Chapter 2946: When Night Falls (28)

After everyone had their fill, they continued storytelling in the same order as before, with Jenna's turn being an even greater disaster.

Actually, Jenna and Zan were aliens. Their home planet suffered a devastating plague that killed both their parents and relatives. By chance, they arrived on Earth on a spaceship and, due to the language and habit differences with Earthlings, caused quite a chaos before being recruited by the Justice League.

This meant one thing, to Earth's human race, the siblings were practically illiterate.

Zan fared a little better since he enjoyed tinkering with machines on his own planet, and after joining the Justice League, he could help the members repair their gear. Jenna, however, had studied geography, which was practically useless once she came to Earth.

With the help of the Justice League members, they learned English, but it was a mishmash and they were only at the stage where they could communicate fluently. However, for them to fully understand the underlying logic when Earthlings spoke was still a bit difficult.

When Jenna talked about her life over the past few months, it was baffling to listen to.

At first, when her mind was still sharp, her English was quite decent, but as her blood sugar rose after the meal and combined with the uninspiring content of her spoken diary, she grew increasingly drowsy. Her speech devolved into English mixed with alien grammar, eventually shifting completely into her native alien tongue.

Their alien language sounded a bit like a mix of Russian and French, expressed in a verbose manner with a monotone pitch that sounded like chanting.

For two to three hours, Jenna droned on and on, knocking out everyone except Batman with her monotonous discourse.

When she declared she had finished speaking, everyone snapped out of it as if from a dream. Wonder Woman gave an appreciative thumbs up to the ever-alert Batman, and Martian Manhunter wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth—he hadn't managed to stay awake either because he couldn't understand the alien language.

Superman's detailed storytelling might have been meticulous, but the exhilaration of his encounters with demons and ghosts had its exciting moments. Jenna's incomprehensible account, demanding constant focus from them, was a bit too hard to manage.

The Flash was utterly confused after waking up, still groggy until Superman nudged him awake. Upon waking, he too had the look of "Who am I? Where am I? What am I supposed to do?"

"Barry, you go first," Batman said, tapping the table. "You're hurt, so after you finish, you can lie down for a while."

The Flash gave him a grateful look because sitting there was indeed uncomfortable, and taking a nap on the side chair would be beneficial for his recovery.

The Flash began recounting his experiences of the past few months.

He was fairly well-educated and a bit of a chatterbox. Usually, he spoke very quickly, but now, injured and feeling terrible, his speech naturally slowed down.

Because of his injury, no one wanted to rush him, and combined with his rambling habit, he would talk about one thing for a while, then switch to another, and later circle back adding corrections or details to earlier topics; his narration was all over the place.

Fortunately, he didn't beat Superman's record, finishing in just over three hours, and by then it was already early morning.

Everyone proposed to go to sleep and continue the next day, and Batman had no objections.

There were three recliners in the conference room, originally for members to rest, but clearly, they weren't enough. The others made do with sleeping on the floor. Heaven knows where Batman got the blankets from, but none were too fussy, so they simply picked a spot and lay down.

However, considering the presence of an undercover threat, no one turned off the lights. They paired up and took turns keeping vigil, with the first pair being Batman and Martian Manhunter.

They moved to another corner of the room, speaking as softly as possible. Martian Manhunter said, "The plan cannot be that simple, right? At least from what I saw during the day, no one seemed to be lying. Are you sure the mole will slip up?"

"Of course, in fact, the information we summarized during the day is already quite substantial," Batman replied. "I believe you can also hear that the expansion pattern of the vampires is quite odd."

"You mean…"

"Theoretically speaking, if an organization wants to expand on Earth, it can't do without three factors: people, territory, and resources."

Martian Manhunter nodded, feeling that it made sense to listen to Batman on this matter.

After all, even though the Justice League was established by the Big Seven, many of the foundational aspects were sorted out by Batman. The piece of land where the Justice League was based was bought by him, the buildings were built using his resources, the Defense System was designed by him, and many of the fan activities were organized by him; he was definitely an authority on the subject.

"But the vampires seem to only care about the first aspect," Batman pointed out sharply. "They indeed have an advantage in terms of transforming members, requiring just a simple ceremony to create an absolutely loyal member, but having members alone is useless."

"First, you need a scientific management System to make the most out of converted members, as loyalty doesn't fill stomachs."

"The leaders must know their people and make the right appointments. They need to figure out everyone's strengths and then assign them to appropriate positions: those good at fighting take to the field, those good at managing take on administrative roles, those with eloquence deal with diplomacy, and those who are good for nothing do logistics and menial tasks."

