Chapter 999 - 561: "Anthropologist" (Part 2)

Li Wenxi thought for a moment and asked, "So, the alien invaders you mentioned, how many of them are there?"

"How many? Hmm..." Xu Ying pondered for a bit and said, "I’m not sure how many alien invaders are in the world now, but back in our time, the number of alien invaders residing on Earth was about... nearly a thousand."

"Nearly a thousand? Hmm... How should I put it, that’s a little less than expected?" Li Wenxi tilted his head, "Didn’t you say they treated Earth as a very important colony? So why only... nearly a thousand? Are they very large?"

"Large? No, no, actually, they’re about the same size as humans from Earth."

"Then..."

Nearing a thousand human-sized individuals, capable of colonizing this vastly expanded planet...?

"Nearly a thousand was the count at the end of the world’s collapse; initially, the ones who invaded Earth numbered only over a hundred."

Xu Ying explained, "Initially, when they arrived on this planet, they just aimed for short-term resource plundering, planning to leave once the planet’s resources useful to them were exhausted."

"So at the start, during the time when we were captured, we were told that these invaders would stay on Earth for about ten years at most before leaving. Back then, we captives were divided into three factions."

"One faction believed that once they left, we survivors could stay and rebuild our home.

Another believed they would take us with them to conquer the entire universe.

The last faction thought that after exploiting us, they’d slaughter us all before leaving."

"But as you know, for some reason, they suddenly decided to stay."

"My brother thinks they wanted to obtain the unique giant beast bloodline from this planet to enhance their interstellar plundering army. Later, their various actions indeed revolved around the giant beast bloodline. But I always feel... it’s not that simple."

Xu Ying looked out the window with doubt in her eyes: "Giant beast bloodline, is it really that important compared to high-tech weapons? And what about Earth’s significant changes? Earth’s volume has expanded a thousandfold, can this be compared to the giant beast bloodline extracted from fossils?"

"Maybe..." Li Wenxi speculated, "The giant beast bloodline is indeed their goal, but perhaps just one of them."

"Hmm, I think so too." Xu Ying looked up at the crystal stones scattered across the ceiling, "The energy contained in these crystal stones is immensely vast, and these things might also be one of their goals."

She then shook her head: "Forget it, who can really guess their intentions... Where were we just now? Ah, the number of these alien invaders."

"At that time, three hundred years after the disaster, the number of alien invaders rose from less than a hundred to over a thousand. And now it’s a thousand years later..."

Li Wenxi chimed in: "Their numbers, it might be even more now. Perhaps tens of thousands?"

"Yes, quite possibly." Xu Ying nodded, "Tens of thousands. Tens of thousands..."

After repeating it, she suddenly laughed bitterly.

"Well, it’s not that many, really."

"...If you see what they look like, you wouldn’t think that." Xu Ying said, with a look of extreme disdain on her face, "They look so random, placing them in the Cambrian Period, they’d be monsters..."

Cambrian Period, an era of life on Earth five hundred million years ago.

Because everything was in the initial stage of life exploration, unlike modern species that have undergone long natural selection, creatures from the Cambrian Period had quite random appearances.

Bring life from the Cambrian Period to now, enlarge the individual to the size of a human, and that magical appearance would rival the creatures of Cthulhu.

Monstrous in the Cambrian Period, what do they really look like...?

Honestly, Li Wenxi was quite curious: "So, what do they look like?"

"Well... you’ll see for yourself later, sister-in-law; you’ll get to encounter them." Xu Ying said helplessly, "There’s quite a bit of individual variation, each looks somewhat different, I can’t even describe them."

"I see." Li Wenxi grew more curious.

"Moreover, those alien invaders not only have extremely strong individual power, making them almost impossible to kill, but most importantly, their ability to control other life forms is too powerful, each individual is like a continuously renewing army. Mutated creatures, you don’t need me to explain more, right?"

"Indeed..." Li Wenxi nodded.

Xu Ying seemed troubled: "So those monsters don’t need large numbers at all, a hundred or so are enough to rule this planet, and if there were tens of thousands, that would really be... my brother left me quite a mess..."

"Hmm..." Li Wenxi started to increasingly feel that reclaiming this planet was really quite hopeless.

"Alright, alright, you go rest, I... I’ll go out and see if I can run into those lackeys again." Xu Ying stood up.

"Weren’t you tired today? Aren’t you resting?"

"Not tired, just started feeling sleepy again. Do you have any oranges, sister-in-law, give me a few."

"Alright."

After getting the oranges, Xu Ying immediately sank and disappeared into a purple-black vortex.