Safe City Ch.111.2

Chapter 111.2: She had really struck gold

“Of course, our Outer City residents currently aren’t allowed to rent vehicles on their own. But there is another way. If everyone wants to rent a vehicle, you can form a team with official residents.”

Mo Yuxuan sat up straight.

Here it comes. She knew it! No matter how good a Safe City was, there would definitely be differences in status between its residents.

“Since we’re talking about forming teams, I’d like to tell everyone something important. Outer City residents must leave the Safe City together with official residents. Otherwise, there’s a very good chance you won’t be able to make it back.”

Mo Yuxuan didn’t quite understand this rule.

Not be able to make it back? Was it because they were worried that Outer City residents weren’t strong enough?

Although she hadn’t officially interacted with many people yet, she had already noticed along the way that the combat strength of Inner City residents was, on average, a level higher than that of Outer City residents.

She raised her hand—before the presentation began, they had been told to raise their hands if they had questions—and asked,

“I’m an ability user. Am I not allowed to travel on my own either?”

The silver-haired staff member replied,

“We don’t recommend it. If you travel on your own and the Safe City relocates, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to return without the guidance of Our God.”

Mo Yuxuan: So Inner City residents have the guidance of Our God?

What kind of principle was this?

An [Inner City Resident Broadcast] exclusively for Inner City residents?

She didn’t understand it, but that didn’t stop her from taking notes.

Speaking of which, there was something rather remarkable about the Blue Sea people: communicating with them was completely effortless. They must have been using some kind of translator or special item.

But this buff was rather strange. It only worked for live communication. If the conversation was recorded and played back later, she couldn’t understand it anymore.

That was why they had orientation sessions for new residents. A Blue Sea resident who could communicate with them without any barriers would explain everything, while the new residents below could use their own languages and writing systems to record the important information in their notebooks.

Mo Yuxuan took down a huge amount of notes.

The orientation was held every day. She decided she’d come again tomorrow, write down everything, and then memorize it every day. That would help her integrate into Blue Sea as quickly as possible.

Mo Yuxuan put an important mark next to [Blue Sea’s Great Creator God].

This is extremely important.

Many of the benefits and privileges were only available to those who became followers of the Blue Sea Creator God and official Inner City residents.

Mo Yuxuan, for example, wasn’t a believer. So despite being a Tier-3 ability user, she still had to live in the Outer City.

Mo Yuxuan was perfectly fine with that, though. In her opinion, the benefits available to Outer City residents were already quite good.

Blue Sea Safe City actually rented out residential units to its residents at low prices!

That was simply unbelievable.

And those residential units didn’t leak when it rained or let the wind in. They even had temperature control and running water.

There was even a toilet inside!

Most importantly, the price was low!

Mo Yuxuan did the math. According to what had been explained during the orientation, she only needed to pay one Tier-2 crystal to rent a residential unit for quite a long time.

Thinking of this, Mo Yuxuan touched the two Tier-2 crystals in her pocket. She had obtained them after killing two sea monsters earlier.

The fact that those two crystals had remained safely in her possession actually surprised her.

After all, the Blue Sea people had confiscated the crystals when they searched her earlier.

But once she chose to join Blue Sea, the police returned them to her.

This further confirmed what they had said earlier: “Resources obtained by Blue Sea residents outside the city are considered personal property.”

The orientation had covered this point as well, though the staff member had specifically explained that both the points earned through working for Blue Sea and the points obtained by exchanging resources were subject to income tax.

Mo Yuxuan accepted that readily.

If Blue Sea Safe City didn’t even collect taxes, she’d have to wonder whether this place was some kind of gathering place for inhumans.

In the apocalypse, anyone running a purely charitable operation would either be dragged down before they had a chance to grow and become powerful, or they would be hiding some earth-shattering conspiracy.

…

—Cheng Qisheng was watching Mo Yuxuan.

She was still quite interested in this Tier-3 ability user from another Safe City.

Especially her age.

She had written down 123 years old on the form.

Cheng Qisheng knew that ability users could break through the lifespan limit. She herself had already done so. But counting Green Billow Star, Blue Sea had only experienced three worlds so far, so this was genuinely the first time she’d encountered someone who had actually lived this long.

And her behavior and mannerisms… didn’t conform to people’s stereotypical image of an elderly person in the slightest.

But then again, it made sense. The reason elderly people became that “steady, slow, and benevolent” image in the eyes of the world was largely because their physical functions could no longer support them doing the things young people could do.

