145: Chapter 145 The orders begin to come from the mouths of the dead.

The aftershocks of the explosion stirred up another storm within the coalition's command system.

After a brief pause, all the short-range communicators on the front lines, rear lines, and flanks were flooded with contradictory static.

"The purification fire canister is destroyed, rear guard, fill in!"

"Wrong! They're telling us to retreat! Fall back fifty meters!"

"What I'm hearing is rescue people! There are survivors in the collapsed building at three o'clock!"

These voices no longer came from a fixed broadcast source.

They bubbled up from beneath the iron covers of sewage manholes, poured in through broken windows blown open by the wind, and echoed from the depths of half-collapsed ventilation ducts.

The entire Dead City seemed to grow countless mouths, simultaneously speaking different words in different voices.

—If it were simply fake orders, human commanders could still cope by blocking channels, switching to flag semaphore, or using light signals.

But Jiang Ming's tactics were far more insidious than this.

He mixed the real orders among the fake ones.

Ten minutes ago, the frontline commander had indeed issued the order to "have the rear guard replenish the canisters."

However, this order was intercepted and duplicated by Jiang Ming's city neural network, then mixed with three fake orders: "full retreat," "hold ground," and "divide forces for rescue," and spewed out simultaneously from at least twenty different "mouths."

Thus, the most fatal poison on the battlefield appeared.

Hesitation.

Just as the logistics team that received the supply order wanted to charge forward, they heard a familiar, captain-like voice from beneath a wrecked vehicle on the side shouting, "All personnel fall back."

They instinctively stopped in their tracks and turned back to confirm.

In that fraction of a second of hesitation, the ground beneath their feet suddenly softened, and half a foot sank into a newly cracked pit of blood and filth.

Inside the observation post of Ash Lamp City, Xu Baiheng's face was paler than paper.

On the map in front of him, the flags representing each squad had turned into a complete mess.

"It isn't tricking us."

Xu Baiheng's voice was very low, yet like a needle, it pierced through all the commotion in the command post. "It is disrupting our 'belief'."

"It mixes the true and false together, making every judgment we make potentially step into a trap."

He suddenly raised his head and looked at the few surviving captains of the coalition.

"Pass down the order! From now on, cancel all long-range verbal communications! Groups of thirty people, only acknowledge the commands of the living people in front of you, and do not listen to any sounds coming from afar! No matter how real that voice sounds!"

This was the first time since the outbreak of war that the human command tier attempted to wrestle the right to define "order" from Jiang Ming's hands.

But this order was still a step too late.

Because Jiang Ming had already begun using his freshest "meat loudspeakers."

In a side street leading to the Broadcast Tower area, a surviving squad from the Three Settlements was carefully moving along the base of a wall.

Suddenly, the captain raised his hand, signaling everyone to stop.

He heard a name.

His adjutant, Azhi.

"Captain... save me... I'm here..."

The voice came from the second floor of a half-collapsed residential building across the street.

Everyone looked in the direction of the voice, their hearts suddenly contracting.

The upper half of Azhi's body was hanging from a piece of steel protruding from the wall on the second floor, his lower abdomen completely empty, his face still frozen with the pain before death.

He had clearly been cut in half at the waist by a cable pulled from underground twenty minutes ago.

Yet now, his head hanging on the steel bar had its throat opening and closing, calling out the captain's name in the exact same tearful tone as when he was alive.

"Captain... my leg is broken... pull me up..."

"It's a trap!"

A veteran in the squad roared, trying to hold the captain back.

But the captain's eyes were already bloodshot.

Reason told him it was fake, but looking at his brother's face and listening to his cry for help, the string named "comradeship" was still plucked.

"Cover me!"

Carrying his blade, he rushed toward that building.

The other three members hesitated for a moment, then gritted their teeth and followed.

They weren't stupid.

They just couldn't watch their brother hanging there "alive," crying for help like that.

What Jiang Ming wanted was precisely this "inability."

—Just as the captain rushed downstairs and prepared to climb, the torso of Azhi's corpse hanging on the steel bar suddenly split open at the abdominal break.

Splat!

What spurted out from inside was not blood.

Instead, it was a large mass of intertwined, black-and-red roots and semi-digested visceral fragments, which shrouded the four people downstairs head-on like a sticky net.

"Ugh—!"

One member had his face smeared with it and dropped to his knees, retching on the spot.

The captain reacted quickly, slashing open the root net in front of him with a blade, but his feet were tightly entangled by new roots drilling out from the gaps in the floor tiles.

He lowered his head and saw that the frozen expression of pain on Azhi's face before death had somehow turned into a bizarre, grinning arc.

Inside the corpse's throat, that phrase was still being repeated.

"Captain... save me..."

This squad completely collapsed.

Jiang Ming didn't even need to turn every corpse into a combat puppet.

He only needed to pick a few key positions and turn the dead into meat loudspeakers that could shout, call for help, and issue orders.

The cost was extremely low.

Yet the lethality could tear all the way down along humanity's most foundational trust relationships.

At the same time, a problem arose in Lin Qiu's wounded shelter.

In the middle of the night, three wounded soldiers diagnosed with "mild sound pollution" suddenly sat up from their wooden beds.

Dragging their bleeding legs, they walked out of the shelter without a word and headed toward the direction of the Dead City.

When the guards stopped them, they discovered that their eyes were hollow and they were repeatedly muttering in their mouths.

"Return to the front line... hold position number three..."

They weren't crazy.

They were executing an order that existed only in their minds.

Watching this scene, Lin Qiu felt a chill rise from the soles of her feet.

Pollution was no longer an external stain that needed to be "washed away."

It had already been planted like a seed inside the minds of these survivors, ready to take root and sprout at any time Jiang Ming desired.

Inside the observation post, Xu Baiheng drew the final cross on the map representing a lost squad.

He had finally completed that most terrifying piece of the puzzle.

From beginning to end, Jiang Ming had never intended to break through Ash Lamp City in one go.

It was using this war to process all invading humans into a group of "mobile pathogen sources" who would mutually misidentify each other, drag each other down, and bring pollution back to their own camps.

As long as the coalition was still "fighting," "advancing," "rescuing," and "transferring the wounded," this tree would always have new nutrients to feed on.

What it was devouring was all the "processes" humans had established to fight against it.

Just then, a messenger hurriedly ran in and handed over a new directive.

"Mr. Xu, too many corpses are piling up on the front lines. The command headquarters orders that the outer defense incineration pits must speed up the cremation process, reduce the retention time of the corpses, and move the cremation ashes forward to fill in some of the blood and filth pits."

Xu Baiheng took the directive and looked at the clear signatures on it, but his fingers grew slightly cold.

Speed up cremation.

Move the cremation ashes forward.

This directive sounded impeccably correct and perfectly complied with wartime sanitary regulations.

But as he stared at the location of the incineration pit on the map—the place close to the damp dead corner and connected to several old ash drainage ditches—a terrifying thought suddenly darted out.

Could this directive... precisely be what Jiang Ming wanted the most?