After all, the Taixu Shrimp itself is a living space creature, and the Earth Mother Fungus lives in symbiosis inside the Taixu Shrimp, at least feeding some nutrients back. The Mo Mountain People are purely hitching a ride on the shrimp’s power, parasitizing the giant shrimp to carry out interstellar colonization. The flesh inside the Legion battleship seems to be the same principle—parasitic on the entire Legion, breeding and growing by borrowing the Legion’s strength, Titan’s strength, and the soldiers’ strength.
Not only are the Titan battle-bodies parasitized by this flesh, the crew aboard the ship are all parasitized Hosts as well. Whether Legion soldiers or slaves, spiders, lizards, bald heads—on all these Different World crew members you can see traces of the flesh’s parasitism.
From the Legion’s daily routine, most of their time beyond training and study is spent maintaining the hull and raising this flesh. They don’t just mix flesh into their daily meals—soldiers will even trade whole chunks of severed limbs to replace their own bodies. The extreme cases simply copy the lizardmen: from the neck down, their entire torso and limbs are kneaded out of this flesh into a human-shaped shell.
Yet this flesh is different from the Fungus Mother. It’s not some specially cultivated symbiotic resource to improve the environment or produce oxygen. On the contrary, it also consumes survival resources and needs regular supplies of protein and water. So in a sense, this flesh can also be regarded as passengers aboard the Titan, as part of the Legion—or to spell it out more clearly:
Flesh is also people.
Yes—if Tie Dan’s analytical calculations and Primordial Spirit Perception are not off, then what this disgusting flesh breaks down into is, in fact, human. And not just one—many people, all their genes mixed together like hybridization, but with a very high level of purity, belonging to the original, pristine "human," with almost no trace of Daoist Skill cultivation genetic modification.
And based on Tie Dan’s further observations, these "People of Flesh" also have an irreplaceable role in the Legion. It seems Legion soldiers need human flesh as a medium in order to operate the Legion’s various weapons and equipment.
On the armor, equipment, vehicles, and outer shells of Legion soldiers, you see collected flesh and skin grease everywhere—patches of skin sewn and pasted onto the armor hull, various bones and skeletons stuck on helmets and shoulders, decked out like serial killers.
Even the most common mecha in the warehouse has its cockpit filled, a layer of flesh smeared over the control consoles. They hang dead men’s bones on the control stick, like car ornaments dangling from a rear-view mirror. When powering up, you have to use the bone for a verification scan before the mecha will start.
So if Tie Dan’s guess is right, this is probably because every piece of equipment in the Titan has strict permission checks. Besides needing the appropriate Legion rank and professional knowledge, you also need these "People of Flesh" genetic credentials to use it. Maybe because Legion soldiers are mostly Different World alien species, they can only use this sinister, filthy, nauseating method—stuffing a few extra catties of meat onto themselves to cosplay as "human."
Though, to be fair, Tie Dan has actually seen this kind of scene—walls and floors smeared everywhere with human flesh.
In Lingxu’s memory.
Indeed, this very scene is also recorded in the Mystic Sect Daoist Sutra.
It was the sort of accident that frequently occurred back when the Mystic Sect first practiced Qi Refining, cultivating Escape Technique methods.
After all, as everyone knows, an Escape Skill first jumps and upgrades your dimension, turning you into escape light to run, then jumps back down a dimension to return to the real world. So for those Disciples with dull natural talent, if their Cultivation Technique isn’t up to standard, or their arithmetic is off, they’ll miss by a hair and be off by a mile—one escape and they get stuck inside a wall, or the upper body goes through but the lower body doesn’t, or the inside goes through while the outside doesn’t.
Thus their bones, flesh, skin, and organs get splattered along the Escape Technique trajectory, forming a road of flesh and blood, while part of them is dropped in other dimensions, other spaces. The entire person ends up spread out into a sheet of rotten meat, neither able to live nor to die—a special scenic spectacle straight out of Purgatory, just like what we’re seeing now.
What? What can you do about it? If the Magic doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work—what else can you do? You just watch the stuck guy cough blood and die, wail and die miserably. So the Mystic Sect gradually learned to keep their eyes clean, and from then on they stopped accepting those dumb idiots who couldn’t learn Escape Skills as entry-level students.
