Stars, Players and Immortals

Chapter 40: Public Video

When the Covenant's SA mechs arrived at the outer battlefield, the smoke trail left by the players had not yet dissipated.

The ground was littered with shell casings, broken prosthetic bodies, charred shield fragments, and trenches dug by chain guns. Security personnel from the Sacred Inquiry Bureau, along with counter-terrorism forces, stormed into the inner ring of the stronghold and quickly located the body of the Blood Tank Gatekeeper in the wetware network computing cluster center.

Valentin Cronin's heavy prosthetic body lay on the ground, its chest overload core completely pierced, its back heat sink fins charred black, its head embedded in the deformed metal skeleton, with only a scarlet prosthetic eye still flickering with intermittent electricity.

The on-site commander's face was extremely grim, and he launched into a tirade against everyone present:

"Activate the track monitoring and pull up all the heat source tracks above Mariner Valley within the last thirty minutes... Don't tell me about permission conflicts; today, all permissions here are under the control of the Special Assets Management Office!"

They quickly sealed off the entire special cordon area, and the counter-terrorism forces, the court, the sacrament review chamber, and the Covenant Army mobile unit began a carpet search. Abandoned pipes, cooling stations, underground maintenance tunnels, freight tracks, and nearby living areas were all turned over layer by layer, and even several suspected Tibetan waste piles were dug up by the machine gunners.

As a result, nothing was gained.

"Go dig up the abandoned cooling station, tear up the underground maintenance tunnels, even if it means demolishing half of the manufacturing corridor, find them!"

"Why is SA team only arriving now? The outer ring road is already in ruins, were you guys just circling in the sky admiring the scenery?!"

The Fourth Calamity seemed to vanish directly from the battlefield. One moment they were exchanging fire with the defending forces on the outer perimeter, and the next they all disappeared around the evacuation point. This infuriated the church's leadership, who cursed loudly on the communication channel.

Zhang Qiming withdrew even earlier. After the wet network was destroyed, he took advantage of the blind spots that Zhi Shilang had laid out in advance to leave the inner ring. He passed through the blockade layer in the few gaps in permissions that Ares had intentionally opened up, and was even faster than the main force of players to evacuate.

He is currently in a secret Skyward outpost deeper within the Sailor Valley Manufacturing Corridor.

This outpost is hidden beneath an old energy distribution station. From the outside, it looks like an old equipment area that has been sealed off for many years, but inside it has been transformed into a small command center, data transfer room, and equipment maintenance room.

Zhang Qiming removed the Unicorn Knight metal mask and sat down at the command console. He had just handed over the video data from the wet network to Zhi Shilang for backup when a prompt from the Gaia system popped up in his field of vision.

The faction raid quest you posted, [Bloodstained Pieces], has been completed!

[Number of active participants: 200]

[Cumulative basic rewards distributed: 1000000 experience points!]

[Cumulative Faction Contribution Rewards Distributed: 1850000 Experience Points!]

[Elite Shared Reward Pool Total Distributed: 150000 Experience Points!]

[Total experience points awarded for this mission: 3000000!]

[The [Tithing] perk has been triggered!]

[You have received 300000 experience points!]

Zhang Qiming looked at the line of 300,000 experience points that had been deposited into his account, and the corners of his mouth finally turned up. He slowly opened the player forum.

The first large-scale dungeon in the Home World line has come to a perfect end. This dungeon saw a massive exodus of millions of players. The minimum reward for a single player was 5000, while high-contribution players could earn over 10,000 or even more. The top ten players could also share the elite prize pool. Zhang Qiming, on the other hand, reaped a whopping 300,000 experience points from this large-scale dungeon.

There were a bunch of battle reports and clips of "The Great Escape of Blood and Wet Items" on the forum. Zhang Qiming quickly flipped through a few videos. He was just casually glancing at them to confirm that the popularity of this large-scale event had taken off. But he soon noticed the guild leader of Little Pony Express, La Kuku, in several highly viewed clips.

In those clips, from the initial group formation before the battle began, to the firepower allocation after engagement, and finally to the evacuation order at the last minute, La Kuku demonstrated exceptional organizational and coordination skills and outstanding command abilities throughout the entire process.

"This Little Pony Express has a lot of potential."

Zhang Qiming tapped his fingers lightly on the table, quickly assigning this guild a separate observation label in his mind.

"The guild has strong financial resources, excellent team execution, and the guild leader is also intelligent and capable... We should pay close attention to them in the future."

He can no longer rely entirely on his memories of his past life to judge the player group. The current player group is not the same as the players in his past life, and may not even be from the same world. Therefore, he can only obtain information about the players through the game forums of the home world line.

