Safe City Ch.45.2

Chapter 45.2: Dazzling Star

Cheng Qisheng had been wondering whether it might be possible to build another floating farm dedicated to livestock.

But with both technology and crystals in short supply, she had no choice but to abandon the idea.

Now, the moment she learned that the Snow Beasts of this frozen world were edible, she immediately felt that this world was worth staying in—even if it had contained no item cards at all.

Wen Huahua, of course, had no idea what Cheng Qisheng was thinking.

He continued sending messages.

Although he had finally managed to establish himself in this world, his Safe City’s combat strength was still lacking, leaving him with little confidence.

Compared to the local Snow Beasts, what Wen Huahua feared more was becoming a target for other Safe Cities.

Now that Blue Sea had arrived, he finally felt a measure of reassurance.

I’ve got a boss backing me up too!

[In the fourth year, someone discovered that killing Snow Beasts had a chance of dropping floating cards. Those are the item cards.

[The Dazzling Star civilization has survived until today entirely because of those item cards. Otherwise, with the technology native to their world, they would have frozen to death long ago in this climate.

[Hehe. Honestly, with my Safe City’s level of technology, if it weren’t for the item cards, my residents would’ve frozen to death ages ago too.]

Although Wen Huahua had already written all of this in the report, that didn’t stop him from chatting away to Cheng Qisheng, happily rambling on anyway.

His main reason was simple:

He firmly believed that chatting more helped build stronger relationships.

So whenever he found even the smallest opening in the conversation, he’d eagerly squeeze in a few more words.

[Boss, you’re still a newcomer, so you probably don’t know this either. Item cards are absolute treasures. You can think of them as packing a huge amount of resources into a single card. They save space and are incredibly easy to carry. The first time I got an item card after coming to this world, I was completely blown away. I’ve even heard that many high-tier City Lords use item cards as currency when trading with each other.]

Although Wen Huahua would have loved nothing more than to keep talking to Cheng Qisheng for an entire day and night, he also knew there was such a thing as too much of a good thing.

So instead of repeating the report word for word, he kept his messages brief.

[Item cards, just like supernatural abilities, have different grades. Their colors correspond to their attributes. There are all kinds of them. Boss, I made a chart—you can take a look.]

Blue Sea Safe City: [Okay. =v=]

Cheng Qisheng reluctantly set aside her thoughts of hunting Snow Beasts and opened the chart.

…Oops.

Wrong one.

That was the Snow Beast chart.

She pulled up the item card chart instead.

Sure enough, it contained a detailed breakdown of every card color and the kinds of resources each one represented.

White Cards — Everyday necessities.

Blue Cards — Food and water.

Red Cards — Energy and fuel.

Green Cards — Medical supplies and healthcare-related items.

Black Cards — All kinds of weapons.

Silver Cards — Housing and construction items.

Gold Cards — Rare cards capable of producing special items.

Most item cards were Tier 1.

Only a small number were of higher tiers, and obtaining those required killing correspondingly stronger Snow Beasts.

Behind each category was a densely packed list of every known item that could be drawn from that type of card.

For example, White Cards could produce cold-weather clothing suited to the current environment, along with blankets, pillows, and other daily necessities.

The Silver Card section included pictures of various buildings.

Most of them were different styles of snow houses.

The Gold Card section displayed a small plot of farmland—roughly ten mu (about 1.6 acres or 0.67 hectares) in size.

Cheng Qisheng asked: [Is the farmland item a Rare Card?]

Coriander Safe City: [Yep! It can probably produce other things too, but Gold Cards are incredibly rare. Among all the information I’ve collected, there’s only a single rumor about them. As for the farmland picture attached to the Gold Card section… I actually photoshopped that myself~]

They’re really that rare?

Cheng Qisheng immediately felt that the floating farmland in her own Safe City had become even more valuable.

Thank you, Dr. Yu. And once again, I wish you success.

She turned to the Snow Beast classification.

As expected, there were all kinds of them.

Their only universal trait was that they were immune to the cold.

