Chapter 2114 - 2107: You Can’t Win
"Sorry, bit of a screw-up there, made everyone laugh at me," Zhang Menglong fumbled to switch the BGM, and for a moment it felt like Steve Jobs was striding across this battlefield with a boombox on his shoulder.
Beside Zhang Menglong, Ying Zheng stood there looking like a kid who’d done something wrong, all aggrieved. He was the one who’d accidentally hit something just now and directly switched out Zhang Menglong’s voice pack.
"Reddington Giant City... tsk tsk tsk, this place is like a hundred times bigger than our Humans’ Great City of Aiville!" Zhang Menglong stood on the Ultimate War Fortress and looked down over this city. If the Humans’ Main City were this big, even if he spent a year or two, maybe he really could get the whole city airborne.
When all the races entered this battlefield, their city sizes were exactly the same, no difference at all. If you want to expand your Main City, there are two conditions: one, your race level has to be upgraded accordingly; two, every expansion burns a ludicrous amount of Supreme Crystal.
Honestly, with the Humans’ current race rank, they could easily expand the Great City of Aiville to three or five times its present size. They just haven’t thought of it yet, that’s all.
To grow a city to this scale, you can imagine how much effort the seniors of the Divine Primordial Civilization poured into it. To be frank, Zhang Menglong’s heart was actually a bit tangled right now. After all, wiping out a race, making them vanish from the river of history, is still a pretty damn pity.
Of course, there will still be people of this Divine Primordial Civilization race coming back to this battlefield again, but by then, the Divine Primordial Civilization will be a completely new race. They’ll be starting over from zero, regrowing and redeveloping.
But that sort of thing is all over the place on this battlefield. Every day there are races disappearing, and every day new races arrive. It can even happen that a race dies out today, and the very next day a new Adventurer of that race shows up here to rebuild it.
Life will always find its own way out. Every race will keep on going somehow. For all they know, Humans long ago might also have been an unbelievably powerful race, just went through a period of collapse, and now they’ve climbed back to Peak again.
Once he’d figured that out, Zhang Menglong stopped dwelling on these trivial little things. Think too much and it just makes him look like his Holy Mother complex is acting up.
He stood on the top of the Ultimate War Fortress in an utterly domineering pose, looking down at the people of this city. In the whole Divine Primordial Civilization there were plenty of people who, just by themselves, could kill Zhang Menglong—spit from their mouths would splatter a crowd of guys like him—but right now, not a single one of them dared to make a rash move.
All the Humans were standing tall with their chests out, feeling insanely proud to be Human.
Zhang Menglong scanned the crowd, and finally his gaze locked onto that Divine Primordial Civilization warrior in the golden robe. He looked the most special, and the aura coming off him was the most overwhelming.
"You’re the one with the most say in the Divine Primordial Civilization, right?" Zhang Menglong looked at him and said, "Do a proper introduction. We’re Humans, my name is Zhang Menglong, and I expect you to remember it."
Though the golden-robed man was feeling extremely heavy-hearted, he still maintained the poise and composure that the strongest civilization ought to have.
"My name is Kaos, leader of the Divine Primordial Civilization." The golden-robed man introduced himself.
"I can tell you knew we were coming," Zhang Menglong said.
"We’ve been waiting for you for a long time. From the instant your points started shooting up, I knew you Humans would end up here sooner or later. I just didn’t expect it to be this fast," the golden-robed man said. "Honestly I’m quite surprised—under normal circumstances, our Divine Primordial Civilization and you Humans shouldn’t have any intersection at all."
"Yeah," Zhang Menglong didn’t deny that at all. "In fact, if those three dumbasses from your race hadn’t come to mess with me, none of this would’ve happened."
Zhang Menglong started ranting right away. "I’m seriously speechless. A bazaar plus an auction—if you’ve got money, bid; if you don’t, sit back and watch. It’s not like I’d look down on your race for being broke, but those three idiots from your race just had to come pick a fight with me on purpose."
"Honestly, there wasn’t really anything to it," Zhang Menglong said. "In an auction, it’s normal for people to argue a bit. Even if you team up, I don’t care—it’s not like there’s a rule that you can’t cooperate on bidding, right? I never said you couldn’t, did I? Besides, even if you all pool together, you still don’t have as much money as me!"
He said it in such a casual tone, but it was the kind of line that could almost make people cough up blood.
"But when you sent people to Aiville City to stir up trouble, that’s where I draw the line," Zhang Menglong said. "No matter what we do, it was only about money. But you wanted to kill and wanted to destroy the foundation of us Humans—that I can’t stomach. If I hadn’t prepped in advance, once the Myriad Tribes Bazaar ended, our Human city would’ve already been gone."
"Yes, that really was our mistake," Kaos sighed. Yet at this moment, the corners of his mouth actually curled into a smile that no one could quite read.
"What are you laughing at?" Zhang Menglong asked, baffled.
"We erred in not discovering your Human civilization sooner," Kaos said regretfully. "If we’d found you before the defense war, you Humans would absolutely not have survived till now, because we would’ve made sure you disappeared from this battlefield before you ever became a threat."
"As expected," Zhang Menglong wasn’t even particularly surprised by that answer. "For you, there’s never been any pity for life itself."
"No," Kaos shook his head. "We’re here for one purpose only: to survive, and to live better. Anything, or anyone, that runs counter to that goal is something we must strive to erase."
"Survival is the only meaning of this battlefield. The total resources here are limited. If you Humans seize more resources, then the resources we can get will be less."
"Damn, to think you could say something like that—if you weren’t from outside Earth, I’d suspect you’re a Three-Body fan," Zhang Menglong joked. "But you’re not wrong. For your race as a whole, your actions are flawless. But for us Humans, this is a catastrophe. Since it’s already happened, it has to be resolved. Now I need you to give me an explanation."
"Then let’s fight," Kaos said. "Even if you Humans are unfathomably strong, our Divine Primordial Civilization won’t necessarily lose. We used an Ancient Relic to compute our win rate. It’s only 0.3%, but as long as there’s hope, we’ll fight to the very end."
"0.3%? And how did it calculate that?" Zhang Menglong suddenly got a bit curious about that Ancient Relic.
He honestly couldn’t imagine Humans losing to this Divine Primordial Civilization. As far as he was concerned, Humans winning was a straight 100%.
"Is there maybe another possibility?" Zhang Menglong said. "That Ancient Relic is scamming you guys!"
Zhang Menglong pulled out a megaphone. "Old fridges, old washing machines, we recycle..."
"Fuck!" Under a bunch of stunned stares, Zhang Menglong hurriedly switched the megaphone mode, then said in an extremely punchable tone, "You guys just can’t win!"