Martian Manhunter nodded again. Although this was a very simple concept, truly achieving it was difficult. Throughout history, those who had successfully understood people and delegated accordingly were without exception, wise monarchs.

"Once personnel arrangements are in place, of course, we need to find a territory," Batman continued. "This is what puzzles me, the vampires have been expanding for so long, and they have no small number of members, yet they have always lacked a main base."

"Maybe they have hidden their base?" Martian Manhunter suggested a possibility.

Batman shook his head and said, "Their numbers are not just in the tens or hundreds, but in the hundreds of thousands. A base capable of accommodating so many members would not be able to escape the notice of The Flash and Wonder Woman, let alone me and Superman."

"You've also heard what Superman said before; he has been dealing with scattered incidents all this time, never a decisive battle. He has flown all over the world and hasn't found a major base with more than a thousand people. If the vampires were capable of hiding from him, they wouldn't need to skulk around in hiding."

Martian Manhunter felt Batman's reasoning made sense. Even if Batman's investigation had overlooked something, the ability of Superman to gather information was beyond reason. He could hear every person's voice on Earth while flying through the cosmos; it was impossible for hundreds of thousands of vampires gathered together to escape Superman's hearing.

"Even if they have hidden their base, where are the resources?" Batman said further. "For ordinary people, how many resource production lines would be needed to support hundreds of thousands of people?"

Martian Manhunter thought it over for a moment and then said, "The human race has already passed this stage; we are now in the age of globalization. The daily necessities of a city of several hundred thousand people may come from all over the world."

"Exactly, even if the vampires require no weapons or equipment, just to solve the food problem, they would need to establish an entirely new industry chain from scratch."

Martian Manhunter shivered as he said, "You mean they are setting up human farms?"

"The problem is they should be doing that, but they aren't," Batman shook his head and said. "As far as I know, a vampire can drain all the blood from a person at once, and they need to feed at least once a day; that is, they consume one human per meal."

"Assuming the King of Vampires has a hundred thousand vampires under his control, with fifty thousand scattered around the world able to hunt individually, and the other fifty thousand engaged in training and production tasks at the main base, to feed these fifty thousand vampires, fifty thousand humans would need to be consumed every day."

"You can't capture that many from the outside, so breeding is the only option. Humans are omnivores, and even just to maintain the minimum survival needs, about 50 tons of food is consumed daily."

Martian Manhunter drew a sharp breath. To modern agriculture, 50 tons of food is not a particularly large number, basically covering seventy to eighty acres of farmland; with agricultural machinery for large-scale farming, one person could finish the work quickly.

But expecting vampires to farm? One could only say the sun would likely not agree, and although it's not impossible to farm at night, Martian Manhunter truly couldn't imagine vampires driving farm machinery in the fields.

"The key issue is reproduction," Batman shook his head and said. "The age at which humans become sexually mature is really too late; it takes over a decade to be able to reproduce, the chance of a difficult childbirth is quite high, and then it would take another decade or so from infancy to when blood can be donated in adulthood."

"If there are a hundred thousand vampires worldwide, they would consume a hundred thousand living humans every day, which amounts to one million in ten days, nearly forty million a year. Even combining the population growth of the two highest-fertility countries, they only add this amount annually."

Martian Manhunter suddenly realized what Batman was implying—the vampires' current strategy of madly transforming members was actually leading to their own extinction.

Even if they were omnipotent and all nations of Earth couldn't stop them, the greatest enemy they would face as they continued like this wouldn't be the human race but starvation.

The reproduction rate of the human race could not keep up with the needs of the vampires.

If they could eat once every five days, or even every three days, there might still be room for improvement.

But they consume one human per day; a hundred thousand vampires a day need a hundred thousand humans. If they expand to two hundred thousand, then two hundred thousand humans would be needed every day. The entire human population of Earth only manages to birth three hundred to four hundred thousand daily; if this propagation continues, no one could sustain it.

"I'm afraid even the so-called King of Vampires hasn't thought about this problem," Batman said. "His one command has caused all vampires to begin transforming members recklessly."

"And their transformation ritual is quite simple; transforming someone takes less than ten minutes, and one vampire could easily transform twenty to thirty people a day—it's exponential growth."

"Even if their base number is only a few thousand, with several months of transformation, no one knows how many they are now; it is likely that some of the less populated villages and towns have already begun to experience famine," Batman said with concern.

"We can't go on like this," Martian Manhunter said. "At this rate of transformation, the human race will eventually become extinct."

"The extinction of the human race is no longer the biggest problem now," Batman sighed and said. "Tell me, what happens next if all humans are transformed into vampires?"

Martian Manhunter was taken aback; he had never considered this question.