Chapter 74.2: Blue Star’s Fate
Looking through the screenshots she had sent, Cheng Qisheng could tell that she was genuinely well educated and highly competent.
After mentally reviewing the information she’d gathered from her various contacts, she messaged one of her university classmates.
A short while later, she returned with a screenshot of a company recruitment notice.
[A university classmate of mine works at this company. He shared this job posting a few days ago. I think you’re qualified for the position they’re hiring for. He also mentioned that the company offers pretty good benefits, and it’s a large, well-established firm. If you’re interested, I can introduce the two of you so you can talk directly.]
That meant the referral was arranged.
There was no guarantee it would work out, but her classmate was delighted all the same. An internal referral skipped a lot of the usual application process and made everything much easier.
[Thank you so much, Qisheng! I really appreciate it! If I get the job, I’m definitely buying you a little gift!]
[No need, really. I hardly did anything, and there’s no guarantee it’ll work out anyway. Forget the gift—we’re classmates. Helping each other out is only natural.]
Meanwhile, Cheng Qisheng’s university classmate was thanking her as well.
His company offered cash bonuses for successful employee referrals.
Otherwise, why would he be so enthusiastic about posting job openings on his social media? He wasn’t even in Human Resources.
The two classmates happily continued chatting with each other in private.
Cheng Qisheng, meanwhile, stared at the thirty-three pieces of information she had compiled and slowly rubbed her forehead.
Bad news: Blue Star was heading toward destruction too.
Good news: There were still at least three hundred years left.
Bad news: The first stage—the Dormant Phase—had probably already begun two or three years ago.
Good news: The Dormant Phase lasted a full century, meaning there were still more than ninety years of relatively peaceful life ahead.
For the current generation, life would certainly become more difficult.
But they would never have to face zombies or snow beasts.
As for Cheng Qisheng…
She was already a Tier 3 Transcendent.
She had unlocked her lifespan limit.
Based on a Tier 3 Transcendent’s lifespan, barring any accidents, she would live to at least one hundred and fifty years old.
And as she continued advancing through the ranks, her lifespan would only grow longer.
She would almost certainly live to see the day Blue Star reached its end.
Expressionless, Cheng Qisheng scooped up a large spoonful of ice cream.
It was rich and velvety, smooth on the tongue, with an intense creamy flavor. The nuts mixed into it were the perfect finishing touch.
Ice cream this delicious…
Three hundred years from now—
No.
Even one hundred years from now—
It probably wouldn’t exist anymore.
Cheng Qisheng had never been someone who accepted fate.
The ultimate evolution of a Safe City was to become a planet.
A complete planet that had fully broken free from disaster…
That would be a true new world.
How large that planet would ultimately become—and how many planets she would one day possess—would depend entirely on her.
But first…
She had to save her home.
By then, she would be far stronger than she was now, and she would have developed many more abilities of her own.
Cheng Qisheng quickly finished the entire tub of ice cream.
The calm expression she usually wore returned to her face.
There was still plenty of time, wasn’t there?
Then…
Within these next three hundred years…
She would become the Lord of a Planet.
…
Blue Sea Safe City descended upon a new set of coordinates.
The Skywing Dragons at the location provided by Jin Yu Safe City had already been wiped out once again.
This time, the coordinates came from Moonspirit—the very place where Mianyin Safe City had once been stationed.
When Mianyin called it the Skywing Dragons’ nest, it hadn’t been an exaggeration.
The instant the Safe City arrived, a vast swarm of Skywing Dragons burst into the air and charged straight toward it.
The very first wave alone numbered at least five hundred thousand.
Any other Safe City would probably have started cursing on the spot.
But this was Blue Sea Safe City—
The people of Blue Sea had always been the ones taking the initiative to hunt Skywing Dragons. This was the first time they’d encountered prey considerate enough to deliver itself to their doorstep.
The Blue Sea residents, who had long been poised for battle, lit up with excitement.
“Woohoo!!!”
One lasso after another shot upward like vines sprouting from the earth, looping neatly around the necks of the charging Skywing Dragons.
By now, the people of Blue Sea had become seasoned veterans at hunting Skywing Dragons.
One inventor had even developed a weapon specifically designed to deal with them: the Dragonlock Net.
It was an enormous net with weighted corners for traction. At first glance, it looked rather like an ordinary fishing net—and in practice, it wasn’t all that different.
