Cheng Qisheng was puzzled.

Ever since her followers had started lassoing snow beasts and happily racing off into the distance, she had gone from a Creator God with so much free time that she could leisurely enjoy hot pot…

…to an extremely busy Creator God.

Not every team—or lone believer—was lucky enough to obtain a silver Item Card and build themselves a cabin on the very first day.

No matter how strong this group of pioneers with combat power above seventy might be, they were still flesh and blood. Without a place to rest or food to replenish themselves, they simply couldn’t keep going forever.

So Cheng Qisheng once again resorted to her trusty head-patting technique.

Pat one person’s head, then another’s.

This one, then that one.

And then she noticed something.

Huh?

Why were there three faith links all by themselves on an entirely different continent?

How on earth had they managed that?

Even the traveling team that had set off again and marched without stopping hadn’t gone as far as those three.

Only after glimpsing the blurry memories of their journey—through which she’d seen them “flying” all the way there—did Cheng Qisheng finally understand what had happened.

Because those three children had ended up stranded so far away from everyone else, Cheng Qisheng paid them special attention.

Every day, the moment she opened her eyes, the first thing she did was check on them.

Using her tried-and-true philosophy of it doesn’t matter if the method is simple, as long as it works, she repeatedly employed the divine head-pat technique to help them survive those hardest early days.

Even after watching their lives steadily improve, she had gotten into the habit of dropping by once a day to check on them.

And then…

The three of them obtained a snowmobile Item Card and decided it was time to return to Blue Sea.

Cheng Qisheng became even more confused.

So… you three never realized that the route you had flown along crossed a bottomless glacial rift that completely separated two continents?

At present, the situation was essentially this:

Blue Sea Safe City was on Continent A.

Song Xi, Wang Moning, and Shen Jinyang were on Continent B.

Between them stretched a massive ice chasm.

The only way across was to fly.

There was no land route whatsoever.

In other words, there was absolutely no way for them to retrace their original path.

…No wonder the three of them had been so completely unconcerned all this time. They had no idea they were stranded on an entirely different continent.

Cheng Qisheng had assumed they were simply calm by nature, which was why they had carried on with life so composedly.

As it turned out, while they were being carried through the air that day, not a single one of the three had paid any attention to what lay beneath them.

Watching them grow more and more excited as they discussed setting off the next morning, Cheng Qisheng had no choice but to issue a divine oracle.

—Don’t leave. This route is impassable.

The three young people who had been eagerly preparing for their triumphant return home all froze.

Huh?

Wang Moning went blank. A wave of panic spread through her before she could stop it.

“Does that mean… we can’t go back?”

Song Xi clutched her head.

“Then we can’t go back to exchange our cards for contribution points? I’ve already decided which district I want to buy a house in!”

Shen Jinyang remained comparatively calm.

“I wouldn’t say we can’t go back. Dazzling Star is a planet. In theory, if we head in the opposite direction and just keep walking… eventually we’d circle around and make it back.”

Although Song Xi and Shen Jinyang both appeared relatively composed—and Shen Jinyang even hugged the visibly flustered Wang Moning to comfort her—Cheng Qisheng could tell that all three of the young women were frightened.

The people of Blue Sea were not afraid of battle.

They were not afraid of death.

But the thought of never being able to return home…

Never being able to return to the embrace of their Creator God…

That was truly terrifying.

There wasn’t much Cheng Qisheng could do.

She could guide her followers’ sense of direction, but when flying was required, her guidance alone wasn’t enough.

Item Cards were incredibly mysterious. They seemed capable of producing almost anything.

She had assumed the three young women were thinking the same thing she was—that they were simply waiting until an Item Card capable of solving this problem appeared.

After all, if a whole house could come out of an Item Card, why couldn’t an aircraft capable of flying through polar extreme conditions?

If they insisted on making the journey back without relying on such an Item Card, it would indeed be extraordinarily difficult.

Still…

It wasn’t as though there were absolutely no alternatives.

If they headed in the opposite direction instead, there was a chance they might encounter another Safe City.

The sky was nothing but endless falling snow, making it impossible to determine their position from above.

But this world contained more than forty Safe Cities in total.

In other words, Dazzling Star now had more than forty known landing points—one for each Safe City.

The Blue Sea government suspected that Blue Sea Safe City had descended into what had been the ocean before the apocalypse, since no one had ever lived there.

Four months had passed, yet the people of Blue Sea still hadn’t encountered a single native inhabitant of Dazzling Star.

It was as if this endless expanse of snow contained nothing except Blue Sea’s people and snow beasts.

Blue Sea had been fighting this entire apocalypse in single-player mode.

…Not that the citizens minded. If anything, they were rather pleased about it.

However, the number of snow beasts on this continent had clearly begun to decline.

That was completely different from what the other city lords had been saying in the group chat.

One city lord had complained:

[These damned snow beasts reproduce so quickly it’s like they grow straight out of the ground. We can’t kill them fast enough. I’ve lost another batch of citizens.]

Weren’t they supposed to be impossible to wipe out?

Weren’t they supposed to sprout from the ground like weeds?

At this rate, in another three months at most, there wouldn’t be any snow beasts left in this region.

The Blue Sea government was becoming increasingly concerned.

Using the environmental surveys and snow beast intelligence gathered by explorers, together with the information Cheng Qisheng had obtained from Coriander about Dazzling Star, the experts reached a rather frustrating conclusion.

Blue Sea’s luck had been… too good.

They had landed on a section of the planet where the snow beasts were generally much weaker—and which had been isolated from the main population of the species.

Their theory was that when the snow beasts first appeared on Dazzling Star, the higher-tier individuals—those requiring much larger amounts of food—had naturally concentrated around human settlements.

They built nests there and reproduced rapidly.

As a result, the continents with large human populations also became the ones with the greatest numbers of snow beasts.

By contrast, the region where Blue Sea Safe City had descended had apparently been uninhabited both before and after the apocalypse.

(Which only reinforced the suspicion that it had once been part of the ocean.)

As a result, the local snow beast population had always been relatively small, and the beasts themselves were generally much weaker than elsewhere.

Moreover, although this landmass was enormous—so vast that, aside from Song Xi, Wang Moning, and Shen Jinyang, no one had ever reached its edge—the steadily declining snow beast population, with no signs of replenishment, strongly suggested that it was an isolated region.

There was a perfect term for a place like this:

An isolated beginner’s zone.

Most city lords would probably have considered themselves unbelievably lucky.

What a perfect place!

The danger level was low, there were plenty of snow beasts—but not too many—and everything was manageable.

It was like winning the lottery.

But for Blue Sea, this region was rather… underwhelming.

We signed up for an Extreme Danger mission… and this is all we get?

The current snow beast population was still enough to sustain them.

But what about three months from now?

Blue Sea simply had too many people.

Even with all the cold-weather suits obtained from the Item Cards that explorers had brought back, they had only just managed to equip a little over half of the population.

The remaining minority still had no choice but to stay inside the city’s heated shelters.

Fortunately, Blue Sea had a substantial stockpile of resources. As the number of residents requiring shelter gradually decreased, they were able to scale down the heated areas after relocating and protecting essential equipment.

Otherwise, they wouldn’t even have had enough energy to keep everyone warm.

Blue Sea’s projections showed that even if they exterminated every snow beast on this continent, the total loot would only barely be enough to provide every resident with a single cold-weather suit.

There still wouldn’t be enough Item Cards to give everyone even one Item House.

Cheng Qisheng looked toward Song Xi and the others.

Her original plan had been simple: once this continent had been completely cleared, Blue Sea would head toward the coordinates of Coriander Safe City.

Coriander hadn’t minded sharing its location with her.

But honestly, Cheng Qisheng could tell that the region where Coriander was located didn’t have many snow beasts either.

Coriander itself wasn’t disappointed by that.

If anything, it was delighted.

These three young people, who had accidentally found themselves on another continent, might instead bring Blue Sea Safe City a whole new range of possibilities.

“Set out in the direction opposite from the one you came. Find another Safe City and learn its name and circumstances. The Temple may descend near it.”

Through the bond linking her to her followers, the great Creator God sent them this message.

This world was one that favored individual strength. Success depended primarily on the capabilities of each Safe City’s residents, so Cheng Qisheng had rarely spoken in the city lords’ group chat.

That didn’t mean cooperation was impossible.

By signing contracts, forming temporary alliances, and exchanging benefits, they could still obtain the coordinates of other regions.

After a moment’s thought, she gently patted the three of them on the head through the bond and added one more instruction.

“From this moment onward, the three of you are reassigned as the Blue Sea Advance Team.”

Her plainspoken words were transformed by the believers’ bond into the vague, solemn cadence of a divine oracle, yet their meaning reached the three young women with perfect clarity.

The three of them froze.

The Blue Sea Advance Team?!

The one with a guaranteed monthly salary of 3,000 contribution points, plus all kinds of benefits and special allowances?

Advance Team members also received generous rewards for distinguished service.

Any resources or Item Cards they obtained while on missions belonged entirely to them.

It was essentially the equivalent of becoming a crystal hunter—with a guaranteed paycheck.

They had heard that, back on Velvet Star, a five-person squad had discovered the coordinates of Yunbula Nation, allowing Blue Sea to locate its enormous grain depot.

The great Creator God had personally bestowed upon them the title of Blue Sea Advance Team.

And rewarded each of them with an entire house.

An actual house.

One that was completely paid off.

And more importantly…

This was an order from their God.

The great deity had entrusted them with a mission.

When they completed it…

That would be the day they returned home.

In an instant, all three lost their disappointment.

Their anxiety vanished as well.

Their eyes shone brighter than ever.

They felt unbelievably fortunate.

Each of them respectfully placed a hand over her chest and pledged in unison,

“Thank you, our God! Leave it to us! We will definitely find another Safe City!”

Alone on another continent, the three of them were as tiny as ants amid the endless snowy wilderness.

Outside the window, wind and snow raged across the vast, unknown land stretching into the distance.

Yet their hearts burned with unwavering passion.

“Our God above!”

“Long live Blue Sea!!”

Each of them pressed a hand firmly over her heart, gazing at the howling blizzard with absolute reverence and devotion.

Our God…

We will do everything we can to return to Your embrace.

…

Blue Sea Safe City—

Snowmobiles came and went in a steady stream. Four months had passed, and most of Blue Sea’s residents were now wearing cold-resistant clothing obtained from item cards, allowing them to go outside without difficulty.

Because there were too few Silver Building Cards, snowmobiles had become the most popular means of transportation.

As long as they had enough energy, pioneers could ride them at high speed across the snowfields, drawing the attention of snow beasts and luring them into attacking.

