Chapter 84.1: Subspace and “Transmigration”
Cheng Qisheng knew perfectly well that Blue Sea had printed the Creator God’s portrait on every Holy Bomb.
That decision had actually been connected to the Temple.
As everyone knew, the people of Old Eighth had been waging wars ever since the barbaric era, and those conflicts had continued all the way into modern times. As technology advanced, so did the scale of warfare.
Then the Holy Bomb was invented.
It was, without question, the ultimate weapon in Old Eighth’s military history—the most devastating and destructive armament ever created.
For a time, the nation that developed the Holy Bomb stood invincible.
But that was the nature of weapons.
Once the first one existed, the second and third would inevitably follow as other nations developed their own.
Unlike the nuclear weapons of Blue Star, Holy Bombs produced no radioactive contamination. As a result, the nine great powers of the time had absolutely no reservations about using them, exchanging volley after volley in open warfare.
The only silver lining was perhaps the instinct deeply ingrained in the people of Old Eighth—they disdained bullying the weak.
They fought their wars, but strictly confined the Holy Bombs to agreed-upon battlefields.
Not a single nation ever deployed one against another country’s civilian population.
Even so, the destructive power of the Holy Bombs caused Old Eighth’s total population to plummet.
In the end, the Temple stepped in and brought the fighting to a halt.
The Temple’s argument was simple:
“You have Holy Bombs. They have Holy Bombs. If this continues, no nation will benefit.”
“And too many people have already died.”
“They are all the Creator God’s people.”
At the time, the nine great powers had already realized that the situation couldn’t continue.
The problem was that no one was willing to be the first to back down.
So when the Temple—whose status on Dark Star was beyond question—stepped in, everyone was finally willing to sit down at the negotiating table.
The Temple proposed two possible solutions.
After all, every nation was simply trying to prove that it was the strongest. Since all Holy Bombs were roughly equal in power, there was no real need to compare them by actually firing them.
The first option was for the Temple to designate an uninhabited region. Every nation would launch its Holy Bombs there, and whichever country fired the greatest number would be declared the winner.
The second option was even simpler: don’t launch them at all. Keep the Holy Bombs stored in each nation’s arsenal, and have the Temple send inspectors to verify the stockpiles. The nation with the largest arsenal would win.
To any other civilization, those two proposals would have sounded like a complete joke.
For either plan to work, every nation possessing Holy Bombs on Dark Star would have to trust the Temple completely. More importantly, they would all have to honor their promises—that if they agreed not to use Holy Bombs, then they truly wouldn’t use them.
On the surface, it sounded utterly absurd.
But for the people of Old Eighth, it wasn’t a difficult problem at all.
First, every nation genuinely did trust the Temple completely.
Second, the Pope at the time proposed that the leaders of every nation swear an oath together before the statue of the Great Creator God, pledging to abide by the Holy Bomb agreement without exception.
Finally, the Pope declared that the clergy would print the Great Creator God’s portrait on every Holy Bomb as a reminder that, whenever one was used as a weapon of war, each Holy Bomb would take the lives of countless people belonging to the Great Creator God.
Everything happened incredibly quickly.
By then, Cheng Qisheng’s Mortal Body Syndrome had worsened to the point where she spent nearly every day drifting in and out of sleep.
From her perspective, it was as if she had slept for two days.
When she woke up, Old Eighth had already completed the entire sequence:
Develop the Holy Bomb → Deploy the Holy Bomb → Exchange volleys of Holy Bombs → Suffer a catastrophic global military collapse → The Temple intervenes → Everyone agrees to stop using Holy Bombs in actual warfare.
Cheng Qisheng: “…”
The only comfort she could find was that, although the people of Old Eighth loved war, they were still remarkably well-behaved.
At the very least, when the Temple called for a ceasefire, everyone was willing to stop. They weren’t going to push themselves to the point of mutual destruction.
After all, the people of Old Eighth loved fighting—but firing painstakingly manufactured Holy Bombs at empty wasteland?
That was nothing but a waste.
So in the end, every nation voted for the second proposal.
The Holy Bombs would remain in storage, and the Temple would send clergy to verify each country’s stockpile.
Driven by the desire to claim the title of the world’s strongest nation, every country threw itself into manufacturing Holy Bombs.
One year, the nation ranked first might possess only a few hundred Holy Bombs.
By the following year, even the country ranked dead last had amassed a stockpile in the thousands.
The Holy Bomb arms race continued for quite some time.
Then some countries finally realized what it was costing them.
They had poured enormous amounts of resources and manpower into Holy Bomb production. Their economies were buckling under the strain, their best scientists and engineers were tied up in weapons development, and public welfare, industry, and technological progress had all suffered.
Meanwhile, the nations that had stayed out of the Holy Bomb race were flourishing.
