Chapter 47.2: Snowboarding
He added another example:
[Coriander Safe City: That Tier 4 big shot once went through an extreme-heat world. When their Safe City first arrived, ordinary heat-resistant protective suits were enough for people to move around normally.]
[Five months later, only upgraded protective suits worked.]
[After seven months, only ability users could function normally outdoors.]
[By the eighth month, just before the Safe City departed, that entire world had become a sea of flames.]
[Boss, can you imagine it? It was terrifying!!]
[There was nowhere to hide. The entire planet was on fire!]
Cheng Qisheng thought to herself:
You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you—not only can I imagine it, I’ve actually seen it.
That was how Eldest Primitive Man had died.
She would never forget it.
Back then, she had still been inexperienced. She didn’t yet understand that fragile human civilizations required constant protection.
She had merely gone into the living room to pour herself a glass of water.
By the time she came back…
…the entire Dark Star had already become a sea of flames.
Recalling that dark memory, Cheng Qisheng promptly went into the living room to pour herself another glass of water to calm her nerves.
Then she changed the subject.
[Do you have anything going on today? If not, come attend another management lesson for a while. We can use your Safe City’s current situation as a case study and figure out how to keep your residents from leaving.]
Wen Huahua’s eyes lit up.
[!]
Boss Blue Sea’s management lessons were incredibly valuable.
Back in his original world, no matter how many teachers lectured him, he had never wanted to listen.
Now, however, anyone willing to teach him useful knowledge was practically a second parent to him.
—As long as they were a City Lord.
Although Wen Huahua had only experienced his second disaster world, he had already figured out one of the unwritten rules among City Lords.
Knowledge should only be learned from other City Lords…
…or from close blood relatives—preferably your own parents—if you genuinely trusted them.
If you weren’t absolutely confident that you could completely command your city’s respect…
Never learn from your own residents.
There was a saying:
“Never expose your own ignorance.”
That principle applied perfectly within a Safe City.
Once residents discovered, “Wait… the City Lord who governs the entire Safe City and holds all of our lives in their hands is actually an incompetent amateur?”
…their sense of awe and respect would vanish almost instantly.
And there was a good chance they’d begin thinking:
“If you can do it, so can I.”
Or worse:
“You don’t understand any of this anyway. I can tell you whatever I want, and you’ll never know the difference.”
At best, a resident might simply deceive the City Lord for personal gain.
At worst…
They might kill the City Lord and seize the city’s core.
That was why nearly every City Lord deliberately maintained a certain distance from their residents—issuing orders, but avoiding unnecessary communication.
Learning from Boss Blue Sea, however, was a completely different matter.
Boss Blue Sea was already far more capable than he was.
She had known he was a rookie from the very beginning!
—If Boss is still willing to teach someone as clueless as me, then she must really accept me as one of her subordinates!
As Wen Huahua encouraged himself with that thought, he hurriedly postponed all of today’s administrative work until tomorrow.
[Thank you, Boss! Boss, I don’t have anything to do today! I’m coming right now!]
—
Wen Huahua happily settled into another management lesson.
The more he listened…
…the more amazed he became.
How does Boss Blue Sea do it?
The lessons covered an astonishing range of subjects, spanning multiple disciplines.
Everything was organized logically, progressing from simple concepts to advanced ones.
Every recommendation was tailored specifically to the circumstances of his Safe City.
The material balanced theoretical reasoning, practical implementation, strategic planning, specialized expertise…
…and countless other fields besides.
He almost felt as though there were more than a dozen experts from different professions teaching him simultaneously.
—
Meanwhile, Cheng Qisheng was eating hot pot while watching those dozen or so experts give the lesson.
Whenever Wen Huahua asked a question, the experts answered it.
Aether acted as the intermediary, relaying information between both sides.
As for Cheng Qisheng…
She picked up a slice of napa cabbage.
Mmm. Delicious.
She continued eating her hot pot while sitting in on the lesson herself, casually learning alongside Wen Huahua.
After all, her own management style had always been extremely straightforward.
Whenever she needed something done, she’d simply go find either the President, the Marshal, or the Pope—whichever of the three was appropriate.
She would explain what she wanted.
And that was the end of her involvement.
Those three would mobilize the resources of an entire nation, if necessary, to make it happen.
After auditing the lesson for more than seven hours, Cheng Qisheng’s attention began to drift slightly.
She was long accustomed to multitasking.
So she peeled off a tiny fraction of her attention to check on the residents she had sent out into the wilderness and see how they were doing.
