Chapter 8: “…just as you wish”
Watching the nuclear crystal hunters arrive at Qianli City, Cheng Qisheng deactivated the guidance.
She did not lead them directly to the coordinates.
The task given to the nuclear crystal hunters was to check whether this city had a safe zone, not to recklessly rush in headfirst.
When it comes to scouting enemy conditions in unfamiliar territory, every Blue Sea warrior has more experience than she does.
The Creator God calmly waited to reap the results.
Cheng Qisheng began checking the various devices she had exchanged from different city lords.
Weather control instrument x1, large-scale water purification systems x3, virus decontamination rooms x2, garbage decomposition plant x1……
These were all first-tier products from the marketplace that could not be upgraded.
Because they couldn’t be advanced, their second-hand prices were relatively cheap. On top of that, Cheng Qisheng was willing to accept resource payments, making them even more cost-effective.
For other city lords, once they advanced to higher tiers, buying similar equipment was unnecessary—upgraded versions could both be enhanced further and cover all residents. So these non-upgradable first-tier products became dispensable.
But that wasn’t the case for Cheng Qisheng.
She had a large population of residents, liked external exploration, and her people followed orders and often acted in groups.
These facilities weren’t just useful now; even later, when truly city-wide upgraded versions became available, these older models could still be taken out and used.
Most importantly—they were cheap!
She was currently saving up nuclear crystals to buy an air tower. Until the air problem was solved, every bit of saving mattered.
Cheng Qisheng didn’t just buy—she also sold.
The various supplies she brought from Dark Star were surprisingly popular among the city lords.
Plus, with Coriander helping her promote them everywhere, she managed to close one or two deals almost every day.
But when she added everything up, there was one rather absurd fact.
Her best-selling item turned out to be high-end mattresses.
Just as she was thinking about it, a new message came in.
[Zhou Yue Safe City: Hello, I heard you sell high-end mattresses here?]
Another city lord who had never spoken in the group chat before.
Cheng Qisheng was already used to this and quickly replied.
[Blue Sea Safe City: Yes, 25 nuclear crystals each. Support technology, memory foam with automatic rebound, ice-silk fabric that doesn’t feel stuffy, reinforced edges for stability~]
[Zhou Yue Safe City: I want twelve. Can we trade now?]
[Blue Sea Safe City: Yes, we accept nuclear crystal payments and exchanges for various facility resources =v=]
[Blue Sea Safe City: Can I ask why everyone is buying mattresses? I’ve sold quite a lot of them today alone, and they were all bought by Tier-2 city lords.]
[Zhou Yue Safe City: Others are buying too? You haven’t been cleaned out of stock, have you? Sister, how about this—I’ll take five more, so seventeen high-end mattresses in total. How about trading them for a small underground mineral exploration detector?]
Cheng Qisheng opened the marketplace to look up this detector.
It really was a good item.
It could automatically scan all types of minerals underground across an entire region. The marketplace price was 1000 nuclear crystals, making it quite a good deal.
So good, in fact, that she felt Zhou Yue was taking a loss.
Would a Tier-2 city lord willingly make a losing trade?
[Blue Sea Safe City: May I ask how much usage time is left, and whether it’s damaged?]
[Zhou Yue Safe City: Almost brand new. I bought it with 5 years of usage time, and it still has 4 years and 9 months left.]
[Zhou Yue Safe City: I’m not trying to scam you, let me make this clear first. This detector is good, really good—but it’s an underground scanning device, do you understand? I don’t know how the marketplace calculates it, but anything it detects starts at least 200 meters underground. Even if it detects something, I can’t organize people to dig it up. So it’s basically been sitting unused in my hands all this time.]
[Zhou Yue Safe City: I heard you brought a lot of equipment from the original world. I’m not sure if you have anything related to mining, but if you do, then this thing will be useful for you.]
Cheng Qisheng definitely had mining-related equipment. She asked the system to wait while she carefully checked the marketplace description. After confirming that Blue Sea could use it, she accepted the trade.
Only after securing the deal did Zhou Yue finally explain why everyone had been buying mattresses.
[I finally have a mattress, aaaah!! There’s none of them in the marketplace at all. We all escaped from our original worlds—who would bring a mattress when fleeing for their lives?]
[Every world has dangers. You can ask residents to risk their lives to bring back food, generators, or medical supplies—it’s at least understandable.
But asking them to carry a mattress? Something huge, heavy, blocks vision, and is purely for comfort? That’s just begging for your residents to complain and rebel against you.]
Perhaps because she had successfully traded away a useless detector, Zhou Yue was in a good mood and even explained why Tier-1 city lords weren’t buying.