People on the ground would hurl the Dragonlock Net into the sky. The moment it touched a Skywing Dragon, the tension in the net triggered its self-locking clasps. The harder the dragon struggled, the tighter the net cinched around it.
Once trapped inside a Dragonlock Net, a Skywing Dragon had nowhere to escape. It couldn’t fly left, right, up, or down. Even if its razor-sharp teeth managed to bite through part of the mesh, its wings remained hopelessly tangled together, leaving it no choice but to plummet heavily to the ground.
And once it hit the ground, the battle became entirely Blue Sea’s domain.
The Dragonlock Net was an instant sensation, embraced throughout the city.
The inventor who created it earned a fortune from patent royalties alone, while the many Blue Sea residents equipped with flight wings—who had helped him test the invention over countless trials—also struck it rich alongside him.
Yes—the inventor had recruited a large number of winged Blue Sea residents to help test the Dragonlock Net during its development.
By now, the rags-to-riches story of the “Pie from the Sky” Hunter Squad had spread throughout Blue Sea.
They had previously gone around “investing” in researchers, and one of those researchers had been Director Ruo, the genius who invented the Flight Wings.
The Flight Wings had since become the number one luxury item every Blue Sea resident dreamed of owning. No matter how expensive they were, that did nothing to diminish people’s desire for a pair of wings.
A small number of people had poured all of their accumulated contribution points into buying Flight Wings, even taking on massive loans to do so.
Most people wanted to do the same, but unfortunately, they hadn’t managed to secure any wings during the great Skywing Dragon campaign. They weren’t even qualified to bankrupt themselves buying Flight Wings because there simply weren’t any available.
If someone were to rank the wealthiest people in the nation now, Director Ruo Buyan would undoubtedly place among the top hundred.
As for the “Pie from the Sky” Hunter Squad, they had instantly become homeowners. Better yet—they had even been able to buy Flight Wings outright, paying the full price in one lump sum.
With the Hunter Squad’s success story right in front of them, Blue Sea’s researchers suddenly discovered that they had become surrounded by “angel investors.”
No matter what project they proposed—or how absurd it sounded—there were always people willing to contribute their time and labor in exchange for the chance of striking it rich someday.
The Dragonlock Net had been developed in much the same way.
When the inventor declared, “I want to create a weapon that can perfectly trap Skywing Dragons. The moment one touches it, it’ll fall straight out of the sky,” the number of people eager to invest in his project was nothing short of overwhelming.
Even more people volunteered to play the role of Skywing Dragons during the testing process.
The reason the Dragonlock Net could now completely seal off every avenue of escape—preventing trapped Skywing Dragons from breaking free no matter how desperately they struggled—was because the Blue Sea volunteers caught in the test nets had attempted every escape method imaginable.
Collectively, their escape attempts were so varied that they could have filled an entire book.
In one test, the Blue Sea resident helping with the experiment was completely wrapped up in the net. Using only the strength of their core, they began spinning rapidly in midair as they fell. By continuously twisting their body, they managed to alter the direction of the net’s tension, eventually slipping free.
In another test, the volunteer contorted into an incredibly awkward position inside the net. Spreading both their limbs and Flight Wings, they propped the net open like a spider supporting its web, maintaining that posture all the way down. Just before hitting the ground, they suddenly tucked their body in, creating a brief opening—and shot out through it in a flash, making a successful escape.
The most unforgettable experiment, however, involved a resident who was pretending to be a Skywing Dragon.
First came the desperate struggle.
Then the realization that struggling wasn’t working.
Then the frantic flapping of wings.
Which only made the wings even more hopelessly entangled.
With a suitably ferocious expression, they plummeted to the ground—
Landing safely on the prepared crash mat.
Everything seemed perfectly normal until the inventor walked over to retrieve the net.
The “Skywing Dragon,” who had managed to poke their head out through the mesh during the struggle, suddenly opened their mouth and bit the inventor’s hand.
Then, with complete confidence, they declared,
“I’m a Skywing Dragon right now. My head got out, so of course I’d bite someone.”
Tilting their neck, they added,
“Actually, a real Skywing Dragon has a longer, narrower head. Judging by the distance between us, I should’ve bitten your head instead.”
“Unfortunately, you’ve been bitten to death.”
The inventor, nursing a bite mark on his hand, fell silent.
Only afterward did he learn that this particular resident had been an actor before the apocalypse.