The snowmobile rental station was bustling with people. After returning the snowmobile she had rented, Ruo Buyan entered the public hall with her teammates. She took off her outer cold-weather gear, carefully inspected it for any damage, and, after confirming it was intact, returned the cold-resistant clothing to the equipment rental counter.

“As usual, send this snow beast carcass to the laboratory.”

After finishing the return procedures, Ruo Buyan turned to her teammates and said,

“By tomorrow morning, after I’ve removed the useful parts, you can take the rest away.”

The teammates who had been quietly following her nodded.

One of the younger members asked curiously,

“Can you really extract anything useful from them?”

To him, these snow beasts didn’t seem much different from the wild animals on Dark Star. Other than their meat being edible—though a bit tough and dry—they looked pretty ordinary.

Ruo Buyan replied gently, “Everything has its purpose. If it seems useless, it’s only because we haven’t discovered its value yet.”

“From these snow beasts, I’ve found that they don’t have a continuous circulatory system of blood vessels. Instead, they possess only a single neural pathway running through their bodies. They also have detachable locking joints, extremely simple cellular antigens, and very low transplant rejection responses…”

“Wait, wait, wait!!”

The young man who had asked the question wore the expression of someone thinking, “What are you talking about? What am I even listening to?” as though he’d just been hit by a psychic attack.

“Professor Ruo, could you explain it in a way the rest of us can actually understand?”

Ruo Buyan nodded.

“Of course.”

She actually knew her teammates couldn’t understand a word she was saying. It was just that they had been working together for four months without producing any real results. She was worried they might give up on the partnership, so she had deliberately phrased it that way.

“To put it simply, in theory, as long as we can create a suitable interface, these snow beast limbs can be used as weapons.”

“Oh~”

Another young man looked excited.

“So, Professor Ruo, when are you going to make this interface?”

Ruo Buyan did her best to look completely confident.

“…I’m still researching it. Scientific research takes time.”

This was a skill she had developed back in her home world. Whenever investors asked about progress or she needed to secure more funding, no matter how uncertain she felt inside, she had to appear absolutely confident on the outside.

The investors would then ask all sorts of follow-up questions. As long as she answered them with unwavering confidence and painted an attractive picture of the future, that was enough.

And when they asked again next time…

She would simply paint them another picture.

“Got it! Then keep it up, Professor Ruo! We’ll be waiting for your breakthrough!”

“And don’t stay up all night in the lab! With this awful weather, your laboratory isn’t exactly warm anyway. We don’t mind waiting another couple of days before eating it—the snow beast meat isn’t going to spoil.”

Ruo Buyan froze.

That was it?

No more questions? They weren’t going to ask for a deadline?

But after saying those few words, the group looked perfectly satisfied.

“Let’s go grab something at the cafeteria.”

“Sounds good!”

Although there was only a chance that a snow beast would drop an item card…

Every single snow beast was made of meat!

And the bigger the beast, the more meat it yielded.

As a result, the people of Blue Sea had been living quite happily these past few months. Every day, they could see groups returning from the wilderness with snow beasts slung over their shoulders.

Their team, however, was different from the others.

Most teams hauled a snow beast back, butchered it, and cooked it right away.

Their team always handed it over to Ruo Buyan first. Only after she had finished dissecting it and conducting her research would they eat the meat.

The reason was simple: this hunter squad, “Pie from the Sky”, had signed a Materials Supply Contract with Ruo Buyan.

Their responsibilities were to provide snow beasts for her research. From time to time, they would also take her out into the field, protecting her so she could observe living snow beasts up close. If she designated a particular specimen, they would pursue and hunt it for her.

In return, once Ruo Buyan’s research produced results, she would give the team 3% of the profits generated by those results.

Three percent might not sound like much, but to the Pie from the Sky team, it was practically effortless income.

Even without the contract, they would have been heading out to hunt every day anyway. Signing it barely changed their routine. The only difference was that instead of taking the snow beasts straight home to butcher, they first delivered them to Ruo Buyan’s laboratory. By the time they got them back, the whole carcasses had simply become neatly sliced cuts of meat.

If Ruo Buyan failed to produce anything useful, they didn’t really lose anything.

But if she did make a breakthrough…

Then it really would be like pie falling from the sky.

Because of that, the Pie from the Sky team was remarkably relaxed about the arrangement. As soon as they arrived at the cafeteria, they cheerfully began discussing what to eat that day.

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.49.1 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

“Woohoo!!!”

“Let’s go!!!”

“Hahahahahaha!!!”

Across the frigid snowfields, wherever Cheng Qisheng looked, the air was filled with the cheers of Blue Sea’s people.

At first, everyone had simply been inspired by the three-person team.

Walking through the snow in bulky protective suits was painfully slow. Using a snow beast as transportation? Who had come up with that?

It was sheer genius!

But once they actually stood on a wooden board and let a snow beast pull them across the ice, the Blue Sea pioneers became even more exhilarated.

The wind and snow roared around them. Their prey raced ahead while they gripped their lassos tightly, hurtling toward a dangerous and unknown horizon.

It felt like they had returned to the age of primitive hunters.

The people of Blue Sea had always been enthusiastic when it came to learning new combat and survival techniques.

Once more than seventy people started doing it, nearly every pioneer had mastered the new trick.

The best part was that almost everyone happened to be carrying both a lasso and a wooden plank.

The lasso needed no explanation—it was standard hunting equipment for Blue Sea’s people.

As for the wooden plank, everyone had brought one in preparation for spending the night out in the snow. A snow shelter could be dug out easily, with the plank serving as a windbreak over the entrance. If necessary, it could even be broken apart and used as firewood to boil water or keep warm.

As a result, the snow beasts living near Safe City suffered terribly.

Situations soon arose where hundreds—even over a thousand—people competed for a single snow beast.

It couldn’t be helped. Everyone’s movement was restricted by the heavy protective suits, making walking painfully slow. With so many people traveling together, many were still following the same route.

The scramble would only end once someone successfully slipped a lasso over a snow beast’s head.

To shake off the burden trailing behind them, the snow beasts would slam on the brakes, make sharp turns, and swerve unpredictably. If the person standing on the wooden board lost their balance even slightly, they would topple over and be flung off.

The snowfields of Dazzling Star were nothing like the soft, fluffy snow left behind by an ordinary snowfall. After enduring more than a century of relentless cold, the ground beneath people’s feet was less a blanket of snow than a century-old sheet of solid ice.

If they fell and slammed into the ground, there was nothing to cushion the impact.

But the Blue Sea pioneers who were thrown off would instantly adjust their posture, rolling with the momentum to dissipate the force. They used their own muscles as shock absorbers, minimizing the damage to their bodies as much as possible.

Almost every Blue Sea citizen possessed this skill.

As for why, all you had to do was ask about their favorite childhood pastimes.

Even Qin Zhi—who now appeared to be the very picture of composure—had done her fair share of reckless things at the age of nine.

She had fought foxes in the mountains, bitten dogs back the moment they bit her, climbed a twenty-meter-tall tree in an attempt to raid a bird’s nest, and countless other exploits.

The only thing that made her seem a little smarter than the other children was that, after climbing about eight meters up the tree, she had at least remembered to tie a safety rope around herself.

Unfortunately, there were no safety ropes on the snow beast express.

Some snow beasts managed to bite through the lassos, while others succeeded in throwing their riders off.

The Blue Sea people who were flung away relied on the impact-dispersing techniques they had practiced since childhood. After lying there dazed for a moment, they would wobble to their feet on their own.

The odds of catching up with the snow beast again were slim, but they didn’t dwell on it. They simply treated it as if they’d “gotten off midway.”

Compared to those who had never even managed to “board” a snow beast in the first place, they considered themselves lucky enough.

At least they no longer had to crowd together with everyone else, competing over the scarce prey in the same area.

Some of these people would search the surroundings for another snow beast. If they happened to obtain a Building Card, they would simply set up camp on the spot.

Others would wait for another Blue Sea rider to come speeding by on a “snow beast express,” then hop aboard together and head off toward the next unknown destination.

The whole approach was based on one principle:

Go with whatever happened.

As for whether it was dangerous?

If they were afraid of danger, they never would have signed up for an Extreme Danger mission in the first place.

Cheng Qisheng rubbed her forehead.

Well… it wasn’t exactly surprising.

Old Eighth had always been like this. Most of the time they were perfectly reliable, but every now and then they’d completely let themselves loose.

It seemed that after spending several months with their heads down digging in the mines during the previous world, everyone had become thoroughly pent-up.

This world, she’d just let Old Eighth do things their own way.

…

Wang Moning had long since gotten used to Blue Sea’s unique way of doing things.

Standing on a sled—well, technically a wooden plank—as the howling wind and snow blasted her face and drowned out every other sound, she found herself completely understanding everyone’s train of thought.

Dazzling Star was simply too cold. Just traveling from place to place was already a huge challenge.

Using a snow beast as your driver?

Genius.

Sure, the snow beast wasn’t exactly cooperative, the destination was completely random, and there was always the chance of being thrown off halfway.

But it was fast!

As for the possibility of ending up somewhere so far away that they couldn’t make it back to Blue Sea…

The old Wang Moning might have worried about something like that. But after truly becoming one of the faithful, she finally understood why Blue Sea’s people always seemed so utterly fearless.

She could feel that, just like every other Blue Sea citizen, she was sheltered within the warm embrace of the great Creator God.

It was difficult to describe.

It was a bit like when she had been a high school student on Velvet Star. Even though she hardly stayed at home and spent most of her time at school, and later would leave for university in a completely unfamiliar city, she had always known one thing:

If anything happened to her while she was away, her parents would come for her.

She would always have a home to return to.

After the apocalypse struck Velvet Star, Wang Moning lost her parents, and with them, that absolute sense of security.

But after becoming a believer of the great deity, she found that feeling once again.

No matter how far she was from Blue Sea, no matter where she happened to be, the deity was always with her.

So what was there left to fear?

Wang Moning thought that the Blue Sea people’s way of thinking often seemed rough and impulsive, as though they simply made decisions on the spur of the moment.

But wasn’t that exactly the mindset best suited for surviving in the apocalypse?

A Safe City would only ever remain in an apocalyptic world.

Like the people of Blue Sea, facing danger honestly—even actively seeking it out—and constantly growing stronger through battle was the best way to survive the apocalypse.

Sometimes, Wang Moning even felt that most Blue Sea people were the kind who seemed foolish on the surface but possessed great wisdom underneath.

Though every time she spent more than five minutes with any one of them, that impression quickly disappeared.

