civilwarnovels Chapter 94 Martian Survivors
Chapter 94 Martian Survivors
Chapter 94 Martian Survivors
Green light, it's green light again.
Now, more than the second half of the agreement that Martian Manhunter had mentioned, Joey was curious about the source of the other party's hostile attitude toward the green light.
Previously, the usually timid blonde Kara dared to directly kill Green Lantern Abin Sue, who worked in sector 2814 of the universe where Earth is located.
Now, the Martian hunters, upon their first encounter, have shown unprecedented hostility towards Starfire, whom they have never met before.
Martian Manhunter, seeing Joey's expression, simply sighed.
"I bet you're wondering right now why we Martians hate green lights so much?"
Joey nodded: "I think you don't need to guess. Don't you Martians know how to read minds? Is there something wrong with her?"
"No, my fellow countrymen and I cannot use telepathy right now, and we don't even know if she has any problems."
Martian Manhunter pointed to a metal wristband on his wrist, from which Joey could clearly see traces of native Kryptonian technology:
"This is one of the problems that Krypton needs to solve for us. We absolutely cannot use telepathy right now."
Martians do indeed possess telepathic abilities. When used to their fullest extent, this ability can even allow them to see through other people's thoughts from a distance, much like mind reading, and even overwhelm and manipulate their minds.
But most of the time, all Martians simply use this ability to form a mental network as a means of communication with each other.
They could share their love and hate with their family and friends in an instant without any words or actions, a feeling that Martian hunters missed dearly.
"Did Kara suppress your telepathic abilities with this wristband? Did she coerce you?"
Having just been inexplicably beaten up by Kara, Joey naturally assumed the worst of her cousin without hesitation:
"I can set you free immediately, as long as you leave Earth and return to Mars."
Superman is too merciful. Cyborg doesn't think these people will leave obediently after regaining their telepathic abilities; they'll definitely turn on him.
Cyborg, who was thinking the same thing, tried to wink at Joey, but found that his current body could only make his eyes emit seven-color RGB light, so he had to give up.
Martian Manhunter and Joey didn't even notice that he had a complaint.
"No, she did give us this wristband, but it wasn't coercion or enslavement; it was protection, just as we said before, it was an equal agreement."
Martian Manhunter then explained to Joey why he and his people couldn't use their telepathic abilities:
"A deadly virus, a mental plague, once appeared on Mars, a curse from the Martian god 'Heromir'."
It infected almost our entire population, including the mental network that Martians once shared.
If we accidentally use our telepathic abilities to access the mind network, viruses can spread along the network.
Once infected, the fire of thought will quickly ignite in our minds, burning us alive from the inside out.
"What's the principle behind this?"
As the most powerful being on the internet, Cyborg analyzed cases using virology and drew an analogy between the electronic internet and Martian mental networks, yet he couldn't understand how this virus spread and existed:
"Once you connect to the mind network, you get infected, and once infected, you die immediately. So how does it spread on such a large scale?"
"The 'virus' is just an analogy. If I had to say, it's more like an emotion, an extreme fear that Martians are born with—we are terrified of fire, terrified to death."
With Martian Manhunter's explanation, Joey finally understood how Martian Manhunter's weakness—a fear of fire similar to Kryptonians' fear of Kryptonite—came into play.
Martians are not physically afraid of fire, given their physical attributes are comparable to those of Kryptonians.
How could it be burned or even killed by ordinary flames?
Martians' fear of fire is a natural fear rooted in their souls and minds, but the problem lies in the fact that their minds are simply too powerful.
When ordinary fire-fearing creatures encounter flames, their fear at most causes them to lose their composure in a panic.
However, the Martians' powerful mental abilities made this panic extremely deadly.
Once the flames ignite outside their bodies, their inner fear of fire will materialize from within through their powerful minds.
The vast majority of Martians who were burned to death were not injured by the initial flames inflicted on them, but died from the fire of their own hearts.
In other words, Martians' fear of fire could literally scare them to death.
As Joey listened to the Martian hunter's story, he remembered to look up and glance at Mars in the night sky.
The Martian landscape that Joey saw at that moment was nothing but barren wasteland, with almost no trace of any civilization that had ever existed.
Only dozens of meters below the red desert can one occasionally see traces of man-made structures.
"This is not what I expected."
Joey's original plan was that the Martians, with the support of their home planet, would secretly infiltrate Earth in preparation for an invasion, and then join forces with the Kryptonians, who were also secretly infiltrating.
As for why they want to conquer the Earth, that's the least important reason to consider.
Militarism, chauvinism, hegemonism, imperialism.
When you are powerful enough and possess one or more of the above ideas, any weak person around you will naturally be born with original sin.
Being conquered is their only purpose in existing in this world.
But Mars is now a dead planet devoid of any signs of life.
"What's happening on Mars? Where are the other people?"
"These are the 'other people' you asked about."
Martian Manhunter counted the 372 people present, meticulously introducing each person's name to Joey before continuing his explanation:
"Aside from a few cowards who refuse to join our cause, this is all the Martians here. I've already told you, that 'virus' is a mindset born from extreme fear."
While a virus cannot spread and infect more people on a large scale by rapidly killing its host, it can infect minds.
The fear of being burned alive spread rapidly through mental networks, as well as through what was seen with the naked eye and even through rumors, creating a chain reaction that infected and wiped out the vast majority of the population on Mars in a very short time.
"We are Martians from thousands of years ago. Decades ago, during a runaway time tunnel experiment on Earth, we were accidentally pulled into the future, which is your current era."
That time travel experiment was full of chance and coincidence. In addition, the difficulty of going downstream and going upstream is vastly different. Even with the wisdom of hundreds of us plus other intelligent people on Earth, we simply cannot reverse and reproduce this kind of time travel.
We had to fly back to Mars in this era, only to discover that everything on Mars had long since disappeared.
No one on Mars survived the deadly plague.
And so, by a twist of fate, we escaped that spiritual plague.
"Then, let me answer the question you were most interested in earlier—why do we hate the Green Lanterns so much? Of course, it's because all of this is inextricably linked to the Oa Guardians behind the Green Lantern Corps."
Are you sure?
Joey didn't know if it was true or not, but he had some vague speculations in his mind.
It's true that the fear of fire is an instinctive reaction of living beings. All animals on Earth are afraid of fire, and most species that are not afraid of fire were burned to death by forest fires and did not survive to the present day.
However, nowadays, humans have a significantly lower subconscious fear of fire than other wild animals, which is why there is the practice of lighting campfires in the wild to scare away wild animals.
This should also apply to Martians; a race that has naturally evolved to the point of civilization should not have such a strong psychological reaction to fire.
Unless their evolutionary process involved some unnatural intervention, "so your Martian fear of fire is not a natural evolutionary trait."
"That's right."
Martian Manhunter clenched his fists, his already blood-red eyes turning even more crimson. At this moment, his humanoid form could no longer conceal his inhuman ferocity.
"After thousands of years, our compatriots turned to dust, our civilization became wasteland, and we became the last Martian survivors."
In the eyes of those who call themselves "guardians of the entire universe," the annihilation of my entire race is merely a negligible price to pay for a more peaceful future for the universe.