"Get out! Damn demons! The Holy Son you are pursuing has not yet come to the world! You shouldn't have come down from the abyss!" The elder roared, holding a bag of explosives and running towards the completely out-of-control battle line, and then he and those giant brown and black monsters with hairy legs were blown into pieces.

An invisible feeling of weightlessness came over him, and Zu Sanshisan shuddered, waking up from his coma. He didn't try to get up immediately, but blinked twice to see the current situation clearly.

At this moment, half of his body was hanging on the edge of the tower. If his center of gravity moved just a little more to the right, he would experience a not-so-pleasant free fall and fall to his death on the real ground in a few seconds.

He, or rather the three of them, may be one of the few remaining survivors of City Three.

He rolled back slowly and got up as quietly as possible, then he saw the other two sleeping companions.

They were An Eighteen and Fu Thirty-one, from two small settlements along his escape route.

An Eighteen, a year older than him and a rare female member of the tribe, occupied the tower's prime vantage point and was fast asleep, hugging the central pillar. Waves of peaceful spiritual energy emanated from her, perpetually allowing Zu Sanshisan to "smell" a strange fragrance.

Fu Sanshiyi was his peer, and had been genetically engineered to favor combat. Given their personalities, they should have died fleeing long ago. He now clasped his arms around his legs, his back pressed against the tower's rotten fence, his eyes narrowed, as if sensing the vibrations from the ground.

After a while, Fu Sanshiyi whispered, "The noise down there has quieted down."

"There are still four hours until dawn, we can rest for a while." Zu Sanshisan said.

"Where are we going?"

"Have you seen the direction of their battle line? We can just infiltrate them and find an unoccupied settlement. If there's a mother body, that would be great; if not, we can try to use her..."

"Well, I'll help you subdue her when the time comes." Fu Sanshiyi agreed. "The battle line stretches from the north to the southwest. It's too long. It doesn't look like a new round of technical exchanges. Maybe the elders have angered the others."

"I don't know much about the power struggles in Parliament." Zu Sanshisan found a place to sit down and began to count the supplies the three of them had. "By the way, have you seen those... things?"

"I haven't seen them. If they have that kind of hidden weapon, they would have taken it out to show off long ago! I tried to fight them before I met you. Their reaction speed is very fast, probably at the level of a senior warrior; the hardness of their shell is about the same as that of a blue helmet, and ordinary spearheads can't hurt them at all; we barely knocked down a few of them, and they would self-explode, and the gas released by the explosion is poisonous." Fu Sanshiyi said.

"Can you counter-control it?"

"It's not easy. First, we don't have Holy Bodies here, so you have to be very close to them to capture them. Secondly, although they don't have Holy Gifts, there are too many of them. Counter-controlling one or two won't be effective, and too many will be too time-consuming and easy to be surrounded. Also, they are much smarter than the previous ones. It's also possible that the elder controlling them is too powerful. In any case, he is not on the same level as the others."

"Him? Not them?"

"Yes. This is what my brother said before he dissolved. He only caught one kind of Holy Gift during the counter-tracking."

"What! Dissolve?" Zu Sanshisan stopped what he was doing.

"It's hard to believe, isn't it? It was just a memory node. His soul was like sugar dissolving in water. It disappeared before we even noticed."