Chapter 89: Ticking Time Bomb
The crystals needed to upgrade Blue Sea Safe City to Tier 4 were generously provided by Tian’ou.
As soon as the upgrade was complete, Cheng Qisheng felt a weight lift from her body.
She stood up and took a couple of steps, then laughed twice.
“Haha.”
Sure enough, her laughter no longer stuttered.
Only after confirming that even her laugh was back to normal did Cheng Qisheng open the Safe City status panel.
[Safe City — Tier 4]
[Actual Area: 94,036 km²]
[Manifested Area: 587 km²]
As far as newly acquired territory went, the land gained from the upgrade was nowhere near as much as what they had taken from Tian’ou.
However, just as upgrading from Tier 2 to Tier 3 had unlocked the Tier 3 Shield for one hour each day, advancing from Tier 3 to Tier 4 naturally came with even more new features.
After finishing her work for the day, Cheng Qisheng deliberately found some free time, sat alone in a small boat in the middle of the artificial lake, and slowly explored the Tier 4 additions.
The first change was that the city walls had increased to 80 meters in height, while the city’s foundation had risen to 40 meters.
The construction materials had also been upgraded from the Tier 3 combination of high-density stone and a steel framework to carbide composite steel plating and superconductive heat-conducting pipelines.
In reality, the materials list contained dozens of entries, but Cheng Qisheng recognized only those two. Things like suspension vibration dampers, thermal-regulation filaments, and Green Crystal Steel were all completely unfamiliar to her. She had never heard of them, whether on Blue Star or Dark Star.
It seemed these belonged to technologies from other civilizations.
The great Creator had decided to outsource the work.
“Aether, copy down the specifications for the city wall materials and send them to the relevant departments for research.”
Aether replied instantly.
“Understood, City Lord.”
Skipping over the materials list, Cheng Qisheng focused on the new lines of text that had appeared beside the city wall information.
[City Wall Physical Defense: 421 An]
[City Wall Energy Defense: 400 An]
[City Wall Environmental Defense: 765 An]
[City Wall Damage: 0%]
Previously, the city wall had a damage indicator, but it would only appear once the wall’s integrity dropped below 60%.
Now, even the slightest damage would be immediately visible to the City Lord.
That was a pretty useful feature.
As Safe City continued to expand and its walls stretched ever farther, even with soldiers assigned to patrol them, it was impossible for every small change along the walls to be noticed immediately.
But with the new damage indicator, things were different.
For example, if they returned to Velvet Star and encountered those evolved zombies that could corrode city walls, Cheng Qisheng would know the instant the walls sustained any damage.
—Though, considering the walls’ current defensive capabilities, she doubted Tier 2 or Tier 3 zombies could even corrode them anymore.
This Defense Rating feature, however, was entirely new.
Cheng Qisheng asked, “The unit it uses is An. That wouldn’t happen to stand for the An in Safe City (安全城/Ānquán chéng), would it?”
Aether replied, “As expected of you, City Lord! That’s right. The unit is indeed An, named after Safe City so that all City Lords can understand it more intuitively.”
Cheng Qisheng found that perfectly reasonable.
Physical Defense was probably self-explanatory—it measured resistance against something like a giant monster roaring outside while smashing the city walls.
She asked, “Then what does Energy Defense mean?”
“‘Energy Defense,’ also known as Citywide Defense, can be understood as a protective barrier that encompasses the entire Safe City. It prevents all external forms of energy from entering the city. For example, if a meteor were to fall from the sky and was on course to strike the Safe City, the Energy Defense would activate automatically and stop the impact.”
True to her experience serving a Tier 5 City Lord, Aether was thoroughly familiar with every new feature of a Tier 4 Safe City.
“However, Energy Defense only protects against external energy. Safe City warfare is not included.”
Cheng Qisheng understood.
“In other words, if I entered a world where acid rain was corrosive, then the moment we arrived, the Energy Defense would activate automatically?”
“Yes, City Lord.”
Aether had become increasingly humanlike and now even took the initiative to explain additional features.
“As for Environmental Defense, it refers to the city walls’ ability to withstand extreme heat, severe cold, storms, and similar environmental conditions. The walls will remain standing by relying on their Environmental Defense Rating. Only when that rating is reduced to zero will the walls begin to suffer actual damage.”
What a fantastic upgrade!!