Their economies boomed.
Their societies remained stable.
Their industries were thriving.
Their citizens enjoyed exceptionally high standards of living.
They were beginning to look poised to overtake the traditional great powers.
The countries that had been desperately mass-producing Holy Bombs: “…”
There was an old saying:
“While my neighbor stockpiles grain, I stockpile guns. Eventually, my neighbor’s grain becomes mine.”
Except…
Holy Bombs weren’t allowed to be used.
And the countries next door weren’t really enemies, either. They were all children of the Great Creator God. At worst, they were simply relatives who didn’t get along.
Even if they fought each other to the bitter end, they were still bound together by their shared faith.
The once-glorious Holy Bomb gradually fell out of favor.
One by one, the great powers sealed away their arsenals, and the Holy Bomb arms race quietly came to an end.
Back then, every nation on Old Eighth had believed that unless aliens invaded, those Holy Bombs would probably never see the light of day again.
When Qin Zhi unified Blue Sea, she considered that the Holy Bombs had already been properly secured, scattered among various storage facilities, and that recovering them would serve no immediate purpose while requiring them to be safeguarded all over again.
So she simply left each country’s Holy Bomb stockpiles where they had originally been stored.
Who could have possibly anticipated what would happen next?
Blue Sea really had lived to see the day it would fight “aliens.”
When Dark Star was destroyed, Blue Sea had only managed to evacuate six hundred Holy Bombs. Cheng Qisheng included, everyone had assumed the rest had perished along with Dark Star.
Looking at the Holy Bomb that had just been fished out of the “sea”—completely dry, without the slightest trace of water—Cheng Qisheng immediately posted a question in the city lord group chat.
[Blue Sea Safe City: Is it possible to fish up things from your original world out of the Sea of Souls?]
A “helpful city lord” answered at once.
[Duxi Safe City: Boss Blue Sea, did you fish up something from your home world? That’s actually pretty likely. I think it has something to do with spacetime attraction. Since Green Billow Star is currently being pulled into Subspace, spacetime around it is pretty unstable. Safe Cities that have just arrived here count as visitors from another spacetime, so there’s a high chance you’ll attract objects from your original world that are drifting in Subspace.]
[Duxi Safe City: It won’t stay like that forever, though. After about a day or two, the Subspace around your area will stabilize and won’t be affected by spacetime attraction anymore. Once that happens, you’ll be able to fish up just about anything again.]
Only one or two days?
Cheng Qisheng immediately realized they had to make the most of the opportunity.
Among all the people she watched over, the ones she paid the closest attention to were the busiest senior officials.
She could vaguely sense that Qin Zhi still regretted not being able to bring more Holy Bombs with them when Dark Star was destroyed.
Well, that problem had just solved itself.
Time to go fishing for Holy Bombs.
Cheng Qisheng promptly sent an oracle to the Marshal, instructing her to organize teams to recover the Holy Bombs.
No… wait.
The more boats they had out at sea, the more they could haul in.
She immediately sent another oracle to the President as well, ordering that every Blue Sea resident capable of going to sea should set out as soon as possible.
Their mission:
Fish for Holy Bombs.
[Blue Sea Safe City: Thanks, Duxi. =v=]
— Blue Sea Safe City has transferred three crates of genuine silk fabric to Duxi Safe City. —
Duxi was a little surprised.
He had witnessed Blue Sea’s ruthless display when it fought Tian’ou and Mingqin.
He hadn’t expected Blue Sea to be so easy to get along with.
Duxi’s revelation wasn’t something every city lord knew.
The moment he posted it, it drew out a flood of responses.
[So that’s what it was?! No wonder the sock I fished up on my first day on Green Billow Star looked so familiar. Could it really have been mine?!]
[Here’s a horror story for you. Five years before the apocalypse hit my home world, I lost a mug. On my first day on Green Billow Star, one of my residents fished up that exact mug. I was scared out of my wits at the time. So it turns out it was spacetime attraction all along.]
[@Duxi Safe City Boss, how do you know so much? You even know about spacetime attraction. That’s incredible!]
[Duxi Safe City: My home world was destroyed because it was pulled into Subspace. We were an interstellar civilization. Before Subspace appeared, our civilization had a population of 130 billion. In the end, only I and ten thousand residents escaped. :)]
[…My condolences, Boss. That’s awful.]
[Duxi Safe City: In any case, everyone should be careful. While a world is gradually being pulled into Subspace, the resulting spacetime instability creates numerous spatial rifts. They might spit out objects from other timelines—or swallow people whole. Once you’re taken in, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever come back. Make sure your residents know that if they ever see a crack suddenly appear out of thin air, they must never go near it. It could send whoever enters it literally anywhere.]
