Chapter 214.1: Tour of Youdu
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture was in a complete daze.
The souls who had been taken to Youdu during the day had already become ghost deities by nightfall. Now, they were even inviting him to join them.
“How could that be possible?”
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture was still somewhat bewildered, but he had already instinctively refused.
“I am a City God appointed by imperial decree of the current dynasty. My divine power is closely tied to the imperial court. How could I possibly go and work for Youdu?”
To put it plainly, ever since the imperial court had appointed him as a City God, he had been unable to leave Tianjiang Prefecture.
The next time he could leave would be when the imperial court made a change, at which point he, the former City God, would die along with it.
Pei Shouji burst out laughing.
“My lord, there’s no need to worry. If you are willing to take up a post, Youdu will issue you another appointment by divine decree. Moreover, I know how devotedly you fulfill your duties. You are concerned that once you leave, no one will be left to watch over Tianjiang Prefecture. Therefore, Youdu will appoint you as its City God as well. When the time comes, you can continue looking after the people of Tianjiang Prefecture.”
That was possible, too?
He had never heard of a deity receiving two appointments by divine decree before.
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture was about to say, “Why don’t you let me think it over?” when Pei Shouji had already grabbed him by the arm.
“If you still have concerns, I’m just about to escort the people’s souls down below. Why don’t you come with me and take a look around Youdu Office?”
“Huh? But…”
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture was still hesitating when Pei Shouji swept his sleeve, and a familiar road appeared before their eyes.
It was the very same road along which the Black and White Impermanence had taken Pei Shouji away that day.
Pulling him along, Pei Shouji stepped onto the road. A few paper effigies of ghost officials then floated lightly out of the City God’s temple, followed by a large number of the people’s souls.
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture stared at the paper figures.
“These are…?”
Pei Shouji smiled.
“Nowadays, there are souls everywhere, and Youdu is desperately short of manpower. For ordinary clerical duties, we use paper figures as substitutes.”
He stepped forward first, then turned back and extended an invitation.
“My lord, please.”
The City God glanced at the faint golden light surrounding Pei Shouji, which signified that he had become a true deity. He then looked at the black-brick road beneath their feet and at the souls of Tianjiang Prefecture’s people, who were still confused and had no idea what was happening. In the end, he followed Pei Shouji forward.
“I am a City God. I’m afraid I cannot leave Tianjiang Prefecture.”
Pei Shouji replied, “That’s all right. Youdu does not belong to the mortal world, so you won’t technically be leaving Tianjiang Prefecture.”
Once he stepped onto the black bricks, he slowly made his way forward under Pei Shouji’s guidance. Before long, white mist rose all around them, obscuring the path ahead.
They walked for roughly the time it took an incense stick to burn. The surrounding fog grew even denser, until anything more than two meters away became impossible to see. However, for a yin deity like the City God, this environment was actually quite comfortable.
He could even see countless similar black-brick roads stretching through the white mist, converging from every direction. Some of those roads were empty, while others had the Black and White Impermanence walking one in front of the other, with several ordinary souls sandwiched between them as they proceeded forward.
—So there were actually many pairs of Black and White Impermanence!
The various paths clearly all led to the same destination. With Pei Shouji leading the way, they eventually arrived before a city gate built from enormous stone blocks and standing dozens of zhang tall.
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture was deeply shaken.
He had been an official of the imperial court when he was alive and had seen the gates of the capital. Yet even those could not compare with the imposing grandeur of this colossal city.
More importantly, at a glance, it was obvious that this place did not belong to the mortal world. The entire structure was dark and gloomy, radiating yin energy. The souls standing beneath it looked as tiny as ants, while atop the towers above the gate, ghost deities resembling government officers stood guard along the battlements, inspiring awe and reverence.
Both massive gates stood wide open. Beside the gate on the left stood an enormous stone stele, upon which three characters were carved:
Ghost Gate (/Gate of Hell).
Along the broad, seemingly endless main road paved with black bricks, souls gathered in great numbers. As soon as they reached this road, ghost officials would immediately step forward to direct them, organizing the souls into orderly queues to enter the city.
