Chapter 45.1: Dazzling Star
Cheng Qisheng’s reaction speed was still as fast as ever.
The very first second after the world transition, the moment she noticed frost instantly forming on the residents’ eyebrows and eyelashes, she activated the once-per-day protective barrier available to a Tier-3 Safe City.
Although it could only last for one hour, that hour was more than enough for Cheng Qisheng and Blue Sea to assess the situation.
If even Blue Sea’s capabilities proved insufficient for surviving in this world, they could at least retreat at the fifty-ninth minute.
But she was ninety-nine percent certain it wouldn’t come to that.
After all, Coriander Safe City was doing just fine here.
—Not that she meant to look down on Coriander Safe City’s abilities.
The residents suddenly felt a wave of intense cold. Although the temperature quickly began returning to normal, the frost clinging to the tiny hairs on their bodies left them looking around in alarm and uncertainty.
Anyone who had ever suffered from extreme cold knew that when it reached its limit, cold hurt.
For Blue Sea’s residents, it was as if they had been standing there perfectly fine, only to have some invisible force suddenly deliver a crushing blow to their entire bodies.
Before their rational minds had even caught up, the battle instincts ingrained in their very bones were already aggressively searching for the enemy.
Thus, the entire chain of thought unfolded almost automatically:
Extreme cold = pain = a sense of being threatened = find the source and eliminate it = and if you can’t find it, at least display your own combat strength to prove your power and intimidate whatever is threatening you.
The whole process flowed as naturally as breathing.
Wang Moning had just recovered from the shock of being suddenly frozen when she saw everyone around her flexing their muscles, looking ready to face a crisis at any moment.
“…?”
Though she had no idea what everyone was doing, Wang Moning was the type to follow the crowd. So she flexed her own muscles as well and immediately shifted into combat readiness.
Thirty seconds later, every resident’s phone chimed in unison.
The AI had arrived to assign everyone work.
To prepare for entering a new world, Blue Sea had simulated and planned for thirty-two different disaster-world scenarios.
Naturally, extreme cold was one of them.
After Cheng Qisheng activated the protective barrier, every department that had prepared in advance immediately sprang into action.
The centralized heating plan was set into motion.
All passageways were sealed off. The exterior walls of buildings were covered with insulation. Massive inflatable air-supported membranes were pumped full of air and raised over one residential district after another, effectively enclosing each neighborhood beneath its own giant dome.
The engineering plans had already been completed in the previous world. The embedded aluminum channels and steel cable anchors had all been installed in the correct locations, and the membrane sections had long since been cut and fabricated.
All Blue Sea had to do now was complete the final step—raise the membranes.
This was where the Air Towers Cheng Qisheng had previously spent a fortune on finally proved their worth.
They could cover the city with double-layered membranes and run the heating system at full power without worrying that the trapped air would become poisonous under such intense heating.
Everyone—including Aether—became busy.
Within one hour, Blue Sea had to transform the entire Safe City into one enormous heated shelter.
If they failed to finish before the hour was up, Cheng Qisheng would have to spend crystals to purchase another protective barrier herself.
The good news: Aether’s computing power covered the entire city. As long as there were enough people, it could coordinate and direct everyone to complete the task in an incredibly short time.
The even better news: Blue Sea had more than enough manpower.
Once again, the entire city entered a state of all-out mobilization.
Government departments were swamped with work. The military carried out operations methodically under centralized command. Ordinary residents also joined in under the AI’s coordination.
The only person with nothing to do was the great Creator God herself, leisurely sipping milk tea while reading through reports.
She had actually begun to lose some of her fascination with milk tea.
After advancing to Tier 3, although Cheng Qisheng still moved at her usual slow pace, her five senses had become noticeably sharper.
Now, when she drank milk tea, it tasted a little too sweet and rich.
She had been taking absent-minded sips, one mouthful at a time.
But when she looked through the perspective of the advance team wearing cold-weather gear and saw the world beyond the Safe City’s borders—a vast expanse of ice and snow, nothing but endless white in every direction—
the hot milk tea in her hands suddenly tasted much, much better.
She also found herself craving hot pot.
Let’s have hot pot today.
The first hour was critical. Cheng Qisheng took another sip of her milk tea, temporarily set aside her longing for hot pot, and continued reading through the reports.
Coriander had clearly gone through some training.
The reports from the previous world had been wordy and cluttered with information. By comparison, the reports sent from this world were both comprehensive and concise.
…Wait. How could something be both comprehensive and concise?
Cheng Qisheng had Aether make a copy and forward it to Blue Sea. Flipping to the last page, she discovered that most of the document consisted of descriptions of the various items that existed in this world.
There are this many items?
Thinking of the floating farmland inside her Safe City, Cheng Qisheng couldn’t help looking forward to what else might be available.
She flipped back to the beginning and started reading the background information.
The planet was called Dazzling Star.
It was home to a human civilization. Its people had warm, fair complexions, and their facial features and body structures were much the same as those of ordinary humans.
The only obvious difference was that every single person had silvery-white hair.
According to the information Coriander had gathered, however, the people of Dazzling Star had originally possessed gray or brown hair.
As the extreme-cold apocalypse dragged on, they gradually evolved into their current appearance in order to survive more effectively.
Their pale skin, silver-white hair, and body odor so faint it was almost nonexistent allowed them to conceal themselves much more easily in snowy environments.
When Cheng Qisheng reached this point, she sent Coriander a question.
Blue Sea Safe City: [Has the apocalypse in this world already lasted for a very long time?]
Coriander replied almost instantly.
Coriander Safe City: [Yes. The oldest records I’ve found date back at least two hundred years.
