Safe City Ch.210

Chapter 210: Luofeng Netherworld Palace

Why thirty-three heavens, rather than simply using “the First Heaven” to represent the Heavenly Court?

Because, obviously, 230,000 square kilometers of land wasn’t enough to complete the entire structure of a Heavenly Court.

The Reincarnation Bureau alone would probably take up a considerable amount of space.

Most importantly, the gods of Fallen Heaven Star had their own divine kingdoms.

If Blue Sea wanted the Heavenly Dao to continue functioning normally even after it left, it would definitely need to recruit a large number of local gods into the Heavenly Court.

All Blue Sea needed to do was lay the groundwork for these gods. As long as it recruited enough local deities, the Blue Sea Great Luo Heavenly Court would naturally continue to grow larger and larger.

At this moment, the situation was rather like Blue Sea was holding a design exhibition. Blue Sea, acting as the organizing committee, had brought out several sample pieces to demonstrate what the exhibits should look like. The other exhibitors would then prepare their own works for the exhibition, following the dimensions and themes of those samples.

Once the exhibition began, the organizers would take back their own samples, leaving only the exhibits created by the other participants on display.

By then, it would truly be a Heavenly Court that belonged to everyone.

All right! After assembling puzzle balls and puzzle airships, Blue Sea had now started assembling a Heavenly Court!

This was pretty difficult.

Even though Cheng Qisheng’s mental power was currently abundant, the process of removing the rules from enormous chunks of land, preserving those rules, sending the land to Fallen Heaven Star, and then using her mental power to keep it suspended in the air was still rather challenging.

In gaming terms, it was basically an action that consumed a huge amount of mana.

After all, previously, she had at least had the divine power of her residents helping to hold everything up. But if she wanted to build the Thirty-Three Heavens now, she would have to rely entirely on her own mental power.

But that was fine. She had just received a gift of mental power from the world’s consciousness, so her mana bar was currently very full.

Besides, when it came to building houses, Cheng Qisheng was an old hand.

It didn’t matter if she couldn’t build a huge palace right away. She could start by laying the foundation.

Once the foundation was in place, as long as people moved in, wouldn’t she be able to start collecting rent (divine power)?

The problem now was that Fallen Heaven Star was like a house with drafts coming in from every direction. Repairs were needed everywhere, and Cheng Qisheng had to sift through a pile of broken bricks and rubble to identify the most, most, most, most urgent points that needed fixing.

Cheng Qisheng slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly closed her eyes, immersing her entire attention in the various believers scattered across Fallen Heaven Star. Borrowing their perspectives, she began examining the state of the planet.

The dragon qi of the various dynasties had all begun to weaken. Black wyrms were rising up in many places, indicating that people within these dynasties were rebelling or staging uprisings. And the most intriguing detail was that as the dragon qi weakened, the black wyrms’ auras grew increasingly powerful.

Government officials and their subordinates were running themselves ragged trying to deal with the situation, yet they couldn’t stop the growing number of demons and monsters. Some had even begun openly replacing officials of the current regime and throwing their weight around in entire regions.

The stars were moving in reverse, meteors streaked across the daytime sky, the righteous order had fallen into disarray, and demons and monsters ran rampant.

However, all of the above was merely what could be observed from a macro perspective.

Every single one of these developments was a major disaster, but things hadn’t yet reached the point where everyone was suffering from calamity.

For the ordinary people of Fallen Heaven, the thing affecting them most at that moment was the collapse of the Reincarnation Bureau.

Yes, Fallen Heaven Star’s reincarnation mechanism had completely ceased to function.

In a world where anything could be converted into energy, the souls of the many people who died remained after their deaths.

If the Heavenly Dao were still in place, their souls would pass through the Reincarnation Bureau to be judged before reincarnating—one form of energy transforming into another, whether a human, an animal, or even a plant.

But with reincarnation no longer functioning, the souls of those who had just died, along with those already waiting in line at the Reincarnation Bureau, could only linger in the mortal world.

As mentioned earlier, Fallen Heaven Star was a world where anything could be converted into energy.

In other words, these souls could also be treated as energy. To powerful evil spirits, devouring them was like snacking on something tasty. If they didn’t want to be eaten, then apart from fleeing in panic, their only option was to grow stronger themselves—for instance, by devouring other souls or absorbing energy from the living.

In addition, the Reincarnation Bureau had a rather crude system for rewarding good and punishing evil. Some evil spirits who had committed wicked deeds in the mortal world had been imprisoned somewhere to serve their sentences while the Heavenly Dao was still around.

And then, while they were locked up, the prison collapsed.

To the evil spirits, it was as if they’d been inexplicably released. They poked their heads out and took a look. Well, well, well! The warden was gone, and so were the laws. Now they could do whatever they wanted!

