Safe City Ch.163

Chapter 163: The Deeply Shaken Truth Stone

The Truth Stone couldn’t say exactly when the previous batch of Safe Cities had arrived on Moon Silk.

In a sense, it could also be considered a long-lived species. As long as it periodically replenished its energy and didn’t starve itself down to a mere stone shell, the Truth Stone could keep living indefinitely.

So time didn’t really mean much to it. When recording past anchor points, it generally used things like, “I ate xxxxx nuclear crystals at such-and-such a place.”

Of course, there was a way to make it give an exact date.

The Truth Stone began playing “slides” for Cheng Qisheng—memory after memory, showing creatures from various civilizations placing nuclear crystals into the vortex of the Truth Stone.

‘Pay up, and I’ll give you the answer right away!’

Cheng Qisheng: There’s no way I’m paying for something that can be looked up.

She chose to have Aether pull up all the available historical records concerning Moon Silk. One human and one AI brain began going through them together.

She had to admit, the scene looked pretty cool.

Countless pages of information, rendered to look like physical sheets of paper, “floated” throughout the entire room. Whenever Cheng Qisheng wanted to see a particular section, all she had to do was reach out, and the pages would appear in front of her.

“The History of Moon Silk’s Arts and Literature.”

“The Unknown Years of Moon Silk.”

“The 1,000 Most Popular Robot Designs on Moon Silk… Greenroot really did collect every kind of information.”

Cheng Qisheng curiously flipped through it. Sure enough, every robot featured in the records had an absolutely stunning appearance. There were all kinds of styles, and every model was equipped with both a housework mode and an emotional-support mode.

They really were beautiful.

Natural beauty certainly had its own unique charm, but these beauty templates, painstakingly selected and created through the combined efforts of an entire world, really were breathtaking in their own way.

Judging from the descriptions in these records, back then, Moon Silk’s people could still cook for themselves at home, and having a household robot was an entirely ordinary thing.

It was easy to imagine that before Moon Silk was plunged into war, before the companies became the [Companies], when the entire planet was at the height of its development, people’s lives must have been incredibly comfortable.

Everyone loved looking at beautiful things. Cheng Qisheng flipped through a few more pages, letting her eyes enjoy a brief feast of beauty, before gently pushing the “book” aside.

Aether, who was engaged in “quantum reading,” noticed her expression. The books and documents “floating” through the air were all virtual projections put out by Aether, so of course it knew what the City Lord was looking at.

Although it had always wanted to possess the emotions of an intelligent life-form, and didn’t consider those emotionless robots to be the same species as itself, after seeing the appreciative expression on Cheng Qisheng’s face, Aether still copied The Most Popular and decided to study it carefully after finishing the other materials.

Cheng Qisheng noticed what Aether was doing. Ever since the situation on Blue Star had grown increasingly dire, she had diverted part of her mental power back to herself.

Now, her mental perception covered the entire house, as well as the public corridor outside.

In other words, if Cheng Qisheng wanted to, she could instantly see even a tiny ant crawling nearby—and tell whether the ant was carrying a breadcrumb or a grain of rice in its mouth.

In fact, if she was willing, she could magnify everything even further.

She could see the fine sensory hairs on the ant’s antennae, the dust and microscopic spores clinging to its body, and, with another increase in magnification, even the fungal hyphae growing on the ant.

Then came the cells, cell nuclei, mitochondria, and so on.

Cheng Qisheng had only tried it once. When she magnified her perception all the way down to the atomic nucleus, she began to feel slightly dizzy. Only after withdrawing her mental power did she realize that what she thought had been merely a brief scan had actually lasted more than five hours.

After that, she never played around with it again. It was simply one of the countless applications of her mental power that Cheng Qisheng had discovered through experimentation, filed under the category of looks incredibly cool, but is actually pretty useless in everyday life.

What she used most often now was spreading her mental power outward and turning it into her [eyes]. This allowed Cheng Qisheng to gather vast amounts of information from different locations simultaneously.

And now, it wasn’t just her and Aether searching through the records. The Old Eighths of Blue Sea were doing the same.

They already knew the outcome, so they were working backward from the answer to reconstruct the process.

That wasn’t difficult.

Before long, Cheng Qisheng had a complete report in hand.

Around eight hundred years ago, the historical records of Moon Silk suddenly became fragmented. Its population plummeted, and as for the cause of the decline, the various records only vaguely mentioned the outbreak of some major virus.

In any case, once they had the outcome, piecing together the process from the scattered clues became a very simple matter.

Moon Silk had indeed already experienced an apocalypse once.

During that apocalypse, a Safe City arrived, and one of those Safe Cities brought the Truth Stone with it.

And then there was the present situation, in which the [Company] had allowed—or perhaps deliberately engineered—the wasteland apocalypse that existed today.