——
Bang!!!
A gigantic white beast, roughly three meters long, crashed to the ground.
A silver card slowly materialized, appearing before the three of them.
Lu Song wiped the frost crystals off his visor with a gloved hand, his face lighting up with delight.
“A Building Card! Thank goodness! We finally got one!”
He looked utterly bedraggled. Qi Yi and Qi Er weren’t in much better shape—their bodies were covered in the white beast’s fur, and with no chance to replenish their energy, their body temperatures had dropped. They were shivering uncontrollably from the cold.
This was the seventh snow beast the three of them had killed.
They had even dug out and slain the snow beasts that crawled beneath the snow—creatures about as thick as an arm and resembling giant worms—just to see if they would drop an item card.
If they still hadn’t gotten a Building Card after this, they would have had no choice but to keep hunting while trembling from the freezing cold.
The reason was simple.
At first, they had merely been traveling with the crowd as usual. Everyone had spread out by unspoken agreement, though they were still not too far from the Safe City.
Then they encountered their first snow beast.
It was the most common variety: a Red Bear.
At the time, their group happened to be the closest to it, and all three immediately prepared to engage.
At the very same moment, with the Red Bear as the center point, at least several hundred people from Blue Sea spotted it as well. Their eyesight was excellent, and the instant they saw the beast, their eyes lit up as they charged toward it from every direction.
The Red Bear had originally been about to rush at them.
But the moment it saw so many people charging straight at it, it instantly turned tail and fled.
Qi Er reacted in a flash, pulling out a lasso and looping it around the Red Bear’s head.
At that very instant, Qi Yi had a sudden flash of inspiration. Moving with incredible speed, he tied the other end of Qi Er’s lasso to the large object he’d been carrying on his back the whole time—something that looked remarkably like an oversized snowboard.
Then the two of them leapt onto the board in one smooth motion, with Qi Yi reaching out a hand toward Lu Song.
“Quick, get on!”
Lu Song didn’t even have time to think. Acting on pure instinct, he grabbed Qi Yi’s hand and climbed onto the board.
All of it happened in the blink of an eye.
And then…
…they were swept away in a roaring storm of wind and snow.
The Red Bear, a lasso looped around its neck, dragged the three of them on the board as it sprinted forward with all its might. It was far faster than the people of Blue Sea, weighed down by their thick protective suits.
At such breakneck speed, the wind and snow struck with the force of gravel, rattling loudly against their visors.
Lu Song’s ears were filled with nothing but the roar of the storm. Through the noise, he could only vaguely make out Qi Yi and Qi Er shouting repeatedly over the public communication channel.
“This Red Bear is ours!”
“Ours!”
“Ours!”
His sense of balance wasn’t as good as that of the Blue Sea residents. Even after grabbing the rope Qi Er handed him, he didn’t have a free hand to wipe the snow off his visor.
Besides, there was no point. The moment he cleared it, the next second it would be covered again.
Even though he could barely see anything, he instinctively joined his teammates in shouting:
“It’s ours!!”
In the end, through the narrow gaps in the snow plastered across his visor, Lu Song could just barely make out the Blue Sea residents who had been charging over slowing to a disappointed stop.
Once a lasso was around the Red Bear’s neck, the prey belonged to the three of them. The people of Blue Sea were actually quite strict about observing that rule.
—Of course, if your lasso snapped, that was a different story.
If your lasso was gone, how could you still claim it was your prey?
The crowd could only stand there silently, secretly praying:
“Great Creator, please let it snap… let it snap… let it snap…”
Unfortunately for them, the Creator’s blessing was with the three-man team.
The lasso didn’t break.
Qi Yi and Qi Er had spent a hefty sum to buy the sturdiest lasso available. It was strong enough for the Red Bear to drag all three of them at a full sprint for over an hour, carrying them far away from Blue Sea.
Perhaps because it had finally put enough distance between itself and the crowd, the Red Bear caught the scent of the humans behind it and decided…
I can take them.
It stopped.
It charged at three humans whose combat power all exceeded seventy.
It fell.
It contributed a white item card.
Getting an item card made the three of them very happy.
But once the excitement wore off, they had to face a rather serious problem.
Given:
A Red Bear can run extremely fast.
It had dragged the three of them for over an hour.
Question:
Where on earth were the three of them now?
The defining feature of Dazzling Star was that no matter where you went, all you could see was an endless expanse of white.
The only thing the three of them could be certain of was that they were now very, very far from the Safe City.
