Safe City Ch.209

Chapter 209: Heavenly Court’s Activity Center

The more Cheng Qisheng thought about it, the more she felt that this plan was entirely feasible.

Who cared about radiation? After passing through the conversion field, everything would become matter, and all of it would be broken apart anyway.

As for whether the land could reassemble itself in the world of Fallen Heaven Star? She would worry about that after giving it a try.

Cheng Qisheng increasingly felt as though she had discovered the entrance to an entirely new world.

She had realized something. Back when Dark Star was first destroyed, and she was still experimenting with her mental power and developing “new tricks,” she had been rather conventional, following established procedures step by step.

But as Blue Sea traveled through one world after another and began navigating the vast universe, she gradually came to understand something.

The universe as a whole might appear to have its own distinct set of rules, such as the advancement system for Transcendents and the advancement system for Safe Cities. But in reality, there were no rules that absolutely had to be followed step by step.

It seemed like everyone was just winging it.

Not only were the worlds bizarre and all over the place, but the Safe City Mall was also a shameless, profiteering swindler.

Even the Safe City rules themselves could explicitly declare that “each [Company] gets one [Heaven’s Punishment],” only to award Blue Sea three [Heaven’s Punishments] all at once after it took down the real [Ota].

To this day, Cheng Qisheng still had no idea why it had given her the extra rewards.

She had tried asking the Truth Stone, but apparently, questions related to the Safe City rules were extremely, extremely, extremely expensive. The countless zeros displayed across the surface of the ruby had been enough to make her abandon the idea.

Old Eighth, however, had a theory. Perhaps it was because the real [Ota] possessed two [Heaven’s Punishments]. Once [Ota] lost its owner status, the Safe City rules had determined that those two [Heaven’s Punishments] were now available for it to reallocate.

And so, those two [Heaven’s Punishments] had been reassigned to the sole winner: Blue Sea Safe City.

That sounded like a pretty makeshift operation, didn’t it?!

And then there was Fallen Heaven Star.

It was an enormous planet with such a fantastical world setting that any random demon, monster, ghost, or deity from its divine cultivation system could reach the level of a Tier 4 ability user. As for the upper limit of their power, it was still impossible to estimate at this point.

After all, the world was enormous, and based on current estimates, the ordinary population alone numbered at least tens of billions.

Yet on a planet like this, every single task required to keep the world running had been handled by the [Heavenly Dao].

It had even reached the point where the moment the [Heavenly Dao] fell, the entire world would be destroyed along with it.

That sounded utterly absurd, but somehow, that was exactly what had happened.

Then there was the conversion field, which could convert anything. The World Consciousness could grant mental power to City Lords, and world quest rewards could include World Rules.

If one day a world quest suddenly offered an entire planet as its reward, Cheng Qisheng wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest.

At this point, she really felt that the vast universe and Fallen Heaven Star were much the same.

They both appeared immense and mysterious, boundless to the City Lords, and served as the very foundation that sustained the various Safe Cities. But in reality, things had long since descended into complete chaos beneath the surface.

Cheng Qisheng tried using her mental power to “cut” a piece of land off Green Lizard Safe City, then pushed it downward toward Fallen Heaven Star.

Since this was just an experiment, the piece of land was quite small, measuring only about 100 square meters.

Then the problem emerged. It was a physical object, yet it couldn’t descend any farther.

Cheng Qisheng wasn’t in a hurry. She simply let her mental power swirl above it, spreading into thin membranes that covered the land layer by layer.

Sure enough, when the third layer had been applied, she detected something familiar.

A tiny, almost imperceptible fragment of a broken rule.

The City Lords of the Safe Cities were unwilling to take the risk of piloting their cities through Fallen Heaven Star’s conversion field. But if they had only dared to take that risk once, they would have discovered that the rules governing Safe Cities conflicted with those of Fallen Heaven Star. A Safe City simply couldn’t enter Fallen Heaven Star in the first place.

