15: Chapter 15 Desperate Situation

The population crossed the four-digit threshold on a sweltering afternoon. With the help of Marcus, Locke completed the second expansion of the recruits—recruiting another eighty people from exiles and survivors who had been fleeing from the surrounding areas, bringing the total number of militia to one hundred and thirty. Old Tom's Arsenal—which now officially occupied three connected wooden huts—had stabilized the daily production of flintlock muskets at five. Laser guns were sealed away by him as a strategic reserve, not to be used until a critical moment.

Alice's work rhythm at the medical station had stabilized. Every morning, she treated the new wounded brought in overnight—most of whom were militia members who had skirmished with orcs while scouting the perimeter. She still wore that suppression ring, but she had found a way to maximize psionic efficiency within the ring's limitations—instead of releasing psionic shocks, she permeated trace amounts of psionic energy into the bandages, allowing wounds to heal at an accelerated rate invisible to the naked eye. He did not ask her how she managed it. He simply took two more packs from that box of mints and placed them in the cabinet at her medical station.

The chaos attention level began to rise steadily. Lin Mo noticed this trend but could not find a direct cause—Alice had not used psionic energy on a large scale, and the militia's activities had not noticeably crossed any lines. However, in the chaos perception system, a bastion of order continuing to expand on the edge of a forgotten star sector was, in itself, a threat.

On the seventy-third day, the scouts brought back definitive intelligence: an unprecedented orc legion was moving toward Blackstone Village. The number was over three thousand, including at least one Warboss-class unit. Locke was silent for a full two minutes after hearing the report.

He stood there, looking at everything before him, and suddenly had a very strange feeling—if someone had told him a month ago that he would be on a planet countless light-years away from Earth, using high school chemistry knowledge to make gunpowder, university club experience to build guns, and product manager logic to plan a village's defense system—he would have certainly thought that person was crazy. But now he stood here, and every single thing was happening in reality.

"Three thousand," he said. "We have eighty flintlock riflemen, twenty laser guns, and the rest are melee weapons."

The night wind blew again. This gust was cooler than the last, carrying a scent of mixed metal and soil. He wrapped himself tighter in the coarse cloth coat that had worn into frayed edges—this had been given to him by the villagers, and it was much warmer than the T-shirt he had been wearing when he transmigrated.

"Can we fight?" Lin Mo asked.

Locke looked up at him: "If we don't fight, how many days will it take them to get here?"

"At their current speed, five days."

"Five days is enough for me to completely reconfigure the terrain outside the village." Locke stood up and brushed the dirt off his knees. "We can fight."

That night, Lin Mo and Locke sat in the Archon's office for three hours, facing a hand-drawn map. Locke used charcoal to draw six defensive lines on the map—it wasn't drawn by him alone; it was the final version he, Marcus, and Old Zhou had revised three times. Lin Mo watched from the side, occasionally interjecting with a question about ammunition rationing. That plan would not look out of place in any military textbook, yet it came from the hand of a militia captain who had never left this planet.

Before the meeting ended, Lin Mo took one last look at the positions marked on the map—there was one point Locke had heavily circled twice with a charcoal pencil. He asked what that was. Locke said he wasn't sure either, but scouts reported regular vibrations on the ground at that location, as if something was moving underground.

He had once read a sentence in a fragment of an Imperial database—[Humanity has expanded among the stars for ten thousand years, yet has never truly understood a single planet.] At the time, he didn't understand. Now, standing on this planet that didn't even have a name, smelling the sulfur and rust in the air—he understood.

The chaos attention level rose to 35. Lin Mo moved Alice's medical station from the end of the village to a position closer to the defensive lines. He said it was for "convenient transport of the wounded," but when Alice saw him designate the empty room at the end of the village with the sealed door as an "emergency evacuation point," she simply nodded.

Five days. Three thousand orcs. One thousand and thirteen people in Blackstone Village. Locke's six defensive lines. Twenty sealed laser guns. And a pair of golden streamers that occasionally flickered at the edge of his vision.

*Three thousand orcs gathered on the horizon into a moving wall,*

*Locke's six defensive lines drawn on the mud had not yet dried.*

Rigert's patrol left Blackstone Village at dusk. Before boarding the vehicle, the Imperial lieutenant turned back to look at Lin Mo and said something that did not belong within the scope of his duties: "If you can survive this year, perhaps you really can change some things." He did not answer. He watched the taillights of the armored vehicle disappear into the gray-purple twilight and wrote a line in his notebook: "The grassroots of the Empire are more fragile than I imagined. Fragile to the point of being willing to tell the truth to a stranger."

