Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 593 - 337 In those years, with spears and armored horses, they raised the divine flag and started a great venture.

Chapter 593: Chapter 337 In those years, with spears and armored horses, they raised the divine flag and started a great venture.

Xiang Shan couldn’t resist opening his eyes and returned to the timespace over two hundred years later.

He, Jader, and Cain, two heroes, were squeezed onto an electric platform car. The platform car traveled through a narrow and long tunnel. The width of the tunnel was just enough to accommodate the platform car. The walls of the tunnel were slightly curved. Every certain distance, these curves would change slightly—this was to prevent enemies from entering the tunnel and then launching remote weapon strikes directly.

A wire was drawn from Xiang Shan’s body, connected to the electric motor of the platform car.

This tunnel had also been prepared by the Burrow Dragon long ago.

After staying for a few days in the empty Green Forest Stronghold, Cain led Jader and Xiang Shan away from that place, covered by a camouflage net, crawling through the blockade area. With his knowledge of the surroundings and Xiang Shan’s exceptional inner strength, the group evaded all combat and broke through the encirclement.

Afterward, Cain brought the two to an underground mine once operated by the Burrow Dragon.

This was left behind by another group of Burrow Dragons decades ago.

By the way, this was a coal mine. Canada was once a major coal-exporting country.

Although mining coal sounds strange in the Cyberpunk era, there are still a few Burrow Dragons who would mine this mineral. Liquified coal into aviation kerosene becomes a fuel with a very high calorific value and can even support supersonic motion of ramjet engines. Compared to liquid hydrogen, aviation kerosene is more stable, easier to store, and forces can be better controlled.

This still holds a certain attraction for close-combat martial artists.

For many people who didn’t have outstanding external strength but chose to install Vector Injectors because of their martial arts, aviation kerosene also qualifies as "reserve supplies."

Of course, Protectors would absolutely not use kerosene. To Protectors, every piece of coal is a fossil resource.

They would rather consume energy to refine metal-based plants.

In this winding underground passage, the three heroes relaxed the nerves that had been on edge for several days, retained a basic level of alertness, and allowed their consciousness to sleep.

And naturally, Xiang Shan continued to read that segment of memory.

The theme of this memory segment seemed to revolve around Lu Xuanyu. Old Lu was not a significant figure in Xiang Shan’s life. Old Lu was considered his friend and had even served as a "personal bodyguard" for a while [of course, it was more "symbolic" in nature], but his relationship wasn’t as close as with other friends.

However, the decades of the forties and fifties when he befriended Xiang Shan, were among the most important years in Xiang Shan’s life.

Many of Xiang Shan’s family and friends from the previous generation passed away during this period. He also lost important friends at this time.

Meanwhile, it was also the era when humanity’s "technological ascension" surged wildly forward. Technological revolutions became a daily occurrence. The business of Superman Enterprises was flourishing like flowers in bloom, boiling like oil in a raging fire. This research and development enterprise grew into a monster capable of influencing the world during these times.

And the person who wove "Xiang Shan’s Memory Labyrinth" also tried to restore that era from multiple different perspectives as much as possible.

The fragments that the Six Dragons Sect bestowed upon Protector Zhili Jiliu were from the perspective of Lu Xuanyu, a pure martial artist pursuing "technology" and "expression" and his experiences and observations during that period.

But this memory segment was too intense for Xiang Shan, causing his brain to "recall" many other things. Another segment of memory recorded by the Eighth Martial God emerged just like that.

This sensation was quite strange. To Xiang Shan, it felt as though he was observing himself through a mirror shattered into countless pieces.

The parts in the recent memory not from "Lu Xuanyu’s perspective" were the legacy of the Eighth Martial God.

The main subject of the Eighth Martial God’s memories was Zhu Xinyu, but Xiang Shan and Zhu Xinyu were not conjoined twins, and they did not stay together at all times. To complete "Xiang Shan’s life" according to the timeline, it was inevitable that perspectives from others would get mixed in.

And the clue was "time."

That conversation he had with Niyaguti and Yawgmoth occurred on the same day Lu Xuanyu was undergoing surgery.

He remembered this very clearly, impossible to forget even if he wanted to.

And that conversation opened a new Chapter for the era.

In the years that followed, humanity burned through more than a hundred billion US Dollars’ worth of resources, researching in the direction proposed by Yawgmoth’s "Plan C."

In 1985, the biology field launched the "Human Genome Project," considered an unprecedentedly massive project in the area. And yet, the budget for this project was a mere three billion US Dollars.

Even taking into account the inflation from 1985 to 2045, Yawgmoth’s "Plan C" still burned through several times the money of the Human Genome Project.

The whole of humanity, countless countries, countless researchers, were all drawn into this enormous undertaking.

And then...

It actually succeeded.

Sometimes Xiang Shan would find it somewhat unbelievable. Even though the "hundred billion US Dollars" was an unimaginable amount, compared to the result, it seemed somewhat trivial. Even when Niyaguti announced that it was a "success" one day, Xiang Shan still felt a sort of shock, thinking, "What, that’s it?"

——Such an achievement, and it only needed to burn through a hundred billion US Dollars...

Xiang Shan held his head, containing the surge of emotions.

Even after spending several years in an era without the concept of "economy," Xiang Shan could still grasp the terror of that number.

The Federation, this superpower, invested about the same amount in scientific research in one year — and this was shared among scholars of an entire nation.

Of course, securing this sum of money was not an easy task.

It involved many negotiations, many struggles.

At the time, it was Xiang Shan who fully utilized his abilities as a manager, breaking this colossal project into many smaller ones. Some were taken out to "trade," establishing deeper cooperation with researchers from around the world. Those parts that could generate "practical technologies" were then used to apply for state or publicly raised research funds.

Not to mention, Yawgmoth’s project required a thorough understanding of the proto-oncogenes used by the human immune system. And after this aspect was researched thoroughly, immunological cancers like lymphoma and leukemia were fundamentally suppressed and defeated on the ground, and even many other cancers found treatment methods — it only required repeating the same process on the remaining proto-oncogenes that Yawgmoth had already completed once.

Then there was HIV... the HIV that changed colors at its very mention.

Talking about it was quite interesting. Actually, Yawgmoth’s Plan A — "accelerating HIV" — was the simplest, lowest-risk, and least expensive to develop out of the four plans. At least "accelerating the HIV infection process" didn’t need a hundred billion US Dollars in research investment.

And in the research process of Yawgmoth’s "Plan C," HIV became an easily curable disease, with no need for fear whatsoever.

But Yawgmoth designed Plan C primarily because everyone was terrified of Plan A. [Before being sanctioned by the UN Security Council, Yawgmoth had already been designing Plan C.]

A small number of people, unsuitable for Plan C due to objective reasons, still chose Plan A.