"Thank you for your sacrifices," Gaia said softly as she gathered the souls of the humans who had died within the underground chamber. Their lives had been taken while Charles contacted his handlers, and Gaia could feel the remnants of their suffering within each soul. She carefully gathered them into her hands, treating them with far more gentleness than the people who had sacrificed them ever had. For a moment, she simply looked at them before deciding that they had already suffered enough.
Gaia then gently blew a breath of air mixed with a small amount of her own energy over the gathered souls. The souls responded to the energy before slowly drifting away from her hands, disappearing into the great rivers of souls that flowed throughout the universe. Those rivers were connected to something far greater than Gaia herself, because the soul was ultimately under the sovereignty of the universe itself. Gaia could not control that sovereignty, but she could ask the universe to treat these particular souls kindly in their next lives.
They had suffered enough, and their deaths had ultimately helped Gaia accomplish something extremely important. Thanks to them, she had located one of the Void's strongholds and, more importantly, gained a way to begin tracking the people connected to it. Gaia had no intention of forgetting what had happened inside that underground facility. The people responsible had finally made a mistake, and she intended to make sure that mistake cost them dearly.
There was another reason Gaia had allowed the communication between Charles and his handlers to continue. As long as the communication remained active, she could follow the life-force signatures of the people involved and trace the connection back toward the location they were attempting to reach. It was not something she could simply do whenever she wanted, because the Void had managed to establish protections that interfered with her ability to observe certain locations directly. Fortunately, the communication gave her a path that bypassed those protections.
Gaia had succeeded, but only because members of the assassin family had managed to sneak into the underground room. Without them, she would have been unable to properly observe what was happening inside. Gaia could not directly peek into that particular room or identify what was happening there, even though she had performed a proper scan of Washington, D.C. The city contained so many corrupted humans that it should have been nearly impossible for the Void to hide completely, yet something had clearly been interfering with her vision.
She had noticed something strange during her scan of Washington, D.C. There were several staircases that appeared to lead nowhere, despite the structures around them indicating that they should have connected to something. Gaia immediately knew that such a thing could not be natural, especially considering how thoroughly she had scanned the area. Someone had deliberately created a method of blocking her vision, and that realization had irritated her considerably.
With the assassins inside the facility, however, Gaia had finally been able to see what was hidden behind those protections. What she discovered made her mood become considerably worse. The reason her vision had been blocked was because the corrupted humans were sacrificing roughly one hundred people every single day to maintain the formation protecting the facility. The sheer scale of the sacrifice made Gaia's anger rise as she finally understood just how far these people were willing to go.
"Boy, do I dislike these verim," Gaia muttered as she thought about what she had discovered. She still had no idea how the first members of the corrupt humans had managed to establish contact with the Void in the first place. There should have been no way for ordinary humans to reach something like that, especially considering the protections surrounding the world. Yet somehow, they had succeeded, and Gaia had no intention of allowing them to continue doing so.
Perhaps she would finally get lucky now that she had located another one of their hidden strongholds. The location itself was almost perfect for hiding from ordinary people, because it had been constructed in the middle of nowhere within the Rocky Mountain range of the United States. Deep inside one of the mountains was a cave that had been extensively carved out and transformed into a massive underground facility. Gaia looked toward the mountain with an irritated expression as she considered how long these people had managed to remain hidden from her.
"Well, let's smoke these rats out of their hiding place," Gaia thought. She still kicked herself for not discovering them sooner, but she wouldn't let them stay hidden any longer as she scanned the world for groups of humans that were out of place. She had expected the Void to have established several hidden bases, but the sheer effort they had put into concealing them had made finding the locations considerably more difficult. Now, however, she had finally found another one.
To her surprise, she discovered two more hidden locations while continuing her search. One was located in China, while the other was hidden deep within the Amazon rainforest. Gaia could not immediately determine whether every person inside those locations was corrupted, but she was not particularly worried about that problem. She could investigate them properly once the locations had been secured, and anyone who turned out to be innocent could be dealt with accordingly.
