Earlier that day…

Hongxing Restaurant, Downtown

It was a small, community-run restaurant. The place itself wasn’t large, but because customers didn’t need ration coupons to buy meals there, business was always brisk.

Sister Fang deliberately chose a table near the entrance, where she had a clear view of the outside. Any unusual movement beyond the door would immediately catch her eye.

She was an exceptionally cautious woman.

It was a lesson the Old Lame Man—the one who had brought her into the trade—had paid for with his life.

She had originally been an ordinary farm woman, scraping a living from poor land that yielded next to nothing. No matter how hard she worked, the harvests were pitiful. She was always hungry, so hungry that her eyes seemed to glow green with starvation.

One day, an old lame beggar wandered into the village looking for food.

She gave him half a steamed bun.

In return, he told her, “Come work with me. You’ll never go hungry again.”

She thought about it for a day.

Then she left with him.

When she left, she also took two children from the village.

After selling them, she ate the first full meal of her life.

This line of work was good.

She could eat her fill, eat well, and even save a considerable amount of money.

The only downside was the danger.

The Old Lame Man’s crippled leg had come from being caught abd*cting a child and beaten by an angry mob. Later, he had been beaten to death right in front of her.

From that day onward, Sister Fang became extraordinarily cautious.

She learned how to recognize police officers, how to shake off anyone following her, and how to obtain sedatives through underworld contacts to keep children asleep…

By being meticulous every step of the way, she had been trafficking children for more than ten years without ever being caught.

She took considerable pride in that record.

Today’s haul had been a good one.

In high spirits, she brought along her lover, Zhou Dazhu, to enjoy a meal at the restaurant.

She ordered two dishes and ate leisurely, all the while calculating how many more children she would have to sell before she’d saved enough money to retire and return to her hometown.

She had already worked out the story she’d tell everyone.

She would claim that she herself had once been trafficked away, and that now, having grown older and no longer being wanted, she had finally managed to escape and come home.

Of course, returning alone wouldn’t do.

It would be best to bring a child back with her—around three years old would be ideal. A child that young wouldn’t remember anything and wouldn’t be too troublesome to care for. By the time the child grew up, they could take care of her in her old age.

Lost in her thoughts of the future, Sister Fang suddenly noticed groups of police officers hurrying past the restaurant one after another.

And they were all heading in the direction she and Zhou Dazhu had come from.

“Sis…”

Since they were engaged in a criminal business, the sight of so many police officers immediately made Zhou Dazhu uneasy. Glancing around to make sure no one was paying attention to them, he lowered his voice.

“They’re moving a lot faster than last time. You don’t think we’re in trouble, do you?”

Sister Fang shot him a sideways glance.

“What? Scared?”

Zhou Dazhu lowered his head sheepishly.

Who wouldn’t be?

“Hmph.”

Sister Fang looked down on his cowardice.

Still, he was obedient and strong enough to be useful, so she could make do with him.

“Hurry up and eat,” she said. “After we’re done, we’ll go take a look. If anything seems off, we’ll leave immediately.”

Seeing how calm Sister Fang remained, Zhou Dazhu relaxed considerably and hurriedly shoveled food into his mouth.

Sister Fang also picked up her pace. After finishing the stir-fried pork with chili peppers, she used her steamed bun to wipe every last bit of sauce from the plate, eating it all until the dish looked as though it had just been washed.

Only then did she stop.

She had known hunger too well in her life. She couldn’t bear to leave food uneaten.

After the meal, Sister Fang deliberately bought some pastries from the shop next door so they would look like a couple visiting relatives. Then she had Zhou Dazhu pedal them toward Dragon King Temple.

They were outsiders. After arriving in the city, they had rented a bicycle from their landlord under the pretense of looking for relatives, using it to roam all over the area and familiarize themselves with the roads.

After learning that Dragon King Temple hosted a market fair, they had gone out of their way to travel every route in the vicinity.

Along the way, Sister Fang deliberately had Zhou Dazhu take a different road.

By then, the market had long since dispersed, and there were few people left on the road.

After riding for a while, they soon came upon a checkpoint.

Seeing what appeared to be an ordinary married couple on a bicycle with nothing suspicious loaded onto it, the traffic officer conducting inspections relaxed a little. He simply raised a hand to signal them to stop.

“Comrade, please stop for a routine inspection.”

Zhou Dazhu brought the bicycle to a halt.

Zhou Dazhu spoke with an obvious out-of-town accent, which would immediately arouse suspicion if he opened his mouth. Well-practiced in playing the timid fool, he kept his head lowered and said nothing.

Instead, Sister Fang craned her neck and, in fluent local dialect that was almost indistinguishable from that of a native, asked curiously,

“Comrade, what’s going on? Why are you checking people at the roadside?”

“What else? Those damned child traffickers!” the traffic officer said with obvious irritation. “They kidnapped three children! If I get my hands on those bastards, I’ll shoot them myself. Thanks to them, I haven’t even had a chance to eat lunch!”

Hearing that, the corners of Sister Fang’s mouth curled upward ever so slightly, so subtly that no one could notice.

A surge of satisfaction welled up inside her at having fooled the police.

Talk is cheap.

She, the trafficker they were looking for, was standing right in front of him, and he hadn’t recognized her at all.

Useless fools, she thought. They can put on a big show, but they’ll never catch me.

Her guard lowered, and she was just about to leave when she suddenly spotted a man in an olive-green uniform riding toward the checkpoint.

Breathing heavily, he stopped his bicycle, pulled a sheet of paper from his shoulder bag, and handed it to the traffic officer.

“Comrade, these are portraits of the three missing children. If you come across anyone traveling with children, compare them against these.”

The instant those words were spoken, Zhou Dazhu’s hands trembled on the handlebars.

A storm of shock erupted in Sister Fang’s heart.

She stole a glance at the paper.

The portraits were astonishingly accurate—identical to the three children they had abd*cted.

Her expression immediately darkened.

How could something like this exist?!

This was bad.

Very bad.

She had been carrying the children around in public. It was impossible that no one had seen them. If the police used these portraits to search, it wouldn’t take long before they traced the children back to the place they were staying.

The police here are no pushovers. We can’t stay any longer.

We have to get out. Immediately.

Having made up her mind, Sister Fang patted her pocket, then suddenly cried out,

“Oh no! I forgot my money pouch! Why didn’t you remind me?”

She smacked Zhou Dazhu on the back in annoyance and urged,

“What are you waiting for? Hurry back and get it!”

“Oh… right… right.”

Only then did Zhou Dazhu snap out of his daze.

He quickly turned the bicycle around and pedaled back the way they had come as fast as he could.

As soon as they returned to their lodging, Sister Fang immediately began packing.

“Damn it. Tough luck. Those three little brats had actually been photographed.”

She picked out a pair of gray trousers with conspicuous patches and changed into them. Then she selected an outfit Zhou Dazhu had never worn before. As she folded their other clothes together and tied them into a bundle, she said,

“I don’t know who drew those portraits, but even the traffic cops at the checkpoints have copies. There must be plenty of them. They might come searching around here sooner or later. Our identities won’t stand up to scrutiny. Get changed—we’re leaving immediately.”

Still breathing heavily from the ride back, Zhou Dazhu looked worried. Pointing beneath the bed, he asked,

“What about the three goods?”

The “goods” were the three children they had just abd*cted.

At the question, Sister Fang paused and fell silent.

The portraits she’d just seen flashed through her mind again.

She knew perfectly well that if they wanted to get away as quickly as possible, they shouldn’t take the merchandise with them.

But the thought made her heart ache as though someone were carving flesh from her body.

They had already spent quite a bit of money lingering here. They couldn’t just leave empty-handed.

That would be too great a loss.

After gritting her teeth, Sister Fang made her decision.

“We’re taking them.”

“I saw the police still concentrating their search around Dragon King Temple. They shouldn’t make it here that quickly. Pack up the merchandise, and we’ll head straight to the train station to buy tickets and get out.”

“All right.”

Without wasting any time, Zhou Dazhu moved the luggage aside and dragged the three unconscious children out from beneath the bed.

Their arms had been twisted behind their backs and tied together. Their feet were bound as well, and strips of cloth had been stuffed into their mouths.

They no longer looked like children at all.

They looked like cargo.

“Wait. Don’t pack them up yet.”

Sister Fang stopped him.

She took a small medicine bottle from her handbag along with a handkerchief. Estimating the dosage based on the elapsed time and the dr*g’s effects, she poured a little of the liquid onto the cloth and pressed it over each child’s nose and mouth in turn.

“Now they won’t wake up until tomorrow.”

Stepping back, she gave her instructions.

“I’ll carry the good-looking one on my back. Put the two skinnier ones into the sack. Stuff plenty of straw around them, then cover them with a couple of pieces of clothing. Pack them carefully.”

After a brief pause, she added coldly,

“Just don’t let them suffocate.”

“Got it.”

Zhou Dazhu acknowledged her instructions and quickly packed the three children separately before changing into a different set of clothes.

The outfit was a worker’s uniform. The elbows were patched, the fabric was faded from countless washings, and traces of dirt still clung to it. Once he put it on, he looked no different from an ordinary laborer.

After taking out their forged letters of introduction, Sister Fang slung the bundle over her shoulder, picked up the sack, and urged,

“Let’s go.”

As she stepped out the door, she turned back for one last look, resentment filling her heart.

How could the police have moved so fast?

The pair didn’t dare linger. They hurried to the nearby bus stop.

While they were waiting, another traffic officer sped past on a motorcycle. Riding behind him was a man holding a thick stack of papers.

Sister Fang’s heart skipped a beat.

Damn… Good thing we left when we did!

With motorcycles, distributing a portrait would only take minutes.

In another two or three hours, the police would probably be searching their lodging.

And at this rate…

The train station might already have the portraits by now.

Sister Fang took a deep breath.

It’s fine.

The children are hidden inside the sacks now. They can’t be seen, so no one will pay any attention to us.

Not only can we get away—we’ll take the merchandise with us as well.

The bus arrived.

The two bought tickets and rode it to the train station without exchanging a single word.

The sun was sinking in the west, stretching the shadows of the trees and the people across the ground. Even so, the station remained crowded, with a constant stream of travelers coming and going.

There was one noticeable difference from before.

Two police officers now stood at the station entrance.

Each held a portrait in hand, their sharp eyes fixed on every passenger entering the station while carrying a child.

Sister Fang carefully observed them for a while. After confirming that they weren’t inspecting anyone’s luggage, she finally walked forward.

That makes sense, she thought.

There were far too many travelers here, and most of them were carrying bags or bundles. It would be impossible to unpack every single one. Doing so would waste an enormous amount of time, and some passengers might even miss their trains.

She cautiously walked past the officers.

When she was certain she hadn’t attracted their attention, the knot in her chest finally loosened.

Her confidence began to return.

Several police officers were stationed inside the waiting hall as well, each holding a portrait. Many of the waiting passengers were quietly discussing the case.

But Sister Fang was no longer afraid.

Pointing to an open spot near the crowd, she said to Zhou Dazhu,

“Wait here. I’ll go buy the tickets.”

With that, she calmly walked to the back of the ticket line as though nothing were amiss.

She had already figured it out.

The police were only using the portraits to look for the missing children. There was no way they could connect the search to her.

All she had to do now was buy the tickets, board the train, and they’d be gone.

The line in front of her grew shorter and shorter.

Her heartbeat quickened.

The thrill of escaping from a tightening police dragnet filled her with excitement.

What a bunch of idiots.

Another customer bought their ticket.

Now it was her turn.

Inside Ticket Window No. 1, the ticket clerk was writing something with her head lowered. Without looking up, she asked casually,

“How many tickets? And where to?”

Sister Fang swallowed.

“Two tickets. To Lin County.”

A woman’s voice.

The ticket clerk’s head snapped up immediately.

Half an hour earlier, the station management had gathered all the ticket clerks and assigned them a special task: watch for a female child trafficker. Each of them had even been given a portrait.

She had been working all day and was already exhausted, but the moment she heard about the assignment, all her fatigue vanished.

This was a chance to catch a child trafficker!

Her eyes repeatedly swept over the woman standing before her.

Then they suddenly narrowed.

This woman…

She looked remarkably similar to the trafficker in the portrait.

The clerk hurriedly compared her face against the portrait hidden beneath the counter.

There was no mistake.

It was her.

The trafficker had actually come to the train station!

Remembering the instructions her supervisor had repeatedly emphasized, the ticket clerk suppressed her excitement and said in an even voice,

“May I see your letter of introduction, please?”

For some reason, Sister Fang felt that something wasn’t quite right.

She couldn’t put her finger on it.

After hesitating for a moment, she still handed the forged letter of introduction through the ticket window.

The instant it crossed the counter, the ticket clerk grabbed hold of her wrist.

At the top of her lungs, she screamed,

“Child trafficker! The trafficker from the portrait is here! Police! Hurry over and arrest her!”

Sister Fang felt as though she’d been struck by lightning.

No… How did they recognize me?!

“What trafficker? I’m not one! You’ve got the wrong person! Let go of me!”

She desperately tried to yank her hand free.

She wanted to run.

Run as far away as possible.

But the ticket clerk had an iron grip on her wrist, refusing to let go no matter how hard she struggled.

The instant they heard the shout, the police officers stationed in the waiting hall rushed over and pinned her to the floor.

Even with her face pressed against the cold ground, Sister Fang still couldn’t understand how she’d been identified.

But there was one thing she understood with perfect clarity.

It was over.

She was truly finished.

…

The ticket clerk’s shout echoed through the waiting hall, instantly drawing the attention of countless passengers.

One traveler who had noticed Sister Fang earlier immediately exclaimed,

“A child trafficker? There was a man with her just now. Is he her accomplice?”

Another passenger asked in surprise,

“There’s another trafficker? Where?”

The moment Zhou Dazhu saw Sister Fang being arrested, his mind went completely blank.

Only one thought remained.

Run.

He spun around, abandoned the luggage, and sprinted toward the station entrance, completely forgetting that two police officers were standing guard outside.

Ironically, if he hadn’t run, the passengers might have taken a while to spot him.

The moment he bolted, however, everyone noticed.

“That man’s running for the exit! Catch him!”

A passenger shouted as he gave chase.

Others immediately followed.

Anyone who ran at a time like this had to be guilty.

They couldn’t let him get away.

But before any of the passengers could lay a hand on him, a plainclothes police officer who had been waiting in the crowd sprang into action. With a swift takedown, he wrestled Zhou Dazhu to the ground and pinned him there.

A passenger who had been sitting near Zhou Dazhu looked at the burlap sack he had abandoned and immediately sensed something was wrong.

He hurried over and untied it.

The moment he loosened the opening, he froze.

Who packs a sack full of straw when traveling?

He pulled away the two pieces of clothing covering the top.

In the next instant, his eyes flew wide open.

“My God!”

“They stuffed a child inside the sack!”

“Quick! Hurry and untie the other two!”

“My God—there’s another one in this sack!”

“Isn’t this one of the children from the portrait? Good heavens! They’d already brought them all the way here. If they’d boarded the train, we’d never have gotten them back!”

…

As cries of shock rang out, every passenger who witnessed the scene flew into a rage.

Who didn’t have children of their own?

To see three little kids bound hand and foot, stuffed into burlap sacks—not only had they suffered who knew how much, they might not even have survived.

This despicable pair deserved to die!

“Damn it—they really are child traffickers!”

“Beat him to death!”

The first passenger who had chased after Zhou Dazhu heard the commotion. Even though the police had already subdued the trafficker, he didn’t stop. Clenching his fist, he drove a punch straight into Zhou Dazhu.

The passengers who arrived behind him immediately joined in, kicking him without hesitation.

Voices erupted from every direction.

“Beat the traffickers to death!”

“Kill them!”

“The people in the back, stop pushing!”

“Let me get in there and kick him a couple of times too!”

…

In an instant, the crowd’s fury boiled over.

People surrounded the trafficker in a tight circle, raining down punch after punch on him.

A railway police officer arrived and stood just outside the crowd.

He made no attempt to stop them.

Instead, he casually pulled a cigarette from his pocket, tucked it between his lips, struck a match, and lit it.

After taking a slow drag, he finally raised his voice and called out,

“Easy now, everyone. Don’t hit them too hard.”

He paused, then added matter-of-factly,

“Just don’t beat the traffickers to death. They’ve probably sold other children too, and we still need to interrogate them.”

<< _ >>

The post Criminal Master System Ch.21.2 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

What?

What was that?!

Among the more than forty City Lords in the group chat, not a single one could process what they had just seen.

Even Wen Huahua—Blue Sea’s most devoted cheerleader—and Jin Yu, who had always been trying to surpass Coriander Safe City, were rendered speechless.

After all, they were City Lords.

None of them were strangers to extraordinary events.

They had all, at one time or another, seen World Missions that were incredibly difficult yet completed by some exceptionally powerful individual.

Different civilizations had different populations and different levels of strength. Just because one Safe City couldn’t accomplish something didn’t mean another couldn’t.

But…

A World Mission that was incredibly difficult…

…being completed by someone in two minutes?

That was utterly absurd.

Fifty million flying snow beasts!

Even if they had been fifty million fat pigs, and tens of millions of residents joined the slaughter, it would still take at least five or six hours to kill them all.

Flying snow beasts certainly weren’t going to sit still and let Blue Sea mass*cre them.

They could even summon ground-based snow beasts!

Granted, according to the mission description, these flying snow beasts had not yet left their nests, so the number of reinforcements they could summon should have been limited.

But when fifty million snow beasts summoned help simultaneously…

Based on every City Lord’s experience, there should have been at least one hundred million, if not two hundred million, ground snow beasts answering the call.

And yet…

Blue Sea had wiped them all out…

…in just two minutes.

How was that even possible?!

How could that possibly be normal?!

The City Lords racked their brains, but none of them could imagine how Blue Sea Safe City had accomplished such a feat.