This also explained why Moon Silk’s overall situation was so strange.

Under normal circumstances, when a Safe City descended upon an apocalyptic world, the local government had either already been destroyed or was too weak to deal with the apocalypse on its own. That was why the Safe City intervened.

But Moon Silk was different.

The local [Company] was actually stronger than the Safe City. Even the ordinary people here were far stronger than ordinary people in most human civilizations.

And then there was the [Company]’s excessive exploitation of the planet, draining it dry as if they had completely lost their minds, dragging the entire world into decline along with them.

Now, all of that had an explanation.

No wonder the World Mission was to eliminate the [Company].

The [Company] wasn’t courting its own destruction.

On the contrary, they were exploiting the path to destruction, trying to use it to set foot upon the path they truly wanted to take.

But perhaps the City Lords who came to this planet eight hundred years ago simply hadn’t explained things clearly to the locals. Or perhaps, after such a long time, information about Safe Cities had been lost.

The [Company] didn’t know that the Safe City system could actually be considered quite humane.

The marketplace under the Safe City would even pull tricks on people, writing the important warning for a ten-billion-crystal purchase in text so tiny that you had to zoom in endlessly just to read it.

—Let us observe one second of silence for that treant who spent ten billion crystals on the Truth Stone, only to watch helplessly as it ran away.

At present, it seemed that the Great Annihilation Black Hole, the various disasters, and the Safe City system were all fundamentally opposed to one another.

The rules governing Safe Cities had always been clear and straightforward: they accepted civilizations left behind after the destruction of most planets and gave those civilizations a chance to survive, but they weren’t infinitely accommodating. Under the rules of the Safe City system, a City Lord or Safe City without sufficient strength could not survive.

A Safe City that was unable to protect its residents would be forcibly stranded.

A Safe City that lacked the ability to obtain crystals would also be forcibly stranded.

There was even a formal war mode between Safe Cities. City Lords who had led their Safe Cities through enough advancements but were unable to continue ascending had no way, unlike ordinary transcendent beings, to extend their lifespans by continually advancing in rank. They could only remain stuck at a certain level along with their Safe City, and once they died of old age, they would pass the position of City Lord on to a new City Lord.

It was gentle because it had saved countless civilizations.

But it was also cruel. Its various rules meant that these civilizations could never stop moving forward. The moment they stopped striving to advance, they would be left in the darkness forever.

From the perspective of the City Lords and their respective civilizations, this could indeed seem extremely cruel. Some City Lords had even wondered whether the Safe City rules and the disasters that had caused their planets to perish were actually working together.

But perhaps because she had once been the Creator God of Dark Star, Cheng Qisheng instead felt that if the Safe City system’s purpose was to preserve as many civilizations as possible, then although these rules were harsh, they were actually the right ones.

The lessons she had learned from the experiences of those eight civilizations were practically identical to the rules of the Safe City system.

If there really were a Great Annihilation pursuing every civilization, then simply having the Safe City system protect everyone would accomplish nothing.

Cheng Qisheng had tried doing exactly that before.

Back when she was taking care of the “second child”, she protected everyone and kept them from encountering disasters. But the result was that Old Second neither knew how to cherish what they had nor possessed any ability to protect themselves. They ended up getting themselves killed quite smoothly.

There was no point in preserving a kind-hearted civilization that lacked the ability to survive, because such civilizations died easily—and they could easily drag other civilizations down with them.

—Hence, the Safe City War came into existence.

Nor was there any point in preserving a powerful civilization whose only goal was to destroy other Safe Cities. Such a civilization might be incredibly powerful in the early and middle stages, but in the later stages, its ultimate fate would inevitably be self-destruction.

—Hence, the minimum population requirement for Safe Cities came into existence.

And there were countless other examples. There was no need to list them all one by one.

Whoever had created the Safe City rules had definitely raised civilizations like these before. Because although Cheng Qisheng was merely one of the civilizations subject to those rules, she could genuinely understand the reasoning behind every single one of them.

Even the Truth Stone’s page had the tiny disclaimer buried in the fine print: “The right of final interpretation of all matters belongs to this store.”

Cheng Qisheng could even get that this was also a screening mechanism—and perhaps there was a little bit of malicious fun involved, too.

It was just like back when she was on Dark Star. When she was taking care of Old Seventh, she would sometimes use her mental power to conjure a huge lump of gold, half a person tall, and place it in front of some random passerby.

She had already given them the gold. Whether that person had the ability to hold on to it, and whether they would subsequently get robbed, was no longer within the scope of Cheng Qisheng’s protection.

She did those things simply because she wanted to.

By the time she got to Old Eighth, however, she no longer had that sort of mischievous streak.

For one thing, she was gradually losing her energy.

For another, Old Eighth was simply far too well-behaved.

