105: Chapter 105 Devastation

The first day of Blue Star's evolution and expansion had passed.

Chen Mo hovered above Han City, his Force Field like a massive, inverted transparent bowl, completely enveloping the entire city and the surrounding area.

Outside the Force Field, the rain poured down like a deluge, with volcanic ash and acid mixing together as they slammed into the earth.

Inside the Force Field, the air was dry. Although the sky was dark, not a single drop of rain could penetrate that invisible boundary.

The intensity of the earthquakes began to decline from its peak.

But Chen Mo knew that the crisis was far from over.

Volcanic ash was still spewing forth.

From the direction of the United States' Yellowstone Supervolcano, a gray column hundreds of kilometers in diameter continued to pour into the stratosphere, converging high in the atmosphere with the ejecta from Mount Fuji in Japan and dozens of volcanoes along the Andes Mountains on the Southern Continent.

Driven by high-altitude atmospheric circulation, the ash spread across the globe.

The sky at noon hung extremely low, glowing with a rust-like dark red.

But what was more lethal were the invisible things.

Sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen fluoride.

These large quantities of toxic gases released by the volcanic eruptions combined with water vapor high in the sky, turning into corrosive acid that poured down with the torrential rain.

Global acid rain had begun to fall.

Chen Mo's perception turned toward the vegetation outside of Han City.

He could "see" those acidic droplets landing on leaves, corroding dense clusters of brown holes.

Vast stretches of broadleaf forests rotted in the acid rain; the leaf tissue was eaten away, leaving only the reticulated veins hanging on the branches like countless tattered green flags.

Vast stretches of broadleaf forests began to die.

First, the leaves fell off, then the bark peeled away from the trunks, exposing the xylem that had already begun to turn black.

Entire forests turned from emerald green to withered yellow within hours, and then to a decaying grayish-black.

Then he saw another scene.

On the same hillside, a low-growing shrub was changing.

Stimulated by the acid rain, its leaves secreted a waxy film; as the rain hit the leaf surface, it formed droplets that rolled off, unable to penetrate.

Several ferns nearby were also secreting a type of alkaline mucus; the moment the acid rain dripped onto the leaves, a weak neutralization reaction occurred, making a sizzling sound.

The Spiritual Qi concentration had reached over a hundred times its initial value, and this number was still slowly climbing.

In an environment with this concentration of Spiritual Qi, evolution was not a slow selection process measured in thousands or tens of thousands of years, but a violent iteration measured in hours and minutes.

Every second, tens of thousands of plants died under the assault of the acid rain, and every second, tens of thousands of plants developed new resistance under the stimulation of Spiritual Qi.

The withered yellow of death and the emerald green of evolution overlapped on the same hillside, forming an ugly but real new layer of vegetation.

The same was true for animals.

In his perception, a clouded leopard was giving birth in a cave.

Its breathing was irregular and its body temperature was high, but two cubs had already arrived safely.

Outside the cave entrance was acid rain, and the air inside the cave was filled with volcanic ash, but the cubs' first cries were still full of vigor.

In the rivers, fish were floating belly-up in droves, while at the same time, the gills of a few individuals were rapidly generating a new layer of mucus to resist the acidic water.

Those fish that survived would complete reproduction within a few days.

Those who were alive were doing everything they could to stay alive.

Chen Mo watched all of this calmly.

These were the miracles of life.

It was the choice made simultaneously by billions of lives in desperate straits.

To survive.

The super cyclones on the ocean surface were moving slowly.

The Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean.

Across the three major oceans, seven super cyclones were moving slowly within their respective domains.

The eye of each cyclone had a diameter exceeding three hundred kilometers, and the outer spiral cloud Systems covered an area of over one thousand five hundred kilometers.

Peak wind speeds exceeded one hundred and twenty meters per second, and central air pressure dropped below eight hundred and fifty hectopascals.

Huge columns of water were sucked up from the ocean surface, and water vapor was transported upward within the cyclone walls at a rate of hundreds of millions of tons per hour, forming a liquid water bridge connecting the ocean surface to the stratosphere.