Their thoughts inevitably drifted back to Mianyin Safe City and Dihai Safe City, both of which had recently fallen at Blue Sea’s hands, as well as Mingxia’s City Lord, who had been forced to abandon territory and flee, only to be hunted down later through Blue Sea’s bounty.

A Safe City capable of taking on three rivals at once was obviously not to be underestimated.

Ever since that incident, no one in the group chat openly discussed Blue Sea anymore.

But privately, every single City Lord had already made up their mind—

It was best to stay as far away from Blue Sea as possible.

Dazzling Star’s frigid climate, combined with its unique way of life—where firearms couldn’t be used and residents were forced to live scattered across vast areas—meant that even Tier 4 Safe Cities had their overall strength greatly diminished.

For a Tier 3 Safe City like Blue Sea to be this formidable…

Many City Lords had long assumed there was only one explanation.

Perhaps extreme cold simply wasn’t a problem for Blue Sea’s civilization.

It was even possible that Blue Sea had originated from a world of perpetual frost.

Such cases weren’t unheard of.

Every civilization was different. Conditions that made survival nearly impossible for one race might be perfectly ordinary for another.

If that were true…

Then Dazzling Star was essentially Blue Sea’s home field.

Back when the Mingxia City Lord was fleeing for his life, he had privately contacted several other City Lords, hoping to sell information about Blue Sea—along with the inside story of how it had defeated three Safe Cities at once—in exchange for crystals, so that he could afford more relocation opportunities.

Not a single person had bought it.

Even Tier 2 City Lords could see the writing on the wall.

With so little territory remaining under his control, combined with Dazzling Star’s requirement that residents live spread out across the landscape, and with Blue Sea relentlessly chasing him from place to place…

There was absolutely no way Mingxia’s City Lord could gather enough residents to leave the world.

His death was inevitable.

The core mechanism behind a Confidentiality Contract was that it was guaranteed by the City’s Core.

Break the agreement, and the City’s Core would shatter.

Once the Core was destroyed, the City Lord would die as well.

But…

The Mingxia City Lord had been doomed from the very beginning.

So what if he signed a confidentiality agreement?

If someone who was guaranteed to die decided, “If I can’t survive, then neither can any of you,” what was stopping him from exposing his buyers before he died?

No one could predict what a man with nothing left to lose might do in his final moments.

No one was willing to gamble on whether the notoriously vindictive Blue Sea would hold a grudge against anyone who bought intelligence from one of its enemies.

Even civilizations that specialized in plundering others knew to pick their targets carefully.

When it came to a hard nut like Blue Sea Safe City…

None of them wanted to provoke it.

The other Safe Cities were much the same.

The Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities didn’t dare stick their necks out, while the Tier 4 cities felt that Dazzling Star wasn’t their home territory, so there was no reason to create unnecessary trouble.

At this moment, however, several Tier 4 City Lords were beginning to regret an earlier decision.

When Blue Sea had defeated three Safe Cities on its own, they had instinctively assumed it was because Dazzling Star happened to be Blue Sea civilization’s home ground.

But now…

Five million flying snow beasts had been annihilated in two minutes.

Even if this world truly favored Blue Sea, such strength was still terrifying beyond belief.

No matter how hard they thought about it, they couldn’t figure out how Blue Sea had accomplished it.

If they’d known things would turn out this way, they should have bought some intelligence on Blue Sea when they’d had the chance.

Then again…

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.

During Mingxia’s repeated attempts to flee before his death, he had inevitably abandoned some of his residents along the way.

His native race, the Four-Eared Civilization, was easy to identify, so the City Lords controlling those regions had all taken those refugees into their own Safe Cities.

They might have refused to trade with Blue Sea’s enemy.

But that didn’t mean they couldn’t collect intelligence from Mingxia’s former residents for free.

According to those Four-Eared survivors who had personally witnessed Blue Sea’s methods in battle, the intelligence they provided was fairly consistent.

Blue Sea civilization most likely belonged to a winged race.

Many of its residents could fly.

Many more, however, had no wings at all.

Its soldiers were undeniably powerful, and their numbers were considerable.

That was about all they knew.

For example, none of the Four-Eared survivors had ever seen any large-scale weapons from the Safe City marketplace that could operate in extreme cold.

Whenever they were questioned, the answers were things like:

“Most of their weapons were just sticks… you know, long spears with sharp tips.”

Or:

“I was hiding inside the inner city. Before long, someone shouted that the city had fallen.”

So…

Were Blue Sea’s people really supposed to have killed fifty million flying snow beasts armed with nothing but spears?

No.

Impossible.

Absolutely impossible.

Either Blue Sea was hiding some devastating superweapon…

Or the Four-Eared survivors had overlooked some crucial detail during the battle.

The City Lords frantically racked their brains, but the more they thought about it, the less any of it made sense.

The group chat fell into a long silence.

Some people were desperately trying to remember whether they had ever offended Blue Sea in the past.

Others were scrolling back through Blue Sea’s old messages.

Some wanted to say something, but seeing that none of the other City Lords were speaking up, they didn’t dare be the first to break the silence.

At last, Wen Huahua—Blue Sea’s number one loyal follower—finally stepped forward.

[Boss is awesome!! You’re way too powerful! I’m sending out a little lucky red packet to celebrate for my boss!!]

He sent out a red packet containing a crate of lumber.

The amount wasn’t much. Once it was divided among all the City Lords, each person only received a few pieces of wood.

But after everyone claimed the red packet, the tense atmosphere in the group naturally eased.

Messages immediately began flooding the chat.

[Congratulations, Blue Sea!]

[Congratulations! (Thumbs up)]

[Thanks for the red packet! Blue Sea is incredible! (Strong! Strong! Strong!)]

[Let me massage the boss’s shoulders and pound their legs! You’re truly a role model for all of us!]

As always, City Lords could lurk quietly most of the time, saying nothing while watching the chat.

But when the overwhelming majority of people were praising one particular City Lord…

Everyone else had to surface eventually and blend in with a few flattering remarks of their own.

Cheng Qisheng couldn’t help thinking:

This feels strangely familiar.

The previous world had been much the same.

She had to admit…

Being surrounded by smiling faces and endless compliments really wasn’t a bad feeling.

Truthfully, she herself had been a little stunned.

When the World Mission first appeared and she saw that there were fifty million flying snow beasts waiting to be killed, her immediate reaction had been one of pure delight.

Because it was obvious—

These flying snow beasts with summoning abilities were the Skywing Dragons.

The people of Blue Sea had already fought those Skywing Dragons continuously for an entire day and night.

The ground-based snow beasts they had summoned had piled up into mountains of corpses that were even taller than those of the Skywing Dragons themselves.

They had only just finished killing off one wave when another flock of Skywing Dragons appeared.

Cheng Qisheng was already preparing to issue orders for everyone to clean up the battlefield as quickly as possible before relocating to hunt down the second wave.

Then she checked the mission coordinates…

They were exactly where she was standing.

Cheng Qisheng: “…”

Well.

She’d thought they were about to earn another batch of flying wings.

Less than two minutes later, the residents had finished cleaning up the battlefield, the World Mission was marked as complete, and the reward of 150,000 crystals was deposited into her account.

Cheng Qisheng had become rich overnight.

Even she found it a little hard to believe.

But seeing that everyone in the group chat had assumed Blue Sea had wiped out the flying snow beasts in just two minutes, she had no intention of correcting the misunderstanding.

Why bother explaining?

It was much better to let everyone keep believing that.

At the very least, on Dazzling Star…

Absolutely no one would dare provoke her in the future.

…Well, to be fair, no one had really dared to before, either.

Blue Sea Safe City: [Thank you, everyone. =v=]

As usual, she distributed crate after crate of fine silk fabric as red packets.

After sending the gifts, Cheng Qisheng immediately turned her attention back to the people of Blue Sea.

From her bird’s-eye perspective, the land below had become a sea of corpses.

Snow beast corpses.

Even the people of Blue Sea were a little tired after fighting nonstop for an entire day and night.

Yet every pair of eyes sparkled with excitement.

Every face was filled with exhilaration.

They’d won!!

Everyone looked toward the towering mountain of Skywing Dragon corpses.

The pile was so enormous that, standing at its base, they could barely make out its peak.

It was finally time…

…to count the spoils of war!!!

After all—

There were fifty million Skywing Dragons here!

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.77 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

What surprised Cheng Qisheng wasn’t just that.

It was also the newly “modified” train Toya had built. Behind the driver’s seat in the locomotive cab, several familiar lines of text had appeared.

[Facility Name: Mechanic-Modified Crude Train (Unranked)

Speed: 60 km/h

Trait: Functions normally even at temperatures as low as -80°C (derived from the traits of a certain type of exotic beast)

Recommended Load Capacity: 30 tons

Maximum Load Capacity: 60 tons (the train cannot start if this limit is exceeded)

Operating Duration: 480 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds (the operating time is paused whenever there are no passengers on board)

Mechanical Creation Evaluation: A Gu Insect Ability User converted the life of an exotic beast into the train’s operating time, while a Mechanic permanently stabilized and enhanced that duration. Together, they created a usable mechanical train with minimal resources. Though it remains unranked, it’s still fully functional. What an excellent partnership~]

Cheng Qisheng took another bite of her ice cream.

A Mechanic.

So their newest believer belonged to the legendary Mechanic class.

No wonder everyone coveted Mechanics—they could manufacture equipment directly!

Judging from the “Unranked” designation, the train Toya had built wasn’t of the same quality as the items obtained from Item Cards.

But it didn’t cost any crystals!

Besides, Cheng Qisheng had been on Dazzling Star for quite some time now, and she’d never seen an Item Card that could produce an entire train.

You had to kill snow beasts just to obtain Item Cards, and even then, whether you got something useful depended entirely on luck.

Yet Toya…

With nothing more than a single steel door, he’d built a modern train!

They’d struck gold this time!

Cheng Qisheng had long admired Song Xi’s snowfield train. It was incredibly fast and required almost no operating cost—because the snow beasts paid nearly all of it themselves. It was practically tailor-made for the apocalypse.

Even if it were taken to another world, it would probably still serve as an excellent means of transportation.

She had even considered capturing large numbers of snow beasts and bringing them to other worlds to use as locomotive engines.

The snow beasts were incredibly hardy. In theory, they could survive for a very long time by feeding on nothing but snow.

The problem was that snow beasts simply weren’t creatures that could be domesticated.

The people of Little Blue Sea had already tested it. Whenever they captured a snow beast alive and locked it in a pen, it would do nothing but hurl itself against the enclosure without stopping for even a moment.

The good news was that their exceptionally tough bodies kept them from killing themselves too quickly.

At that rate of nonstop ramming, a snow beast would usually take about a month to die.

As a result, every station along the snowfield railway now had soldiers stationed there, raising and guarding groups of reserve snow beasts while waiting for Song Xi to arrive and turn them into “locomotives.”

Now, however, Toya’s existence had completely freed Song Xi from that responsibility, meaning she no longer had to travel from place to place.

Song Xi couldn’t have been happier.

It wasn’t that she minded constantly being on the move. The difference was that choosing to travel and being forced to travel were two completely different things.

She jumped off the train, grabbed Toya, and spun him around in a circle. Then a torrent of questions poured out of her, one after another, like the endless line of Blue Sea residents waiting to challenge the Skywing Dragons.

“How did you do it? You’re an ability user, aren’t you? Or did our God grant you this ability? Wow! This train is so much better than the last one! It blocks the wind and rain, it’s fully enclosed, and it even has windows! Are you tired? Are you hungry? I know some ability users get ravenously hungry after using their powers!”

“It’s good that you’re not hungry. Can you modify more trains? Can you turn snow beasts into machines? If I caught a few dozen snow beasts right now and gave you a few dozen steel doors, could you convert all of them into machines too?”

“My God! If that’s possible, wouldn’t we become filthy rich if we captured every snow beast on Dazzling Star?!”

Cheng Qisheng had a few questions she wanted to ask Toya herself, but seeing Song Xi’s mouth firing nonstop like a machine gun…

Forget it. This worked just as well and saved her the trouble.

Toya, on the other hand, didn’t find Song Xi’s barrage of questions bothersome at all.

Because of his physical condition, he had spent most of his life confined to his home, which had given him a gentle, unhurried personality. Someone as enthusiastic and proactive as Song Xi talking to him so warmly actually made him feel comfortable.

He was even a little flattered.

In truth, after seeing Song Xi and the others’ reactions, Toya had realized that things weren’t as he’d imagined.

Even in the Divine Kingdom, there didn’t seem to be anyone else with abilities like his.

In the past, that realization would have thrown him into another panic.

But now, deep within his heart, there was an indescribable yet undeniable connection to the Great Creator God. That bond instinctively filled him with a sense of security.

Comforted by that feeling, Toya answered honestly.

“I don’t think I can directly turn snow beasts into machines. The reason I was able to convert the snow beast in this train is because, in my perception, it was already part of the train.”

Song Xi immediately understood.

If this had been before, her first instinct would have been to bring him back to Blue Sea, where the specialists could analyze Toya’s abilities.

But they were far from home now.

As the highest-ranking leader of Little Blue Sea, Song Xi turned to the soldiers and gave an order.

“Bring me a few snow beasts.”

To Toya, snow beasts were terrifyingly powerful creatures.

Yet the way Song Xi said it made it sound as effortless as, “Bring me a few basins of snow.”

For a moment, Toya instinctively felt a surge of admiration.

Then he remembered that he and Song Xi belonged to the same “family.”

That admiration immediately transformed into happiness.

Now he finally understood why his parents had been so joyful after becoming believers.

It felt as though he had joined a powerful yet warm and welcoming family.

It was an incredible feeling.

With the entire planet currently engulfed in a beast tide, finding a few snow beasts was hardly difficult.

Within moments, dozens of soldiers returned, dragging several snow beasts that had been caught with heavy lassos.

As they avoided the beasts’ snapping jaws, they forcibly hauled them forward with practiced ease. It was obvious that, after spending so much time with Song Xi and the others, they’d become quite experienced at capturing snow beasts.

With the “test subjects” in place, Song Xi looked at Toya expectantly.

“Come on! Let’s give it a try!”

Cheng Qisheng watched the entire experiment with great interest.

Everything she knew about Mechanic-class ability users had come from Gu Gaga.

There were many different branches within the Mechanic-class ability users.

The Mechanic-class ability users Gu Gaga had encountered specialized in enhancing themselves. Most of the information in its records described how they could strengthen specific parts of their bodies or even mechanize themselves.

As long as they had sufficient materials, a Tier 1 Mechanic Ability User could enhance themselves to the combat strength of a Tier 3 or even Tier 4 ability user.

As for the Mechanic branch that Toya belonged to, the records contained very little information. They only mentioned that Mechanics couldn’t strengthen their own bodies and instead possessed abilities more suited to support roles.

Gu Gaga had tried to investigate further, but aside from learning that Mechanics were exceedingly rare, it hadn’t uncovered anything else.

It had added a note at the end of the report:

Ordinarily, even if detailed information about a Safe City couldn’t be obtained, at least a few vague rumors would leak out.

But when absolutely no information could be found, there was only one likely explanation—

If word ever got out that a certain Safe City possessed a Mechanic, it might attract the covetous attention of every other Safe City.

For example, there was once a Safe City that discovered a flower capable of extending one’s lifespan in another world. The flower grew on a tree known as the Tree of Longevity. It bloomed once every ten years, and a single blossom could extend a person’s life by 300 years.

After news of it spread, that Safe City was wiped out in less than five days.

Although City Lords themselves became long-lived beings, and Tier-4 Transcendents could already live for three hundred years, who would ever complain about having too much time to live?

Besides, even if they didn’t need it themselves, everyone had family members, friends… or at the very least, beloved cats and dogs.

Not everyone important to a City Lord could become a Transcendent and qualify for an extended lifespan.

Some City Lords lived alone with only a pet for company. If given the choice, they would naturally want that companion to live forever by their side.

The Safe City marketplace did sell life-extending items.

But they were outrageously expensive.

Unlike the Tree of Longevity…

…which you could simply seize by force.

How convenient.

Back then, the Safe Cities descended into a period of bloody conflict.

Every Safe City wanted to seize the Longevity Flower.

Yet every city that managed to obtain it would soon be defeated by another.

The cycle repeated itself over and over. Each new victor would become the next target, besieged by every other Safe City.

Dozens of Safe Cities were destroyed in succession.

Even if the current owner fled to another world, the others would simply follow. If they failed to catch them in one world, there was always the next one… or the one after that.

Everyone believed they were destiny’s chosen.

Everyone believed they would be the final victor.

The struggle over the Tree of Longevity lasted for more than fifty years. Although many Safe Cities chose to stay out of the conflict, there were always new City Lords eager to join the war.

In the end, the decades-long conflict came to an unexpectedly simple conclusion.

The final City Lord to obtain the Tree of Longevity was exceptionally powerful. Equipped with concealment items, they successfully evaded pursuit by the other Safe Cities.

More importantly…

They managed to cultivate seeds from the Tree of Longevity.

That City Lord immediately began selling the seeds wholesale, offering them in every world they visited.

Even the wholesale price was expensive.

But it was still a hundred times cheaper than buying lifespan-extending items from the Safe City marketplace.

And once you had the seeds, you had a renewable source of Longevity Flowers.

Although each person could only benefit from a Longevity Flower once, the flowers you grew could be sold to others.

If you cultivated the trees long enough, you could even sell the seeds themselves.

By the present day, among high-tier City Lords, Longevity Flowers had become one of the most common high-value trade commodities.

Of course, for lower-tier City Lords, they were still prohibitively expensive.

Cheng Qisheng had seen Gu Gaga’s recorded market price.

A single Longevity Flower sold for ten million crystals.

Just one glance was enough to know it was completely beyond her means.

