Chapter 109.1: Kingdom of Lilith
One hundred and one farms.
The largest farm covered a full 50,000 mu, while even the smallest covered 1,000 mu.
Cheng Qisheng was so happy she felt like humming a song.
What did 1,000 mu of land actually mean?
To put it this way, it was only a little smaller than the Forbidden City on Blue Star.
And that was the smallest of all the floating farms.
All the floating farms combined, large and small, covered a total of 2.7 million mu, occupying an area of 1,800 square kilometers.
That was equivalent to the area of an ordinary Tier 2 Safe City, plus another 200 square kilometers.
The best part was that, apart from the one whose device had been destroyed in the explosion, all one hundred of the other farms were floating in the air, so they wouldn’t take up any space within Blue Sea Safe City.
Cheng Qisheng now completely understood why the City Lords had all said that worlds like this Soul Sea world were so rare.
And why more than a hundred City Lords had been willing to spend tens of thousands of crystals just to purchase floating devices and remain in this world.
Because there were simply too many good things here!
A huge amount of crystals, supplies, and a Replica Mask worth more than a hundred million.
And now, they had even obtained so many floating farms.
Cheng Qisheng began to feel fortunate that she had gone to war with Tian’ou Safe City as soon as she arrived on Green Billow Star.
Judging by how resource-rich Green Billow Star was, if she hadn’t fought Tian’ou back then, then as long as Tian’ou had stayed a little longer, there would definitely have been City Lords who benefited enormously from Green Billow Star coming after them.
Thank goodness.
Thank goodness she’d started the fight the moment she arrived, leaving no opportunity for anyone else to attack Tian’ou.
Honestly, of all their gains, Cheng Qisheng was most satisfied with these floating farms.
Anyone who had ever supported a human population knew just how important farmland was!
Although, through everyone’s concerted efforts, Blue Sea Safe City’s grain reserves had not only failed to decrease over the course of several worlds, but had actually been supplemented with quite a bit of new grain—and the stockpile was still continuing to grow—
as long as they couldn’t achieve true self-sufficiency with a surplus, Cheng Qisheng still felt that it wasn’t secure enough.
Now things were looking good.
Not only had Blue Sea greatly expanded its territory in this world, leaving plenty of spare space for cultivating farmland, but they had also obtained so many floating farms.
The file contained a projected plan. According to Blue Sea’s calculations, if they made the best possible use of every floating farm and planted the highest-yielding crops, the farms could support at least nine million people.
Nine million might seem like a small number compared with Blue Sea’s total population of several hundred million.
But think about it. This was enough to make nine million people completely self-sufficient in food. Based on Blue Sea’s estimates, the farms would produce roughly 4.9 million tons of grain a year. If all that food were given to a single person, the annual yield from these floating farms alone would be enough to feed that person for 9.8 million years.
And that calculation assumed the person ate until they were completely full every day.
Right now, they weren’t short on food, so the grain produced by the floating farms could simply be stored away. If they ever found themselves in a world where food was scarce, having these floating farms and their accumulated reserves from previous years would give the Blue Sea government much greater peace of mind.
A bumper harvest!!
Cheng Qisheng happily poured herself a glass of lemonade.
All those Blue Sea residents had spent half a year infiltrating and disguising themselves by every means imaginable. It had all been worth it.
The great Creator God of Blue Sea waved her hand grandly, declaring that all the residents who had participated in this mission would receive points as rewards!
As for how much credit each resident deserved, how many points each would receive, and what material rewards they would actually be given—that was for Aether, Blue Sea’s Compensation Assessment Department, Statistics Bureau, and Disbursement Department to work out.
Cheng Qisheng only needed to issue the divine decree before turning her attention to the number of crystals they had currently recovered.
The number of crystals in Kansidang’s treasury wasn’t as high as Blue Sea had expected.
After all, unlike ordinary pirates, who didn’t possess many items and rarely had opportunities to use crystals even when they obtained them, Kansidang had a large number of items at her disposal. The largest item facility among them was a Tier-5 Vehicle Manufacturing Plant.
A Tier-5 factory was already quite impressive.
What surprised Cheng Qisheng the most was that this vehicle factory could be upgraded to higher tiers.
According to what Blue Sea had managed to interrogate from the surviving pirates, Kansidang had only truly made his fortune after obtaining this vehicle manufacturing plant thirty years ago.
Back then, Green Billow Star wasn’t anything like it was now, with so many ships everywhere. When the floods suddenly struck, people had barely any time to react before most of the world was submerged.
Of the small portion that remained above water, much of it consisted of uninhabited mountains.
At the time, every surviving ship was packed with people, while even the surviving high-rise buildings were crammed with people.
Back then, a ship was as precious as 4.9 million tons of grain during a famine—or a hundred-billion jackpot in a peaceful world.
And then, the Soul Sea appeared without a sound.
