56: Chapter 56 Human Puppet

At dawn, the interface did not pop up the entry prompt tone as usual!

Instead, an entire patch of dark golden light patterns surged upward from the bottom of the entry bar across the border, and then condensed into four large characters right in the center!

[Flesh Puppet] Grade: Purple.

Effect:

Implants a "Flesh Command Core" into living bodies that are severely injured, have low sanity, or have been infected by Spore Infection to a certain extent.

The host retains partial autonomous action logic and can accept medium-to-long-term compound commands.

The upper limit of controlled quantities fluctuates with the mental value, current upper limit: Three.

Limitations: The host cannot be too strong, cannot have too intact a mentality, and cannot stay away from the root network or anchor points for too long.

Complex commands will increase the control burden, and strong stimulation may lead to loss of control or self-destruction.

Jiang Ming read the entry description word for word twice!

It was not Spore Infection.

It was not the inefficient parasitism of Ah Qiu, which slowly wore down the will through exhaustion and injury, but directly turning into a controllable unit after implanting the command core.

He brought up Ah Qiu's records for comparison—it took Ah Qiu several days from implantation to initial usability.

Command precision was always stuck on the verge of semi-out-of-control, and the high fever shock directly snapped the mycelial network.

The Flesh Puppet did not need the mycelial network to cover the entire central nervous system; the command core only occupied a single point.

The rest relied on the host's own nervous system to maintain operation.

Able to walk, able to speak, able to act, and completely obedient.

For a tree that wanted to eat the Settlement, this was an upgrade from claws and teeth to fingers.

The limitations were equally clear: the host could not be too strong, could not be implanted while in a mentally intact state, and could not leave the root network for too long.

And the upper limit of controlled quantities was only three!

He immediately rummaged through the remaining captives of Shen Kui's Subjugation Team to find a suitable experimental subject.

There were not many live survivors left after the fire attack, but there were still two fringe guards in the corner of the Tree Nest root chamber who hadn't breathed their last.

One person's left leg was pierced by a poisonous thorn, after which the toxin spread to the lumbar plexus, causing paralysis in the lower limbs!

Under the continuous suppression of the Tree Domain, their sanity value had dropped into the hallucination range.

The other person was trapped by the Tree Realm beside the collapsed hunting pit all night; they didn't lose much blood, but their spirit was ground to numbness by repeated attacks, and their pupillary light reflex was sluggish.

Both met the implantation conditions.

The implantation process was more violent than Spore Infection.

The Flesh Command Core was not the mycelial network, but a highly compressed composite of dark red wood fibers and mental tentacles!

It was sent into the host's thoracic mediastinum along the wound blood vessels and unfolded below the aortic arch.

The first guard violently resisted the moment the command core touched the pericardium, and their heart rate skyrocketed.

The surviving nervous system recognized the implant as a fatal foreign object, and the muscles of the whole body spasmed simultaneously, resulting in cardiac arrest before lasting a few breaths.

Jiang Ming did not stop.

The second guard twitched a few times during implantation, their blood pressure dropped significantly, and then stabilized.

After the command core unfolded, it established a connection with the host's remaining ganglia, and the wood fibers spread upward along the spine.

The mental tentacles attached themselves from the outside of the brainstem.

He remained motionless for a few seconds, then opened his eyes again.

His pupils dilated and then slowly contracted; his focusing was not precise, but he could lock onto the nearest thick root in front of him.

He slowly stood up, his movements like someone crawling ashore from icy water—stiff and sluggish, but completing all the actions.

Three basic commands were issued: stand up, pick up the short blade on the ground, and walk ten steps along the stream channel direction.

He did all of it.

He stopped at the eleventh step, turned to face the direction of the Tree Nest, and waited for the next command.

The magnitude of his body's center of gravity shift when walking leaned toward his injured left leg, indicating that the pain reflex was still there, but obedience had overwhelmed the pain.

After the first round of tests was completed, Jiang Ming gave a more complex command: speak out, "There are still people alive behind."

The puppet opened its mouth, its Adam's apple rolling. The first time, it only made a breathy sound; the second time, it squeezed out two vague syllables.

The third time, it spoke the whole sentence intermittently.

The speaking speed was slow, and the articulation sounded like its tongue was swollen, but the content could be heard clearly a few meters away.

Being able to speak meant being able to transmit misleading commands and whisper a piece of false news by the channel.

He continued to use the remaining captives and the living wounded who had not been completely digested in recent days for further testing.

After the second round of testing, three primary Flesh Puppets were stably formed: No. 1 could walk and carry, with stiff movements but precise obedience.

No. 2 could speak, with a slow speaking speed but clearer articulation than No. 1!

No. 3 was in the best overall condition, capable of making simple judgments, and its walking posture was closest to that of a normal person.

Three were not enough to attack a stronghold, but enough to touch a doorknob...

He sent the three puppets to the periphery of Tree Nest No. 1 for their first long-distance simulation mission:

Walk along the transportation route towards the direction of the Settlement, stop after encountering the intersection marker, wait in place, and then return.

No. 1 was half a quarter-hour slower than expected when reaching the intersection, and even stepped into a puddle and fell once along the way. Both No. 2 and No. 3 completed the return trip, and their movement coherence was slightly worse than when they set off, but the commands remained intact.

This test figured out the current puppets' effective activity radius and physical limit—they couldn't be pulled too far away.

They couldn't be given too complex task chains!

He readjusted his strategy!

Every living person eaten before was in the forest.

There were trees, roots, poisonous thorns, and the Tree Realm in the forest; the home-field advantage was entirely in his hands.

But if the Flesh Puppet could step into human territory for him, the hunting ground wouldn't have to stay forever on the boundary line of Black Tree Mouth.

Humans wouldn't shoot arrows at returning routed soldiers, nor would they be on guard against familiar faces in the same organization.

Camp administrators handing over sign-in wooden plates, sentries opening fence gates, garrisons allowing a messenger to approach behind their backs—all these actions required no psychological construction for humans to do among themselves.

The attack posture was no longer just a root springing out from the mud.

It could be a person.

A person still wearing guard attire, with blood on their face, and pinching Shen Kui's dispatch wooden plate in their hand.

The annular damp-soil belt of Tree Nest No. 1 maintained full-water-level operation, and the secondary tree core beat steadily.

He placed the three puppets in the temporary chambers on the periphery of the root chamber, and began to compare the shift times and duty passwords of the peripheral sentries in Shen Kui's memory fragments one by one.

The weakest opening on the edge of the Settlement was the delivery port beside the wooden fence on the outside of the Camp Administration Room!

That place only stopped supplies and not people; as long as both parties knew each other during the handover, no dispatch order was needed—a huge loophole...

Tomorrow evening, Ma Shoucai's bookkeeper would open the window on time to collect the receipts!

A talking puppet could go just right!