensus and memories, causing people to change from the very core of their personality."

As he said this, Raphael's expression became somewhat lonely. The old man sighed, "It gathers hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of memories that can induce people to become evil, making people cold-blooded, ruthless, and incredibly crazy, but loyal to the Descending Spirit Society."

"Even the most steadfast agents will be completely brainwashed and become the most loyal members of the Descending Spirit Society—it is precisely because of this that it is difficult for us to send spies into the Descending Spirit Society, but they can cultivate people who are completely loyal to them."

It sounded like Raphael knew someone, even someone very familiar, who had been brainwashed in this way while working undercover and finally betrayed the Harmony Bureau and joined the Descending Spirit Society.

Su Zhou could easily understand all of this.

A person's memory is, of course, a pure, unique, and inviolable self-thing for them personally, but the Descending Spirit Society's evildoers can use hundreds or thousands of people and their intimate memories to directly devour a person's way of thinking.

Whether it's personality or a sense of good and evil, whether it's a cognition of the world or a liking or disliking of people, it's ultimately a set of evaluation criteria. When the entire evaluation criterion is distorted, a 'person' with all the knowledge and memories of an original natural person but completely distorted and completely loyal to the Descending Spirit Society is born.

"They rely on such methods to ensure loyalty?"

After listening to all of this, Su Zhou said thoughtfully, "In fact, all major forces have similar methods, right?"

Neither Raphael nor Gron answered Su Zhou's question, but the answer was naturally 'yes'.

Even the Descending Spirit Society could master the technique, so how could the real big forces not have it? It's just that, out of various concerns and some practical reasons, they haven't done so.

—After all, cultivation, in a sense, is a very subjective and self-centered thing. Such random modification of memory and soul ultimately only increases the difficulty of cultivation. Who knows how big the inner demons of such brainwashed people are.

When Su Zhou heard about the Descending Spirit Society's methods, his first reaction was certainly anger at this method of playing with memories and souls, but soon he felt that, if it were possible to completely cover the thinking patterns of all intelligent life with memories of goodness, wouldn't it, in a sense, also be possible to directly eliminate the source of evil from the root?

But soon, Su Zhou realized the limitations of his thinking.

If a civilization adopts such a method, it can certainly maintain complete stability and centripetal force, but it is also equivalent to indirectly locking in the possibility of civilization—only by swaying between good and evil can greater ripples be created.

The same goes for cultivation. Forcing people to be good, even if the purpose is good, will only increase their inner demons due to this distorted transformation, making it extremely difficult to go further.

And at this moment, Su Zhou remembered what Yala had said to him in the reincarnation world.

[Severing the possibility of evil...is 'obstructing the freedom of others to do evil'.]

He had wondered why doing evil deserved the word freedom, but now, when he thought about it from another perspective, he naturally discovered that, just like only allowing people to do evil, forcing others to only do good seemed to be 'a kind of evil' in itself, an evil that would prevent humanity from progressing.

Goodness must be accepted, and evil must also be accepted.

Humanity must be possessed, and bestiality must also be possessed.

A healthy civilization must not only hold one side.

Only in this way can it go far.

"When will the Harmony Bureau's troops and the American Federal reinforcements arrive?"

No longer thinking about this question, Su Zhou breathed out a sigh of relief, he asked with some impatience, "I've been waiting for more than forty minutes. Do I have to keep waiting?"

—Forty minutes? Don't you know that the official start date of this joint operation is half a week later?

Gron really didn't know how to answer at this time. How could the mobilization of transcendent individuals from various places be so fast? It's very normal to spend a few days just resetting the defense and having transcendent individuals apply to go abroad, and having the applied-to country accept the contract.

He, Su Zhou, has special privileges. He went from Zheng Nation to Europa, all the way with green lights directly to the Two Worlds Fortress, which took about half a day. Other transcendent individuals don't have that!

However, just as Gron was hesitating, not knowing how to explain to Su Zhou.