For the Chinese locations, Gaia contacted the appropriate Chinese officials and requested their assistance. She needed their cooperation to secure the locations, capture several specific targets, and prevent the inhabitants from escaping before she could investigate them. The rest of the corrupted individuals could be killed if necessary, because Gaia had no intention of allowing another situation like the underground facility in Washington to occur. She had already performed deep scans of the hidden locations and could now confirm that all three were connected to corrupted individuals.
"Well, let's get this show on the road," Gaia said with determination. She prepared the transportation formation and decided that a large force would be necessary to secure all three locations simultaneously. Thirty thousand Chinese police officers and military special forces were teleported toward the designated locations, divided according to the size and requirements of each operation. Gaia wanted everything done quickly so that the evidence could be secured before anyone had the opportunity to destroy it.
The hidden bases were considerably larger than she had initially expected. The largest contained roughly three thousand people, while the other two locations contained approximately twelve hundred inhabitants each. That meant the Chinese forces would have to secure thousands of people spread across difficult terrain while simultaneously preventing anyone from escaping. Gaia therefore wanted every entrance, exit, tunnel, and possible escape route controlled as quickly as possible.
Her primary objective was not simply to eliminate everyone inside. Gaia specifically wanted several individuals captured alive so that she could search their souls and learn more about the Void's organization. The information hidden within those souls could prove extremely valuable to her future efforts. If she could understand how the Void had originally contacted these people and how their organization operated, she might finally be able to begin dismantling it from the inside.
Xun Zhihao was the captain of an armed police force stationed in Beijing. His normal responsibility was maintaining order within the city, particularly when dealing with situations involving weapons, which had become an increasingly common concern over the previous few years. Despite the changes happening throughout the world, however, the last two years had been surprisingly uneventful for his unit. Beijing had effectively been placed under tight security, and serious incidents had become relatively rare.
That peaceful routine ended five minutes earlier.
Xun Zhihao had been informed that he was being assigned to capture a base containing corrupted humans and secure all evidence related to their plans and crimes. The location he had been given was somewhere within the Qinling Mountains, an area where reaching the target quickly would normally have been extremely difficult. His superiors, however, did not appear concerned about the distance at all, because he had simply been ordered to prepare his men and report to the square at their training facility.
The instructions he received were unusually strict. He was told to have every soldier equipped in full battle armor before deployment, and he was warned in no uncertain terms that the people they were about to encounter were expected to fight desperately. His superiors compared them to veteran drug dealers who already knew they were going to be executed and therefore had nothing left to lose. That warning placed considerable pressure on Xun because he understood that they were not dealing with ordinary criminals.
As he assembled his forces, Xun Zhihao immediately called a meeting with his team leaders. They were given a complete layout of the hidden base, including information about its inhabitants, entrances, exits, and potential escape routes. Because there were several possible ways for the corrupted humans to flee, Xun decided that his forces needed to be distributed rather than simply attacking the main entrance with everyone at once. Each escape route would therefore be guarded by one hundred men whose sole responsibility would be capturing anyone attempting to flee.
Xun Zhihao and the remaining soldiers would attack through the main entrance. He deliberately chose this approach because he did not want the people inside to realize that they were completely surrounded. If the corrupted humans believed they still had a chance to escape, they might surrender or remain inside rather than desperately fighting their way through the surrounding forces. Xun wanted to give them an illusion of hope, because desperate enemies were far more dangerous than frightened ones who still believed they had options.
There was not much more time for him to explain the strategy. Once everyone had received their assignments, the teleportation process began, and Xun Zhihao and his men were transported directly to their designated positions around the hidden base. The sudden transition from the training grounds in Beijing to the mountains left many of the soldiers momentarily disoriented, but their training quickly took over. Within moments, thousands of soldiers were positioned around the target according to the plan.
So that was how they were handling the transportation problem, Xun Zhihao thought as he looked toward the hidden base. He still could not help wondering why his unit had been selected for such an important operation, especially considering the enormous number of soldiers available to the Chinese government. The answer was something he did not yet know. His unit had simply been one of the few forces that met all the necessary requirements and could be mobilized immediately when the situation suddenly demanded it.
Xun Zhihao tightened his grip on his weapon and looked toward the entrance. Whatever waited inside that mountain, he knew that the operation had already begun and there was no turning back. His orders were simple: secure the location, capture the designated targets, preserve the evidence, and eliminate anyone who resisted.