Some resembled ordinary animals, while others were bizarre, grotesque creatures.

There were beasts that ran across the ground, monsters that flew through the sky, and even ones that burrowed underground.

It was those burrowing Snow Beasts that had ultimately driven the people of Dazzling Star back onto the surface.

After all, if you hid yourself carefully enough, ground-dwelling Snow Beasts might never discover you.

Humans also had a chance to spot them first and prepare accordingly.

But underground Snow Beasts…

For people living beneath the earth, they were the very definition of a nightmare.

Imagine it.

You’re sleeping peacefully in your bed inside an underground shelter.

The heating system is working normally.

You’re wearing nothing more than a thick set of clothes and covered by a blanket weighing only ten jin (about five kilograms).

Then suddenly—

a Snow Beast tunnels through the ground…

…and tears open your shelter.

Freezing air instantly rushes inside, numbing your fingers with cold.

You scramble into your cold-weather suit and grab your weapon, trying to escape through the corridors—

only to discover they’ve already collapsed after being tunneled through by the Snow Beast.

All you can do is stand there in despair, trapped inside a shelter that’s on the verge of caving in, with so little space there’s nowhere left to hide…

…while a Snow Beast, its eyes glowing red and saliva dripping from its jaws, slowly approaches you.

…Yikes.

Just imagining it made Cheng Qisheng feel despair on behalf of the people of Dazzling Star.

[There’s something even more annoying.]

Never missing an opportunity to continue chatting, Wen Huahua sent another message.

[Flying Snow Beasts are the biggest headache. Boss, I’d recommend having your residents wear white cloth or something similar whenever they go outside, so they won’t be as easily spotted by the flying ones.]

Cheng Qisheng replied: [Why are flying Snow Beasts considered the most troublesome? According to the combat rating chart you sent me, aren’t they actually the weakest type overall?]

Wen Huahua replied: [They’re weak, sure—but only by comparison. They’re still pretty troublesome when they attack from the air. And if some ground-based Snow Beasts notice flying Snow Beasts circling over prey, they might be drawn over too.

[And! Most importantly! Probably because flying Snow Beasts are relatively weak, their item card drop rate is extremely, extremely, EXTREMELY low!

[My residents and I have always been very cautious, so we haven’t run into them ourselves yet. But one of the big-shot City Lords in the group chat has. A flock of flying Snow Beasts attacked her residents. She organized her guards and killed a total of 174 of them. They lost quite a few residents and guards in the fight…

[…and in the end, they got only a single White Card.]

It was only a Tier-1 White Card.

When they opened it…

It contained three crates of shampoo.

The problem was that the civilization this City Lord came from was one where everyone was naturally hairless.

Completely hairless from birth.

[She spent over fifty messages in the group chat cursing the flying Snow Beasts. Her language was so foul that half the messages were censored into gibberish.]

Wen Huahua happily shared the gossip.

[Later, another City Lord offered to buy the shampoo from her, but at a price way below the market rate. He said that since nobody in the Hairless Boss’s civilization had any hair, selling it cheaply was better than letting it sit there unused. The two of them ended up having a huge argument.

[Then last month, that City Lord got caught up in a migration of Tier-3 Snow Beasts, which just happened to move right next to the Hairless Boss’s Safe City. The two Safe Cities ended up going to war. In the end, that City Lord ceded about a thousand square kilometers of territory and fled this world with the six hundred square kilometers he had left.

[The Hairless Boss herself told the whole story in the group chat. I think it was actually useful. At least now, when people chat, they don’t call their civilization the ‘Hairless Civilization’ anymore.]

Cheng Qisheng replied: […Then why do you keep calling her the ‘Hairless Boss’?]

Wen Huahua hurriedly explained: [No, Boss! Don’t misunderstand! I’m a very polite person!]

Wen Huahua: [It’s because the Hairless Boss named her Safe City Hairless Safe City herself. Apparently, her world had encountered another Safe City before, and that civilization did have hair. So when she chose a name, that’s what she went with.]