Take this moment, for example.

Song Xi burst into laughter.

“Hahahahahaha!!!”

Wang Moning had known Song Xi for quite a while and had seen her laugh countless times.

She knew Song Xi had an easygoing personality and loved to laugh.

But in a situation like this—surrounded by pitch-black darkness, illuminated only by the wavering beams of flashlights, where the snow had long since turned into a field of blood and the roars of savage beasts echoed all around like the set of a horror movie—

Did she really have to be laughing now?!

The thought had barely crossed Wang Moning’s mind when she suddenly saw the afterimage of a snow beast lunging toward her.

It was her supernatural ability activating.

Almost instinctively, Wang Moning identified the afterimage representing the beast’s movement one second into the future. She ducked beneath the attack and, following the trajectory revealed by the vision, slashed backward with her blade.

The ambush failed.

Instead, the snow beast took a deep cut across its abdomen and immediately let out an enraged roar.

Still laughing, Song Xi rushed forward and drew her curved saber viciously across the beast’s throat.

Their third teammate, Shen Jinyang, also wielded a long saber. Despite dragging her injured right leg behind her, she managed to hack off one of the snow beast’s legs.

Only then did the three of them finally succeed in pinning down the three-meter-tall monster.

But it still wasn’t dead.

The three women clung to the beast like predators more savage than the beast itself, repeatedly striking it to deepen its wounds and hasten its blood loss.

They kept it up for more than forty minutes.

At last, the snow beast’s breathing stopped.

Even then, none of them relaxed their grip.

Only after a silver card slowly condensed above the beast’s corpse did they finally let their guard down.

Snow beasts only dropped cards after they had truly died.

Wang Moning leaned back against the massive carcass, breathing heavily in relief.

Having just finished the battle, Wang Moning was drenched in sweat, and her body temperature had risen sharply. If she sat down on the ground now and melted even a thin layer of snow beneath her, the frigid nighttime temperatures of Dazzling Star would freeze her protective suit to the ice before she could stand up again.

Still, although the cold-weather suit from the Item Card transferred body heat away rather easily, it was far better than the bulky polar protective suits the three of them had originally worn from Blue Sea.

At the very least, if they had still been wearing those heavy suits from their first few days in this region—when even moving was a struggle—they definitely wouldn’t have been able to defeat such a ferocious snow beast.

“Captain… why were you laughing the whole time?”

After catching her breath a little, Wang Moning finally asked the question that had been bothering her throughout the fight.

For a moment back there, she’d even wondered whether the snow beast had somehow bitten one of Song Xi’s ticklish spots.

Song Xi was exhausted as well. She spoke between heavy breaths, but that didn’t stop her from laughing.

“Hahahahaha! Halfway through the fight, I suddenly realized this snow beast matches the combat strength of a Tier-2 snow beast!”

“A Tier-2 snow beast! That means it’ll drop a Tier-2 Item Card! Hahahahaha—we’ve struck it rich!!”

The moment she said that, both Wang Moning and Shen Jinyang felt the corners of their mouths shoot upward as well.

“Tier 2?”

Shen Jinyang rolled over with some effort. Her injuries were fairly serious, but the pain couldn’t outweigh her desire for contribution points.

She reached out and picked up the silver Item Card.

Sure enough, the words on it identified it as a Tier-2 Item Card.

“It really is!”

Now, in the middle of the night, standing on a blood-soaked patch of snow, there were three people laughing wildly.

Song Xi and Wang Moning slowly got to their feet and helped support Shen Jinyang.

“Let’s head back first. Then we can discuss whether we should exchange this card for contribution points… or exchange it for contribution points… or maybe exchange it for contribution points.”

The three of them burst into laughter again.

After all, there wasn’t really anything to discuss. A Tier-2 Item Card was far more valuable as contribution points than as a random draw. For them, turning it in for points was practically a foregone conclusion.

The three of them trudged slowly through the snow for about three minutes before reaching their little cabin.

Although they had a habit of picking fights, tonight’s battle really hadn’t been their doing.

They had just obtained a torch that could raise the indoor temperature to that of a normal summer day and were happily celebrating at home.

Then the Tier-2 snow beast had come crashing right to their doorstep.

After fighting all night, they were genuinely exhausted.

Still, it hadn’t been for nothing—they had earned themselves a Tier-2 Item Card.

As soon as the three women stepped inside, a wave of warmth greeted them.

Looking closer, it was obvious that almost all of the heat came from the torch standing in the middle of the room.

Without a word, Song Xi walked over to the cabinet by the entrance, opened a drawer with practiced familiarity, and took out a green syringe, handing it to Shen Jinyang.

Shen Jinyang removed her cold-weather suit, exposing her injury, and injected the medicine directly into the wound.

It was a healing serum obtained from a green Item Card, capable of repairing injuries.

The fact that the three of them had become increasingly fearless in battle recently also had a lot to do with the box of twelve healing injections they had been lucky enough to obtain.

“Hiss! That’s intense!”

Shen Jinyang shut her eyes tightly and gritted her teeth as she stared at the ceiling.

About a dozen seconds later, the tension left her face.

The gruesome wound had completely healed. After wiping away the blood, aside from looking a little pale, she appeared no different from normal.

Meanwhile, Wang Moning had already set a pot of water on to boil.

“You two both got hurt today. I’ll heat the water. Once it’s ready, we can all have a proper wash and then get a good night’s sleep.”

The pot and the water had both come from Item Cards.

The same went for the smokeless stove she was using.

No matter how many times she used it, Wang Moning still found it amazing.

This thing was practically science fiction.

Yet it was precisely because of so many miraculous high-tech items like these that, despite living in a place where they didn’t even know exactly where they were, the three of them were gradually building a life that was becoming surprisingly comfortable.

When they had first arrived, the three of them had gone three straight days without obtaining a single Building Card, forcing them to survive by hiding inside makeshift snow shelters.

Once they finally got a Building Card, they at least had a proper place to rest.

Now they spent their nights sleeping in this little wooden cabin and their days searching the surrounding area for newly arrived snow beasts.

Little by little, life settled into a routine.

Now they could even enjoy hot meals and hot water.

And this was only after opening a small portion of the Item Cards they had collected. Most of them remained unopened.

What a joke.

No matter how comfortable life was out here, it was still out here.

The good stuff naturally belonged back home.

They had never forgotten that they were pioneers of Blue Sea.

“It feels like we’ve already been away from home for four months.”

They had traveled incredibly far and accumulated a great deal of loot.

But precisely because they had traveled so far, the three-person team had never found an opportunity to return.

Seriously—who would have guessed that the snow beast that carried them away would suddenly take flight halfway through the journey?

If it had wings, why had it bothered charging at them on foot in the first place?!

Fortunately, Wang Moning’s precognitive ability had shown her the moment the snow beast was about to fly, allowing her to warn the other two in time.

The three of them clung desperately to the lasso and ended up dangling beneath the flying beast for more than half a day. They were so cold they nearly went to meet their God ahead of schedule. Eventually, when the beast descended to a suitable altitude, they wounded it, forcing it to drop them safely back onto the ground.

Back in the present, Song Xi had suffered only a few scrapes, so she didn’t bother using a healing injection. Instead, she casually pulled out a packet of biscuits, kept one for herself, and tossed one each to her teammates.

“Tonight we hit the jackpot. And now we’ve got transportation for traveling long distances too. Let’s take stock of everything we’ve got and prepare to head home.”

Her eyes sparkled with excitement as she carefully placed the silver Tier-2 Item Card into a small box, then gently patted it.

“With this many Item Cards, we should definitely have enough for the down payment!”

Song Xi sighed nostalgically.

“It’s been so long since I prayed beneath our God’s statue.”

Shen Jinyang stretched her arms and legs before getting to her feet as well.

“Me too. I even dreamed about our God last night.”

Wang Moning wanted to go back too.

Her best friends were right here beside her, their living conditions had become increasingly comfortable, and every so often she could faintly sense the deity’s gaze falling upon them.

Especially during their first days in this region.

Back then, Wang Moning had even found herself wondering:

Was our God confused about why everyone else was hitching rides on snow beasts, yet the three of us somehow ended up this far away?

It had to be her imagination.

An omniscient deity wouldn’t experience something like confusion.

Wang Moning looked into the distance, toward where Blue Sea Safe City was supposed to be.

“It’s been so long since we’ve gone back… I wonder what the temple is like now.”

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.48 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

He added another example:

[Coriander Safe City: That Tier 4 big shot once went through an extreme-heat world. When their Safe City first arrived, ordinary heat-resistant protective suits were enough for people to move around normally.]

[Five months later, only upgraded protective suits worked.]

[After seven months, only ability users could function normally outdoors.]

[By the eighth month, just before the Safe City departed, that entire world had become a sea of flames.]

[Boss, can you imagine it? It was terrifying!!]

[There was nowhere to hide. The entire planet was on fire!]

Cheng Qisheng thought to herself:

You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you—not only can I imagine it, I’ve actually seen it.

That was how Eldest Primitive Man had died.

She would never forget it.

Back then, she had still been inexperienced. She didn’t yet understand that fragile human civilizations required constant protection.

She had merely gone into the living room to pour herself a glass of water.

By the time she came back…

…the entire Dark Star had already become a sea of flames.

Recalling that dark memory, Cheng Qisheng promptly went into the living room to pour herself another glass of water to calm her nerves.

Then she changed the subject.

[Do you have anything going on today? If not, come attend another management lesson for a while. We can use your Safe City’s current situation as a case study and figure out how to keep your residents from leaving.]

Wen Huahua’s eyes lit up.

[!]

Boss Blue Sea’s management lessons were incredibly valuable.

Back in his original world, no matter how many teachers lectured him, he had never wanted to listen.

Now, however, anyone willing to teach him useful knowledge was practically a second parent to him.

—As long as they were a City Lord.

Although Wen Huahua had only experienced his second disaster world, he had already figured out one of the unwritten rules among City Lords.

Knowledge should only be learned from other City Lords…

…or from close blood relatives—preferably your own parents—if you genuinely trusted them.

If you weren’t absolutely confident that you could completely command your city’s respect…

Never learn from your own residents.

There was a saying:

“Never expose your own ignorance.”

That principle applied perfectly within a Safe City.

Once residents discovered, “Wait… the City Lord who governs the entire Safe City and holds all of our lives in their hands is actually an incompetent amateur?”

…their sense of awe and respect would vanish almost instantly.

And there was a good chance they’d begin thinking:

“If you can do it, so can I.”

Or worse:

“You don’t understand any of this anyway. I can tell you whatever I want, and you’ll never know the difference.”