And that was after several centuries, once the market had become saturated and prices had finally fallen.

She’d heard that hundreds of years earlier, when competition had been at its fiercest, a single flower could fetch as much as 300 million crystals.

And plenty of high-tier City Lords had actually bought them.

After all, an item in the Safe City marketplace that extended one’s lifespan by three hundred years cost 800 million crystals.

Ever since the Tree of Longevity incident, every City Lord had learned their lesson.

Whenever they found something truly valuable, if they could use it themselves, they guarded it with their lives.

If it was something that could be sold, they’d rather spend a fortune on an Anonymous Card and list it anonymously than reveal their identity.

After all, if you thought something was valuable, everyone else would think so too.

Revealing it was practically an invitation to be robbed.

Gu Gaga suspected that Mechanics fell into exactly that category.

According to all of its information channels, even after making indirect inquiries through high-tier City Lords, not a single one admitted to having a Mechanic in their Safe City.

The most likely explanation is that a Mechanic’s value is comparable to that of the Tree of Longevity. If a Safe City were to reveal that it had a Mechanic among its residents, it would likely attract the attention of other Safe Cities and trigger a war.

Fortunately, Gu Gaga thoughtfully added one final remark:

Safe Cities below Tier 5 don’t need to worry about this. Lower-tier City Lords probably aren’t lucky enough to possess such an extraordinary treasure in the first place.

In short—

Mechanics were a premium asset.

Competition over them would only occur among high-tier Safe Cities.

As for weak little Tier 3 cities like theirs…

There was nothing to worry about~

Cheng Qisheng, a Tier 3 City Lord who had just acquired a Mechanic:

“…”

She had now watched Toya’s entire ability test from beginning to end.

There was no doubt about it.

Toya really could manufacture equipment.

The only limitation was that everything he created had to be machine-related.

That said, Cheng Qisheng couldn’t help feeling that his ability was rather… metaphysical.

Take Song Xi’s version of the snowfield train, for example.

Because her Gu worms had completely overridden the snow beast’s will, turning it into the locomotive, Toya perceived that snow beast as part of the machine.

And because of that…

He was able to modify it.

Moreover, Toya revealed that a single modification wasn’t the limit.

As long as he was supplied with enough materials, he could continue upgrading the train, making it better and better.

Song Xi immediately opened all the Item Cards she’d accumulated along the journey. She piled everything onto the train—steel plates, power sources, and all sorts of miscellaneous materials—then used her Gu worms to control several snow beasts and harnessed them to the train.

“Come on, come on! Merge all these snow beasts into it and see if we can keep increasing its operating time!”

She finished excitedly, only to find Toya crouching in front of the small pile of “junk” she’d tossed aside, carefully sorting through it.

She blinked.

“…You can use this stuff too?”

The contents of twenty-five Item Cards were a complete hodgepodge. Wang Moning had even opened a yoga mat. Among the “trash” tossed to one side was a flattened plastic bottle.

That was simply the reality of Item Cards on Dazzling Star.

Two people could both open Food Item Cards. If one was lucky, they might get an entire case of self-heating hot pots.

If they weren’t…

They might end up with a single expired can of surströmming.

And that was still edible, at least.

Some Item Cards yielded even stranger things—rocks, rotten leaves, beast bones, broken glass, fish bones, tattered cloth, and all kinds of other bizarre odds and ends.

Whether they were people from Blue Sea or natives of Dazzling Star, everyone threw those useless items away without a second thought.

Clearly, though, Toya had never seen them that way.

He answered seriously,

“Some of these can be useful too.”

What everyone else regarded as trash…

Toya saw as materials with their own unique purpose.

He carefully sifted through the items from the Item Cards, selecting quite a few to place on the train.

(He even added a palm-sized rock.)

Shen Jinyang asked curiously how he knew what to pick.

After pondering for a few seconds, Toya replied,

“I just… go by instinct. I’ve been like this since I was little.”

Shen Jinyang silently closed her mouth.

All right.

That’s probably just how the world of ability users works.

Once every usable item from the Item Cards had been loaded onto the train, Toya placed his hand against its metal body once again.

The train began transforming once again—

The snow beasts were absorbed into the locomotive one after another.

If the previous upgrade had merely altered its appearance—like covering wood with a layer of silver—then this time, the transformation was complete.

Its overall length shrank slightly to around twenty-five meters, but its width expanded dramatically from two and a half meters to four meters. Its height also increased, now standing at five and a half meters.

The body had become visibly thicker, the undercarriage sat much higher off the ground, and the wheels had been replaced by wide caterpillar tracks.

The entire vehicle was now short, broad, and imposing, resembling a mobile fortress.

The interior had also undergone major changes.

The three torches obtained from the Item Cards had somehow taken effect. A thermometer had appeared inside the cabin, currently reading 21°C. Compared to the frozen wasteland outside, the warmth inside the train was nothing short of luxurious.

The materials had apparently been insufficient, however, as there still weren’t any passenger seats.

The engineer’s seat in the locomotive cab, on the other hand, had become noticeably more luxurious. The formerly stiff, hard chair had been replaced with a proper leather seat.

But the changes to the train’s appearance and facilities weren’t the most important part.

Before Toya’s modifications, the snowfield train had been powered by a Tier 2 snow beast.

Theoretically, its operating time should have been 240 hours.

After Toya’s first modification, that duration had doubled to 480 hours.

For the second modification, Song Xi had harnessed seven second-tier snow beasts and four first-tier snow beasts to the train.

In the end, six second-tier snow beasts and one first-tier snow beast were encased in metal and melted into the train itself.

Surprisingly, Toya didn’t look exhausted at all.

He merely shook his head slightly at Song Xi.

“I can tell this train has reached its limit. It can only take these few additional snow beasts. Any more won’t fit.”

The moment Cheng Qisheng heard that, she immediately checked the facility’s information.

Sure enough…

It was still classified as Unranked.

Just how incredible would a train have to be before the system finally recognized it as a ranked facility?

Yet even without reaching the ranked tier, the train’s operating time had increased to 1,500 hours.

One thousand five hundred hours!

Even if the train ran without stopping for a single moment, it could keep going for a full 62.5 days.

In an apocalyptic world, that kind of endurance was invaluable.

And Cheng Qisheng’s imagination immediately began running wild.

Toya had managed to transform a wooden train into its current form using nothing more than a steel door and a collection of miscellaneous materials.

So once this train was eventually retired…

Couldn’t he recycle its materials to build or upgrade something else?

Everyone knew that ability users could advance in rank.

If Toya eventually reached a higher tier, would he be able to build even more advanced trains—or perhaps entirely different kinds of machinery?

For example…

An airborne train?

They already had floating farms, floating roads, and even floating Safe Cities.

If those could exist, why couldn’t there be trains that ran through the sky?

For the first time, Cheng Qisheng completely understood why City Lords who possessed a Mechanic kept their existence an absolute secret.

This wasn’t just a Mechanic.

He was practically an equipment craftsman.

Not only could he create equipment—

He could upgrade it as well.

Having a Mechanic was practically the same as possessing an endless source of crystals.

If news ever leaked that a Safe City had a Mechanic, then given how valuable such an ability was, even Safe Cities that didn’t dare start an outright war might send undercover agents to lure the Mechanic away instead.

It was said that infiltration between high-tier Safe Cities was commonplace.

After all, once City Lords reached the higher tiers, they all cherished their lives.

Unless there was an overwhelming reason—such as fighting over the Tree of Longevity—few were willing to risk a full-scale Safe City war.

Although she herself was still only a low-tier City Lord, the Great Creator God was absolutely certain of one thing.

No one would ever be able to poach a citizen of Blue Sea.

Grinning from ear to ear, Cheng Qisheng reached out and gently patted Toya on the head.

Toya, who had been staring intently at the train while wondering what else he could improve, suddenly shivered.

So warm…

He didn’t even need to think about it.

His instincts had already told him—

This was a blessing from God.

What kind of feeling was this?

His frail body seemed to grow warm, as if he had returned to his mother’s embrace as a child.

It also felt as though an unshakable strength now stood behind him.

Toya felt overwhelming encouragement and praise.

It was a feeling unlike anything he had ever experienced before. The deep affection and reverence for the God in the depths of his heart made his entire body tremble with excitement.

“My God, I will serve You with all my heart!”

…

That night, the beast tide had only just receded.

After fighting nonstop for an entire day and night, the City Lords were utterly exhausted.

Just then, a notification from their Intelligent Terminal popped up.

[World Mission: A group of flying snow beasts has evolved. Their numbers are estimated at approximately 40 million. These flying snow beasts possess summoning abilities. All City Lords are requested to eliminate them. Warning: Act according to your own capabilities.]

Before the City Lords even had a chance to complain…

Another notification appeared.

Mission completed by Blue Sea Safe City.

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.76 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

After hanging up, Everly fell into silence.

She had already suspected that the branch investigators might fail to capture the fake Gary, but even she hadn’t expected the situation to spiral into something this disastrous.

The investigators had been the ones to set the trap. They should have been the side with every advantage. So how in the world had they managed to turn such a winning hand into such a catastrophic defeat? They already knew there was a dormant true body lying at the bottom of the lake—couldn’t they have exercised even the slightest bit of caution…?

And now look what had happened. They had dispatched so many people, yet not only had they failed to catch Gary, every last one of them had been killed. Gary grew stronger through slaughter. After claiming that many lives, he had undoubtedly evolved into something far more terrifying than before.

Even worse, those investigators hadn’t just fed him experience—they had handed over a huge cache of items as well. Then the rescue team that arrived afterward had thoughtfully delivered him a helicopter… complete with a pilot.

After this so-called extermination operation, Gary hadn’t suffered the slightest injury. On the contrary, disaster had turned into opportunity. He had essentially reached his fully powered endgame form.

Mike had learned the news from a city police officer in Sunken City. Limited by his rank, the officer had no idea which items the fallen investigators had lost.

If none of them had been tracking items, that would have been one thing. In that case, Everly’s location would still be a secret to Gary—for the time being.

But was that even likely?

A group assembled specifically to hunt someone down would almost certainly be carrying tracking items as standard equipment.

If that was the case, then she couldn’t gamble on Gary failing to find her. From this point forward, every plan had to be made under the assumption that Gary would inevitably track her down.

Taking a deep breath, Everly picked up the satellite phone and called Mike once again.

This time, she instructed him to reveal both her true identity and her exact location, and have the police officer he knew contact the branch investigators.

Everly needed allies.

If the old Gary had merely been an elite monster—dangerous, but still manageable if you figured out the right strategy—then the current Gary had evolved into a full-fledged raid boss. The guns in the panic room might not even be able to pierce his defenses anymore.

Everly needed to know what items Gary now possessed. She needed people to protect her grandfather and friends in the villa. She needed reinforcements from the SAI to fight alongside her.

Mike’s reply came quickly.

The surviving branch investigators had been continuously tracking the rescue helicopter’s location.

After obtaining Everly’s coordinates, they connected them with Emerald Lake Camp’s location and discovered that the line matched the helicopter’s flight path almost perfectly. That proved Everly hadn’t been lying—she really was Gary’s next target.

So many investigators had died, and they’d even lost a priceless S-Class item. There was no way they could swallow that humiliation. They were determined to hunt Gary down to the bitter end. As a result, the investigators—normally infamous for dragging their feet—displayed an almost miraculous level of efficiency for once. The investigator on the other end of the line immediately agreed to cooperate with Everly and also shared a complete list of the items they had lost.

Along with that information came another piece of bad news.

“The rescue helicopter’s top speed is 200 kilometers per hour. However, because the cities around Gilosha are still being battered by heavy rain, it’s only flying at about 120 kilometers per hour. We plotted its current position against your coordinates, and at this rate, Gary’s helicopter should reach your location in about twenty minutes… That is, assuming it doesn’t crash in the storm.”

It probably wouldn’t.

From Everly’s observations, whenever Gary was pursuing someone, he seemed to have a permanent luck buff. Nothing ever seemed to go wrong for him.

“What about your reinforcements? SAI has branch offices in every state, doesn’t it? Can’t you have the investigators from Yanifly State get here as quickly as possible? I’ve got a grandfather who’s nearly eighty years old, and children who can’t even lift a sandbag. Gary’s a ruthless monster—we have no way to deal with him on our own!”

“…”

The investigator on the other end fell silent for a moment before quietly saying, “I’m sorry.”

“You’re right. We do have a branch office in Yanifly State, and it’s located in Gilosha. But during last year’s Gilosha Incident, every investigator assigned to that branch was killed. Since then, the Yanifly branch has been critically understaffed. The trainee investigators we’ve recruited as temporary replacements rarely last more than a few months before either resigning… or dying. At the moment, the branch only has two inexperienced trainees left, and both of them have gone missing in this flood.”

“What about the teleportation array?” Everly refused to give up. “I remember you have teleportation arrays. Can’t they transport living people? Even sending me a few items would help.”

“We do have teleportation arrays, but the conditions for using them are extremely restrictive. A teleportation over such a vast distance… even personnel at headquarters might not be capable of drawing a functioning array.”

Everly caught the implication immediately and didn’t bother dancing around the issue.

“So you can’t help me.”

The investigator took a deep breath, his voice thick with embarrassment.

“…I’m sorry. We’re simply not capable of it. We’re already on our way at full speed. You just need to hold out for thirty minutes…”

Just hold out for thirty minutes.

Easy for him to say.

How was Everly, an ordinary flesh-and-blood human, supposed to survive thirty minutes against Gary? If the branch investigators were the ones in her shoes, could they have managed it themselves?

She desperately wanted to answer with biting sarcasm, but reason stopped her.

At this point, resentment and blame would accomplish nothing. No one had wanted things to end up like this. Rather than waste precious time venting her frustration, she’d be better off figuring out what to do next.

Still, the call hadn’t been a complete waste.

At the very least, Everly now knew what items Gary had obtained—and, more importantly, exactly how the tracking item he had stolen worked.

The item was called “Kitty’s Ball of Yarn.”

Mila was a mischievous little kitten. Chasing after a ball of yarn that had rolled away, she ran out of the yard and onto the streets, where she was frightened and pursued by mischievous children and vicious dogs alike. By the time Mila was finally safe, she had lost her sense of direction and could no longer find her way home.

Scarred and battered, Mila clutched the ball of yarn in her mouth as she shivered in the bitter winter wind. Exhaustion overtook her, and before she knew it, she had fallen asleep.

Winter gave way to spring. The snow melted, and warm sunlight filtered through the bushes, shining upon a set of bleached white bones. As a hearse carrying loneliness, sorrow, and tears passed by the thicket, the weathered ball of yarn suddenly rolled free, tumbling down the slope until it came to rest beside its owner.

With the ball of yarn in her mouth, little Mila finally found her beloved Grandma Valentina.

And so, from that day on, the road to heaven was never lonely again…

The investigator explained that the Ball of Yarn was a single-use item. It could only be used to locate someone the user had seen before.

To activate it, the user had to imitate the kitten by holding the ball of yarn in their mouth while picturing the person they wished to find.

Once activated, the yarn would pull taut in midair, pointing directly toward the target.

There was, however, one critical rule: before reaching the target, the user could never let go of the ball of yarn. The moment it left their mouth, the item would instantly lose its effect.

Clearly, the item tracked Everly’s current, real-time location, not a fixed set of coordinates.

For Everly, that was both bad news and good news.

The bad news was that as long as Gary kept the ball of yarn clenched in his mouth, it wouldn’t matter where she ran—he would always know exactly where she was.

The good news, however, was that she no longer had to worry about dragging Old John and the other two into this.

As long as she left the villa immediately and fled as far away as possible, Gary would never go after her family and companions.

As for where she should run…

Everly’s gaze first lingered on the Sacred Tree bracelet around her wrist before passing through the clear glass window and settling on the vast sea beyond.

She could certainly try summoning the Sacred Tree’s true form, but how long it could remain manifested—and whether it was even capable of defeating Gary—were complete unknowns.

Besides, Gary wasn’t the only threat on shore. There were also the elusive monster fish.

Their attacks barely fazed Gary, but if they landed on Everly, they would be more than enough to kill her. Facing two kinds of enemies at the same time was not a battle she was confident of surviving unscathed.

By comparison, whether she chose to flee or stand and fight, the sea—her home turf—would be the better battlefield.

After ending the call, Everly sprang into action.

There wasn’t much time. She had only moments to think. At the moment, her plan was extremely rough: first, try to escape, putting as much distance between herself and Gary as possible, and see if she could hold out until the SAI arrived. If a direct confrontation became unavoidable, she’d find a way to recover the restraining item Gary had stolen, use it to immobilize him, and then summon a whirlpool to drag him down to the seabed and imprison him there.

It was going to be an incredibly difficult battle.

She needed to conserve every bit of her strength.

That meant the best option was to find herself a boat. If she swam through the ocean in her own body, the drain on both her stamina and mental energy would be far too great.

After thinking it over for a moment, Everly quickly settled on a target.

A few nights earlier, while night fishing off the pier, she had spotted a speedboat about three meters long.

Coincidentally, during the time she’d been confined to the villa, she’d passed the boredom by reading The Mirror Lake Village Murder Case, the latest novel by the famous mystery writer Noah Pipe. As an aside, Lucas had shamelessly insisted on mailing her the book after finishing it, and she’d casually tossed it into her luggage, figuring it might help pass the time on the flight.

Although it was a honkaku-inspired mystery novel with supernatural elements, many of its details were written with strict adherence to real-world conditions. The story was set in a fishing village called Mirror Lake Village. Being located beside the water, it naturally featured boats in several parts of the plot.

In one chapter, Noah Pipe explained that modern speedboats generally fell into two categories.

Some civilian recreational speedboats didn’t require a dedicated ignition key. As long as the power was switched on and the throttle lever was engaged, the boat would start.

Others, however, were more professionally outfitted or used for commercial purposes, and these typically required a key to start the engine.

