Safe City Ch.155

Chapter 155: The Great Extinction

Cheng Qisheng had no time to wonder how Gong Cheng had suddenly become her believer. She immediately extended her mental power upward and began bestowing blessing after blessing, trying to fish him out.

It was a little difficult to pull him out.

Back when Wang Moning had been overwhelmed by too many visions of Dark Star’s historical cycles, her brain had nearly been squeezed into idiocy.

All Cheng Qisheng had needed to do then was use her mental power to blur those images, leaving Wang Moning with only the vague impression of, ‘I saw something, but I don’t remember exactly what I saw,’ or something along those lines.

Gong Cheng was different. Although he had already reached the sixth tier, he seemed to still have poor control over his prophetic ability.

Wang Moning had actively perceived the visions back then, whereas Gong Cheng’s prophecy was passive.

Cheng Qisheng managed to piece together what had happened.

When Gong Cheng’s mental power came into contact with the mental power she had projected into this interrogation room, his prophetic ability had been triggered passively. He had begun to predict Cheng Qisheng’s future—or rather, the future of a tiny sliver of Cheng Qisheng’s mental power.

And then he had suffered backlash.

It was remarkably similar to Gong Ning’s passive prophecy. Cheng Qisheng’s mental power seemed to possess a form of passive defense as well.

It was like a spiked iron ball coated entirely in poison, quietly sitting in one place, when someone suddenly walked up and slapped it.

Before the spiked iron ball could even react, the person who had slapped it was already injured, poisoned, and lying unconscious on the ground.

Cheng Qisheng was the spiked iron ball.

Gong Cheng was the injured, poisoned person.

His act of slapping the spiked iron ball was like opening a door, allowing the poison coating the ball to seep inside.

Cheng Qisheng couldn’t help but think of a question.

Before this, Gong Cheng hadn’t even known about the concept of the Blue Sea Creator God. So when he had suddenly come to believe in her, had he glimpsed a fragment of the future through his passive precognition and consequently become a believer?

Or had he simply been “poisoned” in an instant, with Cheng Qisheng’s mental power flooding into his brain and “corrupting” him into a believer?

After all, the only part of his brain that remained relatively intact now was Cheng Qisheng’s mental power.

With nothing left in his mind but the concept of a god, if he wasn’t a believer, then who was?

Actually, if Cheng Qisheng left Gong Cheng alone right now, he would become some kind of special existence.

He would have no life of his own, no memories of his past, and no identity he recognized. The person known as “Gong Cheng” would be completely erased from existence. What remained would be nothing more than a vessel filled with faith, existing solely to obey the commands of the Creator God.

Cheng Qisheng: That’s kind of disgusting.

She still preferred her believers in their usual state—whooping as they charged into battle and darting all over the place.

The great Blue Sea Creator God began working on his “treatment.”

Wang Moning’s brain had merely been a chaotic mess back then. Once the mess was properly sorted out, she could recover.

But Gong Cheng was different. The memories in his mind belonging to the intelligent being that was once Gong Cheng had already been shattered into countless fragments.

No wonder he had stopped screaming. Even the instinct that made him scream had already been crushed to pieces.

Faced with memories reduced to scraps, Cheng Qisheng found herself unusually stumped.

All she could do was first bestow a portion of her blessing, calming the body down.

Then, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, countless strands of mental power threaded through Gong Cheng’s brain, painstakingly weaving back and forth as she tried to restore his shattered mind to its original state.

Honestly, most of the time, Cheng Qisheng felt as though her life wasn’t much different from that of an ordinary person.

Her daily routine consisted of eating, sleeping, and watching television. Occasionally, she’d watch Old Eighth and the others for entertainment, tag along with the travel teams to take in the scenery, and then, back on Blue Star, pick up her phone and happily chat away in various group chats as if she were just another person idly killing time in a chat group.

Cheng Qisheng had interacted with delivery drivers and dealt with property-management staff. On one of her previous walks downstairs, she’d encountered quite a few people along the way as well.

And throughout all of it, nothing had happened.

But now, Gong Cheng had paid for it in blood and proved something to her: the reason Cheng Qisheng had been able to live like an ordinary person on Blue Star was because Blue Star was a low-level civilization.

There was no technology here capable of detecting signs of the supernatural, nor were there any supernatural beings possessing all sorts of extraordinary abilities.

Because they couldn’t see what was hidden beneath the surface, Blue Star’s people were actually quite safe when they came into direct contact with Cheng Qisheng.

The ability users under the Safe City system were a different matter.

The higher their ability level, the greater the impact and damage they suffered when they actively or passively “looked upon” the Blue Sea Creator God.

Fortunately, Old Eighth and the others had learned their lesson after the Wang Moning incident. The temple had issued a new rule back then:

Do not look directly. Do not listen. Do not seek.

Now, all of Blue Sea’s ability users, whether they belonged to the mental-affinity system or not, were exceedingly well-behaved.

If Gong Cheng could be healed, he would probably become much more cautious from then on as well.