Whether it was good or bad, a sudden emergency alarm broke the awkward stalemate.

[Detection of unidentified high-speed moving objects approaching the original fortress ruins]

A tense alarm sounded from the terminal: [Most likely the Descending Spirit Society...Damn, their exoskeletons have shielding modules, we can't see them anymore!]

"Wh, what?!"

For a moment, Gron didn't react, but Raphael frowned, "They dare to attack us in turn?!"

"Do they really think our Harmony Bureau is a pushover?!"

Although he said so, the current Harmony Bureau was indeed a pushover at the Two Worlds Fortress—since the fortress was breached, in order to avoid secondary damage caused by magical beast attacks, the Harmony Bureau did not try to repair the fortifications on the magical beast realm side before gathering its strength.

They can ensure that the Descending Spirit Society cannot run out of the magical beast realm, but the power in the magical beast realm is not enough to resist the Descending Spirit Society's attacks—that's why they have to summon powerful transcendent individuals from various places.

"Retreat for now."

Raphael said, the old man didn't think there was anything wrong with that. It's a very common tactic for the enemy to retreat and for us to advance: "We have few people now, there's no need to fight them head-on. When our main force advances, they won't be able to defeat us head-on."

This was indeed an excellent suggestion.

But Su Zhou shook his head.

"I don't have obsessive-compulsive disorder, but keeping my word is one thing."

The young man stood in place, he shrugged, "Since I said it before, I will definitely do it."

"—I'll stay here, and I won't go anywhere."

Not to mention the flustered Gron, who was about to lose his hair, there was Raphael, who knew this would be the answer, and Serros, whose eyes were shining, and who continued to record 'Su Zhou's Quotations Excerpts' in her notebook.

At this moment, the Descending Spirit Society also discovered the existence of the Harmony Bureau.

"Wait."

Driving his own exclusive exoskeleton armor, the Rebirth Initiate signaled everyone to stop, he frowned, turned on remote observation mode, and then shouted in surprise, "Why is that 'Thunder Lord' here?!"

"So it was him who took action just now. I was wondering why I didn't know that the Harmony Bureau had an electrical power user of this level—even the Thor inheritance cultivators in Northern Europe cultivate close combat."

Thunder Lord, was the title that Su Zhou had promoted to the outside world, just like Raphael's 'Cessation'. Generally speaking, there are only wrongly given names, and no wrongly given titles. Su Zhou is indeed the number one thunder ability user in the world today, especially for major mysterious organizations, his first famous record was killing the leader of the Descending Spirit Society, the Rebirth Initiate's friend, Shepherd Vashielhardt.

Seeing Su Zhou, the Rebirth Initiate calculated new and old hatreds together. They knew that Su Zhou had fought many against one in the Beast God Realm and defeated four divine beasts who had temporarily broken through to the Overlord tier, but they didn't care.

Not to mention that the Silent Ones also have such strength, which of them, who have listened to the apocalypse of the Celestial God, is not stronger than those divine beasts? Even if Su Zhou's strength has improved again, it is not so easy to defeat them.

And just as the Rebirth Initiate began to observe Su Zhou, Su Zhou also sensed the distant Descending Spirit Society assault force.

That was an elite high-tech force that even he had only seen in the 'Five Direction Divine Soldiers' unit of Zheng Nation—a total of twenty-three large, fully enclosed exoskeleton armor suits, flashing with spiritual light. Substantial spiritual power was rotating in the 'spiritual energy vortex engine', instilling unparalleled violence and defense into the whole body of the armor, and the dense weapons and rocket launchers gave people a full sense of danger.

If Raphael and others hadn't retreated just now, they would have been shocked, because the Descending Spirit Society didn't even use this trump card when attacking the Harmony Bureau fortress—more than twenty professional exoskeleton armor suits!

The powerful hearing that surpassed human imagination allowed Su Zhou to hear the Rebirth Initiate's surprised voice long ago. To this, he even shook his head and smiled.