If the key was lost, there was still an emergency option: hot-wire the ignition.

In the novel, the murderer escaped by hot-wiring a speedboat. Lucas had painstakingly researched the process and described every step in meticulous detail.

To an ordinary reader, the passage might have seemed confusing yet somehow impressive. But Everly had learned how to hot-wire a vintage car from Old John. As she read that section of the book, she could practically see the entire procedure playing out before her eyes.

In principle, the wiring of a speedboat wasn’t all that different from that of an old car. If she had to do it herself, Everly was confident she could get the engine running within three to five minutes.

It had started raining on the very night they went deep-sea fishing, and by the following morning the rain had turned into a torrential downpour.

In weather like this, no one would normally head out to sea, so the speedboat was most likely still moored where she’d seen it.

As long as Everly could reach the pier and board the boat, she’d have an incredibly fast means of transportation.

Fuel wasn’t an issue either. The novel had mentioned that the vast majority of speedboats ran on diesel—and the backup generator at Everly’s villa used diesel as well.

Even in the absolute worst-case scenario, if the speedboat was gone, she could always dive straight into the sea and swim.

Things couldn’t get much worse than they already were.

It was worth trying.

<< TOC >>

The post Rules Ch.311 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

Chief Wu wasted no time. The moment he made up his mind, he set off.

The old man was just as decisive. As soon as he heard that someone could draw the traffickers’ faces, he urged Hu Wei to take him there immediately, constantly telling him to pedal faster along the way.

By the time the two arrived at Dragon King Temple, the sun had already begun to dip toward the western horizon. Jiang Xia was carving the second wax printing plate.

In truth, even if she finished carving this plate, printing another portrait from it wouldn’t be much faster than waiting for the printing factory. It wasn’t really necessary.

But waiting for news was agonizing.

Even Captain Tan couldn’t stop pacing circles around the courtyard, checking his watch every minute. Jiang Xia was even more restless. Rather than sit there worrying, she’d rather keep herself occupied with something.

The parents of the missing children had each taken a portrait and gone off to search along the roads. The only people left in the temple were the old Taoist priest and Jiang Xia.

With no outsiders around, Tan Bingyi no longer bothered pretending to stay calm. Frowning deeply, he gripped his walkie-talkie and repeatedly called out.

The radio was filled with static, and every reply took an unbearably long time to come through, making Captain Tan’s anxiety practically radiate from him.

Standing beneath a tree, he smacked himself on the head in frustration, trying to force himself to calm down.

“It’s almost four o’clock already! How have we still not found a single lead?”

Just as he was nursing a headache, Hu Wei came riding into the courtyard on his Flying Pigeon bicycle, carrying an old man in his fifties or sixties on the back.

He slammed on the brakes, planted one foot on the ground, and shouted at the top of his lungs,

“Jiang Xia! Chief Wu found a witness who saw the traffickers!”

“You found a witness?!”

Jiang Xia sprang to her feet, crossed the courtyard in a few quick strides, and asked urgently, “Did he get a good look at what the traffickers looked like? What exactly happened?”

“He got a clear look at the woman.”

Hu Wei quickly explained, “There were two traffickers in total. They stopped by this old man’s house asking for water, and he happened to see the child with them. Coincidentally, we were thirsty too and stopped at his place for a drink. Chief Wu casually showed him the portrait you drew and asked if he’d seen anyone like that—and that’s when he recognized them.”

Just thinking about it sent a chill down Hu Wei’s spine.

If Chief Wu hadn’t asked that question on a whim, who knew how much longer they would have wasted before uncovering this lead?

Hu Wei paused before adding with a sigh, “You have no idea. The female trafficker actually changed into a blue outfit along the way. She’d dr*gged the child unconscious, put a straw hat on him, and carried him in her arms. You couldn’t even see the kid’s face. Who would’ve been able to find them like that?”

Good grief.

Jiang Xia clicked her tongue in disbelief.

Being able to get her hands on sedatives and knowing to change clothes midway through the crime—this wasn’t the work of an ordinary child trafficker. She must have been doing this for years to have become so experienced.

For all they knew, she might have trafficked well over a hundred children.

“They’ve got a strong sense of counter-surveillance,” Tan Bingyi remarked as he hurried over. Frowning slightly, he turned his attention to the old man. As the elderly man climbed off the bicycle, Tan reached out to steady him and asked, “You’re the eyewitness, correct?”

“That’s right.”

The old man stepped down from the rear seat and let out a sigh.

“I’m getting old. I’m not as sharp as I used to be. The way that child was sleeping wasn’t normal, but I didn’t think much of it. I just let them go.”

“When you first asked me, I didn’t remember. Sigh… If only I’d stopped them back then.”

The traffickers were experienced, and their disguises must have been convincing. It was perfectly understandable that the old man hadn’t realized anything at the time. Now that he knew the truth, though, the more he thought back on it, the more suspicious everything seemed.

“There are plenty of women carrying sleeping children around. They were only at my place long enough to ask for a drink of water. Who would’ve recognized them for what they were?”

“It’s not your fault,” Jiang Xia comforted him. “Besides, you would’ve been facing two traffickers by yourself. That could’ve been dangerous. If something had happened to you, things would’ve been even worse.”

“Hah, young lady, don’t underestimate me.” The old man puffed out his chest, clearly unhappy at being underestimated. “Just two of them? I could’ve pinned them down in no time.”

He spread two fingers in the shape of a gun and added proudly, “And even if I couldn’t, I’ve got one of these at home.”

Jiang Xia froze for a second before realizing what he meant.

Holy crap—a gun!

Wait… was the era really this wild? An ordinary old man could just casually have a firearm at home?

Seeing that Tan Bingyi’s expression didn’t change in the slightest, while Hu Wei nodded repeatedly as though this were perfectly normal, Jiang Xia silently swallowed.

With complete sincerity, she praised the old man.

“You’re amazing, sir.”

“Not as amazing as you, young lady.”

The old man shook his head and looked Jiang Xia up and down.

“You’re the one who can draw portraits of traffickers? At your age? You really can’t judge a person by appearances!”

“It’s nothing special.”

Jiang Xia was already thinking about drawing the trafficker’s portrait, but this case was very different from the previous ones—it would be much more difficult.

After all, parents saw their own children every day. They remembered their features clearly and could describe them in detail. Once she finished a portrait, they could immediately confirm whether it was accurate.

A trafficker, however, was another matter entirely. The old man had only caught a few glances of the woman. It would be difficult for him to remember her appearance perfectly, and the less precise his description was, the harder it would be to draw—and to verify—the likeness.

Putting an end to the mutual compliments, Jiang Xia’s expression turned serious.

“Time is short, so let’s get started on the portrait. I’ll draw based on your description. Sir, how much do you remember about the trafficker’s appearance?”

“I didn’t get a good look at the man, but I remember the woman clearly.”

The old man patted his chest confidently.

“Don’t let my age fool you. I was the captain of the local militia when I was young. I even caught enemy spies back then. If that woman stood in front of me again, I’d recognize her at a glance!”

That was the best news they could have hoped for.

Without another word, Jiang Xia led the old man into the temple’s main hall and sat him down to begin the sketch.

True to his claim of having once been a militia captain, he had clearly received some training. Rather than speaking vaguely, he described the woman’s facial features in precise, descriptive terms. As soon as he spoke, Jiang Xia knew exactly how to translate his words into lines on paper.

With the experience of drawing the three missing children’s portraits already under her belt, Jiang Xia worked with much greater confidence this time. She refined the details according to the old man’s descriptions, and before long, the woman’s portrait took shape on the page.

The old man stared at the drawing in amazement, clicking his tongue repeatedly.

“It’s exactly the same! It’s the spitting image of her!”

Jiang Xia finally set down her pencil.

Only then did the patiently waiting Tan Bingyi get a chance to speak.

“Xiao Jiang, forget about carving the woodblock for now. Even if you send the portrait to the printing factory, they’ll still have to carve the plate before they can print it. By the time we get the copies back, it’ll be the middle of the night. Just draw it directly onto a wax stencil instead. It’ll be much faster, and a hundred or so copies should be more than enough.”

“Looks like we think alike, Captain Tan.”

Without pausing, Jiang Xia used a craft knife to trim the paper, then began sketching the outline onto the wax stencil using the completed portrait as a reference. As she worked, she continued,

“But Captain Tan, I don’t think we should keep chasing after the traffickers anymore.”

“Oh?”

Tan Bingyi had been thinking about how to make the best use of the hundred portraits. Hearing Jiang Xia’s comment, he raised an eyebrow.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m worried about something.”

Now that she had a reference portrait, copying it onto the stencil required very little thought. Jiang Xia multitasked with ease, drawing while organizing her thoughts aloud.

“At this point, the children’s portraits should be almost ready. They won’t be long before they’re distributed to every checkpoint. Once the traffickers realize that, they’ll definitely know they’re being hunted and will probably try to leave as quickly as possible.”

“The question is… will they take the children with them?”

“The best-case scenario is that they panic, leave the children somewhere conspicuous, and slip away on their own.

“But they’ve already spent quite a bit on food, lodging, and travel while they were here. I doubt they’ll be willing to walk away empty-handed. Once they confirm that we’re only searching with the children’s portraits, they’re very likely to hide the children inside containers and smuggle them out.”

“Of course, we could also search every sack, basket, and other container carried by travelers at the checkpoints.”

She paused briefly before continuing.

“But if we do that, there’s an even worse possibility. The traffickers could hide the containers with the children somewhere secluded, then cross the checkpoint by themselves. By the time…”

Jiang Xia didn’t finish the sentence, but Tan Bingyi understood exactly what she meant.

The three children were still unconscious from the dr*g. They couldn’t cry for help. If they were trapped inside a container for several hours, they could very well suffocate to death.

“That’s… that’s unbelievably heartless!”

Hu Wei, who had been listening nearby, stared in shock.

“At the very least, they should leave the kids somewhere people can see them! If the children die, wouldn’t that make their crimes even worse?”

“Since when have child traffickers had a conscience?”

Jiang Xia replied grimly.

“If they left the children somewhere obvious, someone might discover them almost immediately after they walked away. They wouldn’t get very far before the authorities were on their trail.”

Tan Bingyi drew in a slow breath.

In the past, they had never had portraits of missing children. Without that advantage, it had never occurred to him that traffickers might hide the children inside containers and stash them somewhere out of sight.

But the moment Jiang Xia mentioned it, he was already seventy or eighty percent convinced.

Those beasts had already been willing to stuff children into bamboo baskets. What was stopping them from going one step further?

The problem was, that made the situation much trickier.

As long as the traffickers still had the children, it was like kidnappers holding hostages—they had to proceed with extreme caution.

If they searched every container, they risked forcing the traffickers to abandon the children in some hidden place.

If they didn’t search the containers, they’d be letting the traffickers slip away.

How could they arrest the pair while ensuring the children’s safety?

After a moment of thought, Tan Bingyi muttered,

“Now that we have the woman’s portrait… if we stop searching bags…”

“That won’t work either.”

Jiang Xia shook her head.

“We only know what one of the traffickers looks like. These two have an extremely strong sense of counter-surveillance. They might spot from a long distance that we’re looking for a woman. Then she could have the man take the children away while she waits for the right moment to circle around and escape through another route. By then, not only would we fail to catch them, we might lose the children as well.”

She nodded slightly.

As expected of a criminal investigation captain who’s constantly out in the field. His thinking was incredibly fast. With just a small hint, he’d already grasped the problem.

Listening from the side, Hu Wei’s head was starting to ache.

“So searching bags won’t work, and checking people won’t work either. Then how are we supposed to catch them?”

If they hadn’t obtained the trafficker’s portrait, Jiang Xia would have preferred to search every bag despite the risks. At least that way, the children would still be somewhere within the local area. The printing factory would soon have the children’s portraits ready, and once they were distributed throughout the streets, the public could search the area inch by inch. There would still be a good chance of finding them.

But the risk was simply too great.

Now that they had the woman’s portrait, they didn’t have to resort to such drastic measures. They could afford to be more cautious.

“We absolutely have to catch them,” Jiang Xia said. “But we need to do it cleverly, not by brute force.”

She looked at Tan Bingyi.

“I have an idea.”

Tan Bingyi met her gaze.

“Let’s hear it.”

“These two traffickers have a very strong sense of counter-surveillance. They’ll almost certainly move before my portrait reaches the checkpoints. So we need to be one step ahead of them—we need to intercept them at their destination.”

Jiang Xia continued drawing as she spoke, though her pencil moved a little more slowly.

“We haven’t seen any cargo trucks on the roads around Dragon King Temple. And now we’ve confirmed they’ve already entered the city. That means they aren’t truck drivers doing this on the side—they don’t have their own transportation.”

“If they want to get out of the city quickly, their only real options are the train station or the long-distance bus station.”

“They’re traveling with three children, so splitting up would only complicate things. As long as we don’t search bags, they’ll most likely stay together. We should concentrate our forces at those two locations.”

“For example, we can station uniformed officers inside to watch for the children, and assign a few plainclothes officers to look specifically for the traffickers.”

“We can also give a few copies of the portrait to the ticket clerks. They can keep the picture behind the ticket window where customers can’t see it. But the traffickers have to buy tickets if they want to leave. As long as the woman comes up to the counter, we can arrest her on the spot.”

At that, Jiang Xia paused before adding,

“But we can’t put all our eggs in one basket. We also can’t stop tracking them.”

She turned to Hu Wei.

“Hu Wei, take this portrait to Chief Wu right away. Go back along the route and keep asking around. If you find anyone who got a good look at the other trafficker, bring them here immediately. I’ll do my best to draw his portrait as well. Once we have both of them, catching them will be much easier.”

“The only problem is that, until then, we’ll only have one portrait. So let’s avoid tipping them off. Have officers with good memories study the portrait until they’ve memorized it, then station them at the checkpoints. Don’t search bags. But if they spot a man and a woman matching the description, traveling together with a large amount of luggage, detain them immediately.”

A full-scale search, attacking the problem from every angle.

She refused to believe the traffickers could escape all of that.

After listening to her plan, Tan Bingyi looked at Jiang Xia in surprise.

Her thinking was remarkably organized. This was exactly the kind of operational plan an experienced detective would come up with.

No wonder Chen Dong kept recommending her.

She really was a natural for criminal investigations.

“That’s a good plan.”

Tan Bingyi quickly analyzed it and, after confirming that the overall strategy was sound with only a few minor details needing adjustment, made the decision on the spot.

“I’ll report this to Captain Duan immediately and have him redeploy our forces.”

The police could handle the bus station themselves, but the railway system was another matter. The railway police operated independently with their own jurisdiction. As the captain of a local criminal investigation unit, Tan had no authority to command them. He would have to ask his superiors to coordinate first.

…

Municipal Public Security Bureau, Criminal Investigation Division Captain’s Office

The entire office was thick with cigarette smoke.

Captain Duan Guoqiang sat with a cigarette between the fingers of his right hand while holding the telephone receiver to his ear with his left. The longer he listened, the harder it became to suppress the smile spreading across his face.

After waiting all this time, they finally had some good news.

Listening to the proposed arrest plan from the other end of the line, he nodded repeatedly.

“Mm. Mm. Good. That’s a solid plan. The only thing is, we have to be careful when casting the net. We need to get it in place quickly, or the fish will slip away.”

“You don’t need to worry about the printing factory anymore. I’ll coordinate that. I’ll have the traffic police ride motorcycles over there right now. There’s no need to wait an hour. As soon as they print the first hundred copies, have them distributed immediately.”

“Your side has only two tasks now. First, get the trafficker’s portrait to the train station and the bus station as fast as possible. Second, take Jiang Xia and get the other trafficker’s portrait drawn as quickly as you can. It has to be fast—we’re racing against the traffickers now.”

“All right, get moving.”

With that, Duan Guoqiang promptly hung up. Without wasting a second, he dialed the railway police.

“Hello, it’s me. Yes, it’s about that case again. We’ve got more than just the children’s portraits now—we’ve also confirmed the appearance of one of the traffickers. We don’t have many copies yet, but I have an idea. It’s best if we don’t alert them and scare them off…”

As the calls went out, the city’s police force sprang into action once more.

Carrying the portraits in their hands, officers fanned out across the city like countless strands of thread, gradually weaving an enormous net that would, they hoped, capture the child traffickers.

However, as the prey caught in that net, Sister Fang sensed danger in the air long before the trap had been fully woven.

<< _ >>

The post Criminal Master System Ch.21.1 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

Because Toya hadn’t owned proper cold-weather clothing before, he had never been able to leave the house.

He hadn’t attended the family meetings.

He had never even ridden a snowfield train to exchange goods.

To him, the change in his parents was astonishingly sudden.

Not long ago, they had been saying,

“They’re definitely snow bandits. We have to stay on our guard.”

Now, they wore carefree, happy smiles as they declared that they had completely become part of the Little Blue Sea Nation.

And yet…

His parents really were happier than they had ever been.

They no longer spent every day with furrowed brows.

Instead, they enthusiastically discussed when they should move to the central district and what kind of jobs they could look for once they reached the Divine Kingdom.

They even began planning Toya’s future.

“My child, you’ll never have to worry about survival again. It turns out that your ability to repair objects and build machines has a special name in the Divine Kingdom. Better yet, you can use that skill to earn points.”

Toya’s eyes had lit up when he heard those words.

He longed to be acknowledged.

While every other member of his family supported themselves by fighting snow beasts…

He alone could only remain shut inside the house, tinkering with the little gadgets that none of his relatives could understand.

He heard his parents proudly tell him,

“The Divine Envoys have a name for your talent: Mechanical Repair and Manufacturing.”

“Toya, one of the Divine Envoys said there are many people in the Divine Kingdom just like you. They don’t have to leave the Divine Kingdom to fight, yet they still contribute to it and earn points through their own skills. My child, once we enter the Divine Kingdom, you’ll be able to live just like them.”