Back on Dazzling Star, the Tier 3 city walls had been continuously damaged by the planet’s extreme cold. At first, Blue Sea had been able to protect the walls with insulating layers, but by the later stages, even those had stopped working. Cheng Qisheng had no choice but to spend precious crystals repairing the walls.
Now, with Environmental Defense, if they ever encountered such extreme weather again, the walls would at least be able to hold out for a while.
The only problem was that she had no idea how these Defense Ratings were actually calculated. There wasn’t even a baseline for comparison.
Lately, Aether had clearly been watching a lot of TV dramas. Its ability to read people’s expressions had improved by leaps and bounds. The moment Cheng Qisheng furrowed her brow slightly, it floated over to her.
“The City Wall Defense Ratings are not entirely fixed. They will change if the Safe City independently upgrades or modifies its walls. A standard Tier 4 city wall has Defense Ratings of around 400 across the board. After reaching Tier 4, you’ll also be able to view the attack ratings of all weapons sold in the Safe City Marketplace.”
As Aether spoke, it opened the marketplace and projected the image of an enormous rotating cannon with a funnel-shaped barrel.
“For example, this super-heavy weapon—the Seismic Dissolution Long-Range Thunder Cannon. A single shot has an attack power of approximately 370 An. Two shots are enough to break through the Physical Defense of a Tier 4 Safe City.”
Cheng Qisheng raised an eyebrow.
She had never even heard of this thing before.
There could only be one explanation.
It was expensive.
Sure enough, she went straight to its pricing page.
250,000 crystals—and that only included a single shell.
If you wanted to fire it again, the ammunition had to be purchased separately.
One Thunder Cannon shell cost 50,000 crystals.
Good.
That was reassuring.
Cheng Qisheng was confident that, at least at this stage, nobody would be willing to spend 300,000 crystals just to bombard her.
This wasn’t a weapon that any City Lord below Tier 5 could realistically afford.
Having never met a City Lord above Tier 5, Cheng Qisheng had no idea whether battles between higher-tier Safe Cities consisted of both sides bombarding each other with all kinds of advanced heavy weaponry.
As for the Tier 3 and Tier 4 City Lords of today, the most they generally used in wartime were ordinary rocket launchers and the like.
Tier 4’s Defense Ratings were probably intended primarily to protect against colossal beasts destroying cities.
After all, no one would willingly spend 300,000 crystals just to strip away the Physical Defense of a Tier 4 Safe City.
Besides, losing its defenses didn’t mean a Safe City lost its ability to fight back. Rather than wasting that many crystals blasting through a city’s Physical Defense, it would make far more sense to initiate a Safe City War directly.
Still, despite believing no one would actually bombard her, Cheng Qisheng cautiously asked,
“Can Defense Ratings be restored after they drop?”
“Yes,” Aether replied. “When a Defense Rating decreases, you may repair it using crystals. Restoring 1 An requires 150 crystals.”
Good. Understood.
By now, Cheng Qisheng had completely figured out how Safe Cities operated.
In a nutshell:
Everything costs crystals.
The good news was that she happened to have plenty on hand.
She opened her crystal inventory.
This wasn’t a new feature unlocked by reaching Tier 4. Rather, it was a panel Aether had created by imitating the Safe City interface, positioned beside the group chat window.
[Tier 1 Crystals: 25,642]
[Tier 2 Crystals: 775]
[Tier 3 Crystals: 1]
[Tier 4 Crystals: 0]
[Tier 5 Crystals: 1]
Looking at the numbers, Cheng Qisheng couldn’t help sighing.
She owed her current fortune entirely to the generous contributions of her fellow City Lords.
Tian’ou had contributed the most. His subordinate, Mingqin, had been so confident in Tian’ou’s victory that he hadn’t had time to spend their stockpile of crystals on a large scale, allowing Cheng Qisheng to reap the rewards.
Then there were Mingxia and Dihai’s contributions back on Dazzling Star…
Even though their previous world hadn’t produced any crystals at all, Cheng Qisheng had somehow ended up one of the wealthiest City Lords in terms of crystals. She had spent 300,000 crystals upgrading to Tier 4, yet her reserves were still overflowing.
That said, she hadn’t seized many large-scale items from Tian’ou’s Safe City.
After all, before arriving in this world, Tian’ou had only been an ordinary Tier 3 City Lord.