It was like Fallen Heaven Star was a cooking pot. Intelligent life forms could enter it one by one, like dumplings being dropped into the pot. A Safe City, on the other hand, was a lid larger than the pot itself.

It could cover Fallen Heaven Star from above, but it could never make the pot boil itself into that oversized lid.

The moment Cheng Qisheng came into contact with that tiny fragment of Safe City rules, she immediately realized that it had many “clauses” layered over it.

For example, it had a dual-layer structure: one layer defined the actual land area, while the other defined the land area that manifested upon arrival. In the early stages, this allowed City Lords to remain in various apocalyptic worlds more easily.

Another example was its “automatic mode,” which transferred ownership to the victorious side after a war was lost.

Then there was its “land-shedding mode,” which activated when a City Lord wanted to flee.

These tiny clauses were like Lilith’s magical runes, engraved onto the small fragment of rules. Together, they formed the very foundation upon which each Safe City stood.

Cheng Qisheng didn’t “devour” it. Instead, she carefully wrapped it in her mental power.

It was like when she bought an appliance she didn’t use very often. Sometimes, she would keep the original packaging so that if she stopped using the appliance for a long time, she could put it back in its box.

Once she had stripped away that tiny fragment of rules, the 100-square-meter patch of land indeed began passing through Fallen Heaven Star’s dazzling, multicolored passage.

Cheng Qisheng kept her mental power attached to it the entire time, watching as it passed through the conversion field, was broken down, and was transformed.

Then she watched as, just as expected, it slowly reassembled into a patch of land after emerging from the conversion field.

Cheng Qisheng sent it to Wu Mingfeng, the [Ming Gong Earth God], who currently had the most believers and whose temples covered the widest area.

This wasn’t difficult. The 100-square-meter patch of land initially descended slowly, but then, like a meteor, it suddenly slammed toward Daluo Village.

Wait, this was a little too scientific. Wouldn’t it turn into a meteorite when it hit the ground?

Cheng Qisheng hurriedly acted while she still had time, splitting off a tiny portion of the rules she had previously devoured—approximately one ten-billionth of the original. She didn’t say anything aloud. Instead, she simply pictured the kind of land she wanted in her mind.

—

Wu Mingfeng had received his God’s divine decree and was making every effort to prepare for the expansion of his temple. But when this “meteor” struck, the first thing he felt was an intensely soothing sensation, as though his body had been replenished with divine power.

He looked around and discovered that the temple itself hadn’t expanded. Instead, an entirely new space had appeared right in front of him.

Everything inside was identical to the Temple of the Ming Gong Earth God, and it covered an area of approximately 100 square meters.

It existed in another dimension of the world of Fallen Heaven Star.

It was just like a newly created miniature world. As long as Wu Mingfeng didn’t want anyone to enter, no one could get inside—except for his God. He could establish his own divine administration within it, invite other deities over as guests, and even allow his believers or ordinary people with a high degree of spirituality to live there.

As a deity of this world, Wu Mingfeng immediately understood what it was.

“Great God, it’s a divine kingdom—”

—

“It’s… the… rules…”

On Blue Star, Cheng Qisheng lay in bed, slowly uttering those three words as she used her mental power to divide up the land of the Green Lizard civilization.

Just now, she had created a miniature world in the truest sense of the word.

Although this miniature world could only be sustained by divine power and was merely a temporary version that existed within Fallen Heaven Star, the process of “creating a new world” had taught Cheng Qisheng many things on an intuitive level.

She was certain now: the vast universe and Fallen Heaven Star were essentially two contrasting examples of the same thing.

Rules that were functioning normally could never be captured by someone like Cheng Qisheng, a Tier 7 Transcendent.

Previously, she had assumed that this was simply how “rules” worked. Although she had found it somewhat strange and felt as though she were exploiting a cheat code, she was still getting benefits out of it. Naturally, she would keep taking those benefits while remaining puzzled.