Because they had completely lost their connection to the AI network.
Qi Yi and Qi Er only brooded over it for a moment before waving it off.
“Perfect. There were too many people before. Even when we found prey, we couldn’t get to it.”
“Now we’ve ended up in some godforsaken place that nobody knows about. Who’s going to steal our kills now?”
The more they talked, the happier they became.
Lu Song: “…I’ve fought alongside plenty of Blue Sea people, but sometimes I really have to admire your ability to adjust your mindset.”
Originally, the plan had been simple. If they got a Building Card, they would settle down outside the city. If they didn’t, they would return to the Safe City, restock on food and water, get a night’s sleep, and head back out the next day.
But now, after being dragged away by the Red Bear for over an hour, they had to obtain a Building Card before nightfall.
Otherwise, their only option would be to dig a hole in the snow and barely survive the night.
All three of them were experienced fighters, so they weren’t particularly worried about encountering snow beasts while camping in the wilderness. In fact, if they did run into one, it would actually be a good thing—snow beasts dropped item cards.
What they feared was the nighttime temperature.
If it dropped much further, they might wake up the next morning as three human popsicles.
Besides, without some kind of shelter from the cold, they couldn’t even take off their visors long enough to eat. That simply wasn’t sustainable.
Qi Yi put it this way:
“In that case, we’ve got about three days at most. So we’d better hurry.”
Lu Song stared at him.
“…You mean you can actually survive three days under these conditions?”
Just how absurdly tough are the people of Blue Sea?
In the end, the three of them had no choice but to hurry through this unfamiliar wilderness, searching everywhere for snow beasts.
Lu Song was even more enthusiastic than Qi Yi and Qi Er.
After all…
He definitely couldn’t last three days.
They fought nonstop for seven straight hours.
At long last, they finally obtained a Building Card.
Only then did all three of them let out a sigh of relief.
Qi Er was so exhausted that he slumped against the snow beast’s corpse and sat down.
“Thank goodness. If we still hadn’t found one, we’d have had no choice but to pray for the Great Creator to guide us back to the city.”
Leaning against the snow beast’s body himself just to stay on his feet, Lu Song blinked in surprise.
“…You can actually pray for the Creator to guide you?”
He had always assumed that divine guidance was a one-way blessing.
After all, wasn’t the usual understanding of gods that they could bestow favors upon believers, but believers couldn’t ask for things whenever they wanted?
Qi Yi nodded.
“Of course. As long as you pray sincerely—if you’re anxious enough and earnest enough—the Great Creator will notice us and show us the way home.”
Back on Dark Star, the Creator hadn’t answered believers’ prayers very often.
But ever since Dark Star’s destruction, perhaps because the new world was so dangerous, the benevolent Creator had become much more attentive to Her people. There had already been several instances where worshippers prayed and genuinely received a response.
Lu Song: “…???”
He couldn’t help voicing the question that had just struck him.
“Then… why didn’t we just pray to go back seven hours ago?”
Qi Yi answered matter-of-factly.
“The Great Creator is merciful. We shouldn’t trouble Her over every little thing.”
Still leaning against the snow beast, Lu Song echoed blankly,
“…A little thing?”
“Yeah. We weren’t going to die anytime soon. Besides, isn’t this place great? Nobody’s here to compete with us.”
Lu Song: …
Of course nobody’s competing with us—because there’s literally nobody here!
Still, now that he was holding the Building Card in his hand, he had to admit…
This place really wasn’t bad.
A Building Card.
And they’d gotten one on the very first day.
Between the three of them, they now had three cards in total.
If they’d stayed near Blue Sea, they’d have been lucky just to claim a single snow beast. They might not have gotten even one card.
…Wait.
When he’d been riding that board behind the fleeing Red Bear, through the blur of snow he’d vaguely seen quite a few Blue Sea residents pulling out lassos as well.
Surely…
They hadn’t all gotten the same idea?
Were they planning to catch a fast-running snow beast, let it drag them far away from the Safe City, and monopolize the snow beasts in some remote region all for themselves?
After hearing Lu Song’s theory, Qi Yi thought it was highly likely.
“Actually, I could’ve taken that Red Bear down halfway through the chase. But then I figured it could carry us even farther away, so I held back.”
Qi Er grinned at Lu Song.
“To be honest, if your body could’ve handled it, we probably would’ve stayed out here for another two days before asking the Great Creator for help. Then we’d spend one day traveling back.”
Lu Song didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he was also touched.
