Meng Chao sucked in a sharp breath. “Could it be?”
“Yes. It’s just as you imagined.”
Ye Xiaoxing plucked out a second photo.
It was a picture of more than one thousand sturdy men around a burning fire. Within it, a young and beautiful girl was tied-up to a wooden post.
Even though it was just a picture, Meng Chao could tell from the girl’s twisted features that she was enduring indescribable pain.
“What are they doing? Why are they using such brutal methods to kill their own kind?” he asked in shock.
“They’re executing judgment on a witch.”
Meng Chao was in disbelief. “Who’s a witch?”
“All women are witches,” Ye Xiaoxing said.
Meng Chao was dumbfounded for a long time. He could not wrap his head around it. “How could this happen?”
“Dragon City’s exploration team discovered Dragon King Town four years ago, but their civilization had already turned into something completely different from ours. So, the exploration team did not come into contact with them. Instead, they lurked in the dark and observed them for a year.
“Then, they thought of a way to get a large number of diaries, wills, selfies, videos, and other information left by people of Dragon King Town. Based on the clues, they finally formed the picture of what had happened in Dragon King Town during the fifty years after it transmigrated.”
“When Dragon King Town transmigrated, due to the push from the dimensional vortex, it was located pretty far away from its relative position to Dragon City’s main city area. It ended up in a corner isolated by mountains. Hence, the people in the town didn’t know that there were tens of millions of their own kind who had transmigrated alongside them. They thought that only the tens of thousands of people in the town were affected by this horrible fate.
“During the first few years, Dragon King Town continued with its own strength.
“At the start, the dimensional vortex formed a wall of fog which blocked the fierce monsters outside. Even though the viruses of the Other World violently attacked their immunity system and created some zombies among them, Dragon King Town was really lucky. They didn’t run into any pandemics. They only had a few zombies, and soon, once they set up strict plans to kill them, the zombies were cut into pieces.
“I told you just now that there were a few machine processing factories in Dragon King Town and a few machinery and civil engineering schools. This means that the citizens didn’t have a lot of problems processing weapons and building forts. Before the fog faded away and monsters invaded them, they set up battle fortresses that surrounded Dragon King Town like iron walls.
“The problem was within—there were too few people who could produce offspring.
“Based on the wills left behind by a lot of Dragon King Town citizens we can tell that they were full of despair. They believed that they could never return to Earth.
“Most of them didn’t even realize that they had transmigrated to a brand new world. They thought that they would forever be trapped in the small town surrounded by fog.
“And there were too few women who were of age. Hence, even if Dragon King Town could survive as a whole, as individuals, most of the town members could not pass on their genes.
“Women who were of age became incredibly rare resources. The hot-blooded men surrounded these rare resources and soon split into different factions. They fought and killed each other.
“In just a few years, even if zombies and monsters did not pose a major threat to them, nearly half of the strong men in Dragon King Town died at the hands of their comrades.
“Of course, aside from women, clean drinking water, food, machines that could allow them to create weapons, and raw materials all became rare resources.
“You can say that while it was surrounded by fog, Dragon King Town could not contain nearly one hundred thousand strong men. They had to kill each other and cut down their population by half to continue maintaining the town.
“After a few years of internal conflict, Dragon King Town used the institutes and factories to form five major factions of power. They were similar to the gangs that formed during the bloody and dark era in Dragon City.
“And the women of age, who were rare resources, died in the fights between gangs or committed suicide because they did not want to accept the tragic fate. Only a few of them survived.
“This meant that the citizens still did not manage to solve the problem of the continuation of their civilization.
“And the internal conflicts were like cultivation of poison. In the end, an incredibly terrifying Queen of Poison was born—a woman who had all the men dancing in the palm of her hand.
“We don’t have much information about this woman. We just know that later, the members of Dragon King Town came to refer to her as the most wicked witch.
“But based on our understanding, in the beginning, this ‘witch’ just wanted to protect her friends. She used her inborn charms to mingle among the leaders of the five gangs. She charmed all of them until they were completely entranced with her.
“She even used some really extreme methods such as uniting all the women of age to monopolize the resource of reproduction so that they could get more power and status.
“Even though the men had absolute advantage in terms of numbers and had greater fighting power, if women didn’t give birth to their offspring, Dragon King Town would soon cease to exist.
“Just like that, the ‘witch’ ingeniously used the conflict among the five gangs to stir up the internal conflict in Dragon King Town.
“During the second internal war, another half of the strong men died. Two of the five gangs were completely destroyed. Many of those who lost the war were chased out of Dragon King Town and disappeared into the depths of the fog.