Any Safe City wealthy enough to afford large-scale strategic equipment wouldn’t have been defeated by Tian’ou in the first place.
Most of the items Cheng Qisheng had obtained from Tian’ou’s Safe City were the sort of standard equipment that nearly every low-tier City Lord owned.
She opened the item list and looked at the densely packed rows.
There were hundreds of thousands of small utility items: recycling bins, small water towers, charging stations, compact incubators, portable flashlights, and the like.
A small portion of these had likely been purchased by City Lords during the Tier 1 and Tier 2 stages. Most of the rest had probably been acquired by their residents in worlds that dropped item cards, like Dazzling Star.
These small items would be assigned prices and added to Blue Sea’s Resource Marketplace for residents to purchase themselves.
What Cheng Qisheng was really interested in, however, were the large-scale facilities purchased from the Safe City Marketplace.
[Tier 2 Water Recycling Tower (4) | Tier 1 Oxygen Generation Pillar (7) | Tier 3 Nutrient Solution Synthesizer (1) | Tier 1 Solar Generator (1,190) | Tier 2 Waste Processing Unit (3) | Tier 2 Precision Workshop (1) | Standard Surveillance Cameras (24,367) | Tier 3 Holographic Training Ground (1) | Tier 1 Mint (1) | Tier 2 Comfort Sleep Pod (1) | Tier 2 Basic Tool Forge (1) | Tier 3 Vehicle Maintenance Factory (1)]
The items she appreciated most were the three factories and the tool forge.
Like the weapons factory, they could rapidly manufacture products as long as sufficient crystals or raw materials were supplied.
The Basic Tool Forge was better suited for individual use than industrial production. Cheng Qisheng marked it for later, intending to have Aether list it in the Resource Marketplace as well.
She then examined the Tier 2 Comfort Sleep Pod.
At a glance, it was obvious that some City Lord had purchased it for personal use.
It had only one function:
To provide an exceptionally high-quality sleep experience in an extremely short amount of time.
Sleeping in it for three hours was equivalent to getting ten hours of normal sleep.
The Comfort Sleep Pod would be quite useful for Blue Sea’s senior leadership.
Ever since Dark Star had been destroyed and Blue Sea Safe City began descending into one disaster world after another, every one of Blue Sea’s dozen or so top government officials had seen their sleep time drastically reduced, while their sleep quality had steadily declined.
Even during periods when the Safe City wasn’t especially busy, their minds simply refused to switch off.
Moreover, unlike the ordinary residents—who could occasionally leave the city to hunt zombies or snow beasts—the senior officials spent nearly all their time dealing with Blue Sea’s affairs. Their daily training time had plummeted, leaving them to squeeze in the occasional visit to the dueling arena just to let off some steam.
If anyone in Blue Sea ever happened to see one of the government’s senior officials hauling bricks, there was no need to be surprised.
That, too, was a way of relieving stress.
Bricklaying demanded intense physical effort, forcing minds that normally churned nonstop over government affairs to finally slow down for a while. At the same time, because they were helping build Blue Sea’s infrastructure and making the city better, the work gave them a genuine sense of satisfaction—a kind of emotional therapy.
Previously, Cheng Qisheng’s solution had been to bestow blessings on them from time to time, soothing both their bodies and minds. Coupled with each official’s daily glass of Starfruit Juice, their health hadn’t suffered too badly.
This Tier 2 Comfort Sleep Pod was perfect.
It could be reserved for those senior officials whose brains kept working even while they slept. With just one sleep pod, a dozen or so people could take turns using it, which should be sufficient.
As for the Tier 3 Holographic Training Ground, that could be opened to all Blue Sea residents.
Each training ground could accommodate 100 people at once. She could charge a modest number of points for admission and use it to support the city’s point circulation program.
Having arranged the large-scale facilities she cared about most, Cheng Qisheng turned her attention to the Tier 3 Nutrient Solution Synthesizer.
When she had first taken over Tian’ou’s Safe City and spotted this large-scale facility, she’d actually been a little excited.
Nutrient solution!
Science fiction from Blue Star featured nutrient solutions all the time.
The kind where a tiny bottle contained all the energy and nutrients the human body needed.
It wouldn’t spoil, was easy to carry, and one small bottle could sustain a person for an entire day.
It was practically made for surviving the apocalypse.