"Why am I here? Stupid question."

Su Zhou's voice was not loud, but it vibrated the spiritual energy, so even the Descending Spirit Society and others in the distance could hear it clearly: "Although some of you may have heard it before, I'll ask again."

"Have you heard the story of 'Xia Ke Xing' (Ode to Gallantry)?"

Of course they hadn't heard it, but before the Descending Spirit Society could open their mouths to reply, Su Zhou, who was improvising, continued on his own: "In ancient times, there was an ordinary knight who passed through a busy city and heard a butcher on the street bullying the orphans and widows next door, so he drew his sword to help, and killed the butcher's head with one stroke."

"The meaning of this story is actually very deep, but to explain it roughly, then the Europa Harmony Bureau is the orphan and widow, you are the butchers on the street, and I am just an ordinary passing knight."

Raphael, who was observing the progress of the situation in real time through Su Zhou's terminal and was ready to provide support at any time:?

—No, why is this person's speech so irritating? What do you mean by saying that our Europa Harmony Bureau are orphans and widows?

But it was obvious that few people in the Descending Spirit Society understood Chinese. Soul communication was okay, but when they opened their mouths, it was basically heavenly scriptures.

Unfortunately, the trash talk Su Zhou said before was basically talking to cows. They couldn't understand the deep meaning of Xia Ke Xing.

So, after a brief silence, the Descending Spirit Society's exoskeleton armor troops all ejected rocket launchers or gun barrels from their backs.

Click, click—the sound of the steel gears ejecting rang out almost simultaneously, and then, there was the explosion of burning flames!

In the next instant, hundreds of rockets, with dazzling flames, and armor-piercing shells with a speed of more than two thousand meters per second, bombarded Su Zhou wildly!

For a time, the entire field of vision was filled with exploding flames and speeding steel.

To this, Su Zhou just sighed.

"Still using saturation bombing?"

Saying this, he stretched out his hand, and the Blade of Extinction was tightly held in Su Zhou's palm, causing the high temperature that made the air tremble and distort to light up on the gradually golden-red blade. The brilliance like the sun began to burst out on the Divine Blade Dao Body, which was as high as several thousand degrees.

The ashes in the air began to ignite spontaneously, lightning was jumping, the smell of ozone being dissociated from the air was truly spreading, and under the effect of the incomparably powerful spiritual energy distortion, various physical phenomena appeared almost simultaneously, and then all turned into a gust of wind, which was restrained on the long knife in the youth's hand.

Boom.

Accompanied by the surging sound of flames, black karma fire suddenly ignited on the blade, and Su Zhou pointed the blade straight ahead, and finally, seriously, swung the knife horizontally towards the front.

Then, a golden-red trajectory began to spread in everyone's retinas.

Next, was the explosion.

The exploding high-temperature air, mixed with spiritual power condensed to the extreme and almost materialized, turned into a dazzling blade light, which met all the rockets and shells head-on.

Rumble!!!

The rockets were detonated, the metal shells were divided into two, the earth was torn apart by the aftershocks, the air was turbulent and set off a hurricane, and even the entire surrounding spiritual energy cycle was divided into two, temporarily appearing disordered—the Descending Spirit Society's elite who launched the rockets and shells watched the existence in the distance who lightly and casually shattered all the artillery and rockets with one slash, and couldn't help but open their mouths slightly.

"The times have changed, stupid guys."

Swinging the Blade of Extinction, causing the substantial black karma fire flowing on the blade to stabilize, Su Zhou smiled and walked step by step towards the Descending Spirit Society in the distance, and the divine knife was dragged by him on his side, cutting out a golden-red molten knife mark on the rocks on the ground: "Now is the era of spiritual energy recovery."

The guy who had just used an electromagnetic cannon to blow away the Descending Spirit Society's camp said shamelessly, "Do you still expect guns and cannons to be useful?"