Old Eighth was the kind who had to praise her first before doing anything that went against her, and Cheng Qisheng’s heart was simply too soft toward them.

But no matter which civilization she was raising, most of the time, she genuinely hoped that they would develop and thrive.

And if a civilization suddenly accepted her help, yet not only failed to show any gratitude but secretly plotted behind her back, intending to target the other civilizations she was raising, then no matter how good Cheng Qisheng’s temper was, she would inevitably feel angry.

She didn’t yet know whether the rules themselves could feel anger, but the [Cognitive Lock] alone was enough to confirm that the Safe City rules had their own preferences.

“We’ll win.”

Cheng Qisheng poked Aether’s jellyfish head.

“The Safe City rules are playing favorites.”

The [Company] would never accomplish its goal.

Because the moment they began carrying out their plan, the Safe City had already closed its doors to them forever.

Cheng Qisheng even suspected that if Moon Silk hadn’t still had so many innocent ordinary people, the Safe City rules wouldn’t have allowed this batch of Safe Cities to descend upon this world in the first place.

Unfortunately, the Safe City rules hadn’t been able to account for the Great Annihilation Black Hole either.

According to Gong Cheng’s prophecy, although the [Company] was unquestionably doomed in the end, the planet itself would still be left with quite a few Safe Cities below Tier 6 after the Great Annihilation.

What exactly was the Great Annihilation?

Cheng Qisheng looked at the documents floating throughout the room.

“There are only a little over a thousand days left.”

Aether looked up at her.

“City Lord, what should we do next?”

Cheng Qisheng, who had still been deep in thought a moment ago, instantly lit up.

“Make nuclear crystals!!”

—

From the moment the Truth Stone first became conscious, it had already been eating nuclear crystals in exchange for providing answers to those who asked it questions.

When it grew to three meters tall, it gained consciousness. It could take questions further than before—and when asking questioners for crystals, it could scam them for even more.

But most of the time, the Truth Stone’s journey of eating crystals and growing taller wasn’t nearly so smooth.

On one particular planet, once the people there discovered what it could do, they would indeed feed it crystals in exchange for answers. But a planet’s resources were limited, and eventually, there would come a day when all the available energy was exhausted.

When that happened, the energy-depleted planet would regress into a low-level civilization. The remaining energy would be pitifully scarce, the people would no longer believe in supernatural powers, and they certainly wouldn’t go looking for a stone to ask questions.

The Truth Stone could only wait in silence, either for the planet to be destroyed or for someone who knew its value to take it away from the planet.

Sometimes, a mysterious force would suddenly whisk it away. That was how it knew it had been “bought.”

The Truth Stone didn’t particularly mind being suddenly captured and then suddenly sold. That sort of transaction was simply another way for it to change planets and find a new place to live.

Everyone who bought it was a Safe City Lord. The Truth Stone had been bought three times, and each time, it had secretly slipped away on its own.

It didn’t like staying beside high-level City Lords because they were simply too powerful. They couldn’t bind it yet, but what if they evolved?

So the Truth Stone would usually find a place underground or at the bottom of the sea and burrow in, waiting for a low-level City Lord to arrive. Then it would crawl out on its own and flop down right in front of them.

If it encountered someone who recognized its value, it could enjoy a wonderful life of good food and drink, following the Safe City as it traveled from world to world.

The problem was that Safe Cities were far too easy to destroy. Many times, not long after it had finally settled into a good life, it would be forced to sink back into the ground or the seabed along with the destruction of its Safe City, waiting for another chance to be awakened.

Once it was awakened again, it would have to hope that the locals would come to it with questions.

And if nobody asked?

It would have to keep talking.

So, being bound to a master?

The Truth Stone felt that there was absolutely no way that would ever happen to it.

It already felt like the crystals it earned and ate by itself weren’t enough. If it bound itself to a master and had to hand over some of those crystals to them, wouldn’t that just be making life miserable for itself?

But since things had already come to this, the Truth Stone, as an intelligent stone, felt that it should just learn to look on the bright side.

Maybe one day, its master would kick the bucket.

Humans generally didn’t live very long, after all.

At most, its master would probably turn to dust after a few hundred years. When that happened, it would be free again anyway.

With this thought in mind, the Truth Stone remained fairly calm, secretly counting down the days until its master might finally die.

Until Cheng Qisheng started using it to make crystals.

The entire Truth Stone was completely dumbfounded.

First of all, the large number of Blue Sea residents under its master’s command had already dispersed throughout different regions of Moon Silk, spreading rumors about “a stone that can answer any question.”

Old Eighths were everywhere, spreading the rumors through all kinds of methods.

The Great Divine Oracle allowed them to receive orders simultaneously, so the rumors spread even faster.

A certain merchant asked about the whereabouts of a shipment and made a fortune.