Cheng Qisheng: “…”

Was it just her imagination?

Every time she heard gossip about interactions between different civilizations, she couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone involved was part of some wildly improvised, barely functional circus troupe.

Wen Huahua, on the other hand, accepted it all as perfectly normal.

[That’s only natural. Not every Safe City gets to recruit outstanding figures from its home civilization. A situation like yours, Boss, is actually pretty rare.]

That reminded Cheng Qisheng of something mentioned in the report.

Natural Disaster Worlds were supposed to produce either item cards or crystals.

But Dark Star had gone through countless near-extinction disasters…

How had it produced neither?

Blue Sea Safe City: [Has there ever been a planet that experienced a natural-disaster apocalypse but produced neither crystals nor item cards?]

Coriander Safe City: “…?”

[I don’t think so. My own home civilization produced cystals. It’s basically a world’s built-in safety net, isn’t it?

[How could any civilization be so unlucky that its own world never produced either cystals or items? That would be unbelievably bad luck. No way that could happen. Hahaha! It feels even less likely than a planet getting swallowed by a black hole.]

Cheng Qisheng: “…”

All right. That’s enough.

Please stop talking.

Coriander Safe City: [Oh, right, Boss. You might need to be a little careful in this world. Even though there are item cards, they’re designed for individual use. For a City Lord like you, who can manage an entire Safe City, they’re not exactly friendly.]

Cheng Qisheng asked: [What do you mean?]

Coriander Safe City: [For example, the buildings you get from item cards are only meant for one or two people to live in. They’re completely unsuitable for housing large groups. A lot of the resource items are also designed for individual use.

[The reason I’ve been able to survive so comfortably in this world is because my residents basically take care of themselves. That greatly reduces my energy consumption. All I have to do is collect an entry fee when they come back to the Safe City.

[I usually charge seventy percent of the item cards they bring back.]

By his own standards, he considered himself fairly kind.

Many City Lords charged ninety percent.

Some even confiscated everything.

But Wen Huahua knew he wasn’t particularly strong. If he charged too much, his residents might simply choose to stay in this world forever—or defect to another Safe City.

So he deliberately kept the return fee relatively low.

The residents all understood that Dazzling Star was ultimately doomed.

Even so, the temptation of item cards was simply too great.

Coriander Safe City lacked clothing, food, and many other necessities.

Some of the stronger residents had found that by hunting Snow Beasts for item cards, they could actually live far better on Dazzling Star than inside the Safe City itself.

Weaker residents might still prefer returning to the Safe City.

But Wen Huahua wasn’t an idiot.

If all the strongest fighters left…

How long would his Safe City survive?

Drawing on his own experience, he offered Cheng Qisheng some advice.

Coriander Safe City: [So, Boss, your residents shouldn’t move around in large groups anymore. Snow Beasts are scattered all over the place. This world is much better suited to individuals or very small teams operating independently. Just collect a return fee when they come back.]

Coriander Safe City: [Residents who get used to living freely out here might be a little dissatisfied when they return, but you can deal with that later. The biggest issue is the temperature. If your Safe City tries to keep everyone together and provide centralized heating, your energy supply simply won’t be enough.]

Wen Huahua was genuinely worried about his boss.

After all, during the Four-City Alliance, Blue Sea’s greatest claim to fame had been its enormous army.

Now, however, their firearms had effectively been “banned” by the world’s rules, rendering the military’s greatest advantage useless.

And Blue Sea’s residents had always been strongest when fighting together.

If they were forced to split up, their combat effectiveness would naturally decline.

Just thinking about it made Wen Huahua feel like pulling his hair out on behalf of his boss.

Cheng Qisheng: ?

Images flashed through her mind one after another—

The various crystal hunter teams.

The exploration teams.

And those residents who were constantly itching to run all over the place, only reluctantly accepting centralized assignments after receiving orders from their Creator God.

Operate independently?

Blue Sea’s people?

…

Wouldn’t they absolutely love that?

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