Fortunately, they had remembered to hold back and hadn’t actually broken the skin. The inventor was left with nothing more than a clear set of teeth marks on his hand.
After that incident, he hurriedly redesigned the Dragonlock Net.
The revised version ensured that even if a Skywing Dragon managed to bite through the netting, the numerous small inward-facing barbs woven into the mesh would snag its head, preventing it from pushing its entire head through the opening to attack anyone.
By the end of the testing phase, the inventor had become absolutely certain of one thing:
These residents pretending to be Skywing Dragons were far more difficult to deal with than actual Skywing Dragons.
At the very least, real Skywing Dragons didn’t rely on core strength to spin themselves through the air!
The inventor endured countless small-scale tests with these enthusiastic “volunteers.” Sleeping only two hours a day, fueled by coffee and starfruit juice, he worked around the clock—testing, revising, then testing again—until the Dragonlock Net finally became the version everyone knew today.
One Dragonlock Net after another soared into the sky.
The moment a Skywing Dragon was caught, there was nowhere left for it to escape.
Blood once again soaked the earth.
Overlooking the battlefield below, Cheng Qisheng shared the vision of her believers and saw an endless sea of Skywing Dragons.
Flying alongside the adults were noticeably smaller juvenile Skywing Dragons.
As the Blue Sea forces pushed deeper into the area, a massive basin came into view. Inside it, countless young Skywing Dragons—each only about two-thirds the size of a full-grown adult—shrieked and screeched incessantly.
No wonder there were so many Skywing Dragons here.
This really was their nesting ground.
Cheng Qisheng quickly estimated the number of juveniles.
There were at least thirty million of them.
Something wasn’t right.
Snow Beasts could only reproduce after consuming enormous amounts of flesh and blood.
Yet there were no ruins of other Safe Cities here, nor were there any corpses of native inhabitants.
Even if they had reproduced by devouring flesh, raising more than thirty million Skywing Dragons under the Snow Beasts’ original reproductive mechanism would have required them to consume at least one hundred million people.
There was no way this region had ever held a population of a hundred million.
There was only one possible explanation.
Moonspirit’s speculation had been correct.
This world really had undergone a major change.
The Snow Beasts had evolved.
They were no longer bound by their previous reproductive limitations. They had entered a phase of explosive reproduction.
The only question was whether this reproductive evolution was unique to Skywing Dragons and other flying Snow Beasts, or whether every type of Snow Beast had acquired it.
Had Blue Sea Safe City not descended upon this place, these thirty million Skywing Dragons would have matured and dispersed across the world, becoming the nightmare of everyone on Dazzling Star.
But now…
The people of Blue Sea had become their nightmare instead.
Cheng Qisheng: Thanks for the offer. We’ll be taking these instead.
The wings of all thirty million Skywing Dragons belonged to Blue Sea now.
Thirty million!!
If she let them get away, she definitely wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.
The Great Creator God sent a divine decree to all her followers, calling even more people into battle.
My good children.
You no longer need to hold back your strength.
Reduce this Skywing Dragon nest to rubble.
Their blood and bone wings shall become Blue Sea’s strongest foundation.
Who cared whether the Snow Beasts of Dazzling Star had evolved?
First, they were going to clean up the enormous windfall that had practically delivered itself to their doorstep.
—
The people of Blue Sea went absolutely wild.
Skywing Dragons!
So many Skywing Dragons!!
Covered in blood, everyone brandished their lassos and Dragonlock Nets as they charged straight into the basin.
“All thanks be to our God for this divine blessing!!!”
It didn’t matter that these Skywing Dragons were smaller!
Their bodies might be undersized, but their wings only looked a little smaller.
As long as they could still fly, they were perfectly usable!
A great tide of Blue Sea residents surged into the basin like a flooding sea.
The juvenile Skywing Dragons had yet to fully mature. They were vicious enough, but compared to the battle-hardened Blue Sea fighters—who had accumulated extensive experience hunting Skywing Dragons and had even adapted their combat tactics specifically for them—they simply weren’t much of a challenge.
The basin that had once belonged to the Skywing Dragons was almost instantly engulfed by the Blue Sea army.
High above, Blue Sea residents equipped with Flight Wings spread out oversized Dragonlock Nets and dove straight down from the sky, trapping as many Skywing Dragons as they could in a single pass.
Below, countless chains shot upward.
Spears were hurled in perfect unison, creating a barrage that looked more like a rain of arrows than thrown weapons.