Cheng Qisheng’s mental power traveled through the mind of this new believer, gradually getting the hang of things.

If all the memories accumulated over a human lifetime were shattered into pieces, just how many pieces would there be?

She could answer that question now.

Nineteen-year-old Gong Cheng’s memories, once shattered into pieces, amounted to roughly eighty billion fragments.

Now, those memories had been tossed into a blender and, with a ‘whirr’, turned into mush.

Fortunately, standing intact at the very center of that mush was a complete concept of the “Great Creator God.” The fragments weren’t gradually disappearing. Instead, they had gathered around that concept, clinging tightly to it.

“Let’s take it slow.”

For now, Cheng Qisheng could only be grateful that she had always been capable of multitasking. She could piece together Gong Cheng’s memories while simultaneously watching Old Eighth and the others go about their daily lives, and even watch a TV series back on Blue Star.

Otherwise, the painstaking process of putting the pieces back together one by one would have been unbearably boring.

Of course, even during this tedious process, she would occasionally stumble across some unusual memories.

For example, right now, Cheng Qisheng saw the memories of Moon Silk’s future that Gong Cheng had foreseen.

—The entire world really had been swallowed by darkness in an instant.

Unlike the wandering black hole that had once torn Dark Star apart and swallowed it whole, this extinction black hole, which Duxi called the “Great Extinction,” did not slowly approach Moon Silk, nor did it give the planet any time to react.

It took one second—no, not even five milliseconds—for Moon Silk to vanish into the void.

No wonder Duxi had said that only a Tier 6 Safe City could escape the Great Extinction.

Evacuating a world with a Safe City required a verbal command. The Great Extinction descended far too quickly. Any City Lord still on Moon Silk at the time would probably be swallowed up along with everything else before they could even finish saying a single word.

Even the notoriously fast-talking Chimi City Lord probably wouldn’t have escaped.

Once a Tier 6 Safe City had a cockpit, deciding how to move and which direction to travel in had to be done from inside the cockpit.

But to evacuate a particular world and enter the Greater Universe, all it took was having the thought in one’s mind.

So it wasn’t that Tier 6 Safe Cities had become more powerful defensively.

They had simply become faster at running away.

‘As long as I run fast enough, the Great Extinction can’t catch me.’

Cheng Qisheng carefully picked out the images of the Great Extinction that Gong Cheng had foreseen. Naturally, she had to piece them back together as she sorted through them, because these prophetic visions had been shattered into fragments too.

Gong Cheng had foreseen the destruction of more than three hundred worlds in total.

In 121 of them, he had seen Safe Cities.

Gong Cheng had said that the cities would suddenly appear and then suddenly disappear. That really had been caused by the Cognition Lock. The images containing Safe Cities had always existed within his memories; he simply couldn’t perceive the Safe Cities within them.

From the perspective of his memories, it was like some kind of blind spot in his mind. He had been desperately searching through the prophetic visions for Safe Cities that flashed past in an instant.

But in reality, the images of the Safe Cities he had foreseen had been right in front of him all along.

Cheng Qisheng went through them one by one. The scenes of Moon Silk that appeared in the prophecies varied greatly. Some took place in relatively prosperous areas, some over vast stretches of farmland, some at the foot of a hill, and others in the middle of the wasteland.

The perspectives in these prophetic visions were different as well.

In one of the scenes, Cheng Qisheng could even clearly see a child’s hand. They were idly drawing lines in the dirt with a stone when, all of a sudden, they were swallowed up by the ultimate darkness.

That actually made sense.

Gong Cheng’s prophetic ability didn’t predict his own future. What he foresaw was the future of other people.

Gong Cheng had already possessed this kind of prophetic ability since he was five years old.

His very first prophecy was the scene of his mother’s death.

Five-year-old Gong Cheng saw his mother in the middle of a battle. The next second, she seemed to sense something and abruptly raised her head. But before she could react, she was swallowed up by absolute nothingness.

One could imagine the psychological trauma that had caused Gong Cheng.

Although the New Humans of Moon Silk were already capable of doing quite a bit of work at the age of five, Gong Cheng was the son of a City Lord. He had lived the life of a young master, and at that age, he had still retained his innocence. He simply couldn’t distinguish between prophecy and reality.

So when Gong Cheng’s mother, Gong Changming, returned after inspecting her territory, she heard that her youngest son had been going around telling everyone that she was dead.

The great mother used a thorough beating to temporarily snap young Gong Cheng out of his inability to distinguish prophecy from reality.

As he grew a little older, he discovered that he could sometimes glimpse the future belonging to other people.

But this ability wasn’t something he could control.

There were people he saw every single day whose futures he could never foresee, while there were others he was meeting for the very first time who could instantly drag Gong Cheng into a new prophetic vision.

That was why he chose to run away from home and wander all over Moon Silk. Every stranger he encountered might passively trigger another prophecy, forcing him to once again witness the final fate awaiting this planet.

In one of his prophetic fragments, when the Great Extinction arrived and eternal darkness descended, more than a dozen enormous cities were silently suspended in the Greater Universe.