The demons and monsters were still in their developmental stage, so they couldn’t yet achieve a GPI of one village per demon.

But ghosts could!

Just think about it. The Reincarnation Bureau had existed ever since civilization first emerged on Fallen Heaven Star. Clearly, the Heavenly Dao wasn’t obsessive-compulsive, nor had it established any rule such as “the dead must reincarnate within one month.”

The Reincarnation Bureau had already accumulated a huge backlog of souls. Meanwhile, the death toll in the living world was skyrocketing. And so, this time, they had truly achieved the goal of having at least one ghost per village.

When Cheng Qisheng was little, she’d read Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio and sometimes thought that being a ghost actually seemed pretty nice. You wouldn’t need to eat or sleep, you could go wherever you wanted, and there’d be other ghosts to befriend. As long as you didn’t do anything bad or run into a Taoist priest, wouldn’t life be absolutely wonderful?

But Fallen Heaven Star clearly hadn’t come with those default settings.

Souls separated from their physical bodies couldn’t remain in the living world for long. The energy of the living world leaned more toward yang energy, whereas souls needed yin energy.

If a ghost remained in the living world for an extended period, it would have a hard time maintaining its sanity unless it was already relatively powerful, had absorbed energy from the living and become an evil spirit, or happened to be in a place with particularly strong yin energy.

After wandering through the living world for about a month, ordinary ghosts would begin to lose their memories of their lives.

Some of these ghosts who had lost their minds would harm people unconsciously. Others would become a kind of pale, shadowy apparition. They had no conscious intention of harming anyone, but if a living person happened to encounter one at night, when yin energy was particularly strong, there was a high probability that the person would fall seriously ill.

Then, given the standard of medical care in ancient times, there was a fifty percent chance that the person would eventually die from the illness.

After death, they would become a soul with no way to reincarnate, left to drift aimlessly through the world. Gradually, they would lose their sanity and, following the habits they’d developed in life, linger in the places where they’d spent the most time while alive. There, they would become a pale, shadowy apparition, only to encounter another person and cause that person to fall ill and die in turn.

—More often than not, their victims would be their own relatives, because the places where they’d spent the most time in life were naturally places their family members frequented as well.

And so the cycle would continue, with more and more souls accumulating in Fallen Heaven Star’s living world. Eventually, there really would be more ghosts than people.

It might even reach the point where a small village had only thirty-odd households, yet hundreds of ghosts drifted through its streets.

Imagine someone suddenly deciding to go outside in the middle of the night. They push open the door, only to find themselves face-to-face with hundreds of pairs of eyes.

At that moment, Cheng Qisheng took a look through the eyes of her believers. The task Blue Sea’s residents performed most often in their capacity as deities was capturing and expelling evil spirits.

But surely they couldn’t kill all those innocent souls, could they? These souls had no conscious intention of harming anyone; they were simply being forced to remain in the living world.

Old Eighth and the others certainly couldn’t bring themselves to do something like that.

For one thing, these souls looked so weak and pitiful, almost like animals that had developed stereotyped behaviors. They would keep circling around the same spot, repeating a few lines that had left a deep impression on them during their lives.

What difference was there between beating them up and beating a child?

At least if someone tried to fight Blue Sea’s children, the children would fight back. These souls, on the other hand, could only passively take a beating.

Cheng Qisheng agreed with her residents’ approach, but she was thinking about the problem on a much deeper level.

If these souls weren’t preserved, and with the Heavenly Dao no longer around to create new souls, then in a few years, all the newborns on Fallen Heaven Star might be soulless people.

Nothing but bodies, without souls.

These souls didn’t merely need to be preserved. Every single one of them had to be sent into the new Reincarnation Bureau.

—A bead of sweat appeared on Cheng Qisheng’s forehead.

This was a rare occurrence. Ever since becoming a supernatural, she had hardly ever sweated.

Apart from that single bead of sweat, Cheng Qisheng’s expression remained perfectly calm. You couldn’t tell at all that her mental power was in the middle of undertaking a massive construction project.

A landmass measuring 100,000 square kilometers was being slammed by her mental power into another dimension of Fallen Heaven Star.

Cheng Qisheng called it the “Divine Kingdom Dimension.”

She had to admit, this thing was pretty convenient. It also bore a striking resemblance to the corridor and several rooms in her home on Blue Star.

Once she finished what she was doing, she would have to look into whether she could open up a similar dimension within Blue Sea Safe City as well.

Phew—

Another bead of sweat appeared on Cheng Qisheng’s forehead.

It felt like hauling bricks for a construction project, then stacking them into a wall dozens of meters high.

She had a feeling that things would have been even more difficult if she hadn’t been granted access to the world’s consciousness and its permissions.

