60: Chapter 60 The Second Tree Nest!

The fire at the storage shed burned away nearly half of the Settlement's lamp oil reserves...

It also burned straight through the last layer of decency between the Camp Administration Room and the field patrol line!

In the Council Shed, Ma Shoucai slapped the ledger and cursed Shen Kui for unauthorized line expansion, while the people from the patrol line retorted that Shen Kui's life or death remained unknown to this day!

Why did the old lamp oil barrels withheld by the Camp Administration Room appear behind the storage shed?

The argument lasted all night, and finally, a temporary resolution came out of the Council Shed:

Tighten the entire line, suspend active exploration for field missions, and double the guards at all Outposts!

Wait until the inner ring cleanup mission over at Tieshan's side wraps up before making plans for a general offensive.

Jiang Ming finished listening to this drama from the remaining channel messages and did not add any more fire to the storage shed ruins.

During a period when the Settlement was tightening its defense, charging forward stubbornly to bite at the wooden palisade was a waste of energy.

He turned back to the middle line and began laying the second Tree Nest!

...

The outer line map in Shen Kui's memory marked every patrol point north of the Old Logging Camp.

And the carrying capacity of every stream channel and every backup route.

He screened the candidate points twice!

He finally locked onto a low-lying area where an abandoned patrol point intersected with a semi-dry stream channel.

This low-lying area was less than a li away from Tree Nest No. 1, and closer to the Settlement Outer Ring wooden palisade than Tree Nest No. 1.

However, the terrain was depressed, surrounded by fallen wood and dense bushes, looking from any direction like nothing more than a pile of rotting wood soaked in shallow water.

It was most suitable to act as a medium-range springboard.

The root networks of Anchor Point No. 1 and Anchor Point No. 2 had already spread to the bend of the stream channel!

They were only a few dozen meters away from the low-lying area.

He split two energy-transmitting main roots from the secondary tree core of Tree Nest No. 1!

Extending them downstream along the damp soil belt.

All the extra energy accumulated by Photosynthetic Overload during the day was poured into these two energy-transmitting roots.

When the root tips advanced through the wet mud, they did not turn over the soil.

They did not push up stones, but only wove through the natural gaps of the old stream channel.

Early the next morning, the first batch of lateral roots reached the low-lying area, began climbing upward along the roots of the fallen wood, and hollowed out the first root chamber cavity inside the decaying wood.

The construction logic of Tree Nest No. 2 was completely different from Tree Nest No. 1.

The Outpost was remodeled after swallowing a human stronghold alive.

It had sheds, wooden palisades, ditches, and ready-made foundations and load-bearing pillars.

The low-lying area had nothing, only fallen wood, mud, gravel, and scour trenches left by the seasonal flooding of the semi-dry stream channel.

Jiang Ming did not need it to resemble a human stronghold.

He had the lateral roots hollow out the fallen wood from the inside, filling the wooden chambers with mycelium clusters and energy-storing fibers.

The damp soil belt circled the low-lying area along the bank walls of the stream channel!

Forming an annular damp soil buffer layer with the same principle as Tree Nest No. 1.

The root chamber was hidden deep in the mud layer directly beneath the largest piece of fallen wood, its four walls woven with petrified root networks. It built no roof and erected no fences, leaving only a cavity for the secondary roots to erupt and a few branch nodes disguised as withered vines exposed on the surface.

On the evening of the third day, a medium-sized mutant badger strayed into the low-lying area.

It stepped on the soft mud at the roots of the fallen wood, wanting to cross the stream bank. As soon as its front paws touched the fallen wood, the Tree Realm was triggered.

The root network sprang up simultaneously from the fallen wood cavity and both sides of the stream bank, dragging it entirely into the root chamber cavity.

The engulfing efficiency was not as good as Tree Nest No. 1—the soil layer in the low-lying area was barren!

It lacked the residual nutrients from human activities that had seeped into the mud over the years like the Outpost—but the ambush Speed was fast.

From triggering to being dragged into the root chamber took less than a few breaths.

He treated this engulfment as an energy-storage test for Tree Nest No. 2.

After the test concluded, he re-calibrated the node positioning:

Tree Nest No. 1 was an external combat stronghold, engaging the enemy head-on, using the secondary tree core, the annular damp soil belt, and the ruined shed as defensive depth.

Tree Nest No. 2 was an ambush-concealment node!

It did not take head-on impacts, specializing instead in striking the flanks of the quick-reaction team.

And it provided a relay springboard for future advancement toward the Settlement direction.

The underground root veins between the two Tree Nests were deliberately arranged by him into two incompletely overlapping energy-transmitting lines.

The perception-biased one ran along the shallow damp soil of the stream channel, connecting Anchor Point No. 1, Anchor Point No. 2, and several small tentacles along the way, dedicated to early warning and coordination.

The combat-biased one passed through the deeper hard soil, responsible for energy transmission and synchronized power supply during the Tree Realm eruption.

The two lines formed a circular loop between the secondary tree core of Tree Nest No. 1 and the root chamber of Tree Nest No. 2. If one was burned or cut off, the other could still maintain basic operation.

The fault-tolerance rate doubled.

The Flesh Puppet was not idle on the edge of the Settlement.

After No. 3 was dragged to the temporary wounded corner on the side of the Camp Administration Room as an overly frightened wounded soldier.

Someone brought it water and dry rations every day.

It repeatedly confused the judgment of the Camp Administration Room with intermittent delirious ravings and disordered memory fragments—today saying Shen Kui went north.

Tomorrow saying the living forest closed in from the Fallen Wood Area, with each statement slightly contradicting the last.

The Camp Administration Room wrote three confession wooden boards, the contents of which did not match, ultimately attributing it to "the wounded person is mentally deranged".

A mentally deranged wounded soldier was not worth guarding closely, so No. 3's range of activity gradually expanded to the periphery of the Camp Administration Room instead.

It saw clearly the shift-handover rhythm inside the wooden palisade, the wooden token verification process when the camp clerks collected materials, and the temporary stacking point of the remaining supplies in the Small Storage Shed.

Someone mentioned in the remaining messages of the outer perimeter patrols.

The monsters over at Black Tree Mouth seemed not to have struck again recently.

The Outpost ruins were quiet, the Fallen Wood Area was quiet, and even the branch roads and transportation routes no longer showed any new drag marks.

Inside the Settlement, some people took this as evidence that the monsters had retreated heavily injured, while others insisted it was a contraction before the storm.

What Jiang Ming wanted was precisely this illusion.

What they saw was that people no longer died in the forest; what they couldn't see was that the two Tree Nests had already closed their energy-transmitting loops underground.

On the night Tree Nest No. 2 took shape!

For the first time, he saw the phrase "Node Network" on the panel.

The forest will's node map automatically updated.

Marking Tree Nest No. 1, Tree Nest No. 2, various anchor piles, and energy-transmitting lines into an interconnected topological map.

No longer just a single point plus a few tentacles, but a line segment with depth from front to back, one end pressing against the Settlement Outer Ring wooden palisade, and the other end rooted deep within Black Tree Mouth.

The sounds from the direction of the Settlement also changed that night.

It was not the scattered footsteps of the field team, nor the sharp axles of transport carts... It was a marching vibration heavier and more orderly than any previous times.

The footsteps were heavy, with few pauses, and the sound of metal collisions was not short spears and handaxes!

It was the piercing trill of blade edges scraping across gravel when heavy blades were dragged on the ground!

Tieshan was moving... like a warrior generously marching to their death.