It was like Cheng Qisheng herself. Before she became ill, she had been someone with an exceptionally high energy level.

Only after falling ill did she gradually understand what people meant when they talked about being a “low-energy person.”

Just saying a few words could leave her exhausted. How could she possibly still be as energetic and enthusiastic as before, working for ten hours straight without slowing down?

The energetic 120-year-old Mo Yuxuan seemed to be planning to live an ordinary person’s life in Blue Sea Safe City for a while.

Her behavior was no different from that of the other new residents. In fact, she seemed to be deliberately imitating them, making herself blend into the crowd like a drop of water.

Cheng Qisheng watched for a while longer and decided that this woman was definitely a consummate survivalist. She probably wasn’t going to be able to figure anything out by watching her.

Never mind.

She turned her attention back to Lilith, who was inspecting the floating device.

Lilith had already become a believer, which undoubtedly put Cheng Qisheng much more at ease.

This meant Lilith was now completely tied to Blue Sea Safe City.

In her mind, Cheng Qisheng began calculating how to improve Lilith’s benefits.

Now that she was one of their own, naturally she should receive the treatment given to one of their own.

—

As someone who wasn’t one of their own, Mo Yuxuan had no idea that she had just attracted the attention of the Blue Sea Creator God.

At that moment, she was planning to exchange one of her nuclear crystals for points and keep the other one for now, just to see how things developed.

She had already decided where she would live, too.

She would stay in an ordinary residential unit.

Although exchanging one of her crystals would give her enough points to rent an apartment with decent living conditions, staying in a residential unit was essentially like “living together” with a large number of residents. It would give Mo Yuxuan more opportunities to interact with them and allow her to understand Blue Sea more quickly.

After the orientation ended and she exchanged her crystal for points, she stood in front of the glass windows in the lobby, her thick notebook in hand, gazing at the rows of skyscrapers standing in the distance and the roads weaving between them.

And throughout the Safe City, drones equipped with machine guns flew around, buzzing as they patrolled.

Some people might think that drones flying around with machine guns attached were dangerous.

But Mo Yuxuan knew very well that these drones represented order.

The new residents who had attended the orientation with her were all in a state she was familiar with: their clothes were ragged, and they were emaciated.

They had been sl*ves under Kansidang’s domain before being accepted by Blue Sea and becoming Outer City residents.

Among them were even several elderly people who had no family.

—There was actually a Safe City willing to accept the elderly.

Mo Yuxuan couldn’t help pressing down on the wound in her left palm.

It hurt.

Everything she was seeing before her was unquestionably real.

Her gaze remained fixed outside, but a trace of anticipation gradually appeared in her eyes.

It was the same anticipation she had felt every time she moved to a new Safe City before.

—I’ve arrived at another new Safe City. This time, I hope I’ll be able to stay a little longer.

That was what Mo Yuxuan thought.

Yet deep down, she had a strong premonition.

This time, she would stay for a very, very long time.

…

“I’ll need quite a long time to convert its energy channels.”

Lilith spent a considerable amount of time inspecting the floating device beneath the entire Safe City, finally completing the examination with the help of the Blue Sea residents.

Fortunately, the floating device supporting the entire Blue Sea Safe City covered only one square kilometer.

If the floating device had actually been as large as the Safe City itself, it would have taken her at least three hundred days to inspect it all, one circuit at a time.

Fortunately, fortunately, the floating device wasn’t anywhere near that absurdly large.

Lilith looked somewhat exhausted, but excitement outweighed her fatigue.

Ever since she had placed her faith in the Great Blue Sea Creator God, she had been in a state of constant exhilaration.

That faint, lingering warmth, that blessing that seemed to sweep away her fatigue, and an indescribable happiness—as though her soul had finally found a place to belong—all proved that God truly existed.

A benevolent and great God had accepted her.

Accepted the Kingdom of Lilith.

Her people would be saved.

The Kingdom of Lilith had once been abandoned by the God of Light.

Yet the Great Blue Sea Creator God had brought a floating city like this one and protected Her believers.

Oh, my God!

Whenever Lilith thought about this, she was filled with boundless motivation.

She eagerly demonstrated her abilities.

“The floating device currently uses a fixed base. Most of the floating devices described in the books use this kind of base because it’s the most convenient and requires the least magic power. But fixed bases have a problem: they lock in the surrounding environment.”

“When the surrounding environment changes, they rapidly break down and become ruins. The ‘disposable’ quality you mentioned should mean this. If this floating city can really leave Green Billow Star and travel to other worlds, changes in spatial fluctuations will cause the fixed base to lose its effectiveness, turning it into what you call a ‘disposable’ item.”