—At last, a heavy thud rang out in silence, inaudible to the people of the living world.

Within the pitch-black void of the Divine Kingdom Dimension, a landmass spanning 100,000 square kilometers floated quietly in the darkness.

It looked barren, like an abandoned island.

Yet this was the foundation of the future Blue Sea Great Luo Heavenly Court, which would float high above the entire world.

Cheng Qisheng paid no attention to the two beads of sweat rolling down her face. At the sluggish pace at which she was moving right now, those two drops would have fallen on their own by the time she could raise a hand to wipe them away.

Good. The Reincarnation Bureau now had an office location.

The great Creator God of Blue Sea thought for a moment, then located a fairly large stone on this vast expanse of land, which was now thoroughly saturated with her mental power.

She placed the stone in front of her and used her mental power to inscribe a few simple characters on its surface.

—Luofeng Netherworld Palace.

Good. The headquarters of the Underworld had been relocated.

The rest could be left to Old Eighth and the others.

——

Blue Sea Safe City

The [Teleportation] ability user, Qian Lishi, was standing in line with the others waiting to descend upon Fallen Heaven Star.

Honestly, ever since joining Blue Sea, the thing he’d done most often was stand in line.

By now, Qian Lishi was an old hand at this. He had even brought a small folding stool with him.

“Big Brother, are you really going?”

His younger brother was still in school, while his younger sister, Qian Liyun, had specifically taken leave to see him off. Since arriving in Blue Sea, this was the first time her expression had been so full of unease.

Qian Lishi patted his sister on the head. “Don’t worry. You know how capable your big brother is, don’t you?”

“Besides, I heard that Blue Sea has established a Heavenly Court down there, with a base called Daluo Village. Once I descend, I should be able to find the main headquarters by following the address. And with so many of us together, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Qian Liyun was still worried. That was just how people were. She could accept taking risks herself, but when it was a family member heading into danger, it felt completely different.

“Big Brother, why don’t you just stay? You’ve been doing so well at the construction site, and you’re earning plenty of points!”

Qian Liyun wasn’t wrong. Qian Lishi’s [Teleportation] ability was incredibly convenient for transporting materials. When they were in the greater universe, he’d tried taking a part-time job at a construction site. One person could do the work of two hundred, and there was still plenty of heavy lifting that the machinery couldn’t handle.

Blue Sea had always operated on the principle that one got out exactly what one put in. Qian Lishi had never dreamed that, in an apocalyptic world, simply working for a company could propel his income straight into the upper-middle range of Blue Sea Safe City’s residents.

Even though his family still lived in the outer city, they were doing quite well.

But Qian Lishi had his own thoughts about the matter.

He glanced around to make sure no one was paying attention to them before lowering his voice and saying to his sister, “I’m a Tier 5 ability user. Do you really think a Safe City would let a Tier 5 ability user sit around inside the city, hauling bricks and building houses every day instead of going out to fight?”

Qian Liyun replied, “But nobody has ever said anything to you about that.”

“Just because they haven’t said anything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it to heart.”

Qian Lishi was an old hand at this sort of thing. He had managed to take two children with him as they moved from one Safe City to another, and had raised them both well. There was no way he could have done all that without a bit of savvy.

“Put yourself in the City Lord’s shoes. If you were the City Lord, would you want to see one of your own dependable workhorses refusing to do any work, just lazing around and eating grass every day?”

“This is the apocalypse. If I were an ordinary person, that would be one thing. But I’m an ability user, and a Tier 5 one at that. Going outside the city to search for supplies counts as doing my job. Staying inside the city, on the other hand, means wasting my combat potential. Nobody’s said anything yet, but we can’t wait until Blue Sea has a problem with us before we make a change, can we?”

“Look at what Lu Song said in his post. I guarantee he’s speaking on behalf of Blue Sea’s management. Even if he’s not, I still want to keep progressing and eventually enter the Inner City.”

Qian Liyun nodded glumly. “I understand.”

Qian Lishi patted his little sister on the head.

“That’s my girl. Your big brother has offensive abilities now, so I’m much stronger than I used to be. And even if I can’t beat something, I can still run away! You know what I’m like. I’ve been fighting outside the city since I was a kid. I’m already used to living this way. If you suddenly made me settle down and haul bricks in peace and quiet, I’d actually feel uncomfortable. You just focus on going to school and studying hard, all right?”

He was almost at the front of the line. Qian Liyun could only retreat reluctantly, waving goodbye to her big brother.

Qian Lishi smiled and nodded at her from a distance before turning back toward the passage leading to Fallen Heaven Star.

Only after his sister was no longer able to see him did the smile on his face slowly fade.

He had lied.

Who would actually enjoy living every day surrounded by danger, with their life liable to end at any moment?

