Chapter 77
Chapter 77: Sleep Together, Play Together, Make Them Furious
On planet M31_1137, more than 1.8 million military academy students heard the rules the Drill Instructor group had just announced. Everyone was overjoyed. Students from the same school were allies. Students from other academies were enemies. Fighting like this would be exciting.
The Drill Instructor group’s broadcast paused for a moment, then continued: “Darlings, schoolmates, little darlings, a special addition: if you mark the neck of one Drill Instructor, your personal points go up by 50. If you mark the neck of one Army Corps commander, your personal points go up by 100, and your squad score also goes up by 100.”
“The total number of Drill Instructors from the thirty Army Corps is nearly 300,000. We hope you schoolmates will cooperate with each other and work hard to ‘kill’ all 300,000 Drill Instructor group members and share their points.”
“Of course, you also need to be careful. Only the Drill Instructor group assigned to your own academy cannot mark your necks. Drill Instructors from all other academies can strike at you freely.”
“If a Drill Instructor group ‘kills’ one of you, they get 5 points. We hope you schoolmates can hold on until the end and do not let the Drill Instructor group mark your necks.”
The Drill Instructors were all speechless.
No wonder he was the Commander in Chief. On the surface, he was training 1.8 million military academy students. In truth, he was letting 1.8 million people surround and attack their 300,000 Drill Instructors.
They could not mark the necks of the students they themselves trained, but those students could mark them.
They not only had to worry about being marked by other Drill Instructors, they also had to face the great tribulation of attacks from 1.8 million people.
The worst part was that the Commander in Chief did not allow them to form alliances. They had to fight alone, yet still be responsible for the safety of the students.
“I knew it,” someone muttered. “When we parachuted, why did each of us get a soft blade that did not look like a real knife? So it is for us to use to mark necks.”
As Cheng Xiao Ting spoke, he pulled the Red Soft Blade, less than 40 centimeters long, from his belt. He swiped it across his own wrist. A red Marking Seal appeared there, like blood. Once it touched skin it dried and could not be rubbed off.
“Yeah, this round seems pretty hard. You are only allowed to mark the neck. Stabbing the heart or the belly does not count.”
“What do you think, should we join up with our schoolmates from the same academy so our chances are better and we can farm more points?”
Jiang Tea Tea yawned and saw that they were all looking at her: “Do not ask me. I do not know anything. I want to sleep for a while. Do you want to sleep?”
Huang Da Zhuang leaned over: “Sister Tea, each military academy student is 10 points. Take away our own 70,000 plus people, and the other twenty nine academies still have over 1.7 million. Every one we ‘kill’ is points!”
Cheng Lin Yue nodded along and started doing the math: “Yeah, Sister Tea, there are nearly 300,000 people in the Drill Instructor group and thirty Army Corps commanders too. They are all points!”
Orange Sparrow also came over: “Sister Tea, how about we focus on attacking the Drill Instructor group that is in charge of our academy? There are more than ten thousand of them. That is over 500,000 points!”
Jiang Tea Tea looked at them in surprise and gave a thumbs up: “You are really something. You want to go after more than ten thousand right away. I am impressed.”
Orange Sparrow laughed: “I am just talking big. We will take however many we can. We are not picky, as long as we are not the ones taken out.”
The others agreed: “Right. Our goal is that even if we do not ‘kill’ others, we cannot let others kill us.”
Jiang Tea Tea pulled her thumb back and spread her hands: “Saving our strength and not letting others take us out is easy. We just hide here and lie low until the end.”
“Come on, Sui Xuan Chu, hurry and go outside to break some branches. Block the entrance. We will rest first and talk later.”
Sui Xuan Chu asked: “Are we really going to rest first and not strike while the iron is hot?”
Jiang Tea Tea nodded and explained: “Strike what. Everyone around this landing point is from our academy.”
“You cannot mark people from your own school, only those from other academies. If we go out now, we will have to spend strength searching for them. Why not stay here and wait for them to come to us, and save some energy?”
The hole she had found was big. It was more than enough for eight people to sleep in.
The main thing was that this place looked like a mountain, but it was more like a man made hill. There was a lot of soil and fertilizer so the flowers could bloom so brightly.
She was a tree, a living tree that could move at any time. [Now that I have found such a good place, it would be a crime not to take root and absorb some fertilizer.]
Sui Xuan Chu and the others suddenly felt she made a lot of sense. Instead of spending effort to find others, it was better to let others come to them.
Taking the initiative while lying down was better than rushing out and then being forced to react.
They split up the work. Inside the cave they set up tents and sprayed insecticide. Outside they went farther away to cut flower branches, pick up dead branches and pull together dry grass to cover the cave entrance.
They took out signal shielding devices and set up three of them to block all signal scans. Then they lay inside their tents, as comfortable as if they were just camping for fun.
Jiang Tea Tea had one tent to herself. She set it up at the very back, took off her shoes and socks, and covered her legs. It looked like she was asleep, but in fact her feet had turned into tree roots that drilled through the rock, searching for fertilizer in the mountain.
She was a tree spirit, a powerful tree spirit. When she absorbed fertilizer, none of the flowering trees, wild grass, or other trees on the mountain could compete with her.
Her roots spread through the vast mountain, into the soil and the streams. Any fertilizer that was good for her was sucked up.
In the blink of an eye, a few days passed. In the surveillance room, the thirty Army Corps commanders could not find any trace of Jiang Tea Tea and her squad on the surveillance system.
All thirty Army Corps commanders had privately ordered their own people to find her squad and hunt them down.
The thirty commanders had a Beast God perspective, yet even they could not find the squad. On the Drill Instructor group’s light-brain wrist terminals, there were only red dots marking the positions of the military academy students. There were more than 1.8 million, all mixed together. No one could tell who was who, let alone pick out her squad.