[Duxi Safe City: Of course, if someone’s willing to gamble, they could always give it a try. In theory, if those rifts can send people anywhere, then ending up in a world untouched by the apocalypse isn’t impossible either. My civilization studied these spacetime rifts before we fell. They’re very similar to the “transmigration” stories from our old literature. If you’re lucky enough, you might actually transmigrate into a pretty good world.]
The moment gambling was mentioned, Born-to-Gamble Safe City immediately popped back into the conversation.
[Born-to-Gamble Safe City: I’m betting that the odds of being transported into a black hole are higher than the odds of ending up in a world without an apocalypse.]
[+1.]
[I think the chances of getting dropped straight into a sea monster’s mouth are even higher.]
Every city lord present had survived an apocalypse.
They had also seen countless disaster worlds.
Not a single one of them assumed a “transmigration” destination would be somewhere pleasant.
Every civilization had once possessed its own home planet. They all understood that, compared to planets capable of supporting intelligent life, more than ninety-nine percent of the universe was nothing but lifeless void.
How unbelievably lucky would someone have to be to travel from one inhabited world to another safe, thriving one?
Cheng Qisheng read the discussion thoughtfully.
A spacetime rift?
Traveling from one place to another?
That sounded… strangely similar to her own ability.
The difference was that those rifts seemed completely random and capable of transporting people much farther away.
As for Cheng Qisheng’s “Door-Pushing Technique,” its destination could currently only be set to her home, and it stopped working beyond a range of one hundred kilometers.
That one-hundred-kilometer limit had long since put an end to her dream of going sightseeing by simply opening a door back home whenever she pleased.
Another city lord tagged Blue Sea Safe City in the group chat.
[Green Billow Star is enormous. Since a small boat and a large ship create roughly the same disturbance in Subspace, they also attract about the same amount of loot. So if you want to gather more resources, the best strategy is to spread your residents out across as many vessels as possible.]
[The problem is that the seawater here is heavily affected by Subspace, making it extremely difficult to navigate. We’ve all spent a fortune buying Tier-3 Safe City Locators. I’d recommend you get one too, Boss. Otherwise your residents might sail out and never find their way back. It’s expensive, sure, but you can use it in other worlds as well, so it’s worth the investment in the long run.]
This particular city lord hadn’t witnessed Blue Sea’s battle firsthand.
But with more than a dozen city lords displaying such a unanimous attitude, even a fool could tell that Blue Sea was an overwhelmingly powerful force.
Doing someone a small favor with a couple of sentences cost nothing.
Why wouldn’t they?
After reading the suggestion, Cheng Qisheng politely sent a thank-you before opening the marketplace to search for it.
The detailed description of the Tier 3 Safe City Locator quickly appeared before her.
In simple terms, once the locator was installed in the Safe City’s central area, it would mark every resident.
With that mark, residents would always be able to sense the direction of their Safe City. When the city lord decided it was time to relocate, they could also activate the locator’s recall function.
The marks on the residents’ bodies would grow faintly warm and emit a red glow.
The moment that happened, everyone would know the Safe City was about to depart, allowing them to follow the locator’s guidance and hurry back.
Cheng Qisheng silently closed the description.
Wasn’t this just a downgraded version of the believers’ guidance?
It couldn’t even transmit messages remotely.
Then she glanced at the price.
The locator cost 80,000 crystals.
Cheng Qisheng: That’s a huge saving!
She had always thought that being able to communicate with all her believers at once was simply convenient.
Now she realized it also saved an enormous amount of crystals.
It felt like she had just made a profit.
Hehe.
Meanwhile, someone in the city lord group chat asked in confusion:
[Huansheng Safe City: Why do you recommend buying the Tier 3 version? Doesn’t the Tier 2 one do the same thing? Its coverage area should already be enough. The only difference is that Tier 3 supports up to 300 million residents, while Tier 2 supports 200 million. Blue Sea shouldn’t even have 300 million people, right?]
At their current stages—mostly Tier 2, Tier 3, or Tier 4 Safe Cities—having over a hundred million residents was already considered extraordinary.
Two or three hundred million sounded practically impossible.
The city lord who had recommended the Tier 3 Locator had no idea that Blue Sea’s population had actually exceeded 300 million.
He explained:
[The Tier 2 model only covers an area of 4 billion square kilometers. Green Billow Star is continuously expanding due to the influence of Subspace. A year ago, I measured the planet with a World Ruler item, and its surface area was 2.5 billion square kilometers. As of now, it’s already grown to 3.2 billion.]
[So to be safe, it’s best to buy the Tier 3 Safe City Locator, which covers up to 10 billion square kilometers.]
The Huansheng City Lord was stunned.
Who would have thought that a planet’s surface area could keep expanding?
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