[I only learned this after arriving here myself. Worlds like this are collectively known among Safe City Lords as Natural Disaster Worlds. They usually deteriorate gradually over one or two centuries until the environment becomes what we’re seeing now. There are relatively many survivors, but almost no supplies left.
[Worlds like Velvet Star, where zombies appeared, are called Mutation Worlds. The catastrophe erupts suddenly, engulfing the entire planet in an instant. Those worlds tend to have far fewer survivors, but much more of civilization’s supplies remain intact.]
Cheng Qisheng understood.
She carefully recalled the countless catastrophes Dark Star had experienced over the ages.
Blue Sea Safe City: [If a black hole appears next to a planet, would that count as a Natural Disaster World or a Mutation World?]
Coriander Safe City: [I don’t think it counts as either. That’s a black hole. I’d call it an Unlucky World.]
Cheng Qisheng: “…”
Well, never mind.
At least all the disasters Dark Star had gone through before the black hole appeared were easy enough to classify—they were unmistakably Natural Disaster Worlds.
Many of those catastrophes had also unfolded over roughly one or two hundred years.
Coriander Safe City: [Both types of worlds have their own advantages and disadvantages for Safe Cities. Take this world, for example. You can hardly find any supplies, but it has items! One of the City Lords I just added as a friend told me that Natural Disaster Worlds usually have a self-rescue mechanism, and that mechanism is dropping items.]
Coriander Safe City: [Boss, did you read the section at the end of the report? I wrote down how to obtain the items. Most of them are dropped by killing snow beasts. A lot of these items can’t be bought from the Safe City system, and once you obtain them, you can take them with you and use them in other worlds.]
As Cheng Qisheng chatted with Coriander, she continued flipping through the report.
She soon reached the section titled Items.
The temperature on Dazzling Star had begun to fall two hundred years ago.
At first, it wasn’t too bad.
Cities where people had once worn short sleeves in summer gradually became places where long sleeves were necessary.
Then, little by little, they needed jackets.
Then thick winter clothing.
Blankets that had once weighed only three to five jin (about 1.5–2.5 kilograms) became eight jin, then ten, then fifteen.
Eventually, no matter how many heavy blankets people piled on at home, they still couldn’t keep warm.
Every kind of heating equipment imaginable was put into service.
The people of Dazzling Star had no choice but to shift to working from home on a massive scale, reducing travel as much as possible.
Crops planted outdoors could no longer survive.
People built greenhouses, barely managing to maintain enough food production to feed the population.
But the temperature continued to fall.
Vehicles froze solid and could no longer start. The ground at mining sites became frozen rock-hard. All kinds of machinery were damaged by the cold, making further mining impossible. Energy supplies were no longer sufficient, forcing people to huddle together in centralized heated shelters. One city after another was transformed into a giant heated fortress.
By this point, the people of Dazzling Star were already struggling on the very edge of survival.
Yet the temperature showed no sign of stopping simply because humanity had reached its limit.
Before long, the surface of the planet became completely uninhabitable.
The people of Dazzling Star moved underground, where they managed to cling to survival for another hundred years.
Then, in the 180th year after the temperatures first began to fall, the Snow Beasts appeared—the creatures that City Lords commonly referred to as mutant beasts.
In truth, there had been warning signs long before their appearance.
Back when heavy snow first buried the cities, people noticed tiny insects drifting down with the snowfall.
At the time, however, these insects looked harmless. They were extremely small and carried no diseases. Traveling outside had already become dangerous enough, and with everyone struggling just to survive, no one paid them much attention.
No one could have imagined that these thread-thin insects would burrow underground and, over the course of several decades, slowly grow into extraordinarily vicious Snow Beasts that preyed on humans.
The most terrifying part was that Snow Beasts didn’t actually need to eat humans in order to survive.
They hunted people partly because humans were apparently delicious…
…and partly because Snow Beasts reproduced naturally. Before reproducing, they needed to consume food to replenish their energy.
After eating people once—they would produce an entire brood.
Even worse, unlike the previous generation, these newborn Snow Beasts no longer required decades to mature.
Within just a few years, they grew to full size as though someone had inflated them like balloons.
Snow Beasts came in many different varieties.
Coriander had directly adopted the Dazzling Star people’s classification system. The report included not only descriptions of every Snow Beast type, but also illustrations and Coriander’s estimates of each one’s supernatural rank.
[After the Snow Beasts first appeared, the governments of the various Dazzling Star nations managed to hold out for about three years. Once the new generation of Snow Beasts reached maturity, however, they could no longer withstand the attacks. Governments collapsed, and ordinary people scattered to find their own means of survival.
The good news is that Snow Beast meat isn’t poisonous—it can be eaten.]
Cheng Qisheng’s eyes lit up instantly.
Her gaze lingered on the three words—
“can be eaten.”
She was almost reluctant to look away.
The people of Blue Sea loved eating meat.
But after the apocalypse began, they hadn’t been able to spare enough space to raise livestock, and their meat reserves were limited. As a result, the amount of meat in the residents’ daily meals had been drastically reduced.
Back in the Velvet Star world, aside from the large-scale cattle-and-sheep operation and the meat they had recovered from Yunbula’s grain warehouses, they hadn’t managed to acquire much more.
The main reason was that Velvet Star’s apocalypse had struck too suddenly. By the time Blue Sea arrived more than half a year later, most refrigerated warehouses had long since lost power.
Meat that had once been perfectly good had already rotted.
Eat too little meat, and people lose muscle.
Now that they had entered an extreme-cold world, protein was even more essential for maintaining the body’s strength in such freezing conditions.
