Chapter 157 Chapter 503 Entering the Yangtze River Basin

Chapter 157 Chapter 5.03 Entering the Yangtze River Basin

On November 11, 143 of the Pandora Era, in the season of austerity, the individual sent by Wei Keng followed Zeng Lin to the north.

This individual was code-named "Zhen Xinzheng". After Zeng Lin set out from the checkpoint in the north of Shaoguang City, he rode a mechanical beast all the way north through southern Jiangxi. Along the way, there are large areas of wilderness occupied by traditional gene communities.

This mountainous area fully reflects the strange ecology of Pandora.

There are wolves that walk upright. The difference between them and the werewolves in the literary works of the old era is that the two hands of this thing are crayfish claws.

There are constant temperature systems and puppies with ant heads.

There are also willow trees that secrete mucus comparable to mouse traps.

Fortunately, there are a lot of ammunition prepared, and the mechanical vehicles are powerful. In addition, Zeng Lin is also familiar with this area, otherwise the team would really be unable to move forward.

"Zhen Xinzheng" rode a mechanical wolf and successfully passed through the 200-kilometer southern Jiangxi wilderness area. ——For this area, the Wei Keng group has only one comment, it's worth a try.

After passing through the wild area of ​​southern Jiangxi, we encountered a human city-state in the central Jiangxi area.

Wei Keng jumped off a tractor-like cart and wanted to buy some local specialties here. As a result, he was knocked for five steel coins before he took two steps. The reason was that the tax for entering the city gate was the vehicle tax, and there was an additional tax for people getting off the car.

Wei Keng argued: "I just went to the toilet!" The guards said: "You have to pay a sanitation tax when you go to the toilet."

Fortunately, Zeng Lin was very familiar with the nobles here. After showing his badge, he helped Wei Keng out.

When meeting with the city lord in the evening, the nobles here had heard about the changes in the Pearl River District in the south, and they were very sad about the changes in Zeng Lin's family.

As the origin of the change, "Zhen Xinzheng" did not interrupt.

...

After the northbound trade team mortgaged the transport machinery in the city-state in the central Jiangxi area, they changed to animal carts and continued to head north.

Then they passed through four military checkpoints.

These military checkpoints were built very magnificently, all of them were thick reinforced concrete buildings. Such a group of fortifications that were 40 meters high and stretched for dozens of kilometers made Wei Keng take a second look.

Zeng Lin introduced to Wei Keng that this was the Ganzhong Fortress Area built before the biological disaster broke out, when the human regime still had functions, and the railway was mobilized to transport a large amount of cement and steel bars to isolate the genetic intersection between the southern mountain gene community and the northern Yangtze River gene community.

Although 70% of them were invalid later, with the resurgence of the Yangtze River human city-state, this place was reactivated and a large number of elite trainers took turns to garrison.

Even if this fortress group was just a military facility built for small-scale battles, the effect of isolating the ecology of the two places was obvious.

The rivers in the north are water systems, and the survival of the fittest in genes maintains the biological characteristics of high repair, hunger resistance, and hibernation in the soil of water system organisms.

The organisms in the southern mountains are small in size, but have strong explosive power and maintain a certain degree of true social communication ability.

Once the biological genes of the two regions are exchanged, a community with the dominant genes of both places will be born. Moreover, such a gene community will maintain its migratory characteristics, which will bring greater threats to the city-states in the Yangtze River Basin.

Therefore, although the city-state alliance in the Yangtze River Basin took over this line of defense, it cost money, but it ensured the safe development of human city-states in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River in the north.

Zhen Xin was looking at the stalactites growing on the mottled wall where the raindrops fell, and he was sure that this was a very old building.

Wei Keng's group sighed inexplicably: "The Great Wall, built in the south?"

...

Walking out of the military checkpoint, the walls on both sides of the road quickly changed from high to low, and then disappeared. From then on, it was a road of standard width for the Yangtze River city-state group.

This road network is obviously much more prosperous. After walking ten kilometers, more than thirty pack animals covered with straw mats were seen coming.

Later, the southern caravan that followed Zeng Lin had delivered the goods and began to separate from the two. They transported the goods here and that was it. Going further north, it was not their territory for business.

After the Great Destruction, business was regionally monopolized, and some goods could only be transported to this region!

Zeng Lin and Wei Keng changed their means of transportation in a city-state area on the ruins of Jiujiang, and began to take a steamship, heading towards Jianye, the holy land of human lighthouse in the south.

Zeng Lin showed a gold medal, and the ticket inspector of the steamship scratched a mark on it.