But after seeing Fallen Heaven Star, a more reasonable explanation was right in front of her.

Just like Fallen Heaven Star, the vast universe was slowly falling apart. It was simply taking much longer to disintegrate.

It was like the lives of humans on Blue Star. Most people lived for fewer than a hundred years, and to the humans of Blue Star, that span of time was an entire lifetime.

But to the cells inside a human body on Blue Star, if they possessed consciousness, their subjective experience might be that the “Blue Star body” had existed for tens of billions, or even hundreds of billions, of years.

The same was true of the vast universe. It might completely disintegrate in a thousand years, ten thousand years, or even a hundred thousand years. To the intelligent beings living within it, that was still a very distant future.

The rules that were disintegrating were currently at their weakest. Perhaps this wasn’t a good thing for the universe as a whole.

But to Cheng Qisheng, weakness meant an opportunity to exploit that vulnerability and take control.

What if—what if she managed to gain control over all the rules before the universe completely disintegrated?

Cheng Qisheng sensed the various strands of rule power within her body.

Wouldn’t that mean she could protect, or even reshape, an entirely new universe?

Even if she couldn’t collect every last strand of rule power, it would be enough to gather enough rules to create a miniature world.

That way, even if the universe really did disintegrate, she could at least protect Old Eighth and her home on Blue Star.

A light of ambition gradually ignited in Cheng Qisheng’s eyes.

She had once believed that hundreds of billions of years of having her mental power tempered by the passage of time on Dark Star had worn away most of her humanity.

The Cheng Qisheng who had once strived to get ahead, aimed for first place in school, and worked to be the best employee at her company had gradually become the calm, detached person she was today, someone who felt that almost anything was acceptable.

For a while, she had worried that her humanity might slowly disappear. To prevent that, she had deliberately held on to the everyday routines of an ordinary person: eating three meals a day when she was able to move around, scrolling through her phone, watching television, playing video games, and so on.

But now, an ambition that nearly filled her entire heart was telling Cheng Qisheng something.

She was still the same person she had always been. Her threshold for ambition had simply been raised.

Cheng Qisheng lay motionless in bed, yet her gaze seemed to reach beyond the stars.

World Rules, Item Rules, Space-Time Rules, Stellar Rules…

Blue Sea Safe City really did need to advance and become a planet.

But becoming a real planet wasn’t the end goal for Blue Sea.

Even after becoming a planet, Blue Sea would still be living under a third-party system of rules.

She wanted to seize control of these tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of rules, so numerous that they couldn’t even be counted, one by one.

Because her mental power was too strong for her mortal body to handle, she had suffered from a condition known as Mortal Body Syndrome and could only rest passively. Because Dark Star had encountered a black hole, she had been forced to bring Old Eighth into the Safe City system. Because the Great Annihilation was chasing them from behind, she had been forced to keep piloting the Safe City forward without ever stopping.

Cheng Qisheng had had enough of this passive existence.

She wanted to become the one who made the rules.

The mental power of the great Creator God of Blue Sea spread across vast stretches of land belonging to Green Lizard Safe City.

—First, she’d use Fallen Heaven Star to practice.

Wrapped in her mental power, enormous stretches of land had their overlying rules stripped away before plunging into Fallen Heaven Star.

Cheng Qisheng began distributing divine kingdoms to her believers one by one, as casually as handing out paychecks.

—Wu Mingfeng’s divine power could probably accommodate about 5,000 square meters. Give him that!

—This Old Eighth’s divine power could support 3,000 square meters. Give her that!

—Oh! This resident just descended! Although his divine power is still rather weak, let’s give him 10 square meters anyway.

The residents of Blue Sea had only recently arrived on Fallen Heaven Star, and their divine power was still in its infancy. Cheng Qisheng busied herself distributing divine kingdoms all around. Only after she had finished and had no one left to give them to did she realize that she had distributed a mere 20,000 square kilometers of land.

