Juggernaut: Rise of the Zerg

Chapter 316 "Autopsy"

The so-called "neural units" of ordinary Zerg individuals are extremely limited. In fact, they have no "consciousness". Without the invisible constraints of the Hive Will, they only have instincts.

If it weren't for the fact that Brain Worm and Zero could even be called "connected with minds" in a certain sense, he still wouldn't know what was happening at this moment.

Fortunately, the death of the brain worm this time was completely different from all the previous death cases of the brain worm. This time, it left a corpse.

This is the first intelligent unit of the Zerg race to die in this incident that can finally be called a disaster. If there is anything to gain besides the information it left in the last moments, then Only its body remains.

Before this, a large number of dead Zerg units had been studied, but the results had been quite limited.This was the first time that Zero had the opportunity to study the body of the Cerebrate, and it was also the first time that all units of the Zerg race had attacked the body of the Cerebrate. Of course, if possible, Zero still felt that it was not dead.

After experiencing the continuous growth of the brain worm, the entire body is getting larger and larger, and more than 70.00% of the mass of this huge body is related to the brain area.

The knowledge reserve of a brainworm in its lifetime is almost comparable to that of a civilization. It once shared all the technologies of the Zerg race, either developed on its own or plundered. There were once fierce thoughts colliding in its body, and countless Zerg races The unit was at its disposal, but now it was just a corpse.

The extremely complex structure is destined to make this research difficult to carry out quickly. In fact, in addition to studying the relevant events, studying the brainworm itself is also in Zero's plan.

With the development of the Zerg race, Zero has become more and more aware of their power. He even said that they are mobile libraries. There is no problem with a walking single civilization. Their bodies are almost never aging, and they are huge. With brain areas that are unimaginable to ordinary beings, and slow but seemingly endless growth, this insect species plays a pivotal role within the entire Zerg race.

Zero has always believed that answers to many secrets of the Zerg may be obtained from them, but he will not take the initiative to kill the brain worms because he needs to study them. The results that can be obtained by in vivo research have basically been studied by Sass and others. .

Since the birth of Sars, it has never stopped researching on itself. To this day, many characteristics of ordinary Zerg units are related to brain worms. In the previous cases of brain worm death, they were all "deathless". The state of "whole corpse" is indeed a pity from a purely research perspective.

This time, it was Sass who was responsible for studying the body of the brainworm once named Lamb.

It is the oldest and most knowledgeable individual of the Zerg race. If the Zerg race has made a total of 50.00 contributions to the development of life science, it alone can monopolize more than [-]%. Even other brain worm individuals, in their infancy, It's also more or less related to it.

"Looking" at this extremely familiar body that was "close before his eyes", Sass suppressed the weird feeling of attacking a real "same kind" and quickly entered a state of scientific research.

It has actually studied this kind of individual that is almost the same as itself. Its understanding of itself made it make rapid progress at the beginning. Many aspects that it had already reached conclusions were quickly skipped by it until it actually entered into what was already known. It became cautious only after the "brain domain" stage that completely stopped functioning.

This kind of research on Sass has long been done. The microscopic insect species "explores" this huge body in a way invisible to the naked eye according to its ideas, and constantly transmits feedback back. Although it cannot share the non-existent field of vision, Sass can In this way, problems can be found more accurately.

In this regard, even the three major civilizations cannot compare with the Zerg!

Under Zero's close attention, Sass conducted the first round of "autopsy" on Lamb, using himself and other brainworms as references to strictly check for any abnormalities at the cellular level.

However, nothing was found. It seemed to be just like an ordinary Zerg unit, just dead.

But this is impossible. Since it can respond at the moment before death, it means that it has at least felt like being "attacked", so it cannot really leave no trace!

So, Sass started the second round. It even teamed up with other brainworms and did not hesitate to conduct extremely detailed analysis using the neural chain in the brain as the basic unit.

For a mature brain worm, even they have to do these things with a huge workload, which is almost equivalent to "reading" Lamb's life. Of course, there is no memory information in it, but the nature is different. Not big.

If this cannot be concluded, then Zero has the last resort, but in that case, even if the executing brainworms each have the ability to adjust the Zerg body at will within the scope of knowledge, it will be a must. Long-lasting research.

Fortunately, things have not come to the final step, and Zero will not start over from scratch to conduct detailed research on the cerebrate unit that is almost as detailed as the original composition.

After further improving the accuracy of the research, it took 32 months to finally find the problem.

For the Zerg, the so-called corpse decay problem is almost impossible to occur. There are no unnecessary microorganisms that will multiply in the Zerg's body. Even if there is a real need, it is a micro-unit of the Zerg itself.From this perspective, they are cleaner than any other race in the universe.

In Lamb's body, or rather in his brain, Sass noticed something abnormal through extreme observation and constant comparison.Combined with the last message left by Lamb, it can be confirmed that something was indeed "invading" it at that moment!
It had almost nothing to do with the body. Even based on the research on Lamb's body, Sass once considered it a normal phenomenon. If it weren't for the message reminder left by Lamb, even if the final screening was carried out in zero time, It is difficult to draw such a conclusion from the corpse!

Determining the cause of Lamb's death was not enough. Soon after truly realizing this, Sasse put forward another speculation, that is, this "invasion" did not begin at the time of Lamb's death, but Start before then!
As for the final death, it is not so much an invasion as a "general attack". Before that, it was just "infiltration".

In other words, this kind of attack is very likely to have been foreshadowed, but it is extremely secretive!