Toya was nothing more than an ordinary native of Dazzling Star.

Yet, at that moment, he felt a sense of anticipation and joy unlike anything he had ever experienced.

There were…

A lot of people just like him?

People who also loved studying these “strange little gadgets”?

People whose minds were likewise filled with circuits, mechanisms, and machines?

For the first time in his life, Toya looked forward to the day he would enter the Divine Kingdom.

But…

This area had been relatively safe for quite some time.

So why were there now three enormous snow beasts outside his family’s home?

They were tearing at the front door with their teeth.

Toya could hear the grating squeal of the reinforced steel door he had personally modified.

It was the sound of thick metal bending under the beasts’ relentless jaws.

His parents were powerful hunters.

Their home was a Tier 3 building, and Toya had reinforced every inch of it.

Once, in the middle of the night, a Burrowing Assault Rabbit had tried to tunnel inside.

After digging for ages, all it had managed to scrape off was a thin layer of the outer wall.

But now…

These snow beasts had deformed that sturdy steel door with frightening ease.

Toya’s entire body trembled uncontrollably.

He had never fought a snow beast.

In fact, until this year, he had never even stepped outside his home.

Even after his parents had exchanged points for a cold-weather suit not long ago, all he had done was put it on and, under their watchful eyes, walk a few laps around the house.

Toya, calm down.

He desperately tried to steady himself.

But the shaking wouldn’t stop.

The signal flare… Right… The signal flare…

With trembling hands, he dragged over the signal flare he had prepared, lit it, hurriedly opened the window, and threw it outside.

A plume of crimson smoke quickly rose into the sky.

Listening to the relentless bang… bang… bang… against the door, Toya tightened his grip around a long spike.

He was so frail that simply holding the weapon felt unbearably heavy.

Craaak…

Craaak…

A thin beam of light shone through the steel door where the beasts had finally bitten through it.

Toya could already see their sharp fangs…

And their blood-red eyes.

Craaak…

The tiny hole rapidly widened.

One of the snow beasts shoved its entire head through the ruined doorway, staring straight at Toya as drool dripped onto the carpet inside the house.

It was the rug his older sister had given their parents as a gift just last month.

Toya tried to charge forward with the spike.

Only then did he realize…

…that at some point his legs had already given way beneath him.

He was sitting collapsed on the floor.

He struggled to stand.

But his legs seemed to be fighting against him.

Every time he managed to get up, he immediately fell again.

At last…

Toya forced himself to his feet.

His legs trembled violently as he gripped the spike with both hands and staggered forward.

Don’t be afraid.

Don’t be afraid.

He kept shouting those words to himself.

Yet the instant he swung…

His eyes squeezed shut on their own.

The spike cut through empty air.

Toya collapsed to the floor once more.

His whole body shook uncontrollably.

His mind went blank.

He wanted nothing more than to curse his own uselessness.

He could already picture himself…

Being swallowed whole by the snow beast.

But after waiting more than ten seconds…

Nothing happened.

His eyes red with panic, Toya slowly looked up.

Only the gaping hole in the steel door remained.

The snow beast…

…was gone.

Whoosh!

Another head suddenly poked through the opening.

This time, however…

It wasn’t a snow beast’s.

It belonged to a person.

Song Xi quickly looked Toya over from head to toe.

“You okay?”

After asking, she watched the young man shake so violently that he looked like a bobblehead.

It was obvious he wasn’t capable of answering.

So Song Xi inspected him herself.

No wounds.

“Mhm! You’re fine then.”

“Stay inside for a while. The door’s broken now. If you’ve got cold-weather gear, put it on. If you don’t, get under the blankets and keep warm. Don’t let yourself freeze.”

After giving those rapid instructions, Song Xi immediately withdrew her head through the hole in the door.

Toya was still trembling, but he could hear the mysterious person—who had appeared just as suddenly as she had left—shouting outside.

“Calling it now! This one’s mine!”

“Roar!!”

“It doesn’t have a tail! Stab it from behind!”

“The eyes! Aim for the eyes!”

“ROOOAR!!!”

“Go, go, go! Cut it off! Don’t let it escape!”

“Woohoo!!!”

Still shaking, his legs weak as jelly, Toya crawled beneath his blankets.

Listening to the voices outside, his panic gradually subsided.

He had no idea how much time had passed before everything suddenly fell silent.

Knock. Knock.

A gentle knock came at the door.

Toya flinched violently and instinctively burrowed deeper into the blankets.

“Hello, little guy. The snow beasts have all been dealt with. Would you like to come out and take a look?”

The people of Dazzling Star were already shorter than those of Blue Sea, and Toya was especially thin and frail. Song Xi had assumed he was only thirteen or fourteen.

Even if she’d known he was actually sixteen, though, someone that age still counted as a kid by Blue Sea standards.

Thinking he was fairly young, she became a little more patient.

“Did your family ever tell you about us? We’re from the Little Blue Sea Nation. That means you’re one of our citizens too. I’m the president, so you have to listen to me. Open the door so we can check whether you’re hurt. We’ll leave once your family comes back.”

The door had already been destroyed.

The home’s heating system almost certainly wasn’t working anymore.

She was worried the kid inside might freeze to death.

Song Xi poked her head through the hole in the door again.

“Kid, if you don’t open up, I’m coming through this hole.”

“I-I’m coming right away.”

Toya had actually wanted to get out of bed earlier.

But his body had been so cold and weak that it had taken him a long time just to regain control of his limbs.

He answered in a shaky voice, hurriedly climbed out of bed, and, with trembling hands, unlocked the damaged door.

The moment Song Xi stepped inside, she behaved like a bandit raiding a house.

Her eyes immediately locked onto a set of insulated winter clothing hanging on the wall.

Without a word, she took it down and started helping Toya put it on herself.

Toya’s face flushed bright red.

He wanted to say, “I can do it myself,” but his throat refused to cooperate. All he could do was let her help him into the insulated coat.

The moment he put it on, the color returned to his deathly pale face.

Only then, through the wide-open doorway, did he notice the three snow beasts lying dead outside.

Beyond them stood a train of snow-beast-drawn sleds—a long caravan roughly thirty meters in length and two meters wide, covered by a wooden roof.

“Hey! Tell me, when do the adults in your family usually come back?”

Song Xi asked him twice. Seeing the child simply stare blankly outside without saying a word or moving an inch, she began to suspect the fright had left him completely numb.

After a moment’s thought, she turned to Wang Moning and held out her hand.

“Let me borrow your precious treasure.”

Wang Moning hesitated, reluctant to part with it. But she’d once been through something similar herself, and she couldn’t help sympathizing with the terrified child. Carefully, she handed Song Xi the little ice sculpture of the Creator God that she always carried with her.

She had carved it herself during breaks on their journey!

Ever since she had this little statue to keep her company, she wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore.

Song Xi gently placed the ice sculpture into Toya’s hands.

The frigid temperature inside the cabin kept it perfectly intact, with no sign of melting.

“Don’t be afraid.”

She patted Toya on the head.

“Our God will protect you.”

Toya looked up at her, then down at the little sculpture in his hands.

It depicted the same deity as the wooden carving his parents had once brought home—a gentle smile on the divine face, as though embracing everything in the world with boundless compassion.

“…Is God… really real?”

Song Xi thumped her chest confidently, wearing an expression that practically said, If you don’t believe me, who else would you believe?

“Of course our God is real!”

“It was our God who sent us here to save you!”

—Actually, that wasn’t true.

They had simply been nearby, leading a group of soldiers to wipe out a dozen or so Tier-2 snow beasts. They were happily looting the corpses when they suddenly spotted the red distress flare rising into the sky.

When one of their own citizens sent out a distress signal, the three leaders naturally gathered their soldiers, boarded the snow train, and raced across the snowy wilderness to the rescue.

But Song Xi had her own way of looking at things.

Our God is omniscient. Every good thing that happens in this world is a gift from Our God!

It was under the Creator God’s blessing that Dark Star came to be, that the Blue Sea Civilization was born, and that Song Xi herself existed.

So if they had saved this child, then it must have been the Creator God’s will!

Hehe, flawless logic!

Song Xi did her best to comfort the frightened child. And in Blue Sea, the greatest comfort anyone could think of was to involve the Creator God.

She urged him, “Go on, thank Our God. Once you do, Our God will continue watching over you.”

Encouraged by Song Xi’s unwavering confidence, Toya looked at the little statue in his hands and softly whispered,

“Thank you, great God.”

…

Meanwhile, Cheng Qisheng was at home, putting a newly delivered batch of ice cream into the freezer while casually watching Blue Sea’s battle against the Skywing Dragons.

She suddenly paused.

She had sensed the formation of a new faith chain.

Normally, every new faith chain began as a dull, matte thread. Only after someone had lived in the Safe City for some time would a portion of those new believers’ faith chains gradually become luminous, signifying that they had awakened as ability users.

But this brand-new faith chain had appeared already glowing.

And not just glowing—it was dazzlingly bright.

What’s going on?

Had this new believer already become an ability user before ever placing his faith in me?

Curious, Cheng Qisheng directed part of her attention toward the new believer, Toya.

By then, the trio had already led him out of the house. Noticing his fascination with the snow train, Song Xi was enthusiastically introducing it to him, her face brimming with pride.

In truth, there wasn’t much to explain.

A snow train was simply a team of snow beasts pulling a series of sled cars.

The only special feature was the roof built over the sleds, which provided a bit of shelter from the wind and snow.

“But it’s really fast!”

Toya gazed silently at the long train stretching out before him.

Toya was still a little afraid of the snow beast standing at the front of the train.

Yet, for some reason, although it still looked exactly like a snow beast, his instincts no longer saw it that way.

To him, it was the locomotive.

A sudden thought surfaced in his mind.

I can make it better.

“I… I can make it stronger,” he murmured.

His voice was so soft it was almost inaudible.

But Song Xi had exceptionally sharp ears.

“Oh? Really? You’re that amazing?”

She was delighted. The frightened child was finally willing to talk normally.

Imitating the way her own parents always encouraged her, she praised him without a second thought.

“That’s great! Do you want to give it a try?”

Toya hadn’t expected such an enthusiastic response. He turned his head toward the steel door that several soldiers were examining.

“But I’ll need some materials. Could you have them bring that door over?”

Most people would have asked why.

Isn’t the door supposed to be repaired? What do you need it for?

Cheng Qisheng was already prepared. If Song Xi asked anything along those lines, she intended to send down a divine message telling her to simply go along with Toya and see what this new believer was trying to do.

Instead, Song Xi agreed without the slightest hesitation.

“Sure!”

Since she considered herself to be humoring a child, she generously spared the soldiers the heavy lifting—though, in truth, none of the people from Dazzling Star could match her strength anyway.

She strode over, effortlessly removed the steel door from its hinges, carried it back, and held it out to him.

“Here. The door.”

She was only one sentence away from adding, ‘Go ahead and play with it.’

Standing nearby, Wang Moning couldn’t help thinking that if the door were propped against the side of the train, it really would make a neat little slide.

The high school student found herself oddly tempted.

If it actually turns into a slide, I’m definitely giving it a try!

But Toya didn’t ask Song Xi to lean the door against the train.

Instead, he had her place it on top of one of the train cars.

Truthfully, even he didn’t understand why so many ideas kept appearing in his head.

It was as if, despite never having seen a train before in his life, he instinctively knew it should be larger, should have more control consoles, and should be much more stable than it was now.

It was just like before. He had never seen a record player, yet he had repaired one purely by instinct.

More often than not, Toya felt completely out of place among his own family. But his parents had always told him that this was called Mechanical Repair and Manufacturing, one of the most common specialties among the Divine Envoys.

And now, the people who had saved him claimed that they, too, came from the Divine Kingdom.

The Divine Kingdom…

‘In that land blessed by the Creator God… there must be many people just like me.’

The thought filled Toya with anticipation.

He slowly raised his trembling hands.

Then, steeling himself, he pressed them against the snow beast serving as the train’s engine.

The next instant, before the stunned eyes of President Song, Marshal Shen, and Pope Wang, the steel door… melted.

The crude wooden train—little more than a collection of sled cars—began to change, as though guided by an invisible giant hand.

Its frame expanded.

Its shape warped and shifted.

Molten steel flowed across its surface, coating the exterior.

Even the snow beast under Song Xi’s control was enveloped in a thin layer of liquid metal. Wherever the steel passed, its beastly form rapidly transformed, as though countless invisible hammers were forging it again and again, until it was reshaped into the unmistakable form of a locomotive.

At last—

A brand-new metal train stood before them.

Its entire body radiated a cold, understated sheen, looking as though it had just rolled out of a factory.

The lines of the train were crisp and clean, its metallic surface gleaming faintly. There wasn’t a single visible seam anywhere on its body; every inch was flawlessly engineered with meticulous precision.

The makeshift passenger cars had transformed as well.

Each carriage was now tightly connected to the next. The wheels, once prone to breaking, were spotless and free of rust, firmly mounted beneath the chassis.

But the most unbelievable change was the snow beast.

It had become a locomotive in every sense of the word.

Its body had taken on a streamlined, rounded nose. A large windshield now occupied the front—

Where had the glass even come from?

—and below it sat two perfectly round headlights.

Through the windshield, they could see the driver’s seat inside.

It, too, was made entirely of metal, firmly welded to the floor, with a simple yet elegant design.

Judging by its appearance alone, no one would have questioned it if they were told this train had been meticulously manufactured in a pre-apocalypse factory.

Song Xi’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.

Tentatively, she opened the cab door and climbed inside.

The driver’s compartment contained a complete control console.

There was a throttle lever, a brake lever, and a master control switch.

Song Xi had never driven a train before.

But she had plenty of courage.

She sat down and casually pushed one of the levers.

The train… actually started moving.

Without any fuel.

Without any external power source.

Well, not exactly.

It did have a power source.

That Tier-2 snow beast had evidently become the train’s sole engine.

Song Xi immediately hit the brakes, hardly daring to believe such an incredible thing was possible.

“Our God!!!”

The God she was calling was just as astonished.

Blinking in disbelief, Cheng Qisheng thought,

A living train…

A perfectly healthy, perfectly useful snow beast…

…had just been transformed into a cold, metal locomotive that was somehow even more useful?!

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.75.3 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

Within the territory of the Little Blue Sea Nation—

Ever since a new batch of clergy had arrived, the three leaders, who all came from the “priesthood”, had happily handed over all domestic affairs to them and gone right back to hunting snow beasts.

In truth, the three of them spent their days wandering all over the country for one simple reason.

Song Xi constantly had to deliver Gu worms to every relay station, while Wang Moning and Shen Jinyang were practically inseparable from her.

As a result, the trio had become the biggest wanderers in the entire Little Blue Sea Nation.

To put it another way, imagine the snowfield trains as buses.

Then Song Xi was the person responsible for recharging those buses.

She had to travel nonstop between stations, replacing each train’s new “engine.” Since those stations were scattered across almost the entire Little Blue Sea Nation, her daily routine consisted of either traveling…

…or traveling to continue traveling.

She might be at the castle today.

Three days later, she could be at the very edge of the nation’s territory.

The cycle repeated endlessly, with hardly a moment to rest.

The three hundred soldiers assigned to accompany them were utterly worn out by the constant marching. Every time the trio returned to headquarters, the escort had to rotate out and be replaced by fresh troops.

Yet the three leaders themselves remained endlessly energetic.

They even hunted snow beasts for fun while traveling.

After all, they had plenty of experience covering long distances.

This little bit of travel was nothing to them.

The three leaders had just killed two snow beasts and were about to collect the Item Card that had materialized from their corpses.

Then another dozen or so snow beasts slowly emerged from the snow.

Wang Moning narrowed her eyes.

“Are these all newly arrived?”

This area lay on the newly claimed frontier of the Little Blue Sea Nation.

Because the frontier was so far from the nation’s central region, any emergency there would be difficult to reinforce in time.

For that reason, whenever the Little Blue Sea Nation acquired new border territory, it always organized a thorough sweep of the area first, reducing the local snow beast population to a manageable level.

Each of the dozen-odd snow beasts stood nearly three meters tall and more than two meters wide. They looked anything but manageable.

They were obviously newcomers.

Shen Jinyang drew her saber.

“Who cares? Let’s kill them first.”

Song Xi was already grinning with excitement.

“The one in front is mine!”

She charged forward at full speed and slashed downward with her blade.

Her eyes narrowed slightly.

…That doesn’t feel right.

Song Xi instantly leaped backward, narrowly avoiding the massive claw sweeping toward her, and shouted a warning,

“They’re Tier 2!”

Wang Moning drew her own saber as well.

“All of them are Tier 2?”

A grin slowly spread across her face.

“Then that’s… even better!”

She and Shen Jinyang rushed into the fray together.

The accompanying soldiers also charged into battle, their faces filled with excitement.

Imitating their leaders’ favorite catchphrase, they shouted at the top of their lungs,

“Woohoo!!!”

The snowfield trains were excellent in every respect…

…except that a single snow beast could pull one for only five days and five nights before dying.

As a result, a snowfield train could travel continuously for no more than two and a half days.

Any farther than that, the passengers could be transported out—but there would be no way to bring them back.

That was why Song Xi had to spend every day traveling across the nation, constantly “recharging” the transportation network.

But snowfield trains pulled by Tier 2 snow beasts were a completely different story.

Tier 2 snow beasts were stronger and far more enduring.

They could run without rest for ten days and ten nights.

The problem was that Tier 2 snow beasts were nowhere near as common as Tier 1s.

Having more than a dozen of them suddenly appear…

…was practically the same as having a dozen perpetual-motion engines with a ten-day battery life drop out of the sky.

On top of that, after the Divine Envoys arrived, many of the nation’s regulations had been revised.

The old, chaotic barter system—and the practice of using Castle Residence Day Passes as currency—had been replaced with a formal points system.