Green Lizard Safe City really was enormous. After all that work distributing land, she’d barely scraped off a thin layer.

Cheng Qisheng’s mental power wandered aimlessly across the 230,000 square kilometers of land.

She was preoccupied with figuring out what to do with all this land when suddenly, something flashed and caught her mental power’s attention.

The mental power that had been drifting along at a leisurely pace immediately slammed on the brakes and hurried over to a glittering pile of nuclear crystals.

That’s right. Everything belonging to the Green Lizard civilization had been destroyed by [Heaven’s Punishment].

However, as the only universally accepted currency in the vast universe, the nuclear crystals they had stored remained perfectly intact.

Cheng Qisheng was still thinking about what to do with all that land when her mental power, acting entirely out of habit, had already spread over the pile of nuclear crystals and begun counting them.

At the same time, she started silently counting in her head.

“Ten million…”

“Fifty million…”

“Seventy million…”

Cheng Qisheng: !!!

What a wonderful surprise!

She had just spent eighty million nuclear crystals upgrading Blue Sea’s protective shield, and now she’d earned another seventy million.

Although it wasn’t quite as much as the eighty million she’d spent, that wasn’t the right way to look at the numbers. Blue Sea’s Tier 8 protective shield hadn’t been destroyed; it had merely been damaged. Another twenty or thirty million nuclear crystals would be enough to restore it to perfect condition.

In other words, in this Safe City war, Blue Sea had not only gained 250,000 square kilometers of land, but had effectively gotten a protective shield for free, with tens of millions of nuclear crystals left over.

And that wasn’t all. Just look at how all the other Safe Cities were now starting to purchase private chat channels and send her “greeting gifts.” That alone showed there were additional, hidden benefits.

At the very least, when Blue Sea’s Great Luo Heavenly Court began operating on Fallen Heaven Star, the residents dispatched by these Safe Cities might not merely refrain from interfering or obstructing them. They might even lend a helping hand.

She had gained both prestige and practical benefits. Everything she needed for the present and the future was now taken care of.

Another enormous profit!

Cheng Qisheng happily used her mental power to push a large quantity of nuclear crystals onto a separated patch of land. Then she moved the land to the gates of Blue Sea Safe City so the residents could collect the crystals.

As it happened, Fallen Heaven Star itself had no “nuclear crystals,” probably because of its conversion field. Instead, it had its own unique currencies: “divine power, demonic power, and magical power.”

These nuclear crystals would be enough to sustain Blue Sea Safe City in the vast universe for a long time, meaning Cheng Qisheng wouldn’t need to open up her “Blue Sea Mini-Mart” to sell supplies in exchange for nuclear crystals.

After safely sending the nuclear crystals back and making sure the profits were secured, Cheng Qisheng cheerfully turned her attention to the remaining 230,000 square kilometers of land.

If she thought about it herself, she could probably come up with a solution.

But the great Creator God of Blue Sea didn’t need to think. She simply asked Old Eighth for a plan.

As expected, the Blue Sea government came up with an excellent proposal.

“Great God, since we’re going to build a Heavenly Court, could we, if possible, suspend these landmasses above Fallen Heaven Star’s cloud layer and use them as the Heavenly Court’s activity center? That way, we wouldn’t waste any land, and we could also demonstrate that the Heavenly Court is a properly established institution.”

What a great idea!!

Cheng Qisheng gave the believer who had proposed the plan a thumbs-up. After all, when she’d watched Journey to the West as a child, the Heavenly Court had indeed been up in the sky, with actual offices where its officials conducted business.

The great Creator God of Blue Sea recalled all the mythology and legends from Blue Star that she had frantically studied when she first arrived on Fallen Heaven Star.

In Blue Star’s legends about the Heavenly Court…

There were Thirty-Three Heavens, right?

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