One of the cyclones originated from the South Sea and traveled westward, carrying enough water vapor to subject the entire Southern Xia region to another week of super torrential rain.

Then it stopped in front of the Himalayas.

That roof of the world, spanning thousands of kilometers, stood like a silent city wall at this moment.

Even a super-large-scale cloud mass at the cyclone level could not easily cross over this gigantic barrier standing thousands of meters above sea level.

The water vapor was forcibly lifted at the southern foothills of the mountains, cooled rapidly, and condensed into a wall of water as it fell.

At the southern foothills of the Himalayas, the air-raid shelters and refuges on the Southeast Continent had all been filled with rainwater.

Disaster prevention buildings in dozens of cities built in the valleys collapsed one after another under several consecutive days of super precipitation.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the United States was enduring the simultaneous landfall of a group of hurricanes.

The fate of the Set-class super aircraft carrier, which once cost twelve billion dollars to build, was like that of a paper boat in the face of the super hurricanes.

As the hurricane's core wind speeds crushed over it, the aircraft carrier's steel hull twisted repeatedly amidst waves exceeding one hundred meters and sonic-speed gales.

The sound of the hull snapping in the middle was swallowed up silently in the roar of the storm.

All the abandoned coastal cities were being repeatedly plowed over by sea waves.

When the seawater backflowed tens of kilometers inland and then receded, it left behind a layer of silt half a meter thick, mixed with broken construction Materials and volcanic ash.

Meanwhile, the African Continent had completely lost contact.

On satellite imagery, that continent only showed a blurry gray-black outline under the cover of volcanic ash.

The last batch of signals from the African Continent came from the directions of Cairo and Johannesburg, and they were interrupted one after another on the evening of the first day of the disaster.

Eleven thousand kilometers away, no one knew what was happening on that continent.

Han City Command Center.

On the holographic screen in front of the high-ranking official, dense data was scrolling and updating.

Behind every piece of data was a disaster report from a base city.

The atmosphere in the command center was slightly more relaxed than when the disaster had first broken out.

The first peak was passing, the communication network was still running, and the coverage of low-orbit satellites remained stable.

But the high-ranking official's expression did not relax.

He was looking at the report for Qian Province.

Qian Province. The losses were the most severe.

The data on the screen showed it clearly: the base city complex in the mountainous area of central Qian Province, although not in the direct impact zone of the flood peak, had endured another form of the disaster during the first day of super torrential rain.

The base city there had made the most thorough preparations when it was built, staying away from mountains, reinforcing the foundation, and designing the drainage System with redundancy to meet the thousand-year flood standard.

But the form in which the disaster descended exceeded everyone's expectations.

It was not just simple torrential rain, nor was it just a simple landslide.

It was a combination of both.

The speed at which the super torrential rain formed runoff on the mountain surfaces exceeded the soil's absorption limit.

The soil became saturated and collapsed, bringing the entire slope down with it; soil, rocks, and broken trees were all swept along by the torrential rain, forming a mudslide-level flash flood.

It carried a force denser than concrete and poured into the base city in the valley.

Those flood control dams built to standard were easily flattened like sand piles in the face of the mud and rock flood.

The design pressure that the watertight gates at the shelter entrances could withstand was instantly exceeded, and the mudslide poured into the refuge areas along the passageways.

"The statistical results," the voice of a staff officer beside him was very low, "Qian Province… 3.7 million people."

The high-ranking official did not answer.

He stared at the screen, looking at that number.

3.7 million, and that was just for Qian Province.

Reports from other provinces were still coming in one after another.

Secondary geological disasters in Xiang Province, local flooding in Yunmeng Province.

Every base had its own casualty count, and behind every number was a specific name.

When all the data was aggregated, the final statistical result appeared in the center of the holographic screen.

Xia Nation.

Within the first week of the disaster, 7.82 million people had perished.

The high-ranking official remained silent for a long time. Then he said: "Prepare the notification."