Even stranger, the place where the Imperial Academies students had jumped from the ship should have been covered with bright flowers and fresh green leaves. Now the flowers, whether they had bloomed or not, were all falling. The leaves were slowly turning yellow.
“Commander in Chief.” Cai Xi Chao held her light-brain wrist terminal and moved from her seat to stand by her Commander in Chief. “The Unknown Energy has appeared again. This time the energy waves are bigger than ever.”
Chong Ming moved his gaze to the holo projection screen that Cai Xi Chao had opened: “Is the energy appearing on our ship?”
Cai Xi Chao pointed down: “It is not on our ship. It is beneath us, about 2500 meters down, where the Imperial Academies students jumped from the ship.”
“I do not know if it is because of this unknown energy, but within a radius of 500 li, all the plants are rapidly withering.”
In the holo projection screen, the sea of flowers that had filled the mountains a few days ago was now falling away. Petals flew in the air and leaves turned yellow.
Chong Ming stared at the holo projection screen and asked: “Within 500 li, how many military academy students and Drill Instructors are there?”
Cai Xi Chao tapped on the virtual keyboard a few times, looked at the data on her screen and replied: “Reporting to the Commander in Chief, within 500 li there are students from 21 military academies, about 550,000 people, and Drill Instructor groups from 15 Army Corps, about 50,000 people in total.”
“The squad that said they would ‘wipe out the students from the other twenty nine academies’ has not come out since they entered that cave.”
Chong Ming thought for a moment: “Deputy Officer Ai, have Director Li go down there. Tell him to report to me at once if there is any movement.”
Deputy Officer Ai answered: “Yes, Commander in Chief.”
As soon as Li Ao heard that the Unknown Energy had appeared below them and that the Commander in Chief wanted him to check it out, he grabbed his gear and went down.
“Sister Tea, Sister Tea, this is bad, something big has happened, wake up.” Huang Da Zhuang’s anxious voice and the sound of his hand slapping the tent came through the fabric.
Jiang Tea Tea had been absorbing fertilizer and nutrients, feeling herself leafy and lush, her spiritual power rising and her whole body comfortable. She was woken up and asked back: “How many people in our squad have died?”
Huang Da Zhuang made a sound: “No one in our squad has died. It is the plants all over the mountain that are about to die.”
Jiang Tea Tea flipped up at once, pulled on her socks and shoes, lifted the tent flap, tied her long hair up into a high ponytail, and walked to the cave mouth. She looked out. Everywhere she could see, there were flower corpses over the ground, cracked branches, and leaves flying in the air.
[I… accidentally overate the fertilizer. I not only sucked up all the nutrients in the soil, I almost ate all the plants on the mountain too.]
Cheng Lin Yue saw Jiang Tea Tea staring without blinking and pointed outside to explain: “Two days ago everything was fine. In just these two or three days, the plants have ended up like this. Do you think that is strange?”
[Strange? Not strange at all.]
[I definitely cannot say I lay here and overdosed on fertilizer.]
Jiang Tea Tea nodded in agreement and instantly tossed the blame away: “It is pretty strange. Is it possible that Chief Commander, Commander in Chief Chong Ming did this on purpose? Sui Xuan Chu, what do you think?”
Sui Xuan Chu, as Chong Ming’s good nephew, knew his methods very well: “It is possible. He is best at surprise attacks, never playing by the rules, striking hard and head on.”
“I suspect he has been watching us from the flagship all this time, seeing us stay in the cave for five days without coming out, and now he is forcing us out.”
[It must be like that. Who else could make this sea of flowers disappear like this? Only he has this ability.]
Jiang Tea Tea threw the blame onto that old mud eel Chong Ming and happily followed Sui Xuan Chu’s words: “He used this sea of flowers as an offering to the sky to force us out. Are we going out, or are we going to keep hiding here?”
Sui Xuan Chu swept his eyes over the other six: “Let us go out. I am afraid if we do not, he might drop a couple of bombs to blow up the mountain.”
Jiang Tea Tea gave Sui Xuan Chu a thumbs up: “You make sense. He could become the Commander in Chief of the Three Armies and the Prince Regent of the Empire. You really cannot judge him by normal standards. Pack up. We will leave the cave and go farm points.”
Everyone agreed to go out and farm points. They were in a good mood. In less than ten minutes they packed everything up and put it into their space knob storage devices.
They jumped out of the cave, feet stepping on dead flowers and leaves, and turned on their light-brain wrist terminals to search for students from other academies closest to them.
After checking and locking on the coordinates, the three of them ran quickly through the mountains. When the wind blew, dead leaves fell from the trees and filled the air.
Jiang Tea Tea had absorbed enough nutrients. Her spiritual power had recovered by about a quarter. As she ran, she deliberately released spiritual power to nourish the trees and plants that were almost dried out because of her.
The leaves that had not yet fallen absorbed the spiritual power and slowly turned green again before their eyes.
“Wait, wait.” Just as they were about to reach the location of the other military academy students, Jiang Tea Tea called out: “Something is up.”
Sui Xuan Chu and the others stopped at once and quickly gathered around her: “What is wrong, what situation?”
Jiang Tea Tea looked toward the northwest: “Over there, a few dozen meters away, someone is rushing toward us. It does not seem like a Drill Instructor.”
Cheng Xiao Ting and Huang Da Zhuang dropped to the ground like a dog and a wolf, pressing their ears to the earth to listen: “Right, not a Drill Instructor. They sound like people from the Supernatural Abilities Institute, carrying heavy gear!”
Jiang Tea Tea looked around. The trees here were not too tall or short, not too thick or thin. “Everyone climb a tree. When they come over, we take them out and grab their gear!”