Zhang Qiming memorized the name, then watched a few more highlights. After watching the part where the British Pound led the Ruby Team to support the Sanren, he casually closed the player forum.

Next, he has something more important to do.

"Chiseiro, compile the video footage of the bloodstained item."

"The public version has been edited into an educational video that even ordinary Martians can understand, highlighting key elements such as the wetware network, complete brain enslavement, nodes under the Black Wall project, and the Sacred Heart censorship approval chain."

"In addition, list out all the identities corresponding to those whose brains have been completely enslaved: name, place of origin, missing person record, death record, medical transport record. Match all that can be matched and send them to the Mars Internet."

[Organization has begun.]

Original image verification complete.

[Murderer ID and identity records are being cross-matched...]

[Matching completed. 】

[Public release version being generated...]

Soon, a video that had been re-edited by Chishiro began to take shape.

The video begins without any inflammatory slogans, only a calm and almost cold explanatory text: "[Blood Wet Components: The Complete Enslavement of the Brain Network under the Black Wall Project]".

The scene begins from the inner ring of the wet component network, with rows of culture tanks, pale yellow nutrient solution, a brain suspended in the tank, silver nerve lines connecting the meninges, and the computing power access slot of the central wet component host all clearly presented to the audience.

Next came the list of numbered entries.

[Number: HW-0917 | Name: Ilya Saviev | Identity: Member of the Covenant Army's Homeland SA Aerospace Armament Test Squadron | Official Record: Died in a training accident | Actual Condition: Brain tissue preserved, connected to a wetware network.]

[ID: HW-0442 | Name: Alexei Mishin | Occupation: Worker at the Third Assembly Plant of Sailor Valley | Official Record: Medical failure following workplace injury | Actual Status: Brain tissue preserved, connected to the wet component network.]

[ID: HW-1206 | Name: Natalia Olga | Occupation: Logistics Registrar of the Sacred Inquiry Bureau | Official Record: Missing | Actual Status: Brain tissue preserved, connected to wetware network.]

[......]

As the names scrolled down, they included Covenant soldiers, low-level workers, patients whose medical records indicated they had failed to be saved, and several low-ranking staff members who originally belonged to the church's internal system.

The public video has been generated.

[Uploading to Mars Internet.]

The next second, Chishiro began to release the product.

The first batch of videos exploded simultaneously from the local Sailor Valley forum, underground prosthetic community, worker mutual aid channel and several anonymous news nodes, and then spread rapidly through mirror distribution, P2P fission caching, short link redirection and hash watermarking.

Using these methods, whenever an original video is deleted, three to five backup versions will reappear from different nodes, and the titles will automatically change.

[The Secret Service's Black Wall Project Exposed]

[List of Brains Completely Enslaved Revealed]

[Your family members may have been connected to a wetware network]

[Are the Covenant soldiers who died in battle really dead?]

The situation quickly caused an uproar on the Mars Internet.

The first to react were the working-class communities in Mariner Valley. Some recognized their relatives on the list, some dug out medical claim slips from a few years ago to check the numbers, and some Covenant soldiers' families began frantically forwarding records of soldiers like Ilya.

In the comments section, anger, fear, and questions piled up like a tsunami within minutes.

The church's public opinion control department quickly stepped in.

Numerous videos were flagged as heretical fabrications, terrorist propaganda, and malicious composite images—related keywords began to be restricted, comments sections showed signs of extensive deletions, and official accounts began issuing emergency notices, urging Martian citizens not to spread unverified terrorist material.

The speed at which posts can be deleted is simply not enough to stop the speed at which they spread.

While projecting the image, Chishiro added multiple layers of hash fingerprints and fragmented caching to the video, breaking the complete video into countless segments and stuffing them into ordinary images, audio files, factory repair manuals, and prosthetic body materials.

As soon as the public opinion department shuts down one channel of communication, another one will pop up from a completely unrelated channel. Some people even click on hydroponics tutorials in agricultural areas and find a list of wet-ware network users at the end.

Ares also joined the fray, cooperating with Chishiro in a performance. Deep within the Martian mainnet, the two Class III AIs began a well-intentioned online confrontation.

This cyber war is raging fiercely.

The two sides are pulling back and forth on the backbone of the Mars Internet, like two giant mechanical nerves silently competing.

Ordinary people cannot see the full picture of this confrontation; they can only sense that the video is being deleted and then reappears, the comments are being cleared and then the list is being reposted.

Zhang Qiming sat quietly in the Sky Chaser's secret base, watching the data popularity rise steadily.

The video of the bloody wet item can no longer be suppressed.