The ability users also unleashed their abilities throughout the battle.
A Skywing Dragon swooped down from above, only to have an iron wall materialize out of thin air before it. Its head punched straight through the barrier—then became hopelessly stuck inside it.
Another Skywing Dragon suddenly began flying as though intoxicated, wobbling unsteadily through the air and roaring at empty space before a spear effortlessly pierced its heart.
Another Skywing Dragon opened its jaws to bite a Blue Sea resident during a close-quarters struggle—
Only to shatter its own teeth.
Elsewhere, a Skywing Dragon found itself facing a Blue Sea resident whose hands crackled faintly with blue arcs of electricity.
The fine web of pale-blue lightning instinctively put the beast on guard.
It circled cautiously overhead, screeching as it abandoned its original attack route and swooped down from another angle instead.
“Lightning, please come out!!”
“Please, lightning!”
“Please… come out?!”
“Please strike?!”
The Lightning-type ability user condensed a bolt of electricity roughly ten centimeters long in his palm and aimed it at the Skywing Dragon.
He shouted until his voice was nearly hoarse.
The lightning still refused to fire.
“…Not good. Looks like it’s still not fully under control.”
The Blue Sea resident, whose day job had been that of a teacher, had only awakened his powers two days earlier. He still hadn’t mastered his supernatural ability.
He had a gentle temperament. Even in the middle of a battle, he didn’t forget to speak politely.
After all, he taught students.
If he didn’t make a habit of using courteous language in everyday life, he worried he’d accidentally start cursing in class one day.
The young teacher looked up at the Skywing Dragon, which was clearly eager to attack.
“Hello. I’m ready now. We can continue.”
The lightning in the human’s palm faded away.
With the threat gone, the Skywing Dragon lunged forward and bit with all its might.
A loop suddenly tightened around its neck.
A tremendous force yanked backward.
Before the beast could even struggle free, a sharp-tipped spear punched straight through its heart.
“Screeeech—!!!”
The Skywing Dragon crashed heavily to the ground.
The Lightning-type ability user calmly retrieved both his spear and his lasso.
Forget it.
I only awakened two days ago, and I’m just Tier 1.
My supernatural ability is still too unreliable.
I’ll just rely on my own strength instead.
The teacher rolled his shoulders and turned toward the nearest Skywing Dragon on his right, wearing the same warm, textbook-perfect smile.
His combat ability was naturally exceptional.
After all…
He taught Blue Sea students.
And anyone from Blue Sea knew exactly what that meant.
At that moment, he felt a warm current rise through his body.
It was a familiar sensation—
The blessing bestowed by the Great Creator God.
He tilted his head slightly upward, basking in divine grace.
He heard the voice of God.
The divine decree had been issued.
Wipe them all out.
He could feel it.
Their God was showing them the way.
A path toward even greater strength lay ahead for Blue Sea.
If that was what their God desired…
Then they would accomplish it, no matter what.
All around him, every Blue Sea fighter became visibly more exhilarated.
“Our God!!!”
“We’ll make it happen!!!”
They charged at the Skywing Dragons in a frenzy, their already soaring fighting spirit climbing to an even greater height.
“Kill every last one of them!!!”
On the treacherous, snow-covered ground, the young teacher deftly wove around the charging Blue Sea warriors.
His feet sank unevenly into the snow, yet he maintained impeccable balance as he sprinted forward and leaped onto the Skywing Dragon he had picked out long ago.
The beast had just broken free of the lasso that had dragged it to the ground and was straining to climb back into the sky.
The young teacher didn’t let go.
He clung tightly to its body.
No matter how violently it rolled and twisted, he remained plastered against it, driving his daggers into different parts of its body and climbing over it as though scaling a mountain.
At last…
He reached the spot he wanted.
The altitude was just right—around fifteen meters.
Even if he fell from here, he could land safely with his grappling hook.
Both of the daggers he had used for “mountain climbing” were embedded in the Skywing Dragon’s abdomen.
He pulled one free.
Blood splashed across his face.
The young elementary school teacher blinked as the blood instantly froze into crimson frost upon his skin.
He raised his right hand high.
The blood-turned-frost didn’t leave him with so much as frostbite.
The blessing of the Great Creator God protected him well.
“Please.”
“Offer your life to our God.”
He spoke with perfect politeness as he drove the dagger straight into the Skywing Dragon’s heart.