All of these cities were Tier 6.

Gong Cheng must have seen a scene like this, which was why he wanted to search for Safe Cities.

In his mind, the world had been destroyed, but a portion of these suddenly appearing cities were able to escape the catastrophe.

He remembered that much. But soon afterward, the Cognition Lock erased his concept of Safe Cities. In the end, all Gong Cheng could remember was that he needed to find some cities—cities that held the key to saving the world.

As for exactly when the world would be destroyed, Gong Cheng himself had no idea.

Patiently, Cheng Qisheng sifted through these images, which were saturated with chaos, pain, despair, and fear, comparing them for anything they had in common.

Gong Cheng couldn’t clearly remember these prophetic visions. That might have been related to his mental capacity to withstand them. For him, having them remain somewhat blurry was probably better.

It was like a good camera capturing an ultra-high-definition image, only for the footage to be played at 480p because of limited bandwidth.

Right now, Cheng Qisheng was like someone wearing a 1080p monitor while looking through Gong Cheng’s memories.

She flipped through the prophetic visions one by one like a PowerPoint presentation, searching them for useful information.

—The green of the farmland. The new wine being served at a tavern, with the year carved into the stone plaque hanging behind the counter being next year. The spot where one of the foreseen members of a merchant caravan had stopped, where people were currently celebrating something enthusiastically.

Cheng Qisheng’s mental power “pinched” this fragment of memory and examined the celebrating crowd. They had covered their entire bodies in some kind of pigment, painting themselves red from head to toe.

Every single one of them had exactly the same short haircut.

She split off a portion of her mental power and opened her private chat with Greenroot City Lord.

[Hello. I’d like to look up some information. Is there any region on Moon Silk where the locals paint their entire bodies red, and regardless of age, all keep their hair cropped extremely short? They gather together, raise both hands above their heads, and dance. What is this for?]

[Greenroot Safe City: Give me a little time.]

[Blue Sea Safe City: Sure. I’ll wait for your message.]

Cheng Qisheng figured that Greenroot City Lord had gone to search through their records.

If nothing relevant could be found in the records, he would probably look for the City Lord governing the region associated with the appearance of the locals Blue Sea had described, purchase the information from them, and then resell it to her at a markup.

That didn’t make him a profiteer.

There was very little trust between City Lords. The fact that Greenroot City Lord could get other City Lords to trust him enough to sell him information in the first place was a skill in itself.

About an hour later, Greenroot City Lord returned, just as expected.

[500 nuclear crystals. You cover the transaction fee. Buying?]

Cheng Qisheng: [Buying.]

The two parties completed the exchange—crystals on one side, information on the other.

Cheng Qisheng opened the documents.

[Painting their entire bodies with red pigment and keeping their hair short is a custom unique to the New Humans of the Rakshasa Red Sea region.]

[They need to venture into the sea to hunt mutated beasts. The red pigment allows them to camouflage themselves more effectively in the water. Their hair is kept short because they frequently dive into the sea. Long hair would be inconvenient and could become entangled in mutated aquatic plants, which could twist around them and kill them.]

[Raising both hands above their heads and dancing in celebration is part of the annual sea-diving ceremony of the Rakshasa Red Sea people.]

[A mutated beast called the Suosuo Fish, which possesses almost no combat ability and grows to around half a meter in length, swims toward the Rakshasa Red Sea every summer. During this period, even the poorest locals can catch enough of them to eat their fill for at least half a month.]

[The locals call this day “Fish Gratitude Day.” On this day, they paint each other’s bodies, dance in celebration, and then jump into the sea together to catch Suosuo Fish.]

Cheng Qisheng flipped through the documents page by page until her eyes settled on the brief introduction to “Fish Gratitude Day.”

Fish Gratitude Day was a local festival on Moon Silk, beginning every year on the 25th day of the 12th month of the Moon Silk calendar.

A year on Moon Silk consisted of twenty-four months, with eighty days in each month. It was currently winter, and the date was the 18th day of the 23rd month.

In other words, the time when the Great Extinction would descend upon Moon Silk—

was still more than a thousand days away.

Cheng Qisheng had Aether close the document page. As she wondered how she could eliminate the [Company] and obtain Heaven’s Punishment within those thousand-plus days, she also thought about how she needed Coriander to evacuate before then.

At the same time, she couldn’t help thinking that relying entirely on other people’s information still wasn’t foolproof. She needed to send some people to the Rakshasa Red Sea to verify that the information was accurate.

Huh?

Wait a second.

After the document page closed, Cheng Qisheng stared at the crystal transfer screen with Greenroot City Lord.

She suddenly realized something.

In Gong Cheng’s memories, quite a few Safe Cities had failed to escape the Great Extinction, vanishing into the void along with everything else. Only the Tier 6 Safe Cities had survived.

If nothing unexpected happened, then among all the City Lords, she was the only one who knew that the Great Extinction was about to arrive.

This life-saving piece of information—could probably be sold for quite a lot of nuclear crystals, right?

<< _ >>