He could tell they meant every word.
They had only just become teammates, yet Qi Yi and Qi Er were already taking responsibility for keeping him alive.
The people of Blue Sea really did treat their comrades well.
They were even willing to shorten the number of days they could recklessly flirt with death—for his sake.
“…Thanks. I ended up holding you two back.”
“Holding us back? Not at all!” Qi Yi said, giving him a firm pat on the shoulder. “What we value is your combat ability. So what if your endurance is a little worse, or your physique isn’t quite as good? That doesn’t matter.”
Lu Song wanted to point out that back on Velvet Star, he had been considered one of the physically strongest people around.
But then he thought about the Blue Sea residents’ absurd constitutions…
…Never mind.
Qi Er suddenly said, “By the way, why are we standing here shivering in the freezing wind? We’ve already got a Building Card!”
“…Right!”
Qi Yi and Lu Song immediately climbed to their feet.
“So where should we use it?”
“Let’s just do it here. It’ll save us the effort of hauling the snow beast around. This thing’s huge—we’ll be eating it for quite a while.”
The three of them, operating like a thoroughly makeshift crew, settled on a location after a few casual exchanges. They handed the Building Card to their team leader, Qi Yi.
Following the AI’s tutorial, Qi Yi let the card float in midair and pressed a finger into the star-shaped emblem at its center.
The silver card began to glow.
The light grew brighter and brighter.
When it finally faded, a small wooden cabin—about the size of two cars parked side by side—stood before them.
From the outside, it looked utterly ordinary.
It was low, plain, and rather shabby.
And when the three of them pushed open the door and stepped inside…
…they discovered it really was just as shabby as it looked.
Three grown adults squeezed into the cabin, making it difficult even to turn around.
But it was warm.
Not particularly warm, but it was still infinitely better than the frozen wasteland outside.
The three of them eagerly peeled off their heavy protective suits, took deep breaths, and, with trembling hands, dug compressed biscuits out of their backpacks.
After fighting nonstop for so many hours without a single bite to eat, both the Blue Sea natives and the Velvet Star native were absolutely starving.
As Lu Song ate, his eyes drifted toward the fireplace in the middle of the cabin.
“Hey, look! There are words there!”
Floating lines of information hovered beside the fireplace.
When Lu Song looked over, he saw the text in Velvet Star’s language.
Qi Yi and Qi Er, meanwhile, saw it in Blue Sea’s language.
Building Name: Basic Log Cabin
Building Type: Small Shelter (Provides protection from the cold wind)
Floor Area: 13 square meters
Occupancy: User-defined
Indoor Temperature: 8°C (Chilly)
Interior Facilities: Small Fireplace (If the fireplace runs out of fuel, the indoor temperature will continue to drop until the fireplace is damaged.)
Qi Yi walked over and noticed another panel of information floating on the opposite side of the fireplace.
Besides the facility details, there was an additional prompt.
Please add: Hardwood | Kindling | Peat | Charcoal | Animal Fat
Current Fireplace Fuel: Hardwood (Remaining Time: 7 days)
Qi Yi immediately turned around.
“Quick, check the information you downloaded on your phones! Does the item card database mention hardwood?”
Lu Song instantly pulled out his phone.
“It does! Hardwood comes from the red cards!”
“Then it looks like if we want to keep this building warm, we’ll have to get red Energy Cards as well.”
Qi Yi let out a long breath and sat down on the floor, basking in the glow of the fire.
“Forget it for now. Let’s get some rest first. Then we’ll go drag the snow beast’s body back and cook some meat.”
The moment they thought about meat, all three of them perked up immediately.
“No wonder they said Dazzling Star isn’t suitable for communal living. This little cabin is way too cramped. We need to find another two Building Cards as soon as possible. Ideally, each of us should have our own cabin.”
“Sounds great! Let’s add extra pepper to the meat later.”
“Where are we supposed to get pepper…? Wait—why on earth did you bring pepper with you?!”
Just then, Cheng Qisheng’s gaze happened to fall on the three of them, sprawled together inside the tiny cabin.
She watched the little cabin with curiosity for a while.
As expected.
The formatting and interface of the building’s information were clearly from the same system as the Safe City itself.
After studying the facility details for a moment, Cheng Qisheng shifted her attention back to the area around the Safe City.
Very good.
Quite a few residents had already encountered snow beasts.
…Wait?
The Creator cast a puzzled glance their way.
Why…
Why are all of you standing on wooden boards, being dragged along by snow beasts?
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