Ninety-eight soldiers soon arrived at the edge of the rainforest.
Shining lights revealed a vast, boundless red grassland outside the rainforest.
Jiang Ye surveyed the terrain. The surroundings were relatively flat and should not accumulate water during rain.
"We'll set up camp here. Listen carefully to the upcoming tasks. Our camp will be half on the plain and half in the rainforest, as large as possible. Everyone needs to disrupt the environment, chop down all the nearby trees, and use the logs to build simple defensive fortifications around the base."
"Alright, let's get to work!" Jiang Ye waved his hand.
The soldiers immediately formed teams and got busy. Swordsmen were responsible for chopping trees, charging masters set up power and charging stations on the plain, continuously supplying power to the swordsmen, while gunners were responsible for transporting logs and guarding the surroundings.
Jiang Ye and Isabella were also busy, walking around with their hands behind their backs, supervising.
All the tall trees were very hard, as their trunks needed to be strong enough to support their own weight. The swordsmen found chopping trees to be exceptionally arduous. The base of the greatswords had serrations, and even with desperate sawing, it took a full three minutes to complete.
The Mil trees here seemed to have a lot of sap. As soon as they were sawed, a gushing flow of bloody red sap emerged, and it didn't stop. The mechs' surfaces were quickly coated in red sap, an effect that even slaughtering several pigs wouldn't achieve.
"Do these trees have any economic value?" Jiang Ye asked, pointing at the recently stacked logs.
"There definitely is, but not much," Isabella replied. "A characteristic of Mil trees is their fishy smell. The wood smells like a gutted fish, and the odor is very difficult to remove. The furniture market doesn't use Mil trees at all. If you make a desk out of Mil wood, it smells like a fish market's cutting board. The construction industry also doesn't use Mil wood. If you build a small wooden house with it, people living inside will dream of fishing at sea every night."
"How can that be? Is there a fishy-smelling gene in the trees? Did the Mil people deliberately create genetically modified trees?" Jiang Ye was confused.
"No, it's just evolved naturally. Who knows the specific reason," Isabella shrugged. "Perhaps the Mil people's home planet has a lot of oceans, and the trees, influenced by their surroundings, developed a fishy smell. Or perhaps a certain type of insect that likes to gnaw on wood dislikes fishy smells, or maybe Mil trees originally grew in the ocean."
Jiang Ye fell silent. He realized that alien life forms were truly unimaginably diverse, with all sorts of strange and peculiar species.
"Commander! We've discovered a giant snail!" a subordinate's voice came through the headset.
"What's so reportable about a snail? Get back to work!" Jiang Ye was speechless.
"No, Commander! It's a super large snail! Truly unbelievably large!" the subordinate's tone was almost panicked. "It's coming! And there are many more of its kind behind it!"
"Shoot!" Jiang Ye ordered decisively.
In the dense forest ahead, gunfire and explosions erupted simultaneously, creating quite a spectacle. Jiang Ye and Isabella rushed over, only to be stunned by the sight before them.
Majestic figures slowly advanced through the forest, their soft white bodies as wide as carpets, carrying black shells as large as small cars!
"Holy crap!" Jiang Ye was shocked. This snail must weigh two to three tons!
The snail's head had no antennae, but instead, pale white eyes. The eyeballs had been shattered by bullets, dangling like broken raw eggs. The snail's shell was incredibly hard; bullets couldn't penetrate it and would even spark and ricochet off.
It was like an armored vehicle!
"Aim for the body! Don't shoot the shell!" Jiang Ye quickly shouted, also opening fire on the snail's head. His subordinates' marksmanship was terrible.
After a barrage of shots, the first snail finally died and stopped moving. Its head, larger than a buffalo's, had been completely decapitated by bullets, revealing the white brain tissue inside. It was disgusting. The entire brain was as large as a durian, with its surface so wrinkled it looked like a bowl of noodles.
More than a dozen snails were advancing from behind, not quickly, about the same pace as a person walking, but their immense size made them appear like an ironclad flood!
Jiang Ye directed the gunners to concentrate their fire, blasting the snails' brains one by one.
After firing tens of thousands of rounds, the advancing snails were finally eliminated.
"Quick! Set them on fire! Pile all the wood onto the snails!" Isabella's voice was urgent.
"They're all dead, what's the fuss?" Jiang Ye asked.
"Go over there and shine your light on the snail shells!" Isabella said.
Jiang Ye walked up to the nearest snail and shone his mech's light at its shell at maximum brightness.
The shell was dark green, like iron, but when the beam hit it, it became translucent like ceramic.
Inside, countless tiny black dots were wriggling, numbering in the tens of thousands, as if the snail shell contained a hundred thousand moving black beans.
"What is this?" Jiang Ye was horrified. "Quick! Bring all the wood over! The more the better!"
"They're full of snail larvae. After the adult snails die, the larvae will start eating the adult snails' bodies from the bottom of the shell. Once they eat through, they'll all come out. It's disgusting. In a few weeks, the entire area will be covered in snails as large as small cars!" Isabella took two steps back.
The soldiers frantically carried the wood over, surrounding the snails as if they were coffins. The charging masters quickly set up charging piles on the wood and then short-circuited them. Soon, sparks flew, and the charging piles began to burn explosively, igniting the wood. The snail carcasses were quickly engulfed in flames.
Flames two stories high rolled in the wind, black smoke shot into the night sky, and the heat scorched the moss and mushrooms on the ground nearby.
The soldiers gathered around to watch, and Jiang Ye also observed silently.
Under the firelight, the snail shells surprisingly turned into a translucent material. Inside, tens of thousands of larvae wriggled frantically. They sensed the high temperature, knowing they were trapped in a steaming cauldron, and wanted to escape. But the shells were too hard to break through, and they could only struggle in vain.
"Are these things called Mil snails?" Jiang Ye patted Isabella's shoulder.
"These are not Mil people's snails. They were created by our military through genetic engineering, and their scientific name is 'Grass Cutter'," Isabella said.
Jiang Ye was utterly bewildered. "Is the military insane? Why would they make something like this?"
"To destroy the enemy's ecosystem at a very low price," Isabella said. "As the name suggests, 'Grass Cutter.' These snails can eat almost all plants, have enormous appetites, produce massive amounts of waste, reproduce prolifically, and are highly resilient. During combat, all you need to do is drop a few snails onto an enemy planet, and they can cause ecological disasters in multiple locations."
"How disastrous?"
"If you drop one snail onto three hundred thousand mu of grassland, it can be eaten clean in a month, even the grass roots. And after that month, the number of snails, both large and small, can reach tens of millions. The largest ones are the size we see now, and the smallest are about the size of mung beans. They are very difficult to eradicate completely. If even one is left behind, it will soon become a large swarm again."