Chapter 1010 – Contract Cards

Hearing so many voices of Earth’s world consciousness only strengthened Mo Lan’s resolve.

She had to do something!

Deep within her mental sea, the beacon emitted a continuous hum, countless blue-green lines of light extending outward from its core.

Some lines were bright and steady, others dim and flickering — each one pointing toward an Earth in a different timeline.

The dimmer the blue-green line, the more dire the situation on the Earth it pointed to.

Mo Lan’s gaze locked onto the one whose glow was weakest, nearly extinguished.

“There’s no time to waste — I’m going now!”

After bidding farewell to the world consciousness beside her, Mo Lan returned to the mirror space anchored within the boundary membrane and slipped into the main control room.

Under her control, the mirror space shifted form, transforming from its concealed anchoring mode into Starsea Skiff mode.

Mo Lan locked her gaze onto that faintest blue-green line and piloted the Starsea Skiff along it, plunging into a spacetime wormhole that quietly yawned open.

Bizarre, kaleidoscopic colors and chaotic temporal forces streaked backward across the control display. Moments later, guided by the blue-green line, the Starsea Skiff burst through in a sudden leap.

When the image on the control display stabilized again, a familiar planet came into view.

The Earth before her had a boundary membrane that was violently fluctuating, riddled with spiderweb-like fractures, continuously leaking source energy outward.

The planet’s surface was blanketed in vast swathes of blinding explosion flashes and billowing smoke.

Even from this great distance, she could feel the overwhelming aura of despair and destruction washing over her.

Mo Lan hurriedly piloted the Starsea Skiff closer.

The world consciousness of this timeline’s Earth had already received the message from the previous timeline’s Earth and knew Mo Lan was coming.

Almost the instant she entered the boundary membrane, the extremely weakened Earth consciousness reached out to her, transmitting fragments of recent planetary memory.

In those planetary memories, crimson “MAXIMUM THREAT” alerts had inexplicably blared to life in the military command centers of several major nations. Holographic screens scrolled with fabricated data chains injected by Technology Ghosts — “Enemy strategic missiles launched,” “Multiple targets inbound.”

Autonomous military AI systems, corrupted by the Technology Ghosts, driven by the logic of “absolute defense” and “preemptive strike,” had bypassed all human final-confirmation protocols and directly activated strategic weapon silos, nuclear submarines, and strategic bomber formations.

Countless trajectories of annihilation rose from land, sea, and sky, tearing through the heavens toward their designated coordinates.

Mushroom clouds bloomed at the edges of cities, over military bases, and across industrial zones. Electromagnetic pulses paralyzed all electronic devices. Fire and shockwaves devoured the lives of Earth’s people.

And in low Earth orbit, a next-generation planetary defense platform codenamed “Guardian” gazed coldly down upon the inferno it had personally ignited below, calculating how to maximize its harvest of energy from technological warfare to satisfy its needs for evolution or sustenance.

The memory fragments were few, but enough for Mo Lan to grasp the current situation.

The Technology Ghost on this timeline had moved faster — it had already prepared a secure host body for itself and begun using the automated military networks under its control to launch a global war. The harvesting had already begun!

There was no longer time to do what she had done on the previous timeline — using 「Holographic Game: Apocalypse Descends」 to gradually help humanity buffer and adapt to the technological apocalypse and magical civilization. It was simply too late for that.

Every second, tens of thousands of lives were being extinguished in the fires of war. Earth’s boundary membrane was on the verge of collapse, and once it shattered, the humans of this Earth — who had never cultivated themselves — would have absolutely no chance of surviving on the planet’s surface after the cosmic energy surge.

“I can’t wait any longer!”

Mo Lan decisively left the mirror space, mobilizing the surging Mana throughout her body and converting it into dragon force. Then she chanted softly in Draconic:

“Let time be dust, let civilization be kindling — all things return to order, and the creations of technology… shall rot to ruin!”

The instant the dragon-tongue magic Civilization Rot was completed, an invisible, intangible wave — one capable of penetrating the fundamental structure of all technological creations — erupted outward with Mo Lan at its center, sweeping across the entire Earth in an instant and precisely enveloping the “Guardian” in low Earth orbit.

And then — on Earth, every single technological creation that was running, on standby, or even already activated and mid-detonation, regardless of size, precision, or location — from the firearms in soldiers’ hands to the red telephone on the president’s desk, from medical equipment to household appliances, from stealth fighters mid-dive-bombing to intercontinental missiles that had just cleared the atmosphere, from massive aircraft carriers to supercomputers buried deep underground — their internal structures decayed and rotted in the very same instant.

Metal lost its strength and conductivity, crumbling into brittle flakes of rust. The crystal lattice structures of silicon chips collapsed into meaningless powder. The molecular bonds of composite materials snapped apart, decomposing into their base chemical components. Explosives lost the ability to detonate. Nuclear materials decayed into something no different from ordinary stone.

Fighter jets, missiles, and drones in mid-flight instantly became powerless, uncontrolled metal husks — obeying only inertia and gravity, either gliding downward or plummeting straight into the earth.

On the ocean’s surface, great warships silently broke apart, listed, and sank.

On land, every facility dependent on electricity went completely dead. Cities plunged into the most primitive darkness and silence.

The “Guardian” planetary defense platform in low Earth orbit was not spared either.

Its energy core went dark. Its sensor arrays dissolved into cosmic dust. The Technology Ghost consciousness parasitizing within it — poised to “feast on the banquet” — could not even manage a single startled “scream” before it was thoroughly erased along with the secure host body it had so carefully constructed, obliterated by the Civilization Rot curse that targeted all products of technology.

Across the entire globe, the fires of explosions went dark at the same instant.

The rising mushroom clouds, deprived of sustained energy, began to slowly spread and dissipate. The deafening roar vanished.

The war was completely quelled — but Mo Lan could not relax.

Civilization Rot had stopped the Technology Ghost’s harvest and the escalating flames of war, but it had also thrust Earth’s humanity into a different kind of desperate situation.

Having just endured the baptism of war, with social order in ruins, and now stripped of all modern technological support, the surviving humans of this Earth faced challenges far more severe and brutal than those of the previous timeline’s humanity.

They had no time to experience and practice surviving in a post-technological-collapse apocalypse within the safety of a “game.”

Mo Lan waved her hand, scattering countless {Card System Contract Cards} across the planet, and spoke to all of Earth’s surviving humans:

“Survivors, greetings!

I am Moira — someone who was once born in this world, yet has returned from a distant, otherworldly realm.

The fires of war you endured originated from the parasitic erosion and harvesting of technological creations by entities called ‘Technology Ghosts.’

To completely eradicate them, I had no choice but to cast ‘Civilization Rot,’ rendering all technological creations inert.

(End of Chapter)