“Stop here! Present your travel permits! Your allotted lifespans have ended, and you have entered the netherworld. From this moment onward, you are separated from the world of the living by the boundary between yin and yang. Do not turn back, do not leave the queue, and do not make a commotion! Keep moving! Everyone, keep moving forward—”
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture listened in bewilderment. He had escorted souls to the Reincarnation Bureau before. Back then, all he had needed to do was bring the souls there and push them inside. Who would have thought that the Luofeng Netherworld Palace would even require travel permits?
He quietly asked Pei Shouji, “What exactly is this travel permit?”
Pei Shouji explained, “The human world has household registration records and official travel documents for passing through checkpoints. Naturally, Youdu has its own travel permits as well.”
“Otherwise, what if some evil ghosts killed ordinary souls and impersonated them, or caused trouble in Youdu? Without travel permits to establish their identities, how would anyone determine who was responsible?”
Pei Shouji had once been an ordinary mortal and had never seen the Reincarnation Bureau, so he accepted all of this quite readily. In fact, he sincerely believed that this was how the world after death ought to work.
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture, however, was experiencing a far greater shock. By now, he had begun to realize that, judging by the way the Luofeng Youdu Office operated, maintaining an entire Youdu would require…
Just how many deities would that take?
The queue stretched for hundreds of meters, with no end in sight. As an internal official, Pei Shouji simply led the City God of Tianjiang Prefecture straight to the front.
The City God watched as the ghost officials guarding the gates verified the identities of the souls one by one.
“Approved!”
“Approved!”
“Next!”
“No cutting in line! Cutting in line is a crime in Youdu, too!”
Pei Shouji stepped forward with the City God of Tianjiang Prefecture, removed the official token hanging at his waist, and handed it to one of the ghost officials.
“This is the City God of Tianjiang Prefecture. I’ve already submitted a request to my superiors, and they approved my bringing this lord to Youdu.”
The ghost official gave the City God a once-over.
“Lord City God, please register here by infusing this with your divine power.”
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture was confused. “Register what?”
The ghost official lightly patted the jade slab on the table, his attitude quite welcoming.
“Just infuse this with your divine power, and that’s all there is to it.”
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture had no idea what was going on, but since he was on someone else’s turf, he naturally had to follow their instructions. He raised his hand and infused a wisp of divine power into the slab.
The ghost official took out a wooden token and handed it to him.
“This is your temporary waist token. You must carry it to move around Youdu. Be careful not to lose it.”
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture hurriedly accepted it. “Thank you.”
…
The moment he hung the token on his person, Cheng Qisheng on Blue Star curiously turned her attention toward him.
That’s right. Ghost deities had no physical bodies, which made them easier for her to observe. As long as they wore a waist token containing even a trace of Cheng Qisheng’s mental power, she could see them.
Although they weren’t as clear to her as Old Eighth was, as long as they were standing in Youdu—a headquarters that had already been thoroughly permeated by her mental power—Cheng Qisheng could still see them fairly clearly.
It was roughly like giving an employee a surveillance device when they joined the company.
Although that sounded a little perverted, there was no denying that it saved Cheng Qisheng a great deal of trouble in her grand undertaking of “recruiting local officials.”
The first local ghost Blue Sea found wasn’t Pei Shouji.
More precisely, he was among the first batch.
Some local ghosts had already completed the entire process in Youdu and gone to queue for reincarnation.
Pei Shouji had been kept on because he was a good person in his previous life, recognized as such by the world itself. He was literate, and he had once built a major merchant house from scratch, demonstrating that he had considerable administrative ability.
He was practically Youdu’s second-best candidate for an overworked corporate drone.
The best candidates were the true deities of Fallen Heaven Star.
After all, these true deities had been vetted by the Heavenly Dao and nurtured by the faith of their worshippers. They were like top-tier employees handpicked by a major corporation: highly professional and exceptionally capable in every respect.
When a major corporation went bankrupt and a new startup began to rise, hoping to get everything running smoothly as quickly as possible, all it had to do was poach those top-tier employees.
Of course, they couldn’t poach every last one of them. Some still had to be left for the Heavenly Court.