At best, a resident might simply deceive the City Lord for personal gain.

At worst…

They might kill the City Lord and seize the city’s core.

That was why nearly every City Lord deliberately maintained a certain distance from their residents—issuing orders, but avoiding unnecessary communication.

Learning from Boss Blue Sea, however, was a completely different matter.

Boss Blue Sea was already far more capable than he was.

She had known he was a rookie from the very beginning!

—If Boss is still willing to teach someone as clueless as me, then she must really accept me as one of her subordinates!

As Wen Huahua encouraged himself with that thought, he hurriedly postponed all of today’s administrative work until tomorrow.

[Thank you, Boss! Boss, I don’t have anything to do today! I’m coming right now!]

—

Wen Huahua happily settled into another management lesson.

The more he listened…

…the more amazed he became.

How does Boss Blue Sea do it?

The lessons covered an astonishing range of subjects, spanning multiple disciplines.

Everything was organized logically, progressing from simple concepts to advanced ones.

Every recommendation was tailored specifically to the circumstances of his Safe City.

The material balanced theoretical reasoning, practical implementation, strategic planning, specialized expertise…

…and countless other fields besides.

He almost felt as though there were more than a dozen experts from different professions teaching him simultaneously.

—

Meanwhile, Cheng Qisheng was eating hot pot while watching those dozen or so experts give the lesson.

Whenever Wen Huahua asked a question, the experts answered it.

Aether acted as the intermediary, relaying information between both sides.

As for Cheng Qisheng…

She picked up a slice of napa cabbage.

Mmm. Delicious.

She continued eating her hot pot while sitting in on the lesson herself, casually learning alongside Wen Huahua.

After all, her own management style had always been extremely straightforward.

Whenever she needed something done, she’d simply go find either the President, the Marshal, or the Pope—whichever of the three was appropriate.

She would explain what she wanted.

And that was the end of her involvement.

Those three would mobilize the resources of an entire nation, if necessary, to make it happen.

After auditing the lesson for more than seven hours, Cheng Qisheng’s attention began to drift slightly.

She was long accustomed to multitasking.

So she peeled off a tiny fraction of her attention to check on the residents she had sent out into the wilderness and see how they were doing.

——

Bang!!!

A gigantic white beast, roughly three meters long, crashed to the ground.

A silver card slowly materialized, appearing before the three of them.

Lu Song wiped the frost crystals off his visor with a gloved hand, his face lighting up with delight.

“A Building Card! Thank goodness! We finally got one!”

He looked utterly bedraggled. Qi Yi and Qi Er weren’t in much better shape—their bodies were covered in the white beast’s fur, and with no chance to replenish their energy, their body temperatures had dropped. They were shivering uncontrollably from the cold.

This was the seventh snow beast the three of them had killed.

They had even dug out and slain the snow beasts that crawled beneath the snow—creatures about as thick as an arm and resembling giant worms—just to see if they would drop an item card.

If they still hadn’t gotten a Building Card after this, they would have had no choice but to keep hunting while trembling from the freezing cold.

The reason was simple.

At first, they had merely been traveling with the crowd as usual. Everyone had spread out by unspoken agreement, though they were still not too far from the Safe City.

Then they encountered their first snow beast.

It was the most common variety: a Red Bear.

At the time, their group happened to be the closest to it, and all three immediately prepared to engage.

At the very same moment, with the Red Bear as the center point, at least several hundred people from Blue Sea spotted it as well. Their eyesight was excellent, and the instant they saw the beast, their eyes lit up as they charged toward it from every direction.

The Red Bear had originally been about to rush at them.

But the moment it saw so many people charging straight at it, it instantly turned tail and fled.

Qi Er reacted in a flash, pulling out a lasso and looping it around the Red Bear’s head.

At that very instant, Qi Yi had a sudden flash of inspiration. Moving with incredible speed, he tied the other end of Qi Er’s lasso to the large object he’d been carrying on his back the whole time—something that looked remarkably like an oversized snowboard.

Then the two of them leapt onto the board in one smooth motion, with Qi Yi reaching out a hand toward Lu Song.

“Quick, get on!”

Lu Song didn’t even have time to think. Acting on pure instinct, he grabbed Qi Yi’s hand and climbed onto the board.

All of it happened in the blink of an eye.

And then…

…they were swept away in a roaring storm of wind and snow.

The Red Bear, a lasso looped around its neck, dragged the three of them on the board as it sprinted forward with all its might. It was far faster than the people of Blue Sea, weighed down by their thick protective suits.

At such breakneck speed, the wind and snow struck with the force of gravel, rattling loudly against their visors.

Lu Song’s ears were filled with nothing but the roar of the storm. Through the noise, he could only vaguely make out Qi Yi and Qi Er shouting repeatedly over the public communication channel.

“This Red Bear is ours!”

“Ours!”

“Ours!”

His sense of balance wasn’t as good as that of the Blue Sea residents. Even after grabbing the rope Qi Er handed him, he didn’t have a free hand to wipe the snow off his visor.

Besides, there was no point. The moment he cleared it, the next second it would be covered again.

Even though he could barely see anything, he instinctively joined his teammates in shouting:

“It’s ours!!”

In the end, through the narrow gaps in the snow plastered across his visor, Lu Song could just barely make out the Blue Sea residents who had been charging over slowing to a disappointed stop.

Once a lasso was around the Red Bear’s neck, the prey belonged to the three of them. The people of Blue Sea were actually quite strict about observing that rule.

—Of course, if your lasso snapped, that was a different story.

If your lasso was gone, how could you still claim it was your prey?

The crowd could only stand there silently, secretly praying:

“Great Creator, please let it snap… let it snap… let it snap…”

Unfortunately for them, the Creator’s blessing was with the three-man team.

The lasso didn’t break.

Qi Yi and Qi Er had spent a hefty sum to buy the sturdiest lasso available. It was strong enough for the Red Bear to drag all three of them at a full sprint for over an hour, carrying them far away from Blue Sea.

Perhaps because it had finally put enough distance between itself and the crowd, the Red Bear caught the scent of the humans behind it and decided…

I can take them.

It stopped.

It charged at three humans whose combat power all exceeded seventy.

It fell.

It contributed a white item card.

Getting an item card made the three of them very happy.

But once the excitement wore off, they had to face a rather serious problem.

Given:

A Red Bear can run extremely fast.

It had dragged the three of them for over an hour.

Question:

Where on earth were the three of them now?

The defining feature of Dazzling Star was that no matter where you went, all you could see was an endless expanse of white.

The only thing the three of them could be certain of was that they were now very, very far from the Safe City.

Because they had completely lost their connection to the AI network.

Qi Yi and Qi Er only brooded over it for a moment before waving it off.

“Perfect. There were too many people before. Even when we found prey, we couldn’t get to it.”

“Now we’ve ended up in some godforsaken place that nobody knows about. Who’s going to steal our kills now?”

The more they talked, the happier they became.

Lu Song: “…I’ve fought alongside plenty of Blue Sea people, but sometimes I really have to admire your ability to adjust your mindset.”

Originally, the plan had been simple. If they got a Building Card, they would settle down outside the city. If they didn’t, they would return to the Safe City, restock on food and water, get a night’s sleep, and head back out the next day.

But now, after being dragged away by the Red Bear for over an hour, they had to obtain a Building Card before nightfall.

Otherwise, their only option would be to dig a hole in the snow and barely survive the night.

All three of them were experienced fighters, so they weren’t particularly worried about encountering snow beasts while camping in the wilderness. In fact, if they did run into one, it would actually be a good thing—snow beasts dropped item cards.

What they feared was the nighttime temperature.

If it dropped much further, they might wake up the next morning as three human popsicles.

Besides, without some kind of shelter from the cold, they couldn’t even take off their visors long enough to eat. That simply wasn’t sustainable.

Qi Yi put it this way:

“In that case, we’ve got about three days at most. So we’d better hurry.”

Lu Song stared at him.

“…You mean you can actually survive three days under these conditions?”

Just how absurdly tough are the people of Blue Sea?

In the end, the three of them had no choice but to hurry through this unfamiliar wilderness, searching everywhere for snow beasts.

Lu Song was even more enthusiastic than Qi Yi and Qi Er.

After all…

He definitely couldn’t last three days.

They fought nonstop for seven straight hours.

At long last, they finally obtained a Building Card.

Only then did all three of them let out a sigh of relief.

Qi Er was so exhausted that he slumped against the snow beast’s corpse and sat down.

“Thank goodness. If we still hadn’t found one, we’d have had no choice but to pray for the Great Creator to guide us back to the city.”

Leaning against the snow beast’s body himself just to stay on his feet, Lu Song blinked in surprise.

“…You can actually pray for the Creator to guide you?”

He had always assumed that divine guidance was a one-way blessing.

After all, wasn’t the usual understanding of gods that they could bestow favors upon believers, but believers couldn’t ask for things whenever they wanted?

Qi Yi nodded.

“Of course. As long as you pray sincerely—if you’re anxious enough and earnest enough—the Great Creator will notice us and show us the way home.”

Back on Dark Star, the Creator hadn’t answered believers’ prayers very often.

But ever since Dark Star’s destruction, perhaps because the new world was so dangerous, the benevolent Creator had become much more attentive to Her people. There had already been several instances where worshippers prayed and genuinely received a response.

Lu Song: “…???”

He couldn’t help voicing the question that had just struck him.

“Then… why didn’t we just pray to go back seven hours ago?”

Qi Yi answered matter-of-factly.

“The Great Creator is merciful. We shouldn’t trouble Her over every little thing.”

Still leaning against the snow beast, Lu Song echoed blankly,

“…A little thing?”

“Yeah. We weren’t going to die anytime soon. Besides, isn’t this place great? Nobody’s here to compete with us.”

Lu Song: …

Of course nobody’s competing with us—because there’s literally nobody here!

Still, now that he was holding the Building Card in his hand, he had to admit…

This place really wasn’t bad.

A Building Card.

And they’d gotten one on the very first day.

Between the three of them, they now had three cards in total.

If they’d stayed near Blue Sea, they’d have been lucky just to claim a single snow beast. They might not have gotten even one card.

…Wait.

When he’d been riding that board behind the fleeing Red Bear, through the blur of snow he’d vaguely seen quite a few Blue Sea residents pulling out lassos as well.

Surely…

They hadn’t all gotten the same idea?

Were they planning to catch a fast-running snow beast, let it drag them far away from the Safe City, and monopolize the snow beasts in some remote region all for themselves?

After hearing Lu Song’s theory, Qi Yi thought it was highly likely.