The time he’d spent using his abilities to haul bricks and build houses in Blue Sea had been the happiest and most carefree period of his life since entering the Safe City system.

There had been no monsters, no viruses, and no need to keep a death grip on his vigilance in every direction just to use the toilet. All he had to do was build houses on autopilot.

However, there was one thing Qian Lishi hadn’t lied to his sister about. As a Tier 5 ability user, he didn’t believe Blue Sea Safe City would allow him to remain inside the city as an ordinary construction worker.

Every resident had a role to play in a Safe City.

As an ability user, Qian Lishi was supposed to fulfill the role expected of one.

And he liked this place far too much. Unless something unexpected happened, the Qian family would continue living in Blue Sea for the foreseeable future.

Therefore, before the higher-ups discovered that he’d been “slacking off,” Qian Lishi felt he should take the initiative.

He would put his brick-hauling days behind him and embark on a life of combat.

—A flash of dazzling light passed over him, and Qian Lishi felt his body grow light.

He opened his eyes and was pleased to discover that he had become a Merchant Travel God, a deity who served as the patron of a small traveling merchant caravan whose territory could change.

Even better, he was in the very same kingdom where Daluo Village was located.

Qian Lishi quickly familiarized himself with the approximate coordinates and the direction he needed to travel, then immediately activated his [Teleportation] ability and headed toward Daluo Village.

Fallen Heaven Star was simply too vast. Even with his [Teleportation] ability, it took Qian Lishi several days to reach Daluo Village.

The moment he arrived, golden light flashed at the village entrance, and Wu Mingfeng’s divine projection appeared before him.

Qian Lishi immediately introduced himself.

“I’m Qian Lishi, an Outer-City resident. My resident ID number is…”

Wu Mingfeng was overjoyed. “You’re Qian Lishi? The [Teleportation] ability user?”

Qian Lishi was taken aback by his reaction. He knew that Blue Sea’s Inner-City residents were generally easygoing and friendly toward Outer-City residents, but wasn’t this a little too enthusiastic?

Based on his life experience, when someone was excessively friendly toward him, it usually meant they wanted him to do something dangerous.

“Uh… yes, that’s me. Hello.”

“Hello, hello! We happen to be in desperate need of talent like you!” Wu Mingfeng said enthusiastically. “The temple has issued a Level One mission. It comes with a salary and allowances, though there are also confidentiality requirements. You can review the details on-site before deciding whether to accept it.”

Qian Lishi’s internal alarm bells began ringing furiously.

Anyone who had been through several different Safe Cities knew that when a Safe City issued a mission, it was usually something earth-shattering—the kind of task where those assigned had to risk their lives to get it done.

He really wanted to say, “No, thank you. I’m not interested.”

But then he thought of his younger sister, who was studying in Blue Sea and constantly being praised by her teachers for her talent, and his younger brother, who cheerfully shared with him every day what delicious food was on the cafeteria menu.

He also thought of Blue Sea’s policy: regardless of whether a resident belonged to the Inner or Outer city, if someone died while carrying out a collective mission, the city would ensure that their family was taken care of.

If another Safe City had such a policy, Qian Lishi would still have been skeptical.

But Blue Sea Safe City…

It really was the kind of place that would follow through on its rules once they had been established.

Qian Lishi put on a smile that made him look as though he were genuinely looking forward to the task.

“Of course! I’d be more than happy to serve Blue Sea. What’s the mission?”

Wu Mingfeng gave him a mysterious smile.

“It’s a very important mission.”

Qian Lishi stood in the bustling Luofeng Netherworld Palace, where everyone was hard at work, their heads bent over their tasks.

A large ancient-style building was already more than halfway complete. Numerous minor deities belonging to Blue Sea were rushing about, carrying soil and hauling stones.

Someone was even shouting orders while channeling divine power.

“We need a few more people over here!!!”

“Hey!!! Any water-element ability users around? We need some water!”

“Where did you get that roof? Did we ever make roofs in that style before?”

“Heh heh, I brought over the roof of the temple my believers built for me.”

“Building houses with divine power doesn’t feel any easier than building them with our physical bodies.”

“That’s because we had excavators back in the city!”

A foreman came hurrying over.

“Everyone, don’t panic! Our God is watching over us! We’ve got a colleague with a [Teleportation] ability here! He can use his powers to transport earth and building materials. With him on the job, the entire construction process will be much easier!”

Across the vast stretches of land, the Blue Sea residents who had taken the forms of minor deities erupted into jubilant cheers.

The Tier 5 ability user Qian Lishi, who had given up his job at a construction site inside Blue Sea Safe City and specifically come to Fallen Heaven Star to take part in a dangerous mission:

“……”

“The important mission you were talking about is having me build houses on Fallen Heaven Star?!”

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