Wei Keng looked at it curiously. Zeng Lin's gold medal is equivalent to a card, with a large number of small grids of about one millimeter arranged inside. Scratching it is equivalent to paying a sum of money in the public transportation system or the post station system of the Yangtze River.

Although primitive, it shows that the economic system in this area is unified.

There are also electric lights and even refrigerated warehouses on the steamship, which makes Wei Keng's group admire the ability of the northern civilization system to maintain part of the old civilization era.

System: "The Yangtze River has a very strong water transport capacity, which was able to sustain a large city of 600,000 people in the classical era. The current human settlement group centered on Jianye still has a population of more than 5 million. This population base allows it to maintain key technologies such as gas turbines and high-voltage substations. It will take more than 40 years for it to weaken."

Makoto Shinsei: "Well, weaken in 40 years?"

The system opened the data, which was discovered by other time travelers on this timeline, and the future fate of human city-state forces.

…

After entering the main channel of the Yangtze River, Zhen Xinzheng saw the foggy river, and could not see the other side at a glance. As far as the eye could see, within the visible range of thousands of meters, tens of millions of tons of river water were surging eastward in a mighty and unified manner (the flow of the Yangtze River is about 33,000 cubic meters per second). In nature, such an orderly and grand phenomenon will convey a heroic association to those who see it.

As an individual, Zhen Xinzheng went deep into the Jianghuai area of ​​the Pandora world alone, and felt a trembling feeling of walking on the edge of a cliff. This was a long-lost feeling after the Pandora plane entered the group.

At noon, the alarm sounded from the bow.

Zhen Xinzheng stood on the side of the ship and looked around. After a while, he found the surging fins on the river surface and couldn't help picking up the telescope. After a few seconds, Wei Keng confirmed that this was a finless porpoise, but it seemed not completely true. How could a finless porpoise be six meters long, and the head spout was an elephant's trunk!

The system retrieved the information to Wei Keng for popular science: This is a new species group dominated by finless porpoise genes. After human civilization experienced a round of collapse, Pandora Field provided a network of gene exchange for species around the world, so that many species that were under heavy pressure from humans in the past suddenly became sunny.

The terrestrial freshwater niche can originally provide species that are more than three meters long. That is, humans, a land species, invented the tool of fishing nets, which unprecedentedly took food into the freshwater niche, and the hunting efficiency was far superior to the evolution of all deep-water species, which led to the sudden decadence of the top of the freshwater niche.

After the sudden collapse of human civilization, the bottom of the freshwater became rich all of a sudden. There were no family-killing nets, nor the propellers of 10,000-ton giant ships that could produce supercavitation.

It took a hundred years for the Yangtze River dolphin species to become a dominant species in the area under the blessing of Pandora Field. Its internal skeleton also began to strengthen, and it was able to jump from one water body to another under the blessing of heavy rains in the rainy season from mid-June to early July every year, just like mudskippers.

The system listed four main directions of the biological mutation of the Yangtze River dolphin in front of Wei Keng:

One is the lake water species with the body shape of an eel;

One is the high-speed species with a completely streamlined, water drop shape;

Another is the flat species like a turbot, sticking to the shore to play a surprise attack;

The last one completely gave up speed, and the two pairs of forelimbs were specialized into thin and long nets. It seems that there is no combat power? Well, it is directly discharged.

Wei Keng's consciousness group: "Life is really working hard to survive."

But after a few seconds, it suddenly asked back: "By the way, there are Yangtze alligators in the Yangtze River, how are they now?"

The system switched the pattern.

Wei Keng looked at the scale on the ruler that the Yangtze alligator gene could reach, and asked in astonishment: "Why is it shrinking? Well, this~"

Then, he saw a migration map and understood.

Unlike the ecological world before the Pandora era, genes depended on the migration of species.

In the Pandora field era, genes must be kept in a sufficient amount in one area to be stably preserved. There will never be a situation where a small number of external species suddenly multiply indefinitely after landing and wipe out local species. In other words, there is no concept of invasive species.

Today in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, when the finless porpoise occupies the main genetic position of large species in this type of environment, the Yangtze alligator has been squeezed out. It either shrinks in size and gives up the ecological niche of large species, or finds its own position in the gene communities in the south and north. It became a gecko.

The genes that maintain the large-scale Yangtze alligator have just been wiped out in recent years. They are the dragon system of the Dongting community a few years ago, but now Dongting Lake has been replaced by Yucheng genes.

When Wei Keng came last time, he set fire to the mountains and caused the first ecological disaster, forcing the Guangdong gene community to collectively move north. As a result, the Dongting Lake gene community exploded and expanded, then moved south, and was beaten up by Wei Keng again, and retreated back to the north.