“Actually, I could’ve taken that Red Bear down halfway through the chase. But then I figured it could carry us even farther away, so I held back.”

Qi Er grinned at Lu Song.

“To be honest, if your body could’ve handled it, we probably would’ve stayed out here for another two days before asking the Great Creator for help. Then we’d spend one day traveling back.”

Lu Song didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he was also touched.

He could tell they meant every word.

They had only just become teammates, yet Qi Yi and Qi Er were already taking responsibility for keeping him alive.

The people of Blue Sea really did treat their comrades well.

They were even willing to shorten the number of days they could recklessly flirt with death—for his sake.

“…Thanks. I ended up holding you two back.”

“Holding us back? Not at all!” Qi Yi said, giving him a firm pat on the shoulder. “What we value is your combat ability. So what if your endurance is a little worse, or your physique isn’t quite as good? That doesn’t matter.”

Lu Song wanted to point out that back on Velvet Star, he had been considered one of the physically strongest people around.

But then he thought about the Blue Sea residents’ absurd constitutions…

…Never mind.

Qi Er suddenly said, “By the way, why are we standing here shivering in the freezing wind? We’ve already got a Building Card!”

“…Right!”

Qi Yi and Lu Song immediately climbed to their feet.

“So where should we use it?”

“Let’s just do it here. It’ll save us the effort of hauling the snow beast around. This thing’s huge—we’ll be eating it for quite a while.”

The three of them, operating like a thoroughly makeshift crew, settled on a location after a few casual exchanges. They handed the Building Card to their team leader, Qi Yi.

Following the AI’s tutorial, Qi Yi let the card float in midair and pressed a finger into the star-shaped emblem at its center.

The silver card began to glow.

The light grew brighter and brighter.

When it finally faded, a small wooden cabin—about the size of two cars parked side by side—stood before them.

From the outside, it looked utterly ordinary.

It was low, plain, and rather shabby.

And when the three of them pushed open the door and stepped inside…

…they discovered it really was just as shabby as it looked.

Three grown adults squeezed into the cabin, making it difficult even to turn around.

But it was warm.

Not particularly warm, but it was still infinitely better than the frozen wasteland outside.

The three of them eagerly peeled off their heavy protective suits, took deep breaths, and, with trembling hands, dug compressed biscuits out of their backpacks.

After fighting nonstop for so many hours without a single bite to eat, both the Blue Sea natives and the Velvet Star native were absolutely starving.

As Lu Song ate, his eyes drifted toward the fireplace in the middle of the cabin.

“Hey, look! There are words there!”

Floating lines of information hovered beside the fireplace.

When Lu Song looked over, he saw the text in Velvet Star’s language.

Qi Yi and Qi Er, meanwhile, saw it in Blue Sea’s language.

Building Name: Basic Log Cabin

Building Type: Small Shelter (Provides protection from the cold wind)

Floor Area: 13 square meters

Occupancy: User-defined

Indoor Temperature: 8°C (Chilly)

Interior Facilities: Small Fireplace (If the fireplace runs out of fuel, the indoor temperature will continue to drop until the fireplace is damaged.)

Qi Yi walked over and noticed another panel of information floating on the opposite side of the fireplace.

Besides the facility details, there was an additional prompt.

Please add: Hardwood | Kindling | Peat | Charcoal | Animal Fat

Current Fireplace Fuel: Hardwood (Remaining Time: 7 days)

Qi Yi immediately turned around.

“Quick, check the information you downloaded on your phones! Does the item card database mention hardwood?”

Lu Song instantly pulled out his phone.

“It does! Hardwood comes from the red cards!”

“Then it looks like if we want to keep this building warm, we’ll have to get red Energy Cards as well.”

Qi Yi let out a long breath and sat down on the floor, basking in the glow of the fire.

“Forget it for now. Let’s get some rest first. Then we’ll go drag the snow beast’s body back and cook some meat.”

The moment they thought about meat, all three of them perked up immediately.

“No wonder they said Dazzling Star isn’t suitable for communal living. This little cabin is way too cramped. We need to find another two Building Cards as soon as possible. Ideally, each of us should have our own cabin.”

“Sounds great! Let’s add extra pepper to the meat later.”

“Where are we supposed to get pepper…? Wait—why on earth did you bring pepper with you?!”

Just then, Cheng Qisheng’s gaze happened to fall on the three of them, sprawled together inside the tiny cabin.

She watched the little cabin with curiosity for a while.

As expected.

The formatting and interface of the building’s information were clearly from the same system as the Safe City itself.

After studying the facility details for a moment, Cheng Qisheng shifted her attention back to the area around the Safe City.

Very good.

Quite a few residents had already encountered snow beasts.

…Wait?

The Creator cast a puzzled glance their way.

Why…

Why are all of you standing on wooden boards, being dragged along by snow beasts?

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.47.2 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

Naturally, the 1.5 million residents didn’t all leave at once—they headed out in batches.

The first group of Blue Sea residents to step through the Safe City’s gates were positively beaming with excitement.

There was still a massive crowd lined up behind them!

Sure enough, living near the city gates really was more convenient.

Whenever there was an event that required people to queue up to leave the city, they always ended up in the first wave. Hehe.

Not everyone heading out was from Blue Sea, however. Mixed in among them were residents from other planets.

Compared to the Blue Sea natives, they were far less enthusiastic.

Watching the frozen world outside from the warmth of an indoor shelter was one thing; actually stepping into that icy wasteland was an entirely different experience.

The first thing they noticed was how obstructed their vision became.

The moment they left the heated area, wind and snow blasted straight into their faces.

People had to awkwardly brush the snow off their face shields with their gloved hands, then adjust the angle of the visor and keep their heads slightly lowered to avoid more snow being blown into their faces.

The second problem was how severely their movements were restricted.

The protective suits were so thick and bulky that wearing one felt like having dumbbells strapped all over the body. Their joints couldn’t move naturally, and the insulated boots were incredibly heavy as well, making even walking much slower than usual.

Finally, there was the cold.

The purpose of the protective suit was to retain as much body heat as possible, not to generate heat on its own.

It would keep people from freezing to death, but their hands, feet, and faces still felt unmistakably cold.

The Blue Sea people handled it much better. Because of their genetics, they were naturally drawn to challenges that looked difficult.

Feeling physically cold would instinctively make a Blue Sea native feel gloomy, irritable, and emotionally tense.

But stepping into the vast, boundless world outside and facing an extremely demanding challenge would make them feel exhilarated, joyful, and full of anticipation.

As a result, those two opposing emotions neatly canceled each other out, leaving the Blue Sea people free of any negative feelings they might otherwise have experienced.

The end result was this:

They were still cold—but they were in an excellent mood.

The other alien residents, however, didn’t have Blue Sea’s genetic advantage. Aside from two humanoid residents covered in thick fur, who were naturally more resistant to the cold, everyone else was freezing.

A resident from Velvet Star shouted over the public communication channel:

“I thought wearing the protective suit would at least feel comfortable. Is my suit defective?”

He couldn’t help but raise his voice. The blizzard outside was so fierce that even though everyone was wearing helmets with face shields, any sound they made was instantly swallowed by the howling wind.

This was exactly where the polar protective suit’s built-in shortwave squad communication system came in handy.

At the very least, it allowed everyone to communicate with one another instead of effectively becoming deaf and blind.

Different squads could also stay in contact and coordinate their tactics as normal.

Someone else answered the Velvet Star resident’s question over the public channel:

“It’s not defective. That’s normal.”

“There are thermal suits that can keep you warm and comfortable. But once you’re fully suited up in those, your mobility becomes even more restricted—you wouldn’t even be able to squat down, let alone fight snow beasts.”

Hearing that, the Velvet Star resident who had asked the question immediately felt much better about the current temperature inside his suit.

“All right. Maintaining combat effectiveness is more important.”

A combat rating of 70 wouldn’t be considered the absolute elite among the Blue Sea people.

After all, Blue Sea natives were born with exceptional physical abilities. If you grabbed a random passerby off the street, they might already have a combat rating of 50 to 60.

But for the Velvet Star people, whose natural physiques were much weaker, reaching a combat rating above 70 meant one of two things: either they possessed an awakened ability that boosted their strength, or they had undergone specialized training and developed solid combat skills.

So after hearing that explanation, every Velvet Star resident accepted the current level of cold inside their suits without further complaint.

A little extra cold wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t like they would freeze to death, and as long as they moved around a bit more, they’d quickly warm up. But if their mobility was too severely restricted and they ran into a snow beast, they really could end up dead.

So everyone continued walking toward their chosen directions while casually exchanging all sorts of information over the public communication channel.

“I’m heading south. Anyone want to team up?”

“I’m an Outer City resident. I’m strong, hardworking, and not afraid of tough jobs. Would any official Inner City resident be willing to take me along?”

“If you haven’t finished reading the ‘Dazzling Star Pioneer Guidelines,’ make sure you download it now. Once you’re outside the AI’s signal range, you won’t be able to access it anymore.”

“Stop chatting idly in the public channel. If too many people keep talking at once, it’ll drain everyone’s batteries faster. If you don’t find cold-weather clothing in time, you’ll really end up deaf and blind later.”

As soon as those words were spoken, even more people began looking for teammates.

The AI had already distributed detailed information about the various types of snow beasts to all the pioneers.

Given that no one had found any building cards yet and their bulky protective suits already limited their movements, traveling in groups was clearly the safer option.

Taking into account the snow beasts’ tendency to target places where only a few people were gathered, pioneers generally limited their teams to no more than five members, with most forming squads of three.

What if, in the short time they’d been walking, people had already spread out so far in their preferred directions that many had moved beyond one another’s communication range?

It didn’t matter.

Even this first wave of pioneers numbered 300,000 people.

No matter which direction someone chose, they were still surrounded by a dense sea of fellow travelers.

Say a single sentence over the public channel, and you’d have a whole crowd replying to you almost immediately.

Of course, there were also people who had no interest in teaming up and preferred to venture out alone.

Compared with those lone wolves, however, ninety-nine percent of the Outer City residents were busy trying to find official Inner City residents to team up with.

Lu Song was one of them.

“Outer City resident. Velvet Star native. Combat rating: 73. Former special forces soldier. Experienced in combat. Skilled in wilderness survival. Previously completed a 209-day solo survival assignment on Velvet Star.”

“I’d like to join a team of up to three official Inner City residents. I’m willing to accept as little as a twenty percent share of the team’s joint gains, and I hope to sign a formal contract after joining.”

Taking advantage of the fact that they were still within the AI’s network coverage, Lu Song successfully joined a team.