As long as someone had enough points, they could exchange them for anything in the national warehouses.

If they accumulated enough, they could even redeem a Lifetime Snowfield Train Usage Pass.

Granted, the price of that card was so astronomical that most people felt they wouldn’t be able to save enough points for it even after ten years.

If a squad of soldiers managed to pin down even a single Tier 2 snow beast, then regardless of whether it dropped an Item Card after death, the value it could create simply by serving as the “engine” of a snowfield train would be enough to make them a fortune.

Even if it took several people working together to subdue one and they had to split the reward points among themselves, it would still be a tidy profit.

After all, those points…

…could be spent in the Divine Kingdom as well.

After years of battling snow beasts, the people of Dazzling Star had developed a fear of them that was etched into their very bones.

Faced with snow beasts that were not only more numerous but also more powerful than before, they should have been afraid…

Anxious…

Hesitant…

But—

The faith engraved into their very souls continuously filled them with courage.

Snow beasts were terrifying.

Yet at this moment, in the eyes of the citizens of the Little Blue Sea Nation, they had become something else entirely.

Points.

Food.

Warm homes.

And…

The hope of reaching the Divine Kingdom and living a happy life.

On a snow-covered plain, a family that had been out on a routine hunt gripped their weapons tightly beneath the rising plume of a lit signal flare.

“Mom…”

The eldest son, who had just turned twelve and was on his first hunting trip, was shielded behind his mother.

Already fair-skinned, his face had now gone deathly pale.

As the five snow beasts drew closer, he could hear their low growls and catch the crimson gleam in their eyes.

Nervously, he pinched a tiny corner of his mother’s winter coat.

He didn’t even dare hold on too tightly, afraid that he might somehow become a burden to his parents.

“Rooaar—!”

These five snow beasts were clearly different from the ones the people of Dazzling Star usually fought.

Instead of charging in recklessly, they advanced cautiously, probing with occasional attacks.

Every arrow the couple fired was deftly avoided.

The parents’ expressions darkened.

“They’re intelligent.”

“They know our arrows can hurt them.”

“They also know we’ll eventually run out of arrows.”

“They’re trying to wear us down.”

Damn it.

When had these beasts become so clever?

Just as the family cautiously retreated, only to find themselves slowly being surrounded…

…a distant rumbling sound echoed across the snow.

A snowfield train, pulled by a snow beast and packed with passengers, happened to be passing by along its regular route.

“There’s a signal flare over there!”

One of the hunters was the first to spot it.

The hunters aboard the train immediately jumped off and sprinted toward the family.

If this had happened in the past, they would have preferred to mind their own business.

After all, the family wasn’t related to them.

But now…

They were all children of God.

The hunters charged fearlessly into battle against the five Tier 2 snow beasts.

The family’s deathly pale faces quickly regained their color.

With so many allies joining the fight, the snow beasts could no longer dodge every arrow with ease.

Amid furious roars, one massive beast after another crashed to the ground.

The twelve-year-old boy remained safely behind the adults throughout the battle.

He stared at these unfamiliar uncles and aunts who had come to save his family.

When the fighting was over, he quietly said,

“Thank you…”

One of the men ruffled his hair.

“Hahaha, no need to thank us. We’re all believers of our God, so that makes us one big family!”

Similar battles were unfolding all across the Little Blue Sea Nation.

Large numbers of clergy had begun patrolling the territory.

Whenever they discovered a battle, they would hover overhead, watching the fight.

If any citizen began to lose ground—or was in danger of being killed—the white-robed, black-winged clergy would dive from the sky and pull them to safety.

These people of Dazzling Star, once so timid…

…were now displaying astonishing courage as they fought against the beast tide.

They had been forced to live in isolation for over a century.

And because of that, they longed for companionship more than any other civilization.

Now, however, they lived beneath the protection of the Great Creator God.

Behind them stood countless compatriots who shared the same faith.

So what was there left to fear?

They had endured this kind of life…

For decades.

They had long since had enough of it!

Another squad of soldiers encountered more than a dozen snow beasts.

The captain at their head raised the long spike in his hand.

This was the twenty-first day since he had joined the Little Blue Sea Nation.

The eleventh day since he had enlisted.

The fifth day since he had devoted himself to the Great Creator God.

And the second day since he had become a squad captain.

He thought of his parents, who had long since passed away.

He thought of his eldest son and eldest daughter, both killed by snow beasts in battle.

He thought of his partner, bedridden by illness and now receiving treatment in the castle.

He remembered that night two years ago when snow beasts had torn apart their home in the dead of night.

He and his partner had managed to flee with their children.

The two of them survived.

So did some of the children.

But their youngest son, only two years old…

…was left behind forever that night.

His partner had also been injured during their escape.

Those injuries had become the root of a lingering illness. For the past two years she had been confined to her bed, no longer the strong woman she once was.

Night after night, he would wake with a start.

He would reach out to check whether she was still breathing.

Then lie awake in the darkness, staring into the night, terrified that she might quietly slip away before morning.

But now…

She lived in a warm, comfortable castle, cared for by the Divine Envoys.

She no longer coughed.

She no longer burned with fever.

Their only two surviving children no longer wore fearful, timid expressions.

They could run and play freely through the castle’s residential corridors every single day.

He had drifted through more than thirty years of life in a daze.

Yet only during these twenty-one days…

…had he truly felt alive.

He would never—

Never again run away!

These damned snow beasts…

They would never be allowed to destroy his home again!

The captain fixed his eyes on the snow beasts before him and charged first.

“Our God watches over us!”

The soldiers behind him roared in unison,

“Long live Blue Sea!!!”

…

Toya was an utterly ordinary native of Dazzling Star.

Unlike the rest of his family, however, he had been frail since childhood.

Even at sixteen years old, he was still incapable of fighting a snow beast on his own.

Because of this, his parents had decided they would continue caring for him.

The family had even held a meeting to discuss his future.

After his parents eventually grew old and passed away, his surviving brothers and sisters would take care of him.

If they too died one day…

Then his nieces and nephews would assume the responsibility.

In short, as long as there was still someone left in the family…

Toya would always have relatives who would lovingly look after him.

When he was little, Toya didn’t understand what that meant.

But as he grew older, he gradually realized the truth.

He had become a burden.

His family refused to abandon him, and he himself lacked the courage to end his own life.

So Toya began searching for other ways to help the people he loved.

For example, he experimented with the odds and ends that came out of Item Cards, tinkering until he could make simple little toys.

Over time, whenever something from an Item Card was damaged, his family would simply hand it to him and let him take it apart however he pleased.

By now, Toya had truly become useful to them.

Whenever an electronic device from an Item Card broke, he could painstakingly repair it using the assortment of tools he had accumulated over the years.

Last year, he had even cobbled together what he claimed was a record player—a machine that had existed only two hundred years ago—using a bizarre assortment of parts that no one else in his family could make sense of.

When the record player was connected to the rechargeable battery Toya had built, and his older sister placed on it a vinyl record she had obtained from an Item Card the previous year…

The whole family gathered around and listened together as beautiful, melodious music filled the room.

This year, through nothing but trial and error, Toya had gone a step further.

He built an electric heater that consumed very little power while providing exceptional warmth.

His relatives praised him endlessly for it.

His parents’ faces were filled with pride.

For the first time, Toya felt he had found a purpose in life.

Even though his body was weak…

He could still help his family.

He could still make their lives better.

Some time ago, a stranger had arrived at their family settlement.

The visitor introduced himself as a representative of the Little Blue Sea Nation and invited Toya’s family to join the country.

The elders discussed the matter for a long time.

In the end, they announced their decision.

“We’re joining the Little Blue Sea Nation.”

“It’s still expanding. They have a huge population, powerful weapons, and incredible means of transportation.”

“We’re simply not in a position to refuse.”

Indeed, the biggest reason Toya’s family joined the Little Blue Sea Nation…

…was because they knew perfectly well they couldn’t beat them.

And if you couldn’t beat them—

You might as well join them.

What if they refused and the other side turned hostile?

Before joining the Little Blue Sea Nation, Toya’s entire family had already braced themselves to be extorted.

In their eyes, the Little Blue Sea Nation was nothing more than a band of snow bandits.

A powerful group gathered together…

Armed with superior weapons…

Possessing strange means of transportation—the snowfield trains…

And demanding that unrelated families join them.

Wasn’t that exactly what snow bandits were?

Yet after joining the Little Blue Sea Nation, the entire family found themselves utterly bewildered.

Not only were they not extorted…

They were taught, free of charge, how to make signal flares.

They were also told that if they ever encountered danger they couldn’t handle, all they had to do was light one, and nearby citizens would come to their rescue.

At the same time, the nation dispatched large numbers of people to sweep through the surrounding area, eliminating every powerful snow beast that posed a serious threat to the local residents.

“Incredible!”

After secretly watching the operation, Toya’s parents returned home in amazement.

“They didn’t ask us for a single Item Card! They only said that because our home is on the nation’s frontier, they were clearing out the dangerous snow beasts to keep us safe.”

After the powerful beasts in the area had been wiped out, only comparatively weaker snow beasts remained.

Hunting became far safer for Toya’s family.

Ever since Toya could remember, bad news had periodically reached their household.

Relatives would lose against particularly powerful snow beasts…

Leave to hunt…

And never return home.

Now, however, the chances of a loved one failing to come back had been reduced to the absolute minimum.

Because of that, Toya felt genuine gratitude toward the nation that called itself Little Blue Sea.

His parents returned home one day after another with exciting news.

“My goodness, Toya! The Little Blue Sea Nation actually has a Tier 8 building! It’s just like the Divine Kingdom from the old legends. It’s warm inside, there’s endless hot water, and soldiers guard it outside. As long as we save up enough Item Cards, we’ll be able to move in someday!”

—”Toya, do you remember the stories about the gods that we used to tell you when you were little? No wonder the Little Blue Sea Nation is just like the Divine Kingdom from those legends. It has the blessing of a god. The one who founded it came from the Divine Kingdom.”

—”This is a wooden statue of the Great Creator God. As long as we become one of Her believers, we’ll be able to return to the Divine Kingdom together with the Little Blue Sea Nation. We’ll never have to fear the cold again.”

—”Toya, look! The electric heater you made is incredibly popular. We’ve earned a lot of points! We exchanged them for this insulated winter suit. From now on, you’ll be able to go outside like everyone else.”

—”Toya, we’ve become believers of our God. My dear child… this feeling is wonderful. Since the day I was born, I’ve never experienced warmth like this. It’s as though our God’s light is constantly shining upon me. My child, I hope you’ll be able to experience this same happiness.”

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.75.2 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

Inside the campground office.

With the campground managers subdued, one of the investigators stepped forward carrying a jar of clay.

The team had been assembled from three neighboring states. Most of the investigators had never worked together before and knew very little about each other’s abilities and supernatural items. Before using the clay, the investigator took a moment to explain how it worked.

The clay was called Fleshbone Clay, an evil artifact confiscated from a witch’s home. It was made from the flesh, blood, and cremated bones of the dead.

If a strand of a living person’s hair was mixed into the clay before it was applied to the user’s face, even a lump no larger than a thumb could completely alter the user’s appearance—body shape, facial features, scent, and even voice—making them indistinguishable from the owner of the hair.

There were, however, two important limitations.

First, the disguise lasted only thirty minutes. Once the time expired, the clay would dry, crack, and flake away, revealing the user’s original appearance.

Second, water was its greatest weakness. If the clay became wet, it would soften, collapse, and lose its effect almost immediately.

The investigator used the Fleshbone Clay to transform himself into one of the campground managers. After changing into the manager’s clothes and slipping on a pair of sandals, he walked down to the lakeshore.

Claiming that he had an important announcement to make, he successfully gathered all of the young swimmers into a nearby wooden pavilion, where the investigators quickly brought them under control.

Throughout the entire process, Gary kept his head lowered, allowing his damp hair to cover his face. He offered no resistance whatsoever.

The other campers, caught completely off guard by the sudden assault, were too busy watching the investigators surrounding them to notice that one unfamiliar man had somehow slipped into their ranks.

Without the slightest suspicion, Gary blended seamlessly into the group of campers and was escorted by two of the less combat-capable investigators to an abandoned villa near the campground, where they were assigned to guard the captives.

If Everly had been there, she would have immediately cited Horror Movie Survival Rule #11: Never split up or go off alone, and stopped the investigators from making such a fatal mistake.

Unfortunately…

She wasn’t.

Thus, in a corner where no one was paying attention, Death’s blade fell without warning.

Separated from the main group, the two investigators never even had a chance to react. One after the other, their throats were slit by a silent, blond man hidden among the campers, using nothing more than a shard of broken glass.

“AAAH!”

A shrill scream rang out as vivid blood once again spread across the weathered wooden floor of the abandoned villa.

…

“I don’t know why, but I have a really bad feeling about this.”

Beside Emerald Lake, a female investigator disguised as a vacationer suddenly pressed a hand to her chest, her expression grave.

“Because of Fake Gary? We heard he’s already driven into Red Oak Forest.”

“Maybe…” She frowned, her voice distant. “I’ve never felt my heart pounding this hard before. Can this operation really succeed?”

The surrounding investigators fell silent.

More than half of the SAI investigators possessed psychic abilities, and among psychics, having a “sixth sense” or an uncanny premonition was fairly common.

The woman who had just spoken wasn’t the only one feeling it. Several other investigators stationed throughout the campground who possessed precognitive or intuitive abilities had also begun exhibiting symptoms to varying degrees—heart palpitations, shortness of breath, chills, cold sweats…

It was a sign that this mission was extraordinarily dangerous.

There was a very real possibility that they were marching toward almost certain death.

No one was unafraid of dying, and the investigators’ grim expressions reflected that.

Even so, none of them considered backing down.

They might not have been as powerful as the personnel at SAI Headquarters, and each had joined the organization for different reasons. But there was one thing they all shared:

The moment they entered the SAI, they had already accepted the possibility of dying in the line of duty.

Even if this mission ended in certain death, none of them would retreat.

“The enemy is formidable. Some casualties are inevitable,” one investigator said, patting the woman reassuringly on the shoulder. “Fortunately, we’ve secured authorization to use an S-Class artifact. With it on our side, there’s a good chance this operation will succeed.”

As the investigator had said, for this capture operation, the SAI branches of Yonah and Dwight States had jointly submitted a request to Headquarters, which approved the deployment of the precious S-Class artifact: Brain in a Vat.

Imagine removing a person’s brain, preserving it in a tank of nutrient solution, and connecting its nerves to a supercomputer. The computer simulates everything a person would experience in daily life—temperature, humidity, color, touch, smell, sound…

When every sensation is indistinguishable from reality, how can you tell whether you are still a human being… or merely a brain suspended in a vat?

Is the world around you real?

Or is it nothing more than an illusion created by an extraordinary power?

The Brain in a Vat, confiscated from an underground research facility, was precisely such a tragic existence.

It was the brain of someone who had been completely deceived by an artificial reality, forever living inside a fabricated world.

This brain possessed supernatural powers.

It should have died long ago, but the illusion convinced it that it was still alive. Believing itself to be living, it defied the natural order and continued to “exist,” becoming a monster suspended somewhere between life and death.

With the Brain in a Vat as its center, every intelligent being that entered within a five-meter radius would be drawn into its illusion, losing all ability to act.

The term “being” here referred not only to humans and other conventional lifeforms, but also to abnormal existences such as monsters, demons, ghosts, and the like.

Naturally, Gary also fell within the range of beings the Brain in a Vat could capture.

The artifact itself was enormous. The supercomputer connected to it consisted of forty computing cabinets and eight network cabinets, occupying roughly sixty square meters. Every transport required the use of extremely expensive spatial artifacts.

Moreover, the Brain in a Vat was exceedingly fragile. Destroying either the supercomputer or the life-support apparatus surrounding the brain would permanently ruin the artifact.

For that reason, Headquarters approved its deployment only when dealing with the most dangerous and irredeemably vicious enemies.

With a weapon like that brought to bear…

Surely capturing a mere serial killer wouldn’t be impossible.

Before the operation began, in order to reassure everyone, a tarot reader took out a deck of cards and, under the watchful eyes of the entire team, performed a solemn divination.

The question posed in the reader’s mind was:

“Will Fake Gary be captured by the Brain in a Vat?”

The card drawn was Major Arcana XII — The Hanged Man (Upright).

Its meaning was that the seeker’s desired outcome would ultimately come to pass, but the path toward it would be filled with hardship and danger, demanding considerable sacrifice.

When they saw the result, everyone finally relaxed.

The tarot reader was renowned throughout several neighboring states for the remarkable accuracy of their divinations.

Since the cards had foretold that Fake Gary would be captured, today’s operation was surely destined to succeed…

And if success required the deaths of more investigators, so be it.

Their sacrifice would ensure that countless innocent people would never have to make the same sacrifice in the future.

The tarot reading proved frighteningly accurate.

Fake Gary came with overwhelming ferocity.

During his flight, he slaughtered several investigators in succession, his strength increasing dramatically with every kill. Compared with the monster from a year earlier, he was on an entirely different level.

Even with a carefully prepared trap designed specifically for him, the investigators found themselves completely overwhelmed when faced with such an intelligent, ruthless, bloodthirsty opponent.

A brutal battle unlike anything they had ever experienced erupted.

The most terrifying part was that the investigators had limited stamina, limited artifacts, and only one life.

Gary, on the other hand, grew stronger through every act of killing.

He could resurrect endlessly.

The longer the battle continued, the more powerful he became.

In the end, three investigators stepped forward voluntarily to serve as bait.

At the cost of their own lives, they lured Fake Gary to the location of the teleportation array.

Seizing the opportunity, the remaining investigators activated the formation, instantly transporting Gary to the dining area of the campground…

…where the Brain in a Vat had been hidden.

The illusion projected by the Brain in a Vat expanded outward.