Of course, Tie Dan still can’t tell, for the moment, what kind of magic trick, Escape Skill, or scientific experiment this particular "Person of Flesh" went through to end up in this neither-living-nor-dead, neither-form-nor-formless, eerie state.
But based on the overall structure of the Titan and the distribution of flesh textures throughout, Tie Dan can analyze and deduce that these "People of Flesh" are probably the true owners of the Titan—likely the original crew of the ship—who were wiped out in war, or underwent some catastrophic uncontrolled upheaval that caused the Titan to crash and turned all the crew into this grotesque flesh state.
After that, this Titan was captured by the Legion and then usurped by all kinds of Evil Demons and Heretics from the Different World, modified into the main base of the Chaotic Star Sea.
Indeed, judging from the external celestial environment, this place is the Chaotic Star Sea—what people call the asteroid belt.
Tie Dan originally came to the Mecha Zone to find a few local Divine Sect trainees and ask about Earth’s situation. But he didn’t know the way, and somehow, muddled and confused, he just followed the Demons and flesh mecha out of the bay, then followed the mass of mecha flying into space, weaving through meteors and entering the asteroid mining belt to extract resources.
And yes, although these Legion heavy mecha are wrapped in human skin, crowned with skeletons, half metal half flesh, with a terrifying and frenzied getup that looks like some Chaos Demon King, they’re actually just the lowest-tier miners.
Judging purely by parameters and calculations, forget about picking a fight with the Mystic Sect—their overall quality doesn’t even beat Mo Mountain’s cockroach fairy clothes or the Multi-headed Demon Gods. At best they’re space tractors: industrial Equipment that low-ranking privates and natives are allowed to operate, so long as they’ve learned basic idiot-proof controls. They handle basic tasks like mining and hauling ore, sending resources into the Titan for processing to directly manufacture all kinds of Equipment, starships, and ammunition.
From the outside, this Legion Titan doesn’t look that disgusting. It’s a textbook industrial-style super-ship, shaped like a gun. Its size seems a bit smaller than the umbrella fungus, and the tech looks a bit more backward, but it still has complete production lines and shipyards built-in.
After five hundred years of intensive mining in the Chaotic Star Sea, with the Titan’s support, hundreds of nearby asteroids have been converted into military ports and shipyards, packed densely with container freighters and asteroid factories. Just by numbers, there are probably over a thousand ships.
Of course, the Legion presumably isn’t dumb enough to use this kind of civilian fleet to go head-to-head with the Company’s Titan Fleet. It’s probably just so they can haul more property with them when they run.
"Shua shua shua."
At this moment Tie Dan sensed a violent surge from the Luohou Star, and looked over—only to see three starships arrive in a flash of jump light.
Completely different in style from the Legion warships, these three ships were clearly in the local aesthetic. The classic Immortal Palace-style Flying Dragon Ship–Meng Chong Lou Ship, ornate beams and painted rafters, brocade flags fluttering—despite being in the vacuum of space, they somehow still had oars and sails. Probably just some kind of sightseeing flower boats.
But strangely enough, Tie Dan saw at a glance that True Qi was flourishing around those three tower ships, each wrapped inside a Luminous Pearl–like bubble of water. The Xuanming Water was crystal clear, forming an ocean like glass, reflecting every ship’s giant main sail, on which two huge gold-shining Seal characters blazed.
Penglai
Yingzhou
Fanghu
Huh???
Seeing this, Tie Dan wanted to fly over and take a closer look, to see if they were local acquaintances he recognized. But just then, a strand of web tugged, the Star Xuan shifted, and Tie Dan blinked to find himself staring into the spider’s eight eyes again, knowing it had dragged him back inside.
"Xuantian friend, we are very sorry—your application to join the Legion has been Bo."
"Tsk..."
Tie Dan was thoroughly annoyed.
"So what, your General refuses the polite drink just to force the penalty wine, huh? You just have to make a move against me? Fine, come on—fight!"
The spider shook its head, clutching a broken chelicera, and spoke softly,
"Not so, not so. Different World pirates have come knocking to rob us. The General has decided to use this opportunity to test your violence.
Xuantian friend, get ready—we’re about to launch you over."