“And the ‘witch’ managed to temporarily seize the highest seat of power in the town, which led to Dragon King Town entering something similar to matriarchy.
“The women of age who were lucky enough to survive seemed to have welcomed the best time.
“Their status was far higher than anyone else, and they could choose tall, handsome, gentle, considerate, or brutish men as their partners. They could also use the need of cultivating their offspring as a reason to occupy the best resources and deliver the harshest punishments to the perverse, ugly, and unattractive men.
“Unfortunately, during the short period of time the women lived in a dream where they enjoyed being treated like empresses, they forgot to think about a problem.”
“What problem?” Meng Chao asked.
Ye Xiaoxing sighed. “Compared to handsome and gentle men, there are too many average men who have perverse personalities.
“Once they realized that they could never get the women and pass on their genes, the perverse men launched the third internal war in Dragon King Town.
“Their numbers were the greatest in the town, and after the two internal wars, the humanity in the town members was basically gone.
“Their brains were occupied by androgens and turned into foul-smelling, useless mush. The sleazy men launched indiscriminate attacks. They treated all women as ‘witches’ and all the handsome men taken care of by the witches became ‘warlocks’. Both ‘witches’ and ‘warlocks’ were criminals who had launched the third internal war in Dragon King Town, so they were all killed in the end.
“Women were problems. If even one single woman remained alive, the internal chaos in Dragon King Town would never die down!
“This was the slogan of those sleazy men at that time.”
“But if that’s the case, Dragon King Town would have no future,” Meng Chao said uncertainly.
“Yes. After the frenzied fervor died away, the survivors looked at the torn up Dragon King Town and its population, which led to a quick realization that they were all men. The survivors then regained some of their rationality. They became aware that they had personally destroyed their own future.
“At that moment, the fog around Dragon King Town dissipated a little, and all sorts of monsters as well as etherealized plants appeared one after another, which started a new crisis,” Ye Xiaoxing said.
“Dragon King Town could not survive it. Even if they managed to fend off a few waves of the monsters’ attacks, without any offspring, they would lose their most basic motivation to survive.
“Fortunately, the Divine Tree appeared.”
“What is this Divine Tree?” Meng Chao asked.
“It’s an incredibly unique plant, or rather, it’s something between a plant and a fungus. It’s a new life form that does not exist on Earth.”
Ye Xiaoxing pointed at the first picture with the towering tree that had a tree crown covering half of the town. “This isn’t the real form of the Divine Tree. It resided in a banyan tree, whose genes it has changed. The Divine Tree should look like a bryophyte or a mushroom.
“You should have guessed by now. This strange life form has an incredibly advanced ability to change genes. It can even… help humans pass on their genes.”
As he spoke, Ye Xiaoxing slowly flipped over the third picture.
It showed fruits growing all over the branches of the tree. Some of the branches almost reached the ground because of the weight, and quite a number of humans were harvesting the fruits.
Those humans were different from the people who judged the witches in the second picture. Most of them did not wear clothes. They only had a simple loincloth covering their groin.
Their skins were an unnatural green, as if they had a faint layer of moss.
Their upper limbs were clearly longer and thicker than those of normal humans. Their lower limbs were shorter, but their toes were incredibly well-developed.
They were like gibbons. They relied on their arms to jump about the branches while their toes handled a lot of meticulous work.
However, what surprised Meng Chao the most were the things they harvested.
They were cocoons that were as thin as cicada wings and covered in bloody veins.
…No, they were neither fruits nor cocoons.
In the fourth picture, one of them was carefully cut open and a person was taking a baby out of it.
“How… How could this be?!” Meng Chao cried out.
He had never seen something so bizarre in his previous life.
“Now, you should understand why we didn’t want to publicly announce that we rediscovered Dragon King Town, right?” Ye Xiaoxing said. “Over the long course of the past half a century, Dragon King Town seems to have formed… some sort of symbiotic relationship with this strange Other World life form so that the town members can pass on their genes.
“The Divine Tree helps them pass on their genes while it takes resources from underground. It also grows branches with toughness and strength that doesn’t lose to metal, which they can use as raw materials for machines and weapons.
“Dragon King Town are the Divine Tree’s hunters and guardians. They make up for what the Divine Tree lacks in mobility and offensive power. They hunt monsters for it as food so that it can grow faster.
“As of current, the Dragon King Town members have a tight working relationship with the Divine Tree. You can say that the humans in Dragon King Town have become one with the life form of the Other World and created… a brand new civilization.”