Cheng Qisheng could already picture Blue Sea’s residents marching confidently into the wilderness, each carrying two bulging packs full of nutrient solution.
Then she opened the detailed description.
Her smile froze.
[Facility Name: Nutrient Solution Synthesizer (Tier 3)]
[Function: Produces Crude Nutrient Solution (Nutritional Completeness: 20%; long-term consumers have an estimated lifespan of approximately five years)]
[Production Capacity: 30,000,000 bottles/day]
[Operating Cost: 100 crystals/day]
[Service Life: 100 years (Used: 12 years, 9 months, 7 days, 4 hours)]
Cheng Qisheng stared at the line that read, “long-term consumers have an estimated lifespan of approximately five years,” then rubbed her face.
Seriously…
What kind of City Lord would buy something like this?
“Aether, find out which Safe City this facility came from.”
Although the City Lords of Tian’ou’s and Mingqin’s Safe Cities had died after Blue Sea conquered them, quite a few of their senior officials had been captured alive. Blue Sea’s government had questioned every one of them, carefully documenting the origins of every large-scale facility and every cache of crystals.
Aether pulled up the archive.
“The Nutrient Solution Synthesizer came from a Safe City that was defeated by Tian’ou and forced to cede territory before withdrawing from Green Billow Star.”
“The Safe City was called Blackstone Safe City. It was a Tier 4 Safe City with an area of roughly over one hundred thousand square kilometers. However, when it descended onto Green Billow Star, its city walls were already damaged, and the city itself was suffering from an unidentified viral outbreak. Tian’ou seized the opportunity to invade.”
“The outcome was that Blackstone Safe City ceded more than 10,000 square kilometers of territory before surrendering and leaving Green Billow Star.”
As Aether summarized the report, Cheng Qisheng read through the detailed records herself.
This wasn’t simply a case of Blackstone Safe City being defeated and withdrawing.
The truth was that, in its previous world, Blackstone Safe City had been struck by a viral outbreak. It had quarantined all confirmed and suspected cases within that 10,000-square-kilometer region. While it was still scrambling to contain the crisis, Tian’ou launched an invasion.
And by sheer coincidence, the area he attacked was the quarantined epidemic zone.
In effect, Blackstone Safe City had swiftly dumped what was, to them, a ticking time bomb onto Tian’ou by ceding the infected territory.
Blackstone Safe City operated under a sl*ve system.
Within the ceded territory were more than ten million sl*ves, along with this Nutrient Solution Synthesizer.
At first, Tian’ou was delighted by the spoils.
It didn’t take long, however, for him to discover that at least three million of those sl*ves were infected.
The virus was ferocious.
It had an extremely high fatality rate and was highly contagious. It spread not only among humans but also to the livestock raised within the Safe City.
Before long, more than half of Tian’ou’s own residents had been infected.
The outbreak threw the entire city into chaos, pushing it to the brink of destruction.
Fortunately, one of his residents discovered that a certain species of seaweed native to Green Billow Star could cure the disease.
Only then did Tian’ou’s Safe City survive the epidemic.
Even so, the outbreak claimed the lives of over a hundred thousand of Tian’ou’s own residents.
Of the more than ten million sl*ves inherited from Blackstone Safe City, over two million also perished.
Now Cheng Qisheng finally understood why Tian’ou had been so confident.
The man really did have extraordinary luck on his side.
A virus that had left an entire Tier 4 Safe City completely helpless—forcing it to abandon both the infected population and a vast stretch of territory, then flee the world without daring to remain any longer—had somehow ended up in Tian’ou’s hands…
…and he’d managed to survive it with relatively limited losses.
Tian’ou had also been quite pleased with the Nutrient Solution Synthesizer.
He used it to feed not only the sl*ves inherited from Blackstone Safe City but also the sl*ves he captured from other Safe Cities.
In a sense, he had faithfully carried on Blackstone Safe City’s legacy—
—even though Blackstone Safe City itself was still very much alive.
Tian’ou had already sold off more than two million sl*ves.
He had planned to gradually sell the remaining over ten million—
—and then he ran into Cheng Qisheng.
Cheng Qisheng pinched the bridge of her nose.
“So you’re saying… a huge portion of our captives are sl*ves?”
“Yes, City Lord. We captured 24.13 million people in total, of whom 15.13 million are sl*ves.”