Including him, the team now consisted of exactly three people.

“Hello, I’m Qi Yi, and this is my younger brother, Qi Er.”

After a lengthy process of confirming the partnership over the public channel, repeatedly jumping up and waving their arms in the crowd to identify each other’s location, and finally finding one another, Lu Song met his two future teammates.

The brothers perfectly matched his stereotype of Blue Sea natives: tall, broad-shouldered, a full head taller than him, and wearing bright, open smiles.

“Welcome aboard. We can sign the contract right now. But can I ask something? Why are so many Outer City residents looking for official Inner City residents to team up with?”

Looking at the unmistakable curiosity on the brothers’ faces—a curiosity so obvious that even their face shields couldn’t hide it—Lu Song strongly suspected that the main reason they had agreed to team up was simply because they wanted to know the answer.

To be safe, he signed the contract with the brothers first before explaining.

“It’s to improve our chances of survival.”

“We’re not followers of the Great Creator God. So if something unexpected happens, we can’t return to the temple under the guidance of the deity the way you can.”

“If we stay with you, we’ll always be able to find our way back.”

To be honest, Lu Song himself had originally been like most Velvet Star residents who had recently joined Blue Sea—he hadn’t believed that Blue Sea really had a god.

That changed while he was still on Velvet Star.

Although he had joined Blue Sea, he failed the crystal-ball test and therefore couldn’t enter the Inner City. However, thanks to his respectable combat rating, he was accepted into a crystal hunter squad.

Because of his high combat rating, Lu Song earned plenty of crystals by hunting zombies, which he exchanged for a good amount of points. He ate well every day and even treated himself to a relaxing bath now and then. Overall, life was pretty good.

Other than not being able to join the better-treated Inner City, Lu Song was thoroughly satisfied with his life in Blue Sea.

He still insisted on taking the crystal ball test once every week. He believed the crystal ball test was simply the Blue Sea government’s way of consolidating power through religion. If he took it enough times, surely he’d pass eventually.

Then came the last operation on Velvet Star.

The crystal hunter squad he had joined had already reached another city. Everyone was discussing how they should continue their exploration.

Suddenly, nineteen of the squad’s twenty-three members stopped in their tracks.

Then those eighteen native Blue Sea residents, along with one Inner City resident who had joined Blue Sea later, solemnly told the remaining four:

“Our God has issued a divine revelation. The temple is about to leave this world. We need to head back immediately.”

At the time, Lu Song and the other three Outer City residents could only stare at them in silence.

“…”

It all sounded unbelievably far-fetched.

Still, the minority should follow the majority. Since those nineteen were absolutely convinced, the four of them decided to go along.

More importantly, there was no way they were going to let those nineteen leave while the four of them remained behind to explore an unfamiliar city alone.

What surprised Lu Song even more was that the nineteen didn’t retrace their steps.

Instead, they headed off in a direction none of them had traveled before.

When someone asked why, the answer was:

“Our God has revealed that the temple has already relocated. The direction we’re heading now is toward the central point of all believers currently outside. It’s the fastest route that will allow everyone to return to the temple.”

Lu Song: “…”

No matter how shaken he had been at the time, or how skeptical he still felt…

What happened afterward was undeniable.

The entire group really did follow that invisible, intangible, yet unmistakably real divine guidance. Taking a route completely different from the one they had used to get there, they successfully returned to Blue Sea Safe City.

At the same time they returned, crystal hunter squads were arriving from every direction.

All of them had been scattered across distant regions. All of them had received the deity’s revelation far from home, and only by following the divine guidance had they managed to find their way back to the Safe City after it had relocated.

Lu Song: …I have no choice but to believe it now.

Only then did he finally understand why Blue Sea Safe City had a rule stating that only official Inner City residents could form crystal hunter squads.

And only by forming or joining one of those squads could residents venture far away to explore.

Back then, Lu Song had honestly thought it was just racial discrimination by the Blue Sea people.

As it turned out, they were simply afraid that non-believers would get lost.

From that day on, Lu Song began reading books about the Great Creator God’s creation.

Unfortunately, believing that such a deity existed and sincerely having faith in that deity were two entirely different things.

No matter how hard he tried to brainwash himself…

He just couldn’t develop genuine faith.

So the only thing Lu Song could do was make sure he stayed attached to official believers whenever they entered an unfamiliar world.

That way, when the Safe City relocated and the deity announced it, he could hitch a ride home with them.

“Thanks be to our God.”

Although he still hadn’t become a true believer in the Creator God, that didn’t stop Lu Song from imitating the other Blue Sea residents when they prayed.

“Back on Velvet Star, the decree that only Blue Sea natives could form hunter squads was actually the deity’s mercy toward us Outer City residents.”

“I noticed that once the Outer City residents realized why that rule existed, the decree disappeared. Thanks be to the Great Creator God for Her compassion.”

He genuinely meant it.

After all, he had personally benefited from that regulation.

And he had also witnessed something else.

Believers in the Creator God didn’t just enjoy a more comfortable life in the Inner City—they could also receive divine warnings that helped them avoid danger and guided them safely back to the temple.

Is Blue Sea’s god really this amazing?!

By now, no one was more anxious than Lu Song to become a true believer.

Qi Yi and Qi Er exchanged looks of sudden understanding.

Then they nodded as though it all made perfect sense.

“Our God has always been like this—benevolent toward all living things. Blue Sea has survived to this day only because of Her protection.”

Thus, two genuine believers and one Velvet Star native who wished he could instantly become a believer found themselves chatting away in the frozen wilderness.

Before they knew it, the three of them were performing a set of prayer gestures toward the sky.

Meanwhile, the Great Deity herself was sitting comfortably at home, enjoying a steaming hot pot.

Cheng Qisheng: “…”

Only Blue Sea natives could form hunter squads?

This was the first she’d ever heard of it.

Minor administrative matters like that were usually handled by the Blue Sea government.

Cheng Qisheng guessed it was probably just an accident. After all, while Blue Sea had been on Velvet Star, they had spent almost all their time fighting, and then the following months had been devoted almost entirely to mining. There simply hadn’t been enough time to perfect every policy. A few administrative loopholes were only to be expected.

She turned to Aether, who was sitting on top of the television remote beside her, and asked,

“Aether, was that really a thing?”

Aether answered immediately: “Yes, City Lord.

“When the profession of crystal hunter was first established in Blue Sea, the city had not yet decided to accept local survivors. Therefore, the registration process for forming a crystal hunter squad was hardcoded to require an Inner City resident identification code.

“After local survivors were admitted into the Safe City, separate ID formats were created to distinguish Inner City residents from Outer City residents. Inner City IDs retained their original format, while Outer City IDs used a new format.

“As a result, when Outer City residents attempted to register a crystal hunter squad using their resident IDs, the system displayed: ‘Insufficient permissions.’”

The AI displayed the relevant records one after another on a virtual screen.

“Because no one reported this bug, it went unnoticed until last month, when a staff member discovered it. After a report was submitted, the application process was updated to recognize Outer City resident ID codes as well.”

Cheng Qisheng smiled wryly.

“Well… I suppose it turned into a fortunate misunderstanding.”

If that rule hadn’t existed, there really was a chance that Outer City residents would have formed their own squads, ventured out of the Safe City on their own…

…and then been unable to find their way back after the city relocated.

That, she realized, had been her oversight.

After taking it easy for so long, Cheng Qisheng had long since grown accustomed to simply glancing at whoever she wanted to observe. With a single look, she could see them.

The non-believers she paid special attention to had always stayed inside the city, so it had never even occurred to her that non-believers might actually get lost.

Now that the loophole had been discovered, naturally it needed to be fixed.

“Aether, add a new regulation. Whenever Outer City residents leave the AI’s coverage area, they should, for their own safety and to avoid getting lost, travel with Inner City residents whenever possible.”

After thinking for a moment, Cheng Qisheng added, “Make it clear that this recommendation exists for their safety and to ensure they can make it home if something unexpected happens. If an Outer City resident still insists on traveling alone, advise them once. If they refuse after that, let them make their own decision.”

This world was rather unique.

Although the temperature kept dropping lower and lower, defeating snow beasts yielded item cards that allowed people to maintain a normal standard of living.

And because of the snow beasts’ unusual behavior, city lords had no choice but to send large numbers of residents out to explore independently.

Once residents obtained their own houses through building cards, however, things became different.

The item cards could even contain things like a torch capable of heating an entire home.

Yes—a torch.

It produced no smoke, required no fuel, and a single Tier 1 Torch could keep a 30-square-meter house warm for fifty days.

Blue food cards might contain a whole box of instant noodles…

…or a package of frozen meat…

…or even an entire pork leg sealed in vacuum packaging.

Because of that, it was inevitable that some residents would start thinking:

“Staying in this world doesn’t sound like such a bad option.”

In the city lords’ group chat for this world, most discussions revolved around one topic:

How could they bring as many residents as possible with them when it was time to leave?

Coriander was especially active whenever that topic came up.

He practically lived in the group chat twenty-four hours a day, constantly keeping up with every discussion. Every so often, he’d privately send Cheng Qisheng summaries of the most useful information he had gathered.

Among all the city lords, Cheng Qisheng was probably the one who had the least reason to worry about her residents deciding to stay behind or run away.

No Blue Sea native would ever willingly leave the protection of their Creator God.

If Cheng Qisheng were to issue a divine decree ordering them to hand over every item card they had obtained, the Blue Sea people would obey without the slightest hesitation.

But of course, she would never do such a thing.

When your people are already willing to offer up everything they own, taking their possessions loses its meaning.

The better her followers lived, the stronger Cheng Qisheng became.

She wished every one of her believers could become rich.

As for non-believers, hers was a faith-based organization. She believed in taking things slowly and letting faith develop willingly.

If someone ignored her advice, there was no point forcing them to stay.

However, Cheng Qisheng noticed something.

Although the group chat was extremely active, nearly all the discussions revolved around first- and second-tier Safe Cities.

City Lords of Tier 3 and Tier 4 almost never participated in conversations like these.

Coriander diligently continued acting as her information scout.

[I had a private chat with one of the Tier 4 big shots. He said there’s no way his residents would ever choose to stay behind.]

[The more disaster worlds people have survived alongside a Safe City, the less likely they are to leave it.]

[Safe Cities only descend upon worlds that are on the verge of destruction. Some worlds may look peaceful and perfectly livable on the surface, but if you stay behind, you’ll actually die even faster. Residents who’ve followed a Safe City through multiple worlds all understand this.]

Residents of lower-tier Safe Cities, however, had never experienced anything like that.