In an instant, it seized Gary’s consciousness.

One moment, Fake Gary was drenched in blood, laughing wildly as he slaughtered everyone in sight.

The next…

It was as though his soul had been ripped away.

He closed his eyes and collapsed limply to the ground. His upturned face relaxed, and the bloodstained corners of his lips curled into a faint smile, as if he had fallen into a pleasant dream. Even the savage, bloodthirsty aura surrounding him seemed to fade considerably.

“It’s finally over…”

After confirming that the target had been captured, the battered investigators emerged from every corner of the campground, supporting one another as they walked.

The operation had succeeded.

Everyone should have been celebrating.

Yet a glance around them was enough to extinguish that joy. Their companions—people who had been laughing and chatting only a short while ago—now lay scattered across the ground as lifeless corpses.

A heavy sense of grief settled over them.

“The rescue helicopters will be here soon. Hang in there, everyone. If anyone still has healing artifacts left, please use them on the seriously wounded—”

Before the team leader could finish speaking, an agonizing pain exploded through his chest.

His eyes widened.

In disbelief, he looked down.

A gleaming dagger had somehow pierced straight through his chest, its pristine blade emerging from his back. Slowly, the knife drew downward, carving open an ever-widening wound.

“Ugh… cough—!”

The leader spat out a mouthful of blood and collapsed uncontrollably to the ground.

Reflected in his rapidly dimming eyes was the face of someone he knew all too well.

Locke.

Just moments ago, the two of them had fought side by side against Fake Gary.

And now…

Why was Locke’s weapon buried in his chest?

As blood poured from the fatal wound, the light quickly faded from the leader’s eyes.

He died without ever learning the answer.

That answer, however, was revealed only moments later.

After killing the team leader with a single strike—and casually destroying the communication device in his hand—”Locke” turned to face the remaining investigators.

With a lazy stretch, he reached up and casually peeled away the hardened, cracked layer of clay covering his face.

“Phew…”

A familiar smile spread across his lips.

“Using my own face is so much more comfortable.”

Chunks of hardened clay crumbled away with a soft patter.

As they fell, the man’s facial features, complexion, and build changed with them.

By the time he lowered his hand, “Locke” had an entirely different face—the face every investigator present knew all too well.

Only a few minutes earlier, they had been risking their lives trying to kill him…

Or rather, his duplicate.

Now, the real Gary stood before them, a bloodstained dagger in hand. His posture was relaxed, his expression calm as he looked over the surviving investigators.

His lips parted slightly, and he asked, with impeccable politeness,

“I’m in rather a hurry—I have somewhere else to be.”

“Would you mind dying a little faster?”

Those words became the last thing anyone there ever remembered.

…

“In order to avoid arousing Fake Gary’s suspicion, the Dwight State investigators who had originally been tracking him, along with the municipal police from Sunken and Veska, stayed on the perimeter and didn’t participate in the ambush. By the time they realized something had gone wrong and rushed to Emerald Lake Camp…”

“…the place was already a slaughterhouse.”

Everyone was dead.

The campers.

The investigators.

Even the rescue team that had hurried to the campground after receiving the distress call.

The police discovered countless bodies scattered throughout the campground and the abandoned villa nearby.

So much blood had flowed from the corpses that it stained the entire campground red.

The Brain in a Vat had also been destroyed.

Someone had thrown a stone from a distance, shattering the glass enclosure surrounding the brain. The nutrient solution spilled across the floor, and the brain—which had clung to its unnatural existence for who knew how long—finally collapsed into a putrid mass of flesh amid the broken glass.

As for the Fake Gary who should have been trapped inside the illusion…

Like the original body lying at the bottom of Emerald Lake…

He had vanished without a trace.

“…The municipal officer told me the rescue team flew in by helicopter,” Mike continued. “But every member of the rescue crew was found dead at the campground. There was no sign of the helicopter or its pilot. The investigators’ supernatural artifacts disappeared too.”

After recounting everything in one breath, Mike paused.

When he spoke again, his voice had become noticeably more solemn.

“Everly…”

“Be careful.”

“I think Gary’s next destination…”

“…is you.”

<< TOC >>

The post Rules Ch.310 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

Inside the Dragon King Temple, everyone crowded around the male teacher, eager to print as many portraits as possible and brainstorming ways to make the ink dry faster.

Though everyone was anxious, there actually wasn’t much work to do. Before long, the parents had taken over all the tasks.

Lu Yixing found himself with nothing to help with.

Watching them carefully hang the portraits up to dry with utmost caution, he quietly stepped back, intending to inform Captain Tan first.

Before leaving, Lu Yixing glanced at Jiang Xia once more.

She was leaning against a pillar with her eyes gently closed. A trace of fatigue lingered between her brows, while her right hand, hanging loosely at her side, trembled almost imperceptibly.

Lu Yixing frowned slightly.

He walked over to an elderly Taoist priest and whispered a few words in his ear. After the priest nodded, Lu Yixing thanked him and hurried out of the temple.

The old Taoist washed a teacup, poured it full of hot water, and carried it over to Jiang Xia’s table.

Setting it down in front of her, he asked, “Officer, you’ve been drawing for so long. Your arm must be exhausted, right? I know a little massage therapy. How about I give it a rub?”

“Huh?”

Jiang Xia’s arm was aching badly.

She would recover gradually if she rested for a while, of course—but who would turn down a proper massage when someone offered?

Everyone had been busy just now, so she hadn’t wanted to trouble anyone.

She hadn’t expected the elderly Taoist to volunteer.

Naturally, Jiang Xia wasn’t about to refuse.

She extended her arm toward him. “Then thank you very much, Daozhang.”

“Oh, don’t mention it.”

The white-bearded Taoist waved a hand dismissively, pulled over a stool, and sat down. With practiced fingers, he began kneading the acupoints around Jiang Xia’s wrist.

“We’ve only provided the venue. It’s nothing compared to what you police officers have been through. You’ve been working nonstop all this time and haven’t even had a sip of water.”

“Those child traffickers deserve to be thrown into a vat of boiling oil.”

As he spoke, the old Taoist naturally drifted back to the topic of the traffickers. Worry crept into his expression.

“I just wonder whether those three children can be found.”

Jiang Xia didn’t know the answer to that either.

Still, deep down, she was cautiously optimistic.

With transportation still so inconvenient these days, it would be difficult for two traffickers to move three children quickly to another city. As long as they hadn’t left by tonight, the children’s portraits could be posted all over the city.

By then, there would be no way for them to take the children away unnoticed.

But until the children were actually rescued, it was only a prediction—not a result.

Hopefully, everything would go smoothly.

Jiang Xia offered a silent prayer.

…

Meanwhile, at the marketplace, Tan Bingyi was so frustrated he was on the verge of cursing.

Staring at the jet-black police dog, he demanded irritably, “Did this dog skip its meal or what? It’s been circling the same spot forever!”

The dog handler replied helplessly, “There’s nothing we can do, Captain Tan. There are too many people here, and quite a few spice vendors. The scents are overwhelming. Lightning can’t pick up the missing children’s scent at all, so all he can do is keep circling.”

“Enough, enough. It’s always one problem after another. I don’t want to hear excuses. Let’s move.”

Tan Bingyi waved him off impatiently before turning to Chen Dong, who had just returned, drenched in sweat.

“How’s the printing factory?”

Chen Dong wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve.

“The master engravers have already started carving the plates. They said the drawings are easy to carve. The first plate should be finished and ready for printing around four o’clock, and the first portrait should come off the press by five. They’re also working on the other two plates. Two of the master engravers said they’ll take turns doing only the parts each of them is fastest at, so all three portraits should be ready at about the same time.”

Tan Bingyi raised his wrist and checked his watch.

It was already a little past two.

That meant they would have the portraits in just three more hours.

That was good news.

His mood improved ever so slightly as he straightened up.

“In a bit, call the district substation and have them send someone to pick them up from the printing factory.”

“No problem.”

Chen Dong nodded. Glancing around the marketplace, which had mostly emptied out, he asked, “Captain Tan, what’s the situation now?”

The question immediately rekindled Tan Bingyi’s anger.

“We’ve searched the entire market and found absolutely nothing! By the time the families realized the kids were missing, those bastards had already taken off.”

Everyone had already considered this possibility, but no one was willing to gamble on whether the traffickers might be brazen enough to hide in plain sight.

That was why Tan Bingyi hadn’t dared overlook anything. He had insisted on searching every nook and cranny of the marketplace, paying particular attention to baskets, burlap sacks, woven bags, and any other containers brought by vendors or customers that could conceal a child.

Although the search had turned up nothing—which made it seem like a wasted effort—it had at least narrowed down the search area and helped establish when the traffickers had left. That information would still prove valuable for the investigation going forward.

Even so, after putting in so much effort and still failing to crack the case, it was impossible not to feel frustrated.

“At this point, it’s already too late to set up roadblocks,” Tan Bingyi said with a sigh. “All we can do now is hope the neighborhood officers we sent out searching bring back some good news. But so far, not a single one has reported in.”

Chen Dong shook his head.

The marketplace had been packed with people. There were countless individuals matching similar descriptions, and the roads led not only into the city but also toward the surrounding communes. Expecting the hundred or so local officers they’d pulled in to track the suspects down by following the roads was wishful thinking.

Just as they resigned themselves to waiting for the printing factory, Lu Yixing, one of the detectives, came running over at full speed.

“Captain Tan, Brother Chen.”

After greeting them, he spoke rapidly.

“Jiang Xia used a mimeograph machine to print over a hundred portraits of the missing children. They’re drying right now. Shouldn’t we gather some people and get ready to distribute them to every major intersection?”

Tan Bingyi immediately seized on the important part.

“Over a hundred portraits already?!”

“This is a lifesaver!”

A little over a hundred wasn’t a huge number, but it was more than enough for the search teams to carry along the roads and ask passersby for information. Tan Bingyi’s spirits instantly lifted.

“Hurry! Xiao Lu, Old Chen! Round up as many people and vehicles as you can and head to the Dragon King Temple. The more, the better!”

With that, he took off running toward the temple himself, eager to see the portraits.

The moment he stepped inside, he saw that the bluestone courtyard was already covered with sheets of paper spread out to dry.

He casually picked up one of the sheets.

The same three children stared back at him, but this time the portraits had been drawn in yet another style. They consisted entirely of lines—even the hair was rendered with nothing but strokes.

This Jiang Xia was really something.

Who would’ve thought a single portrait could be drawn in so many different ways?

Clicking his tongue in amazement, he carefully returned the still-wet print to its place in the sun to continue drying. Then he looked around until his eyes landed on the mimeograph machine the male teacher was still operating inside the main hall.

He froze.

His eyes slowly began to shine.

Who would’ve imagined that something as useless as a mimeograph machine could be put to use like this?

If, in the future, every officer sent out to search for suspects carried a portrait like this…

He hardly dared imagine how much easier investigations would become.

No.

Once this case was over, even if he had to cling to Chief Duan’s leg and bawl his eyes out, he’d make sure Jiang Xia was transferred to his team.

Tan Bingyi made up his mind.

Meanwhile, Lu Yixing and Chen Dong quickly rounded up seven or eight people, all on bicycles. Once the ink had dried enough, each of them took several portraits and hurried off along different roads to deliver them to the neighborhood officers conducting the search.

…

Dawang Village.

Wang Leihu and his partner, Guo Yongnian, rode into the village on their bicycles.

Their team was responsible for the road leading toward Hongxing Commune.

There had been plenty of people along the way, with farmers returning home from the fields on both sides of the road.

There was no shortage of witnesses—but when they asked whether anyone had seen a woman in a gray jacket and black pants carrying a child around five years old, the answers were all over the place.

One person claimed they’d seen one such woman.

Another insisted they’d seen two.

After eliminating the sightings that had already been verified as unrelated and combining the remaining reports, there were still six women matching the description who couldn’t be ruled out.

There was nothing for it.

They would have to follow each lead themselves.

So the officers split into pairs and headed to different villages to verify each sighting.

The woman Wang Leihu and Guo Yongnian were investigating was in her early fifties. According to a witness, she had been seen heading toward Dawang Village.

So the two of them could only pedal their bicycles all the way there.

The rural dirt road was rough and uneven. Not only was it impossible to ride fast, but every bump and rut jolted them relentlessly, leaving them utterly exhausted.

As soon as they entered the village, Guo Yongnian got off his bicycle and began pushing it.

It was already past noon, and most of the villagers were resting at home. The village roads were nearly deserted.

He turned his head from side to side, searching for anyone in sight while chatting with Wang Leihu.

“This is the second one already, isn’t it? We’ve come all the way to another village. I’m telling you, it’s probably just another villager who took a kid to the market.”

As he spoke, Guo Yongnian suddenly stopped. His nose twitched a couple of times before he turned toward a nearby house.

“Oh! They’re making kimchi in this house!” he exclaimed. “Smells incredible. How about we buy some and snack on it while we’re on the road?”

Right on cue, Wang Leihu’s stomach let out a loud growl.

He hadn’t eaten a single bite since the morning.

With a sigh, he said, “Let’s finish asking our questions first.”

They walked a few more steps and arrived at the gate of the house.

The gate stood open. A little boy of four or five was squatting on the ground playing with mud, while an elderly woman, dressed in black trousers, a gray jacket, and a heavily patched apron, was scrubbing bowls with a pig-bristle brush.

“Ma’am.”

What a coincidence.

The very first identifying characteristics matched perfectly.

Wang Leihu got straight to the point.

“Did you take a child with you to the Dragon King Temple fair today?”

“A police officer?”

The elderly woman looked up. Seeing two uniformed officers standing at her gate, she was visibly startled.

She hurriedly explained, “I did go, but all I bought was a sickle. That’s not against the law, is it?”

“No, of course not. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

Wang Leihu continued, “On your way back, did you happen to see any strangers carrying young children?”

The woman thought carefully for a moment before shaking her head.

“No, I didn’t.”

Another false lead.

Disappointment was written all over Guo Yongnian’s face.

He couldn’t help grumbling, “At this rate, when are we ever going to find them?”

“That’s how door-to-door investigations work.” Wang Leihu waved him along. “Come on, let’s grab a couple of bites to eat and head to the next village.”

Guo Yongnian let out a weary sigh.

Wang Leihu didn’t have any better ideas. Trying to keep his partner’s spirits up, he took some money out of his pocket and bought two coarse-grain steamed buns and some pickled napa cabbage from the elderly woman. He handed one bun to Guo Yongnian, and the two of them squatted at the entrance of the village, washing the food down with well water. In no time, they had polished everything off.

After washing their hands, they gathered themselves and prepared to head for the next village.

Just as they were about to leave, a neighborhood officer came racing toward them on a bicycle from the distance, shouting at the top of his lungs.

“Officer Wang! Don’t go yet!”

He quickly rode up, stopped his bicycle, jumped off, and hurriedly pulled a thin sheet of paper from his shoulder bag. As he handed it over, he said excitedly,

“We’ve got an expert in our department! They drew portraits of all three missing children. Headquarters says to use these to search from now on—we don’t need to keep looking for a woman in black pants and a gray jacket anymore!”

“Portraits? That’s fantastic!”

Searching with an actual likeness was far easier than checking people one by one based on a vague description.

Guo Yongnian immediately sprang to his feet and eagerly took the paper.

“Wow, these portraits look incredibly lifelike. You can tell they’re children at a glance. Hey, when did our department get someone this talented?”

The officer delivering the message grinned.

“Just recently. She’s a young woman, too!”

“What?”

Guo Yongnian’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Now that’s something you don’t see every day!”

Meanwhile, Wang Leihu stared at the portraits as if he’d been struck by lightning.

Instantly, he remembered the young female officer he’d met just a few hours earlier.

His mind was in complete turmoil.

She had actually been able to draw the portraits?

She wasn’t some well-connected nepotism hire after all?!

The more he thought about the things he’d said to her, the hotter his face burned.

Damn…

I’ve really made a fool of myself this time.

When we get back, Chen Dong is never going to let me live this down.

Hearing Guo Yongnian continue asking which station the young officer belonged to, Wang Leihu became so embarrassed that he could barely stand still.

He hurriedly urged them,

“Uh… now that we’ve got the portraits, let’s not waste any more time. We should get moving and start asking around!”

With that, he pushed his bicycle forward and hurried off.

“Hey, Old Wang! Why are you in such a hurry?”

Watching him rush off, Guo Yongnian looked utterly baffled.

For some reason, Wang Leihu’s retreating figure seemed… strangely flustered.

…

On the city roads, Chief Wu’s team had also received quite a few reports of possible suspects.

The roads in the city were much better, allowing them to travel quickly by bicycle. Before long, the few people assigned to his team had all been located and ruled out.

With nothing else to do for the moment, he returned to the intersection to wait for the other teams to report back.

Several people were already there. Wang Huoda and Hu Wei had returned even earlier.

The four of them had barely exchanged a few words when a traffic police officer rode over.

“Chief Wu!”

The officer got off his bicycle and carefully counted out four portraits from his satchel before handing them over.

“Here. These are the newly issued portraits of the missing children. Headquarters wants everyone to switch to searching by the portraits immediately. Please take them and distribute them to the officers conducting the search.”

With that, he climbed back onto his bicycle and promptly headed for the next intersection.

“So Xiao Jiang actually managed to draw them!” Old Hu, who often worked with Chief Wu, pulled out one of the portraits.

After studying it for a couple of seconds, he suddenly noticed something odd.

Holding it up to the sunlight, he exclaimed in surprise,

“They’re printed? Looks like they used a mimeograph machine… Huh. She even knows how to engrave mimeograph stencils? Chief Wu, tell me—what can’t Xiao Jiang do?”

“How should I know?”

Chief Wu held the portrait in his hands, his emotions thoroughly mixed.

He was delighted because Jiang Xia had produced the portraits, which meant finding the children would be much easier.

But he was also worried.