While everyone else was still scrambling to salvage basic necessities, Kansidang, who was already the leader of a small band of pirates at the time, managed to salvage a Tier-1 Vehicle Manufacturing Plant.
Using the vehicle factory, he manufactured small boats one after another. By combining favors with intimidation, he recruited more and more people. Before long, he discovered the use of crystals and began slowly gathering them, using them to upgrade the factory.
As the factory’s tier increased, the ships it produced became more capable and more luxurious.
While everyone else was still rowing around in little wooden boats, Kansidang’s people were already using fishing vessels. While others struggled to build a single platform on the sea, Kansidang’s people already had ships equipped with running water and electricity.
Naturally, the ships produced by nuclear-crystal technology also required nuclear crystals to operate.
So Kansidang kept upgrading the factory, then used crystals to mass-produce ships. As the number of people under him grew, the crystals consumed throughout Kansidang’s territory also became increasingly enormous.
The pirates who had participated in the Pirate Conference—or who had died at the hands of the Blue Sea people before they even had the chance to participate—had a combined total of 4.72 million crystals in their possession.
As one of the biggest players among the pirates, Kansidang’s crystal treasury contained crystals of various tiers. After converting them all into equivalent Tier-1 crystals, their total value came to only 2.59 million Tier-1 crystals.
—Of course, the relatively small number of crystals was partly because the pirates who had come to attend the Pirate Conference had originally intended to hand those more than four million crystals over to Kansidang.
One of the major reasons he had held the Pirate Conference in the first place was to collect these crystals.
And now, they had all ended up in Blue Sea’s hands.
Although the number of crystals in Kansidang’s treasury wasn’t particularly impressive, fortunately, his trusted subordinates had, unsurprisingly, lined their own pockets quite thoroughly.
The Blue Sea people searched the homes of seventeen high-ranking figures in Kansidang’s territory and recovered a combined total of 2.1 million crystals.
And that didn’t even include the scattered crystals stored aboard Kansidang’s ships.
Cheng Qisheng took a long gulp of lemonade.
In the previous world, she hadn’t even been able to scrape together the 300,000 crystals needed for a tier upgrade.
Yet now, less than a year after arriving on Green Billow Star, Blue Sea’s crystal reserves were already approaching ten million.
Not to mention the huge number of item facilities they’d obtained in this haul. The Tier-5 Vehicle Manufacturing Plant alone would be enormously useful to Blue Sea, and then there were all those floating farms.
Even after deducting the one million crystals needed to upgrade from Tier 4 to Tier 5, they’d still have more than eight million left.
—Am I actually the Chosen One?
The thought made Cheng Qisheng laugh at herself.
Her gains had been enormous, but that didn’t mean the other City Lords hadn’t gained much as well.
There were more than a hundred City Lords in the group chat, and every last one of them was a shrewd operator. With the “painful lessons paid for in blood and tears by their predecessors” as a warning, even if the City Lords had gotten their hands on something good, they would certainly keep their mouths shut about it.
Then she thought about that story of the “painful lesson.” The City Lords who had purchased Immortality Flowers had casually offered prices in the tens of millions of crystals, even as high as 300 million.
It was inevitable that, starting from some world onward, Safe Cities would have more and more ways to obtain crystals.
Naturally, the dangers would increase as well.
Whether it was the zombies of Velvet Star, the mutated beasts of Dazzling Star, or the sea monsters of Green Billow Star, they all shared one common trait: the more valuable the crystal inside a monster’s head, the stronger the monster’s combat power.
So were crystals really only useful for upgrading Safe Cities and purchasing various facilities from the marketplace?
Cheng Qisheng asked Aether first. As expected, Aether didn’t know of any other uses for crystals.
Its previous City Lord had remained stuck in a certain world at Tier 4, then used the crystals he had left to upgrade to Tier 5 in that same world. There simply hadn’t been any crystals left over for him to use for anything else.
As for how crystals could be used after reaching the higher tiers, Aether knew even less.
Cheng Qisheng decided to go straight to Duxi Safe City.
She was flush with money now, so she directly purchased the [Information Free Inquiry] service that Duxi had listed in the group chat.
She had barely finished paying when Duxi sent her a private message before she could even say anything.
[Duxi Safe City: Boss, why’d you buy that? I only put it up for sale for City Lords I don’t know well. We’re already so familiar with each other. Whatever you want to ask me, if I know the answer, I’ll definitely tell you.]
As he spoke, Duxi refunded her the information consultation fee.
Cheng Qisheng was rather curious about what he was trying to do. If he was only trying to build a good relationship with her, this was almost too cautious.
[Blue Sea Safe City: That’s too embarrassing. What I want to ask is actually pretty valuable information. I wouldn’t feel right having you tell me for free.]
[Duxi Safe City: There’s nothing embarrassing about it. We’re all friends, after all. Go ahead and ask, Boss. If I know, I’ll definitely tell you.]