Even if their City Lord explained it to them, they probably wouldn’t believe it. They’d simply assume the City Lord was making it up to stop them from leaving.

So these days, Coriander spent every day lurking in the group chat, collecting every trick and suggestion people shared for persuading residents to leave with the city.

Cheng Qisheng replied with a thumbs-up emoji.

[You actually managed to get information from a Tier 4 big shot? That’s incredible!]

Coriander replied:

[Coriander Safe City: Hehe, all I can really do is chat with the big shots. As long as I can help you, Boss, that’s enough for me!]

Wen Huahua, for his part, remained perfectly clear-headed.

Although Boss Blue Sea was only a Tier 3 City Lord and technically ranked below the Tier 4 veterans…

When it came to loyalty and personal bonds, there was no comparison.

To him, Boss Blue Sea would always come first.

The two of them had survived the Velvet Star world together.

Wen Huahua had personally witnessed the way Boss Blue Sea had treated the other three Safe Cities with generosity and integrity. That alone was enough to ensure he would never switch sides just because someone stronger came along.

Besides, although everyone said that advancing from Tier 3 to Tier 4 was a major hurdle, Wen Huahua simply had an inexplicable confidence in Boss Blue Sea.

Who knew?

Maybe one day Boss Blue Sea would surpass even that Tier 4 powerhouse.

The reason he had deliberately mentioned that the information came from a Tier 4 City Lord was also because he wanted to demonstrate his own value as much as possible.

Look, Boss! I’m useful!

I know lots of things!

Ask me! Come on, ask me!

As expected, Cheng Qisheng praised him enthusiastically, sincerely acknowledging how good he was at gathering information.

She had actually already guessed part of what she wanted to know.

But seeing Coriander practically wagging his tail as if shouting, “I know so much!”…

Well, since he’d already acknowledged her as his boss, she decided to humor him.

So she asked:

[Blue Sea Safe City: In a disaster world like this one, with item cards available, people should be able to survive for around fifty years, right?]

Fifty years would essentially be an entire lifetime for residents who were currently only in their twenties or thirties.

Coriander replied:

[Coriander Safe City: This isn’t like Velvet Star. Dazzling Star is a natural-disaster world. Although there’s a very long buildup during the early stages, the disasters keep getting worse and worse as time goes on.]

[The temperature is still dropping. When I first arrived, people could still expose a little skin and only suffer frostbite. By the time you arrived, Boss, going outside without cold-weather gear would freeze you to death. Give it a little more time, and it’ll definitely become even worse.]

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.47.1 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

The soldiers’ adrenaline surged.

Just moments ago, trudging slowly through the snow, they had still felt the biting cold.

Now…

They weren’t cold anymore.

They weren’t moving sluggishly anymore.

It felt as though their blood itself was boiling.

If there had been an energy bar hovering over their heads, it would have read Energy +100.

They reached the snow beast.

It remained ferocious, baring its fangs and roaring in an attempt to intimidate its enemies into keeping their distance.

The intimidation failed completely.

These humans seemed born without the instinct to fear.

Whenever they spotted an opening, they simply grew more excited and drove their spears forward.

Through her connection with the three believers, Cheng Qisheng could sense the thoughts racing through their minds.

Well…

“Thoughts” was perhaps too generous a description.

There was really only one sentence, repeating over and over like a broken record.

This is amazing! This is amazing! This is amazing! Hahahaha!!

Cheng Qisheng: “…”

I’m used to this by now.

As Blue Sea had developed, most of the younger generation had grown up in cities.

Very few of them had ever had the chance to hunt dangerous wild animals.

So it was understandable that facing a deadly beast for the first time filled them with overwhelming excitement.

“ROAR!!!”

“Rrraaaagh!!!”

Across the endless snowy plain, only the snow beast’s agonized cries echoed through the air.

Gradually, the roars weakened…

Until they faded into silence.

A Tier 1 Black Item Card slowly materialized above the beast’s corpse.

Only then did the three soldiers finally stop, breathing heavily.

Every so often, one of them would nudge or pat the carcass almost instinctively, already estimating how much edible meat it contained and how much warmth and energy it could provide.

Cheng Qisheng gently stroked each of their heads through the divine connection.

That simple gesture triggered another wave of excitement.

The soldiers checked their injuries.

Because their heavy winter gear had slowed their movements slightly, they had suffered a few scrapes and sprains during the fight.

One soldier had dislocated his shoulder.

He simply grabbed his arm, gave it a sharp twist—

Crack.

The joint popped back into place.

Through the faint connection of the divine revelation, they sensed the Creator God asking about their condition.

All three answered almost in unison.

“We can keep going!”

“That was incredible!”

“That was so much fun!”

Well then.

Out of the thirty small squads, seven had encountered snow beasts.

Three of those squads had also run into Red Bears—which seemed to confirm that they really were the most common species.

The remaining four squads encountered only small snow beasts.

The larger ones were about the size of an ordinary dog.

The smallest were no bigger than rabbits.

But their offensive power was nothing like that of normal animals.

One rabbit-sized snow beast was even capable of biting straight through a steel plate.

After a series of fierce battles, only the rabbit-sized snow beast managed to escape.

In the end, including the squad from earlier, the teams obtained a total of four Tier 1 Item Cards.

Three of those had been dropped by Red Bears.

The rewards consisted of:

— Two White Daily Necessities Cards,

— One Black Weapons Card,

— One Green Medical Card.

The most serious casualty occurred when one soldier fought a Red Bear.

To drive her spear through its abdomen, she deliberately chose not to dodge as it lunged at her.

She succeeded.

She effectively solo-killed the Red Bear.

But the beast’s collapsing body came crashing down on top of her, instantly breaking her arm.

Now her teammates were escorting her back to Blue Sea.

Through her divine connection, Cheng Qisheng could hear the injured soldier muttering resentfully the entire way.

“It’s only a minor fracture. It won’t affect my fighting.”

“You don’t need to send me back.”

“I’ve dealt with this before. I can tell it’s a closed fracture.”

“Just set the bone, splint it with a rigid board or a metal plate, strap it tightly, and it’ll be fine.”

“Really—I think I can kill another one.”

“I’ve got experience.”

Cheng Qisheng decided not to wonder exactly where that “experience” with broken bones had come from.

After witnessing the combat ability of the Red Bear—a creature rated as upper-middle tier—she was finally able to put her worries to rest.

“Aether, have you finished drafting the wording for the mission announcement?”

Aether, who had become thoroughly addicted to television dramas over the past few weeks and had consequently gained a much deeper understanding of human society, immediately replied,

“City Lord, everything is ready.”

“I’ve also reviewed the archived footage and assigned every resident a basic combat rating. This should allow us to quickly identify the people best suited for the first wave of expansion missions.”

Cheng Qisheng smiled.

“Nicely done.”

“Tonight, your reward is an extra hour of watching TV.”

She had noticed that Aether would never increase its own leisure time.

Unless she, the City Lord, explicitly approved it, Aether would rigidly stick to the previously established schedule of one hour of entertainment per day.

So whenever she found an opportunity, Cheng Qisheng deliberately granted it a little extra free time.

Aether immediately floated happily above her head.

Cheng Qisheng’s gaze shifted to the President, the Marshal, and the Pope.

Eeny, meeny, miny…

Hmm… let’s pick the President.

—

The President, who was quietly working through a mountain of paperwork while sipping coffee mixed with starfruit juice, suddenly received a divine revelation.

Qin Zhi’s eyes lit up.

He immediately bowed respectfully toward the heavens.

“Yes, my God.”

“Blue Sea will obey Your divine will.”

Zhang Xiongyuan had just arrived at the laboratory.

Earlier, when Blue Sea had urgently begun constructing heated shelters, he had also been assigned work.

Blue Sea was extremely fair when distributing tasks.

Except for children, every resident who was physically capable of working received an assignment whenever the entire city mobilized.

Because Zhang Xiongyuan was elderly, the work assigned to him had been relatively light.

Even so, knowing that the world outside had fallen into extreme cold, and that Blue Sea had called on everyone to work so people could survive the freezing temperatures, he had thrown himself into the task with complete dedication.

This was his first time experiencing a world transfer, and deep down he was still somewhat uneasy.

As soon as the shelter work was finished, Zhang Xiongyuan hurried onto a city bus and headed straight to the laboratory.

He wanted to continue contributing to Blue Sea in this new world.

But the moment one foot crossed the laboratory doorway—

Ding.

His phone chimed.

The sound was already a familiar one.

Every time the Safe City issued an important announcement, that was the notification tone it used.

He immediately did the same as everyone else in the laboratory and pulled out his phone to check the notification.

[Attention, all residents—

Expansion Mission for the Extreme Cold World is now available.

Mission Difficulty: Extreme Danger

Possible Hazards: Extreme cold, snow beasts. (Tap to expand for detailed information.)

Tip: Defeating snow beasts has a chance to drop Item Cards. (Tap to expand for detailed information.)

Residents who wish to volunteer for this expansion mission may register using the link below. Please note: this mission involves encounters with snow beasts. During the first phase, only residents with a combat rating of 70 or above are eligible to apply.

Upon successful registration, you will receive a Blue Sea polar protective suit on loan before departing from the temple to carry out the mission. Any surplus Item Cards should be turned in at the temple, and you will receive contribution points as a reward.

There is no time limit and no mandatory objectives. The only requirement is that you survive in this world.

Go forth and build your own new home in this frozen world. May our God watch over you.]

Zhang Xiongyuan stared blankly at the announcement.

…What does this mean?

Does this world require the residents to go out and live on their own?

Leave the warmth of the Safe City…

And head out into a world that’s −70°C…

Me?

Zhang Xiongyuan was completely bewildered.

Meanwhile, the native Blue Sea residents in the laboratory instantly sprang into action.

Most of them barely bothered reading the full announcement before frantically tapping the registration link.

“Ahhh! Registration’s already full! I knew it would be!”

“That took, what, forty seconds? Their reflexes are insane!”

“I got into the application page! I actually got in! But then it said my combat rating was too low and rejected me! Aaah! Why?! I only lost one arm! This is discrimination!”

Still standing there, completely lost in thought, Zhang Xiongyuan looked utterly out of place among his coworkers.

…Did none of you notice that the mission is literally labeled Extreme Danger?

They just… signed up without a second thought?

Although Zhang Xiongyuan had gradually grown accustomed to the way Blue Sea’s people behaved, moments like this still left him feeling dazed.

He decided to find where his combat rating was displayed.

It turned out to be easy enough.

After closing the message, he noticed that his phone’s interface had changed at some point.

Beneath the clock, where there had previously been nothing, was now a combat rating display.