In the end, Yucheng took advantage of it, and now the large-scale ecological niche of Dongting Lake has been occupied by the otter system.

In this era, although humans are no longer strong, the fighting between biological communities with huge genetic differences has caused extinction to continue.

The only difference is that the number of humans is also decreasing.

…

When Wei Keng wanted to take a closer look at the finless porpoise,

the crew warned Wei Keng and asked him to go back to the steamship. As Wei Keng went back, layers of metal shutter doors were pulled down, forming layers of armor. (When various shops in the 21st century closed for the New Year, the metal shutters were pulled down.)

Zeng Lin took Zhen Xinzheng into the captain's room on the top floor of the steamship. The crew's appearance of facing a great enemy made Zhen Xinzheng a little curious.

In Wei Keng's impression, the thing fluttering in the water was like a killer whale, a cute creature friendly to humans. How exactly are they threatening the humans on the ship now? Are they jumping up to bite people? There are railings, how can they jump up?

Two minutes later,

the finless porpoise jumped out of the water. Before Wei Keng could appreciate its heroic posture, this ten-meter-long big guy seemed to grin and then swung it up with the trunk of the elephant on his head.

With a bang, a projectile bombarded directly.

Zhenxin was looking at the rolling door that was clanging and the splattered gravel powder, and his mouth twitched.

These guys with trunks on their heads were not only trying to smash the door, they were also trying to smash the windows on the top of the ship. However, the windows of the ship were covered with a very resilient wire mesh, and the pebbles hit the mesh and made a dent, then rolled down to the deck.

Wei Keng's consciousness group cursed immediately: "These finless porpoises are as annoying as the macaques in Mount Emei."

At this time, the system belatedly explained: "This is an aggressive finless porpoise, which has evolved stone throwing skills. Although it is mainly based on the genes of the even-toed finless porpoise, it has integrated the genes of sharks in its teeth and can proliferate infinitely. This allows them to use their teeth to grind some pebbles of about 500 grams and use the nasal nozzle to spray projectiles for attack.

The ejection speed of the projectile can reach 33m/s. With the blessing of its swimming speed, the projectile speed can often reach 50m/s.

This is simply the power of a small catapult. And they are used to knocking creatures on the boat and the shore into the water and then sharing them.

After encountering a surprise attack,

the finless porpoise in Zhen Xinzheng's eyes is not so cute. He commented on it in his heart: "A deformity with a strange nose."

Then, he added cynically: "Wait until the autumn wind on August 8, I will fry fish and bloom. "

...

The trouble-making porpoises circled the ship twice. Seeing that all the people had hidden in the cabin, they seemed very dissatisfied and tried to block the door and catch people.

However, a few minutes later, as the mechanical flying dragons roared in the air and hovered above the river, the porpoises fled like mice.

Zeng Lin looked up and said, "The dive attack system, the patrol osprey, is specially used to protect the safety of the waterway. "

As soon as the voice fell, a series of small bombs fell from the sky.

As a large amount of water curtains splashed, blood seemed to float on the surface of the river, but then it disappeared as the river rolled.

And the electric shock mechanical beast that Zeng Lin was going to activate retracted into the container in the cabin.

...

Five minutes later, when the ship continued to sail down the river, Zhen Xin saw a tall tower standing in the mist on the shore, and there were many old-time cranes (steel cranes for repairing houses) around the tower.

The shadow in the sky, like the previous cruise osprey, fell on this tower, grabbed the mechanical pull rod, and then turned into the tower.

Since then, Wei Keng has an intuitive understanding of the entire Yangtze River system public system.

Roads, river transportation, post stations, patrols, and a series of public departments protect the transportation network. The city-states in the entire Yangtze River region have good governance capabilities.

Wei Keng: "According to the information given by the system, although it is still an aristocratic system, it is obviously much better than the fragmented small city-states in Guangdong. ”

However, in the following plot (explored in multiple timelines), such a system weakened after forty years, causing the death of millions of humans? Could it be a plot directed by the time travelers from Luo Hongxing's side?

Bai Linglu personally gave the answer: "No, before your first time traveling, when this plane was still in an unknown and terrifying state, those dozens of explorers discovered during their exploration that the human city-state would have a great decline. This great decline will even lead to the extinction of human forces in the Yangtze River Basin. After you came and formed the human settlements in the Pearl District, the danger of extinction is gone, but the plot of the great decline cannot be changed. ”

Wei Keng: "What is the reason for the great decline?"

Bai Linglu: "Apostle!"

Wei Keng: "Apostle?"

Bai Linglu smiled mysteriously: "Roughly speaking, you will also be defined as an apostle. ”