[Tier-1s don’t buy because they’re poor and can’t afford comfort. Tier-2s already have basic safety guarantees and more stable populations, so of course they start wanting to enjoy a normal life.]
[As for why Tier-3s don’t buy… I know about “Meow Meow”—she sleeps curled up, so she doesn’t need a mattress. As for Blue Leaf, his original world seems like a medieval one, so he probably isn’t used to mattresses either.]
As for “Cosmic,” she didn’t even mention him.
Although there were only thirteen people in this group, Cosmic had very successfully managed to make twelve of them dislike him.
Zhou Yue was happily lying on her newly bought mattress while explaining to Cheng Qisheng why everyone was so short on mattresses.
Most safe cities were basically structured the same way: one city lord, one AI core, and a large number of refugees who had escaped into the city.
Then everyone embarked on the path of survival together.
There might be residents with special abilities, some workers, some who understood technology—but for city lords, building factories was simply not worth it.
The outside world was so dangerous. Safe cities needed more combat power, more healthy and mobile laborers. How could they be tied up on factory assembly lines?!
If they needed something, they could just buy it from the marketplace anyway.
As for items the marketplace didn’t sell—like mattresses—those weren’t essential. They didn’t affect survival. Having them was nice, not having them was fine.
Other safe cities didn’t have many residents, unlike Blue Sea, which could simply clear out an entire town, build walls, and calmly search the town for supplies.
They could only carry out quick raids, grab resources, and retreat immediately, or risk being attacked by zombies from elsewhere.
To save manpower and maintain reputation, city lords couldn’t possibly let residents risk their lives hauling back mattresses.
After all, lacking food and water would kill you—but not having a mattress? That wouldn’t really matter. You could just layer a few blankets and sleep anyway!
Of course, that was the logic—but once Cheng Qisheng started selling mattresses, all those Tier-2 city lords from modern worlds still rushed to buy them happily.
Because when they were Tier-1, they had no choice but to endure hardship. Now that they were Tier-2, they felt they finally had the right to start enjoying life a little.
Zhou Yue received seventeen mattresses—enough to last her for over a hundred years. In a very good mood, she gave Cheng Qisheng a reminder.
[If you’re running low on mattresses, you might want to stop selling for now. When you encounter other Tier-3 city lords in the next world, you might be able to sell them at a higher price. This thing is practically a hard currency.]
Cheng Qisheng sent back a thank-you for the reminder, and also included a gift of ten latex pillows for this big customer.
Then she checked her warehouse inventory. The mattresses she had been selling were all looted from a furniture store in a zombie town—70 in total.
Those seventy mattresses had been nearly wiped out by Tier-2 city lords. Now only three pitiful ones remained.
But then she looked again at Blue Sea’s own internal storage.
Since mattresses weren’t core survival supplies, Blue Sea hadn’t brought many during relocation.
In total… about 2 million of them.
And even if they were all used up, Blue Sea had relocated the entire planet. All technology and production equipment was intact. As long as she wanted, the people of Blue Sea could start a factory and produce mattresses at any time.
But looking at those two million, Cheng Qisheng decided there was probably no need to open a factory for now.
—
Zhou Yue Safe City—
Zhou Yue was just called Zhou Yue. When disaster struck her original world, she had been in the middle of an exam.
She was about to write her name on the test paper when the Safe City suddenly appeared, and she instinctively named it “Zhou Yue Safe City.”
She looked at the latex pillows she had been gifted and felt pleasantly surprised.
Coriander had been right—Blue Sea was the type to repay kindness.
Back when Blue Sea was in its early development phase, Coriander had given her a ton of wood, and Blue Sea had been willing to sell food in return to help him through his difficulties.
Now, she had only helped explain a few things, and Blue Sea had already sent her pillows.
Even though she couldn’t recognize the text on the packaging, just by looking at it she could tell that these pillows—like the mattresses—were high-end goods.
Zhou Yue happily hugged the pillows and rolled over on her 1.8-meter-wide comfortable mattress.
Ahhh, this is what modern life is supposed to be!
In the last world, she had been surviving in the wilderness, and she had nearly turned into a wild person!
She thanked Blue Sea from the bottom of her heart.
She needed to find a way to get closer to Blue Sea.
This was definitely a big shot. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to trade for her detector—meaning Blue Sea must have underground scanning equipment.
Who wouldn’t want to stay close to a capable, generous big shot who also repays kindness?
Zhou Yue personally carried the mattress onto the bed frame, spread out the sheets and duvet, turned on the bedside lamp, and looked satisfied at her newly arranged 300-square-meter bedroom.
As expected, advancing tiers felt amazing—the room had gotten so much bigger.
It was a pity that in the last world she had only been surviving in the wilderness, so she didn’t have many things to decorate it with. The room still looked rather empty.