However, one thing was certain: the City Gods could pretty much all be poached. The duties and authority of the City Gods on Fallen Heaven Star partially overlapped with those of City Gods in the mythology of Blue Star, making them easy targets for recruitment.
Moreover, within the divine system, City Gods had the closest ties to the local populace. Once they were connected to Youdu, the people would be able to learn about Youdu much more quickly as well.
And once they learned about it, they would begin generating faith power. Only then would this underworld, which Old Eighth and the others had spent several months building with their supernatural abilities and divine power, finally become the true Luofeng Youdu Office.
Many of the features created by the supernatural residents would gradually become real as Youdu sent more and more souls off to reincarnation.
The problem was that Youdu was really, really, really short-staffed.
The good news was that large numbers of souls were currently stranded in the mortal world. When Blue Sea’s residents brought them back, they could select suitable souls from among them and recruit them into Youdu.
But sooner or later, Blue Sea would have to leave. Youdu had already begun retrieving souls in large numbers and was officially operational, yet its most important positions in the underworld were still vacant. Old Eighth and the others were taking turns serving as acting officials.
Cheng Qisheng had now figured out the operating principles of Fallen Heaven Star.
These important positions required a certain level of cultivation. Ordinary souls alone weren’t enough; the candidates had to have accumulated considerable good karma during their lifetimes.
And good karma alone wasn’t sufficient, either. A candidate also needed the ability to handle government affairs. Someone like Pei Shouji, for example, could at most become a mid-level ghost official. After all, he had ultimately been a merchant, and he wasn’t particularly skilled at administrative work. He didn’t seem to have much aptitude for it, either.
—Though it was hard to say for sure. If he kept studying and studying, perhaps he could be trained into a capable administrator.
Right now, Youdu was short-staffed in every department—or rather, short on deities. Minor ghost officials were easy enough to find, but the candidates for important positions had to be identified early.
The Ten Kings of Hell. The Four Great Judges.
And Meng Po.
At present, the great Creator God of Blue Sea was temporarily filling in as Meng Po.
Her method of serving as Meng Po was also remarkably crude and straightforward. The souls appeared to be bowing their heads and drinking soup, but in reality, Cheng Qisheng had placed a large amount of her own mental power at the bottom of their bowls.
When the souls were struck by her mental power, their memories would be wiped clean on the spot.
—This inspiration came from the prophet, Gong Cheng.
Thanks to Fallen Heaven Star’s peculiar energy-conversion mechanism, the souls would suffer no other effects beyond having their memories erased.
Oh, no. That wasn’t entirely true. There was still another effect.
If the Meng Po of Blue Star’s myths and legends used a bowl of steaming hot soup to gradually wash away a soul’s memories, then Cheng Qisheng’s version of Meng Po simply whacked them with a stick and smashed those memories to pieces.
The shock was so intense that even after reincarnation, the souls would still retain a faint memory of it immediately after being reborn.
The next generation of children born on Fallen Heaven Star would probably cry their lungs out.
Thinking of this, Cheng Qisheng felt a little guilty.
So she stopped thinking about it.
The gaze of the great Creator God of Blue Sea fell upon the City God of Tianjiang Prefecture.
Fallen Heaven Star was a place where, as long as you had energy, you could accomplish practically anything—though only within the limits of the planet itself.
As long as Youdu accumulated enough faith power, it could genuinely develop a recipe for Meng Po’s Soup. By then, all they would need to do was find a reliable Meng Po to take charge.
But first, this place, where humans, deities, and ghosts were all rushing around too busy to catch their breath, needed more staff.
“This is the Yellow Springs Road. These flowers are called the Flowers of the Other Shore.”
Pei Shouji led the City God of Tianjiang Prefecture onto a road lined with brilliantly colored flowers.
“This is the true road leading to Youdu. Once the souls of the dead set foot on the Yellow Springs Road, they can never return to the world of the living.”
The City God of Tianjiang Prefecture still couldn’t resist looking around. On either side of the road lay the same dense, heavy fog, while squads of departed souls advanced under the escort of ghost officers.