Although he did not control the source of its occurrence like Mira and used individuals from an entire civilization as experimental subjects, Sass still relied on the Zerg's absolute advantage in life technology to accurately discover this.

But during the subsequent self-examination, problems appeared again.No abnormalities were found among the Cerebrates, and there was no difference in the census of ordinary Zerg units.

Judging from the frequency of attacks by this unknown means, this is impossible.

Either Sasse's conclusion is wrong, or it needs to be improved.

However, after only four rounds of attacks, Sass added a new prerequisite for his research results-limited to intelligent individuals.

The price for reaching this conclusion is that the second brainworm is about to face the threat of death.Because after the fourth round of Zerg death wave, among the many Cerebrates, it was the only one that showed the changes predicted by Sasse.

In Zerg 3294, nearly 100 years have passed since the Vegeans tried to "curse" the Zerg but ended up succumbing to it. The number of Zerg brainworms is only seventeen so far. Although after Lamb died, the new brainworms The worms grew very fast, which did not directly reduce this number, but the scientific research power of the worms undoubtedly suffered a considerable loss as a result.

However, at this moment, Zero has to face this matter. In fact, he does need an insect to go through this whole process, to "feel" the "invasion" itself carefully, and to observe the erosion. What characteristics does it possess.

At the same time, the Vege Empire has gradually shown signs of fatigue. It can be said that it is almost on the verge of collapse. The center of the empire is bearing terrifying pressure every day, and this pressure is also exerting pressure on Korva and Xi. Passed by Luo Federation.

At this moment, the Vege Empire looks more and more like a "powder keg" and a "madman"!
They are filled with depression and madness from top to bottom. No one knows when this originally huge giant will engage in a crazy war that spreads throughout the entire explored universe before collapsing.

Over the years, with the joint participation of the Korva Empire and the Hero Federation, this research has indeed made a lot of progress, especially some results on the in vivo experiments of alien civilizations, which once caused Vege to burst out to solve the problem. There was hope in the question, but in the end it was still at a loss.

"Curse" is not a curse, it is just a higher-level attack method, and it may not even be considered an attack. After all, the opponent never takes the initiative to target it. Everything is the choice of the Veggies themselves.

It can be found from external monitoring that the insect swarms are getting closer day by day, and they still have not stopped evolving. Every once in a while, their navigation ability will be significantly improved. The interval may be longer or shorter, but it will always be there. In progress.

Internally, the three major civilizations are in deep internal turmoil, and they no longer have much energy to build the defense lines they had envisioned back then!

1000 years have passed since they encountered the Zerg. Compared with their original position, the Zerg has spanned a large star field. To this day, they cannot even really determine the time of contact with the Zerg. They can only come up with a rough time. scope.

If we follow this development trend, in another 800 years, the insect swarm will truly reach the edge of the explored universe, and war will inevitably break out at that time.This is still an optimistic estimate, because no one knows when the insect swarm will be able to enter space jump!
As long as they complete this technological breakthrough, war will break out in decades or even ten years!
At this time, although the three major civilizations were all expanding their armies in unison, their fundamental purpose was not to stop the advance of the insect swarm, but to defend against each other or suppress unrest.

The Virgils no longer care about external threats, but the Hero Federation and the Korva Empire cannot help but care about the inevitable invasion of the Zerg in the future, and it is very likely that they will even face the attack of another omnic life form. Although It seems there is still a lot of time, but the situation is already quite serious.

They are confident that even if they face the possible civil war between the Zerg and Vege at the same time, civilization will not perish. However, the two are so huge that when it comes to a full-scale war, the foreseeable losses alone will be unacceptable. numbers!

If possible, the Hero Federation hopes that their catastrophe can end as soon as possible, even more than the Veegis themselves. The Zerg may treat the three major civilizations equally, but Mira will definitely focus on "taking care of" Hero. The Federation, after launching several operations against Mira to no avail, had to make preparations to respond to Mira's attack alone.

.......................................

Zero gradually felt that this erosion might not be simply an attack. Even if he did not know its source, it did not prevent him from making such a judgment.

This incident makes him feel more and more like a "natural disaster" rather than an active attack?
Of course, this is just a guess.

Judging from the recent reactions of the enemies, that is, the three major civilizations, Zero feels that there may be some changes that he is not aware of in launching this method against the Zerg.

If the enemy possesses such a mysterious method, there is no reason why they have been quiescent for a period of time. The harassment suffered by the Zerg can be said to have dropped by two levels, and the opponent does not even have the slightest intention to conceal it.

From a zero perspective, this is illogical.

If you relax your thinking a little more and erase the original preconceptions about the culprit of the Zerg's changes, and start from the beginning to comprehensively sort out the whole story of the past hundred years, some extremely likely guesses will be smoothly made. came to Zero's mind.

Maybe the Zerg aren't the only victims?
He wasn't entirely sure, but it could indeed explain a lot of things.

The Zerg have a lot to do now. Although many clues about the accident have been obtained from Lamb's body, the research on it itself has not stopped. There is likely to be a secret to the birth of the Zerg in the body of the Cerebrate. , why that mysterious "stone" gave birth to such a race, perhaps the answer can only be found here.

Of course, in addition to this, the scientific research bases of many intelligent races under the Zerg have also been upgraded, from living completely "inside the body" of the Zerg to the current large space space that combines the life technology of the Zerg with the inherent technologies of each race. Station, while no longer affected by the life and death of individual Zerg, it did not reduce the Zerg's control over them.

(End of this chapter)