[Why are you still here?] Lin Mo asked the young man who had been following him.

The young man paused for a moment, then said: [Because the direction you are walking in is the right one.]

[How do you know?]

[I don't know. But I would rather die following someone who is walking in the right direction than live following a group of people walking in the wrong one.]

Lin Mo opened his notebook under the kerosene lamp. From the first day of his transmigration, he had been recording everything he deemed important: the weaknesses of orcs, the bureaucratic structure of the Empire, the fluctuation frequency of underground energy, and the temperature changes of the octagram pendant. These records looked disorganized—but in his mind, they were slowly forming a web. Every piece of information was a thread in this web. He believed that one day, when enough threads were interwoven, he would see the complete shape of this web. He added today's events to it as well. Then he closed the notebook and locked it in the desk drawer.

[What is this thing?] Someone poked the metal fragments on the ground with a gun barrel.

[Don't touch it.] Lin Mo stopped him, [It might be a mark of chaos.]

Rigert's patrol left in the twilight. The armored vehicle's taillights became smaller and smaller under the gray-purple skyline, eventually disappearing into the undulating outline of the hills. Lin Mo stood at the village entrance, watching the vehicle leave. He noticed that the convoy's route was different from when they arrived—Rigert was avoiding a certain direction. That direction was exactly the North Mountain Hills that Old Tom had mentioned. He did not tell anyone about this observation. He tucked this information into the increasingly dense web in his mind.

After Rigert's patrol left, Lin Mo stood at the village entrance for a long time. It wasn't because he wanted to watch the convoy leave—it was because he was waiting for verification. He was waiting to see if Rigert would stop halfway, if he would send scouts back, if he would observe Blackstone Village one last time with binoculars from the high point of the hills. He waited for about a quarter of an hour. Nothing happened. The convoy never appeared again after disappearing over the horizon. Lin Mo confirmed two things: First, Rigert's interest in Blackstone Village was limited to his inspection mission. Second, the direction Rigert was avoiding—the North Mountain Hills—indeed had a road he did not want to take. Rigert knew where that road led.

In the evening, Lin Mo thickened the dashed line for the North Mountain Hills on the map. He still didn't know what was behind the wall. But he knew that the Imperial officer was deliberately avoiding that direction, and that was a valuable clue. He marked a word next to this line: Needs Investigation.

After Rigert's patrol left, Lin Mo went over the day's conversation in his mind again and again. Every word Rigert said was standard Imperial bureaucratic language—no promises beyond his authority, no leaking anything on information that shouldn't be spoken. But the sentence he said before boarding the armored vehicle—"If you can survive this year"—was not something an Imperial officer should say to a civilian in a frontier settlement. That was a line-crossing remark. Rigert had risked being disciplined to say it. Lin Mo needed to understand the meaning behind this sentence—Rigert saw some kind of risk that Lin Mo himself had not yet seen, and he believed that Lin Mo had the ability to deal with this risk.

He wrote a self-dialogue in his diary, trying to clarify Rigert's intentions. After finishing, he read those few lines again. The core conclusion was—the Empire was undergoing a subtle personnel change. Some officers on the border were beginning to try to express goodwill within the scope of their duties toward settlements they deemed worthy of attention. This goodwill was very limited—not enough to change anything substantive—but it existed.

Lin Mo closed his diary. He knew what to do. Do not rely on the Empire's goodwill—but utilize it. Find people who can cooperate within the cracks of the Empire, and then widen the cracks a little. This was the most realistic choice he could make at this stage.

*An Imperial efficiency evaluation report,*

*And a portion of military rations taken from the cellar,*

*——Lin Mo, annotation on the Imperial efficiency evaluation report*

But he did not know that tonight's moonlight was more suitable for hunting than any other night's.

Another day ended. The number of days he had spent on this planet was slowly becoming a number he dared not think about too closely. But he was still alive every day—and that was enough.

---

Five days. The vanguard of three thousand orcs had already begun to gather on the horizon. Locke wrote a line in the corner of the final defense map and then handed it to Lin Mo—he turned it over, and there were only three words on the back: **"Don't die."**

*[It is hard to meet, and hard to part, The east wind is weak, and the flowers fade. The spring silkworm will spin its silk until it dies, The candle will only cease to weep when it turns to ash.]*

*——Li Shangyin, "Untitled." One of the memory fragments of the mirror of the emperor*