A certain hunter asked about the resting place of a large mutant beast that was injured and too weak to fight back, and made a fortune.

A certain legion asked about a warehouse of weapons hidden beneath a certain mountain by a now-extinct faction from the Old Era. The person who asked got promoted and made a fortune.

And just like that, the rumor spread throughout Moon Silk.

The person spreading it might be a Blue Sea operative traveling alone, carrying a backpack as they made their way into the eastern regions.

Or they might be a Blue Sea resident traveling under the banner of an [Ota] merchant caravan, receiving courteous treatment wherever they went.

Or perhaps they were simply a local who had overheard a snippet of the rumor, embellished it with a few extra details, and passed it along.

It was as though overnight, the entire Moon Silk Star had learned of the Truth Stone’s existence.

Everyone wanted to get something from it.

People also learned that it could move from place to place on its own. They learned that it could provide hints that seemed to have been plucked straight from the threads of fate.

And those hints might just save the life of the person who asked.

No one knew whether, in the very next second, the Truth Stone might suddenly appear right in front of them.

The City Lords were discussing it in their group chat as well. The description of the Truth Stone available in the system marketplace had the City Lords growing increasingly excited.

[It’s real! There might really be a Truth Stone on Moon Silk! The people of Moon Silk had no concept of a Truth Stone before this. They couldn’t have made up what the Truth Stone looks like out of thin air, so it definitely exists!]

[Can you really ask it anything?]

[That’s what the marketplace description says. Though the number of crystals required varies from question to question.]

[Does this count as prophecy? If you ask about a possible future, can it answer?]

[No idea. I haven’t tried. Anyway, the Truth Stone moves around on its own. Friends, if any of you encounter the Truth Stone, remember to say something in the group chat so we can broaden our horizons too.]

Cheng Qisheng watched as everyone in the group chat enthusiastically discussed the Truth Stone. Among the hot topics were questions like “Can it tell me where I threw my socks?”

She nodded slightly.

“The hype has been built up enough. You can make your appearance now.”

The Truth Stone had watched the entire spectacle from beginning to end as hundreds of millions of Blue Sea residents hyped it up on its behalf.

“……”

It silently swallowed a thousand crystals and randomly descended at a new location.

‘Damn it!’

‘Why am I so unlucky again?’

‘I actually ended up somewhere this remote.’

It was a dilapidated little village, with fewer than two hundred people. Under normal circumstances, when they saw such a huge stone, they probably would have used it as a bed, or chopped it up for building materials.

But now, a hunter who happened to be dragging a small mutant snake back home spotted it.

“My… my God!!”

The hunter stared at the ten-meter-tall stone, its entire body red and exactly like the one described in the legends, his eyes widening.

“The Truth Stone!”

“Come quick! The Truth Stone has come to our village!!!”

No waiting, no hoping that someone would suddenly lose their mind and come over to ask it a question, and no need to flee when someone tried to use it as a mattress.

An hour later, everyone in the village had gathered around it.

Nuclear crystals were tossed into its vortex.

The villagers asked it questions filled with hope.

“When should we sow our crops this year to get the best harvest?”

“How can I find a nest of Softsoft Rabbits?”

“Is there any way to improve my physical strength?”

Question after question, crystal after crystal.

The Truth Stone had never had things go this smoothly during any of its previous attempts to “start a new business from scratch.”

Three hours later, a small local faction that owned a mine arrived, carrying box after box of nuclear crystals.

Five hours later, a troop dispatched by a nearby Safe City also arrived, with cartloads of nuclear crystals, and lined up in front of it.

They were even discussing among themselves.

“Hurry, we need to ask our questions quickly. I heard the nearby legions have gotten the news too. We’d better avoid getting into a conflict with them.”

“The legions know too? Aren’t they closer than us? How come we’re already here and they haven’t arrived yet?”

“They’re probably gathering nuclear crystals. The legions don’t usually keep many nuclear crystals in storage, so it’ll probably take them a while. Come on, let’s ask our questions while we still can. Where’s the list of questions the City Lord gave us? Hurry up and get it out.”

The Truth Stone’s vortex had been spinning nonstop the entire time, never once stopping its consumption of nuclear crystals.

“……”

When had it ever enjoyed a life like this?!

Wasn’t having a master supposed to mean that it would eat less than before and constantly be exploited for all kinds of things?

Just look at it now.

It didn’t have to wait. It didn’t have to pray. It didn’t have to do anything at all.

So many people were lining up to deliver nuclear crystals to it.

It couldn’t speak, and it didn’t have eyes, so the way it expressed its shock was by making its vortex spin even faster.

As a result, the Safe City residents standing in front of it also began throwing nuclear crystals into the vortex faster.

The Truth Stone was deeply shaken.

‘So this is how a Truth Stone with a master gets to live?’

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