“I can gradually modify the magic runes on the fixed base into an iterative base. The construct itself will also need to be changed into a growth-type model. I’ll expand all the magic-rune modules and turn it into an adaptive evolution core, allowing it to continuously iterate until it reaches a state where it won’t be affected by environmental changes.”

“However, this will require a large amount of magic crystals—in other words, the nuclear crystals you call them.”

The staff member assigned to work with her had a whole head full of magical-world terminology after listening to her. He felt as though he’d just encountered a researcher from some laboratory, yet at the same time, it was like he’d wandered into a fantasy novel.

He did his best to make sense of what she’d said.

“You need nuclear crystals? No problem. How many?”

Lilith took a deep breath and began drawing out the numbers of the Kingdom of Lilith stroke by stroke in magic runes before her.

“Give me a moment. I need to calculate this.”

As she drew one strange symbol after another in the air with tiny traces of magical power, she muttered to herself,

“Given that the energy of one Tier-1 magic crystal is 12 Hz, while one Tier-1 nuclear crystal contains approximately 142 Hz of energy, constructing 1 pz worth of floating-device magic runes requires 15,678,976 mJ, of which the spatial runes account for 1,232 mJ, the levitation runes account for 8,236,337 mJ, plus the anti-gravity anchoring runes… buffer runes… atmospheric distribution runes… gale propulsion runes…”

“…Then it’s wo(t) = qe*{12 + 0.18lnj}. And after factoring in the iterative evolution formula… Hiss, no, that’s not right! The numbers don’t add up. The overload differential and the increase ratio of magic overflow should be 126dg*352 + 0.02 lp…”

Cheng Qisheng stared at her in stunned silence.

She had thought magic was powered by mana.

Then Lilith told her that using magic also required knowing how to solve math problems?

Although no one could understand what Lilith was calculating, it was obvious to everyone that this “problem” was incredibly difficult.

Sometimes Lilith would furiously calculate. Other times, she’d cross out the results she’d gotten earlier. At still other times, she’d rummage through books looking for something called the “layer-lock formula” or the “magic-flow formula.”

She became so completely absorbed in her calculations that she couldn’t hear anything happening around her. Even when mealtime came, she refused to stop.

The staff member assigned to work with her would feed her, and she’d simply open her mouth and eat while continuing to calculate with her hands. It was enough to make people wonder whether she even realized she was eating.

When she ran out of magical power, she switched to pen and paper. Once she’d rested and recovered, she’d resume using magic to fill in what she’d written before and continue calculating.

Even Cheng Qisheng thought she was pushing herself far too hard.

But Lilith refused to rest. Whenever someone told her to take a break, she’d only say, “Almost done, almost done. I’ll have it figured out in a moment.”

The only time she briefly returned to the city was when she needed to use the bathroom. Otherwise, she spent all her time in a hammock suspended beneath the floating device, giving it everything she had as she worked through calculations using units and terminology that nobody else could understand.

This time, she calculated for a full two days.

When the result finally came out, a satisfied smile appeared on Lilith’s face, which was flushed slightly from her excitement.

“I finally figured it out!!! Hahahahahaha!!”

According to the history recorded by the Kingdom of Lilith, even the great nations in the surrounding region had never possessed such a massive floating device.

Yet she had managed to figure out how to modify it. How could that not be exhilarating?!

Lilith’s eyes were bloodshot, and her expression was feverishly excited. She grinned like some great villain who was about to use mathematics to poison the world.

She grabbed the arm of the staff member who had been standing guard beside her in case she fell.

“I figured it out! Give me 2.78 million Tier-1 nuclear crystals!”

“I can do it. I’m confident I can turn it into a permanent floating device!”

Cheng Qisheng had been watching the whole thing. The moment she heard this, she exerted a little too much force, accidentally bending the spoon she had been using to eat watermelon in her hand.

2.78 million nuclear crystals.

That was 2.22 million fewer than the price in the system shop.

And in the future, once Blue Sea Safe City’s area expanded again, they could have Lilith further upgrade the floating device in the same way.

How many more nuclear crystals would they be able to save then?

Cheng Qisheng slowly bent the spoon back into shape.

The more she thought about it, the better she felt.

She had really struck gold.

Lilith wasn’t just capable of modifying the floating device used by the Safe City. She could also modify floating farmland, floating roads—

In other words, all of Blue Sea Safe City’s floating infrastructure could undergo a massive upgrade under Lilith’s hands.

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