Once these portraits were distributed, everyone—from the Municipal Public Security Bureau all the way down to every local station—would learn that their station had someone this talented.

How much longer could they possibly keep her?

It probably wouldn’t be long before the transfer order arrived.

Sure, this apprentice of his had some unusual hobbies…

Her talents were a little unconventional…

And she had an uncanny knack for giving him headaches…

But she could solve cases.

He’d only had her under his wing for less than a month.

He hadn’t even had time to properly “break her in,” and now someone was already going to poach her.

He let out a long sigh.

Chief Wu let out a long sigh before forcing himself to focus again.

“Now that the portraits are here, let’s not stand around. Old Hu, take these two to the officers who haven’t come back yet. Have them retrace their routes and ask everyone again.”

“Got it.”

Old Hu agreed, tucked another portrait carefully into his bag, mounted his bicycle, and rode off to find the others.

Chief Wu then called over Wang Huoda and Hu Wei, who had already returned, and the three of them headed back into the city.

Although they had already searched that stretch of road once, there was always the chance they had overlooked something. It would be more reassuring to go over it again with the portraits in hand.

The three rode along, stopping every so often to question passersby.

Unfortunately, everyone they asked said they hadn’t seen the children.

As the day grew hotter, their throats became parched from asking the same questions over and over. Spotting a small farmhouse just ahead, they rode over, hoping to ask for a drink of water.

The gate stood open.

An elderly man was sitting in the courtyard, basking in the sun. Seeing the three officers walk in, he looked at them curiously.

“Huh? You again? Didn’t you come by around noon? Why are you back?”

Chief Wu recognized him at a glance.

The courtyard sat close to the road. If anyone had been outside, they would certainly have seen what was happening on the road, which was why he’d stopped by earlier that morning. Unfortunately, the old man had been inside all day making straw brooms and hadn’t gone out once, so he hadn’t seen anything.

Hu Wei, never one to mince words, said, “Sir, we’ve been running around all afternoon and we’re dying of thirst. We were hoping to ask for a bowl of water.”

“Oh.”

The old man nodded in understanding and pointed toward a corner of the courtyard.

“The water jar’s over there. There’s a dipper inside. Help yourselves.”

None of the three officers stood on ceremony. They scooped cool water from the jar with the dipper and took turns drinking.

Chief Wu finished first.

While waiting for the other two, he habitually pulled out one of the portraits. Even though he knew the old man hadn’t left the house, he still held it out and asked,

“Brother, have you seen any of these three children?”

He had expected the usual answer.

Instead, the old man pinched one corner of the portrait and studied it carefully for quite a while before suddenly saying,

“I think… I’ve seen this chubby-faced one.”

“What?”

Chief Wu froze for a moment before immediately snapping back to attention.

“Brother, when did you see them?”

“It was this morning,” the old man recalled. “Around eleven o’clock, I think.”

“A husband and wife stopped by to ask for some water. The man was carrying a shoulder pole, and the woman was holding this child.” He pointed at the portrait. “She’d put a straw hat on him, covering most of his face. If she hadn’t needed both hands to drink and set the child down for a moment, I wouldn’t have seen him at all.”

“Oh, right. I don’t know if the little boy was just worn out or what, but he was asleep on the woman’s shoulder. She put him down and picked him back up again, making quite a bit of movement, yet he never woke up.”

The moment he heard that, Chief Wu was already seventy to eighty percent convinced.

Children around five or six were bundles of energy. A five-minute nap could leave them bouncing around for the next two hours, and they were light sleepers. It was highly unusual for one to remain completely unresponsive while being put down and picked up again.

There was a good chance the child had been dr*gged.

The couple’s suspicion level immediately skyrocketed.

Especially the man.

He had been carrying a shoulder pole with two baskets hanging from either end—large enough to hide the other two children.

Chief Wu hurriedly asked, “Brother, do you remember what the couple looked like? What they were wearing? Which direction they went?”

The old man thought for another moment before shaking his head.

“The man never came over, so I didn’t get a look at his face.”

“But I remember the woman. She was around forty years old, wearing a blue jacket and blue trousers. About five foot three. She had a square, rounded face, thin eyebrows, and her lower lip was thinner than her upper one.”

“After they finished drinking, they continued along that road toward the city.”

Blue clothes?

No wonder they hadn’t found them.

These traffickers had a much stronger sense of counter-surveillance than they’d expected.

They had simply changed clothes.

With the suspects no longer matching the witness descriptions they’d been chasing all afternoon, it was no surprise the search had come up empty.

As the thought crossed his mind, Chief Wu glanced down at the portrait in his hand again.

The corners of his mouth slowly lifted into a smile.

The traffickers could never have imagined that their station had someone with such an extraordinary talent—or that even in this little farmhouse courtyard, Chief Wu would refuse to skip asking one last question.

“Old Wang, we’ve got a lead!” Chief Wu exclaimed, instantly energized. “This gentleman saw the traffickers! There were two of them, and they headed back toward the city. Let’s move!”

His spirits completely revived. Raising his voice, he turned to Hu Wei and ordered,

“Xiao Hu, you’ve got the stamina. Take this gentleman to the Dragon King Temple and have Xiao Jiang see if she can draw portraits of the traffickers. If we can’t catch them ourselves…”

“…then we’ll be relying on her.”

He refused to believe the traffickers could change their faces as easily as they’d changed their clothes.

<< _ >>

The post Criminal Master System Ch.20 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

Cheng Qisheng watched as the Skywing Dragons were dragged into the abyss of war by the people of Blue Sea.

The snow-white basin had become a basin of blood. The mournful cries of the Skywing Dragons echoed without end.

One after another, Blue Sea citizens—each barely a fifth the size of a Skywing Dragon—threw themselves at the black, winged behemoths, hauling them down from the sky with all their strength.

If this scene were filmed and released as a movie back in Blue Sea, the visuals and sound effects alone would make Cheng Qisheng a fortune.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t After Traveling Between Two Worlds, My Real War Footage Became a Blockbuster. As the Great Creator God—cautious to the point of bordering on paranoid—she was the only audience fortunate enough to witness this epic battlefield spectacle.

After the Safe City expanded, the Blue Sea government wasted no time on its first major construction project: city gates.

This Safe City now covered more than 40,000 square kilometers, and it already boasted 2,890 gates, with more still under construction.

The frigid environment of Dazzling Star severely limited Blue Sea’s construction speed. Otherwise, they would have built even more.

Cheng Qisheng had read Aether’s report. Blue Sea’s target was a total of 6,700 city gates.

Why did they need so many?

The answer was right before her eyes.

After more than six hours of fighting, the battlefield had become a sea of blood so gruesome it looked as though it had been censored into a crimson mosaic. The number of Skywing Dragons had dropped dramatically, yet endless streams of Blue Sea citizens were still pouring out from gate after gate, rapidly reinforcing the front lines.

That was why Blue Sea needed so many gates.

Ever since Blue Sea Safe City arrived in this world, it had never once been able to deploy its full military strength.

It couldn’t be helped. Every location where Blue Sea had descended had been a case of too many monks competing for too little porridge.

A battlefield could only accommodate so many soldiers. Pack in too many people, and it would devolve into a chaotic crush. At that point, if someone threw a spear and it fell back into the crowd, even the nimblest Blue Sea citizen wouldn’t have enough room to dodge.

—Don’t ask Cheng Qisheng how she knew.

Back in the Primitive Era, Old Eighth had personally demonstrated the lesson with their own bodies:

On a battlefield, people must never be packed shoulder to shoulder.

A lot of people had been cooped up for far too long.

Take this elementary school teacher, for example. He wore a gentle smile, but with his face splattered in blood, he looked more like a deranged serial killer.

Since he wasn’t a frontline combatant and had to look after the children, he had spent every single day since Blue Sea Safe City arrived on Dazzling Star living in the school’s heated greenhouse.

With. A. Bunch. Of. Blue. Sea. Kids.

Only someone who had worked in Blue Sea’s education system could truly appreciate how utterly maddening that was.

Originally, the government had planned to let the teachers out today to blow off some steam, even if there hadn’t been this many Skywing Dragons.

Who could have guessed that the dragon population here would be so abundant—or that the Great Creator God would issue a divine decree ordering everyone to be deployed?

Our God is merciful!

The people of Blue Sea soon noticed something.

The smaller Skywing Dragons were obviously smarter than the larger ones.

The last time they had attacked a Skywing Dragon flock at the coordinates provided by Puya Safe City, the dragons had stubbornly fought until only a dozen or so remained before fleeing in panic.

But these smaller Skywing Dragons were different. After just six hours of battle and the loss of a little over ten million of their kind, the remaining twenty million or so had already begun to hesitate, circling high overhead instead of diving in to attack.

The endless stream of Blue Sea citizens pouring out of the city gates collectively cried out in despair.

No! Don’t leave! We just got here!

Fortunately, the smaller Skywing Dragons didn’t leave.

“Screee!”

“Screee!”

Their piercing cries rang across the sky.

Soon, countless snow beasts came charging across the endless white plains toward the battlefield.

Every single one of them was Tier 2.

The blood-soaked citizens already standing in the middle of the battlefield…

The citizens who had just reached the edge of the battlefield, rushing excitedly toward the basin…

The citizens who had finally made it out of Safe City after waiting impatiently in line…

Every last one of them lit up with excitement.

Wonderful!

The Skywing Dragons hadn’t fled—they’d even called over more Item Cards…

No, wait—they’d called over more snow beasts!

The countless Blue Sea citizens, who had been itching for a fight, enthusiastically rushed forward to welcome them.

“Move!”

“Drag the Skywing Dragons down first! Don’t let them get away!”

“Here I come! Watch my giant net attack!”

Even with 2,890 city gates, people were still pouring out in an endless flood.

…

Meanwhile, high above the city, inside one of the school’s heated greenhouses, a group of tiny children stood obediently in their uniforms, pressing against the fogged-up windows as they tried to make out the battle outside.

“Wow! It looks so fun! Teacher, I want to go play too!”

“Teacher! Teacher! I’m a Skywing Dragon! Screee! I’m flying! I flew to the left, now I’m flying to the right! Come catch me! Hahaha!”

“Zhang Zhimiao, you’re not a Skywing Dragon! Skywing Dragons fly—they don’t crawl on the ceiling! Look at me! I’m the Skywing Dragon!”

A little boy had somehow climbed onto the three-meter-high ceiling. He suddenly spread his arms and leaped downward.

“Screee! Here comes the Skywing Dragon!”

His target was the teacher’s back.

The teacher, who was looking down at her phone, didn’t even bother to raise her head. She simply extended one hand and, with flawless timing, caught the child in midair.

The little boy instantly ended up sprawled across her palm like a tiny turtle.

“Tian Xiaodou,” the teacher said calmly, “is that how your PE teacher taught you? Tell me, when diving from above onto an enemy, what are you supposed to do?”

The boy wriggled for a moment, but realizing there was no escaping her grip, he answered obediently,

“Protect your vulnerable areas, like your abdomen and your head and neck. Use a weapon to attack first whenever possible. Strike before the enemy can.”

Only then did the teacher look up, forcing a gentle smile.

“Very good. Where are you trying to go?”

The boy excitedly pointed at a desk about five meters away.

With a light flick of her wrist, the teacher tossed him through the air.

He landed lightly on the designated desk.

His eyes sparkled with excitement.

“Woohoo! I can fly!!!”

He thrust one arm into the air, imitating the adults’ battle cry.

“Our God watches over us! Long live Blue Sea!”

Then he immediately resumed scrambling around the classroom, climbing over everything in sight and play-fighting with his classmates.

His behavior wasn’t unusual in the slightest.

Because every child in the classroom was doing exactly the same thing—climbing everywhere, roughhousing with one another, never staying still for even a second.

The Little Long-Tendril was climbing around too.

Its bucket had long since been upgraded to a fish tank, now filled more than halfway with water. The tank had a narrow opening, allowing it to tuck all of its tendrils inside and seal the mouth completely. That way, it could drag the tank around wherever it went without worrying about running out of water.

It crawled over to the teacher’s feet and pressed one of its tendrils against her skin.

“I’m a Skywing Dragon! I’m biting Teacher! Bloop bloop!”

Still wearing her gentle smile, the teacher picked up the Little Long-Tendril.

“Such a good child. Skywing Dragons need sharp teeth, you know.”

The Little Long-Tendril proudly raised its tendrils, indicating that it had sharp tendrils instead.

“Mmm, I suppose those work too. Very nice. Now then, where would you like to go?”

One whisker pointed toward the elastic safety net stretched across the back of the classroom. It had been specially prepared as its “landing pad,” so it could play the game of “Teacher Toss” with the other children without risking its fish tank cracking.

“All right, get ready.”

The teacher lifted the Little Long-Tendril, took careful aim…

Whoosh!

She tossed it through the air.

It landed squarely on the net and let out a series of delighted bloop bloop cries.

The teacher maintained her warm smile as she threw more than thirty students in succession. Finally, the classroom door opened from the outside.

Ji Anze hurried in.

“Ms. Li, I’m here to take over.”

The smile that had seemed welded to Ms. Li’s face instantly turned into one of genuine joy.

“Thank you! Thank you so much! I’m off!”

She dashed out like a gust of wind, silently praying to their God.

Please, don’t let all the Skywing Dragons be dead already… Please leave some for me!

Ji Anze took the seat the teacher had just vacated.

The moment the Little Long-Tendril saw that its “Mama” had arrived, it excitedly climbed down from the elastic net. Weaving around its classmates—who were all running wild like a pack of little demons—it used its tendrils as legs and scampered rapidly across the classroom before climbing onto Ji Anze’s lap.

Ji Anze lowered his head slightly in practiced cooperation, allowing his child to press its interface tendrils snugly against his cheek.

He heard the child exclaim excitedly,

“Fight! Fight the Skywing Dragons!”

“That’s right,” Ji Anze replied. “Everyone outside is fighting the Skywing Dragons. When you’re a little older, you’ll be able to fight them too.”

The Little Long-Tendril chirped,

“Bloop bloop! Mama fights Skywing Dragons!”

Ji Anze—a man in every sense of the word—didn’t even blink.

“Mama has already fought them before. Your teacher has been staying at the school this whole time and never got the chance, so Mama came to take over for the teacher.”

The teachers were heading out to fight, but someone still had to look after the children.

So the government and the schools had jointly recruited volunteers from across Blue Sea to substitute for the teachers for a day.

Officially they were volunteers, but the government was offering very generous substitute pay. Even so, relatively few people had signed up.

After all, it was a day off.

Nobody wanted to spend their holiday supervising a classroom full of Blue Sea children during their time off.

In the end, most of the volunteers were parents like Ji Anze.

They all shared roughly the same mindset:

The teachers have been suffering on our behalf all this time. Now that it matters, it’s our turn to make the sacrifice.

Ji Anze didn’t actually think looking after the Little Long-Tendril was suffering.

But he knew the little one loved being with its family, so he had signed up to spend the day with it.

Something poked his calf.

Looking down, he saw a little girl with sparkling eyes.

“Baby’s mama! Let’s play Chase Battle! You be the Skywing Dragon, and we’ll chase you, okay?!”

Behind her stood a whole crowd of children with equally sparkling eyes. Some were hanging upside down, some were standing on top of their classmates, and others were crawling across the floor. Every one of them was eagerly waiting for his answer.

The Little Long-Tendril slid down from his lap and “stood” together with its classmates.

Though its face was unreadable, Ji Anze, as its parent, could easily sense its anticipation.

Ji Anze: “…”

Imitating Ms. Li’s warm, gentle smile, he forced one onto his own face.

“Of course. Let’s play.”

…All right.

Ms. Li had only just left, and he was already starting to miss her.

…

After confirming the number of Tier 2 land-dwelling snow beasts that had been summoned, Cheng Qisheng posted a message in the City Lord group chat.

Blue Sea Safe City: [Everyone, be careful. The snow beasts may be evolving. I’ve discovered a large number of Tier 2 snow beasts. There are a lot of them, and they may have already broken free of their reproductive lock.]

The previously casual, chatty group instantly fell silent before erupting.

[Huh?!]

[A huge number of Tier 2 snow beasts?! Damn it! Tier 1s already give my residents enough trouble. Are Tier 2s seriously supposed to let us live?]

[Thank you, Boss Blue Sea! You’re such a good person, sharing information this important with the rest of us!]

[Thanks, Boss! My boss is the kindest!]

[Is that really true? I can believe the snow beasts evolving, but if they’ve broken their reproductive lock, then how are we supposed to fight them?]

Normally, when City Lords discovered information this important, they would keep it under wraps for a while. At most, they’d drop a vague hint in the group chat, attach a purchase link, and earn themselves a tidy sum of crystals.

Blue Sea Safe City, however, had completely ignored the unwritten rules and dropped such explosive news without asking for anything in return.

It was the first time anyone had seen something like this.

Since she had already shared the most crucial piece of information outright, the other City Lords stopped worrying about secrecy as well.

[Damn, damn, damn! It’s true! A whole bunch of Tier 2 snow beasts have appeared near my Safe City!]

[A beast tide! It’s a beast tide! How is this possible? Beast tides are only supposed to attack small villages with low populations!]

[Danger! I see them too!]

[No, that’s not right. The beast tide isn’t attacking Safe Cities specifically—it’s attacking the entire world! The world’s difficulty has increased!]

[I’ve got to go! I need to command my troops! Good luck, everyone! I hope we all survive!]

As soon as Cheng Qisheng sent out the warning, Safe Cities across the world immediately went on high alert, rapidly mobilizing their residents to prepare for battle.

Thanks to the advance notice, many Safe Cities were able to respond in time to the sudden worldwide beast tide instead of being caught completely off guard.

Only a handful of messages remained in the group chat—mostly words of thanks. The vast majority of the City Lords had already shifted their full attention to fighting the beast tide.

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.75.1 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.