Safe City Ch.73

Chapter 73: Three Phases of Natural Disaster

Cheng Qisheng received a private message from Moonspirit.

She said that she had already gathered her residents and had them more or less settled. She would be leaving this world shortly.

Moonspirit Safe City: [You know how it is. I have to leave as soon as possible. I don’t want another incident where my residents misjudge the situation because of their past experiences.]

Cheng Qisheng understood.

After working together this time, the two of them couldn’t exactly be called friends, but they had at least built a certain rapport. At the very least, Moonspirit had developed a favorable impression of Blue Sea.

Whether it was admiration for Blue Sea’s strength or respect for Cheng Qisheng’s character, Moonspirit had decided it was worth maintaining a good relationship with her.

She offered a piece of intelligence that might prove useful.

[That blizzard was only the beginning. Things are definitely going to get worse from here.]

[I know your residents are physically very resilient, but don’t let them underestimate the temperatures they’ll face in the future.]

[Trust me. What’s coming will be far colder than it is now.]

While they had been dividing up the rescued residents, quite a few people from Blue Sea Safe City had taken on translation work, giving Moonspirit the chance to observe just how resistant Blue Sea’s residents were to the cold.

In the frozen wasteland, residents from the other Safe Cities either wore heavy cold-weather gear and forced themselves to stay awake through the night—because falling asleep meant their body temperature would drop, potentially freezing them to death—or sheltered inside item-based buildings, or hurried back to their Safe City before nightfall.

But the people of Blue Sea?

They simply dug themselves snow caves and went to sleep.

The way they casually hollowed out snow shelters and settled in for the night was so natural that residents from several Safe Cities came to believe Blue Sea’s homeworld had always been a land of endless ice and snow.

It wasn’t until someone finally couldn’t help asking that a Blue Sea resident answered matter-of-factly,

“Not at all. This is our first time seeing an extreme-cold world too.”

“At first, it was unbearably cold. But after getting used to it for a while… it didn’t seem so bad anymore.”

Moonspirit was astonished to discover that the people of Blue Sea weren’t actually resistant to the cold.

What they were resistant to was damage—and they possessed astonishing regenerative abilities.

It wasn’t that they didn’t feel cold. They did.

But after enduring the cold long enough, they gradually adapted to it. At first, their bodies would develop frostbite and go numb, yet they would recover with remarkable speed.

It was like a character in a game whose HP kept dropping, only to be constantly replenished, until the health bar eventually reached a perfect equilibrium.

And if their health dropped even faster?

A Blue Sea resident’s first reaction wasn’t, I should recover.

Instead, it was, My damage resistance isn’t high enough. I need more desensitization training.

For example, they might deliberately spend an entire night sleeping in a snow cave.

To an outsider, it looked almost like self-inflicted torture.

The problem was… it actually worked.

With the naked eye, Moonspirit could see that more and more Blue Sea residents were becoming less afraid of the cold.

Moonspirit’s feelings were complicated.

Moonspirit Safe City: [The constitution of your civilization’s people is practically tailor-made for the apocalypse. I don’t mean their physical strength—I mean this incredible ability they have to adapt perfectly to every new environment.

Give them enough time to grow, and your civilization will only become stronger and stronger.

But in the early stages, you still need to be careful. Don’t underestimate the apocalyptic world. It’s already passed its dormant phase and its decay phase. Now that it’s entered the Extinction Phase, it’s at its most dangerous. It’ll always catch us off guard when we least expect it.]

Cheng Qisheng understood what Moonspirit was trying to say.

The residents of Blue Sea genuinely disliked living in item-based shelters.

Part of the reason was that those Tier 1 buildings were simply too cramped. Blue Sea’s people were, on average, quite tall, so staying inside them felt unbearably confining.

The other reason was that storage-type items had only ever appeared once before—in the hands of the trio. As far as the people of Blue Sea were concerned, it was far better to make do in a snow cave while wearing cold-weather gear than to waste a building card. They would rather bring the item card back and offer it to their god.

But that was only at the current temperature.

The world of Dazzling Star would only become colder from here on out.

The people of Blue Sea were tough, but they weren’t truly immune to freezing to death.

It was time to make sure they took better care of themselves.

While making a mental note to issue a divine decree later, Cheng Qisheng also caught the key terms in Moonspirit’s message and asked,

Cheng Qisheng: [What do you mean by the “Decay Phase” and the “Extinction Phase”? Could you explain them? I’ve never heard those terms before.]

Moonspirit readily agreed.

Moonspirit Safe City: [Sure. I don’t actually know who came up with this classification, but you know that apocalyptic worlds generally fall into two categories, right?

One is the sudden type, like viral outbreaks or beast tides. The other is the gradual natural-disaster type. Dazzling Star is an example of the latter. Although it also has snow beasts, they only appear during the Extinction Phase. They didn’t exist during the first three hundred years after the planet began to succumb to the cold.]

Moonspirit briefly explained the differences between the two types of disasters. She didn’t dwell much on the sudden type, since it was more or less the same as what Cheng Qisheng already knew about Velvet Star.

Natural-disaster worlds, however, could be divided into distinct stages.

Moonspirit Safe City: [During the first hundred years, life isn’t all that difficult yet. It might just be a blizzard, or crops suddenly producing smaller harvests for no apparent reason. People don’t start dying en masse. They simply feel that survival is becoming harder. Things that used to be plentiful gradually become scarce, and everyone’s quality of life slowly but steadily declines.

Moonspirit’s homeworld had been a natural-disaster world, so she was describing everything from her own civilization’s experience.

As all kinds of minor natural disasters become more frequent and each year grows colder than the last, people complain about it, but it still doesn’t severely disrupt most people’s daily lives. That’s known as the Dormant Phase.

Then come the next two hundred years—the Decay Phase. People realize that every single year is worse than the one before, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. Deaths begin to occur among the population. That’s the Decay Phase.

Cheng Qisheng noticed something.

Moonspirit’s timeline for a planet’s demise didn’t match Coriander’s.

According to the information Coriander had gathered from the local inhabitants, Dazzling Star’s crisis had begun two hundred years ago.

But Moonspirit was certain that for worlds facing natural-disaster apocalypses, the entire process from the onset of the catastrophe to the planet’s destruction generally lasted around three hundred years.

That actually made sense.

If the first hundred years were merely the Dormant Phase, who would look at vegetables costing two dollars more than they did yesterday and conclude that their world had officially entered the apocalypse?

For the people of Dazzling Star, the true apocalypse only began when the cold started threatening human lives.

Moonspirit Safe City: [And finally, we arrive at what we’re seeing now—the Extinction Phase.]

Moonspirit honestly couldn’t understand why someone as powerful as Blue Sea was still unfamiliar with all of this.

Could it be that Blue Sea had only experienced four or five worlds?

…Wait.

If that were true, then Blue Sea’s potential was downright terrifying.

After traversing only four or five worlds, they had already reached Tier 3 and possessed this level of combat strength. If they made it through ten worlds, wouldn’t they be racing straight toward Tier 5?

Cheng Qisheng had no idea what Moonspirit was thinking.

She was thinking about something entirely different.

Come to think of it… when I bought groceries yesterday, vegetable prices seemed to have gone up by about thirty percent across the board.

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