Cheng Qisheng narrowed her eyes slightly.
Duxi was being far too enthusiastic. It was almost as if he wanted to write I WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND in huge letters across his forehead.
And yet, Cheng Qisheng really did need this “friend” of hers.
She quickly considered all the possibilities, but ultimately decided to ask first and worry about the rest later. After all, there didn’t seem to be any harm in it for now. Even if Duxi really did have ulterior motives, she wasn’t exactly afraid of him anymore.
Although Duxi could very well infer something about her current situation from the questions she asked—for example, that she’d made a fortune in crystals—so what if he figured it out?
Cheng Qisheng thought it through and sent Duxi her question about the uses of crystals.
As expected, Duxi knew the answer.
—He really was the king of information.
[Duxi Safe City: Nuclear crystals are actually a kind of evolutionary energy. It’s just that they manifest before us in the form of crystals. You can think of it as us killing mutated beasts and extracting the evolutionary energy they’ve stored inside themselves.]
[Duxi Safe City: This evolutionary energy can be used to evolve practically anything. Besides upgrading Safe Cities, it can also be used to advance ability users to higher tiers and replenish their energy. But that’s something only a Tier-5 Safe City can do.]
This matched Cheng Qisheng’s speculation.
In fact, based on all the novels she’d read, she’d been rather puzzled before about why the ability users in Blue Sea Safe City couldn’t absorb crystals.
Duxi went on to explain the reason in detail.
[Duxi Safe City: Evolution doesn’t work that way. Evolution requires an environment.]
[Duxi Safe City: To use human history as an analogy, let’s say a feudal dynasty that can’t generate its own energy is a Tier-1 civilization, a civilization in the early Industrial Age capable of utilizing various forms of energy is a Tier 2 civilization, and an interstellar empire is a Tier-3 civilization.]
The “early Industrial Age” he referred to was essentially the modern era.
Ability users were equivalent to the inhabitants of these civilizations. If you took a resident of a feudal dynasty and asked them to fly an airplane from the early Industrial Age, or a spacecraft from an interstellar empire, they obviously wouldn’t be able to do it.
But if that feudal dynasty began developing from that point onward—if they acquired knowledge of aerodynamics and meteorology, as well as aviation systems—then that ability user could learn to fly an airplane by studying that knowledge.
Next, as the dynasty continued to develop, it acquired knowledge of interstellar astrophysics, interstellar navigation and cartography, and the engineering principles behind spacecraft. After studying all of this, the ability user could eventually pilot a spacecraft. And the only reason he was capable of doing all this was because his environment had changed.
Perhaps he had possessed exceptional talent as a pilot back when he lived in the feudal dynasty, but if that feudal dynasty never evolved, his talent would have remained useless for his entire life.
The same was true for civilizations and ability users.
Every time a Safe City advanced a tier, it was, in essence, the civilization itself advancing.
When Blue Sea advanced from a Tier-1 Safe City to Tier 2, the Ability Users Lock was lifted, and ability users began appearing one after another.
After advancing to Tier 3, the number of ability users increased.
After advancing to Tier 4, another wave of newly awakened residents emerged. At this point, the number of awakened residents in Blue Sea had reached one-fifth of its total population.
And once the Safe City advanced to Tier 5, the Evolution Lock would also be unlocked. At that point, Blue Sea’s residents would gain the ability to use crystals for evolution, resulting in a significant increase in their overall combat strength.
[Blue Sea Safe City: So you’re saying that the stronger the civilization, the stronger the residents within that civilization will become as well?]
[Duxi Safe City: Yes. You can think of a Safe City as an ocean. The ocean of a Tier-1 Safe City is stagnant water. After Tier 2, things become different. With every successive advancement, the Safe City’s waters become broader, deeper, and reach a more suitable temperature. Only then can they nurture increasingly abundant and magnificent forms of life.]
[Duxi Safe City: Some City Lords believe that even if they have enough crystals, it’s better not to advance too quickly. They’re afraid that after advancing, they’ll go from being the biggest fish in a small pond to the smallest fish in a vast ocean when they enter a new world. But that’s actually the wrong way to think about it. The earlier you advance, the faster your residents can grow, and the stronger your Safe City will become. If you keep putting off advancement, one major disaster could wipe out your entire city…]
He hesitated for a moment, but eventually said it anyway:
[Duxi Safe City: I’ve heard a rumor. Actually, low-tier Safe Cities aren’t completely safe either. Only Safe Cities above Tier 6 can achieve true, absolute safety. I suspect the reason you’re asking me about the uses of crystals is that you’ve obtained a large number of them. If I’m right, then you’d better advance as quickly as possible.]
The moment Cheng Qisheng read this, she immediately sat up straight.
Safe Cities weren’t safe?
She’d never heard anything like this before.