But with just a mattress and a pillow, she was already very satisfied. She could slowly add more later.
Zhou Yue decided to take a nap. Lying in bed, she was still thinking that Blue Sea must have brought a lot of supplies and equipment from their original world.
Their bedroom must be incredibly luxurious.
—
Meanwhile, Cheng Qisheng’s house was plunged into darkness.
The power was out.
Then she realized—she hadn’t paid the electricity bill.
There was no other reason. She was simply out of money.
Only then did Cheng Qisheng suddenly realize: right, it was time to make money.
She was very good at making money.
When she first entered university, she had been full of ambition, wanting to earn enough to buy a home of her own.
In her first year, she wrote course design projects for classmates, worked part-time shaking milk tea, and tutored students.
In her second year, she helped various businesses build official websites and developed small programs on her own.
By her third year, her earlier “connections” and increasingly mature technical skills allowed her to take on high-paying commercial projects, working herself to exhaustion every day.
In her fourth year of university, Cheng Qisheng finally bought a small one-bedroom apartment and received an offer from a major company, with an expected starting annual salary of 300,000.
If she worked for another two years, a salary of 500,000 wouldn’t be a problem—and there was even hope for more.
And then, she was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
She had considered selling the apartment and focusing entirely on treatment, but after careful thought, she gave up on the idea.
First, she had always longed to own a home of her own. Second, if she sold it, given her condition—becoming unable to take care of herself later, even struggling to speak—what landlord would be willing to rent to her?
While she could still move around, Cheng Qisheng worked frantically to earn money. She arranged caregivers, cleaning staff, scheduled treatment plans, and even set up a supervision system.
In the end, she paid all her housing-related expenses for three years in advance.
When she was first diagnosed, she had asked around and learned that her life expectancy might only be two or three years.
Standing on her small balcony at that time, looking at the distant lights, she thought: alright, then three years.
—She would prepare everything for those three years. Whether she lived or not would depend on whether she could find a way out on Dark Star.
Three years passed.
And she really did find a way out.
In the dark room, Cheng Qisheng smiled faintly as she slowly stood up and walked toward the small balcony that had been specially partitioned off.
After her body became immobile a year ago, she had asked the cleaning lady to lock the balcony door, so it wouldn’t need cleaning and dust wouldn’t drift in.
On this power-out night, she suddenly wanted, like three years ago, to stand on that balcony and look out at the twinkling lights.
She pushed the door open—
Bright as daylight.
Cheng Qisheng: “?”
She looked at what should have been a narrow balcony, barely wide enough for two people to pass each other, and found that it was now at least 150 square meters, fully lit.
“Wait—where is this electricity coming from?”
“Aether, explain what’s going on with this room.”
The jellyfish drifted over quickly and circled the space once.
“This is the city lord’s bedroom within the City Lord’s Mansion.”
“The base area of the city lord’s bedroom is 150 square meters. At Tier 2, it expands to 300 square meters. The room you are seeing has been expanded accordingly.”
Cheng Qisheng: “……”
So what you’re saying is… the expanded space of the city lord’s bedroom actually extended into her real-world bedroom?
Her 50-square-meter apartment now had an extra 150-square-meter balcony??
Aether didn’t understand why the city lord seemed emotionally unsettled.
“City Lord, do you have any other questions?”
“Yes. Do I need to pay electricity bills?”
“Of course not. The electricity consumption of the City Lord’s Mansion is supplied uniformly by Blue Sea Power Plant.”
Cheng Qisheng took a deep breath. “Good. That’s fine.”
“City Lord, do you need anything else?”
Cheng Qisheng could barely suppress the corners of her mouth from lifting.
“No. I’ll just sit here and watch the lights.”
She already had a 150-square-meter balcony—why would she need to go look at someone else’s twinkling city lights?
She could sit here all day and look at this space that had no shared-area fees and no electricity bills.
Three years ago, she had prepared for everything in despair—including her own death.
Three years later, she sat with a talking jellyfish AI, looking up at bright, sparkling lights that cost her nothing at all.
“Aether… will the future get better and better?”
“Of course, City Lord. Under your wise leadership, Blue Sea Safe City will surely implement your policies and directives, centering around your designated…”
“Stop with the flattery you just learned.”
“Understood, City Lord. Then… what should Aether say instead?”
Cheng Qisheng patted its head.
“When I ask you things like ‘will it be like this in the future,’ you should say, ‘Yes, City Lord.’”
Aether looked up at her.
“Yes, City Lord.”
It looked at her, clearly already having been given the standard answer. Its newly awakened rudimentary intelligence core felt faintly warm—and, on its own, added a line that surfaced without instruction:
“The future will surely become better and better, just as you wish.”