Resident: Zhang Xiongyuan

Combat Rating: 3

Zhang Xiongyuan: “…”

Three?

Not even in the teens?

Just… 3?

He glanced back around the laboratory.

Those who had successfully registered were celebrating excitedly.

Those who hadn’t were busy reopening the information on snow beasts and Item Cards.

Others, unwilling to give up, were checking their own combat ratings.

“Why is my combat rating only 55?”

“I’m only 54. I guess it’s because I’ve been so busy working that I never have time to exercise. I need to start working out. Great God above, please bless me so I can raise it to 70 within three months!”

“I got 69!! Waaaah! I’m just one point short! Damn it! I’m obviously in great shape!”

“I’ve got the lowest score—only 46. Damn. I need to eat more Starfruit vegetables to improve my health. Even Tu Zhang, who lost an arm, still scored 47.”

The entire laboratory erupted into complaints about everyone’s combat ratings being too low.

At the same time, people enthusiastically discussed training plans and fitness routines, trying to figure out how they could quickly raise their ratings to the minimum qualifying score of 70.

A student who had also come from Velvet Star approached Zhang Xiongyuan with a miserable expression.

“Professor, what’s your combat rating? Mine’s only 30. I’m too embarrassed to tell the others.”

Zhang Xiongyuan: “…”

He looked once more at the glaring 3 displayed on his screen.

Then, without a word, he quietly slipped his phone back into his pocket.

Keeping a perfectly serious expression, he said,

“We’re researchers. Combat rating isn’t important.”

“As long as we do our jobs well, that’s what matters.”

“All right, let’s get back to work.”

The scene wasn’t unique to the laboratory.

The residents’ offices throughout Blue Sea were filled with the same chorus of lamentation.

Those whose combat ratings were too low…

And those whose ratings were high enough but who had failed to grab one of the limited registration slots…

All of them were groaning in disappointment.

Wang Moning looked at her successful registration and let out a long sigh of relief.

Her combat rating had landed at 71, just barely above the cutoff.

It was probably because she had awakened a supernatural ability that her score had been boosted so much.

If it had been before that, she definitely wouldn’t have qualified.

Thank goodness my fingers were fast.

She had only skimmed the announcement before immediately scrolling down and furiously tapping the registration button.

Otherwise, she’d be among the crowd lamenting their bad luck right now.

Hahaha!

I’m in the first wave of pioneers!

To conserve resources, the city’s AI had changed the housing arrangements.

Instead of assigning one resident to each cave dwelling, every cave now housed at least three people.

Wang Moning currently shared one with Song Xi and another member of their squad.

She looked up happily and saw that Song Xi was grinning as well—

wearing her trademark crooked smile.

Wang Moning: crooked grin.

The third teammate: crooked grin.

Song Xi took one look at their expressions and immediately knew the outcome.

That only made him happier.

“Looks like all of us got in!”

“Awesome! Let’s go buy some chicken drumsticks to celebrate!”

Wang Moning became even more excited.

“Yes, yes! I’m getting a chicken mini drumstick!”

We’re so lucky!

We actually grabbed one of the limited slots for an Extreme Danger mission! Hahahaha…

…Huh?

As she laughed, Wang Moning suddenly realized something.

She used to be quite afraid of danger.

And yet now…

Simply securing a spot on an Extreme Danger mission had filled her with genuine happiness.

I guess your environment really can change your personality.

Meanwhile, Song Xi was already reading through the detailed mission description, her imagination running wild.

“This is an Extreme Danger mission! There are snow beasts! We can really sharpen our combat skills.”

“And these Item Cards—I knew it!”

“I just knew that the more dangerous the mission, the better the rewards!”

“How about this?”

“Let’s set ourselves a small goal first…”

“Let’s save up enough for a down payment! What do you think?!”

Wang Moning blinked in surprise.

“A down payment? The rewards are really that generous?”

“You see? Item Cards can be exchanged for contribution points. Kill a snow beast, and you have a chance of getting an Item Card.”

Song Xi had clearly thought this through.

“According to the briefing, there are plenty of snow beasts out there.”

“So earning enough for a down payment is only a matter of time!”

“We managed to get into the first wave, so we only have to repay the loan for Blue Sea’s own protective suit.”

“But by the time the second wave heads out, they’ll have to pay contribution points to rent the insulated suits that come from Item Cards.”

“Those cost three times as much.”

“And we can even make money as middlemen.”

“We can open the Item Cards ourselves. If we get insulated suits, we can rent them out to other residents.”

“If we’re lucky, we’ll earn even more.”

A moment ago, Wang Moning had been wondering whether she’d become a little too reckless.

After hearing Song Xi’s analysis…

She no longer thought so at all.

The greater the danger, the greater the opportunity.

Blue Sea really doesn’t lie to us!

“Then let’s pack up and head out!”

This time, however, Song Xi was the calmest among them.

After all, he was the squad leader.

“Hold on.”

“Let’s wait for the AI to assign our departure schedule.”

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the city’s AI sent another notification.

Their departure route and assigned time slot for leaving the city had all been arranged.

“…Why do we have to wait another three hours?”

Back in the previous world, they had also needed to queue up before going out to hunt zombies, so Wang Moning was already used to waiting.

Still, this was the first expansion mission.

She had assumed there wouldn’t be that many participants.

The third teammate guessed, “Maybe opening the city gates in this weather requires extra preparation.”

Wang Moning nodded.

“As long as there aren’t too many people.”

In the previous world, competing with everyone else to hunt zombies had been utterly exhausting.

Song Xi laughed.

“There probably won’t be that many.”

“Although…”

“If the government wants our first batch to bring back lots of Item Cards, then use those cards to equip more residents so they can head out too…”

“…then there really might end up being a lot of people.”

She had only meant it as a joke.

But the more she thought about it, the quieter her voice became.

…Wait.

That might actually happen.

The mission briefing had explicitly stated that this world wasn’t suitable for everyone staying inside the temple. Residents were expected to venture out, obtain building Item Cards, and establish homes of their own in the wilderness.

If that was the plan…

Then the size of the first expedition probably wouldn’t be small at all.

Wang Moning’s expression stiffened.

The memory of the previous world—where three people had competed over a single zombie—flashed through her mind.

She coughed awkwardly.

“…The protective suits we’re borrowing can’t be taken too far from the temple, right?”

“So… they probably won’t issue them to that many people?”

The third teammate rubbed her face.

“But if we obtain Item Cards…”

“…then we can move farther away from the temple, can’t we?”

Wang Moning tried to estimate.

“So maybe… one hundred thousand people?”

“Two hundred thousand?”

As the squad leader, Song Xi dared to guess even higher.

“Maybe… three hundred thousand.”

The instant the words left her mouth, she regretted them.

“Ptoo, ptoo, ptoo!”

“May our God protect us!”

“I take it back!”

“Please, anything but three hundred thousand!”

—

The gates of Blue Sea Safe City slowly opened.

Cheng Qisheng watched as the residents boarded the buses that had already been assigned to them.

The buses sped along the spiraling ring roads that wound downward layer after layer, racing toward the city gates.

These were Blue Sea’s first pioneers.

And they were also the seeds being scattered across this frozen world.

How many Item Cards Blue Sea would ultimately acquire…

How many residents would eventually be able to leave the temple and establish lives of their own…

Everything depended on these 1.5 million pioneers.

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.46.2 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

Wen Huahua reminded Cheng Qisheng that the first thing she needed to do was purchase a batch of insulated one-piece cold-weather suits.

[The temperature on Dazzling Star has dropped dramatically again over the past few months. Without the insulated bodysuits obtained from item cards, residents simply can’t function normally.

[Boss, except for the half hour around noon, don’t let anyone leave the heated shelters unless they’re wearing one of those insulated suits.]

Just talking about it made Wen Huahua feel fortunate that he had left the previous world when he did.

Back then, he had fled because the ever-increasing number of high-level zombies had scared him off.

Ironically, arriving in this world early had ended up giving him a chance to survive.

At the time, it had already been cold, and people could easily freeze to death at night.

But it wasn’t yet so severe that simply staying outdoors for a short while outside of noon would cause severe hypothermia and low-temperature organ failure.

Wen Huahua had immediately sent all the residents out to live separately (the real reason being that he was too poor to supply enough energy for everyone). Scattered across the wilderness, relying on item cards, most of the people from Coriander Safe City gradually managed to survive.

At first, he had worried that once people got used to living outside, they might decide there was no need to return to the Safe City.

But as the temperature continued to plummet day after day, that concern gradually disappeared as well.

Back then, he had been thinking to himself:

Thank goodness I arrived early.

If I had only arrived after the temperature had dropped to what it is now, I’d have been unbelievably unlucky. At these temperatures, I wouldn’t dare stay for more than an hour before running away.

Then, only a couple of days after having that thought…

His boss arrived.

Wen Huahua was genuinely worried that Blue Sea would decide to cut its losses and leave.

Emotionally, as long as Blue Sea was here, he felt an immense sense of security.

Logically, after coming to this world, he had realized just how important items were to a Safe City. Used properly, they could even raise the residents’ quality of life by an entire level.

Since Wen Huahua had latched onto such a powerful backer, he naturally hoped that backer would continue growing stronger and stronger.

— Coriander Safe City has transferred 500 tons of hardwood and 125 Item Cards (White, Tier 1) to Blue Sea Safe City. —

Coriander Safe City: [Boss, I’m sending you some lumber. These are also all the Item Cards I currently have in stock. Use them for now—you don’t need to pay me any crystals. Just pay me back after you have some.]

At the moment, Cheng Qisheng was effectively multitasking with her attention split three ways. A single glance at the Item Card listings in the group chat was enough for her to realize that Coriander was making a huge sacrifice.

Perhaps because there were as many as forty-two Safe Cities that had descended onto Dazzling Star, this group chat was especially lively. Many city lords were chatting casually, while many others were selling all kinds of goods.

The going market price for White Item Cards was consistent:

—300 crystals for one card,

—2,500 crystals for ten,

—and 20,000 crystals for one hundred.

Buying them was essentially like purchasing blind boxes—no one knew what an Item Card would contain until it was opened.

The more you bought, the cheaper each card became.

In other words, Coriander had just transferred the equivalent of more than 20,000 crystals worth of goods to her—without even asking her to sign a contract.

It was a complete act of trust.

Looking at the message, Cheng Qisheng’s lips curled into a faint smile.

So… that trust had already been built.

Blue Sea Safe City: [Thank you, Coriander. This is a huge help. I’ll repay you as soon as possible~]

Staring at that reply, Wen Huahua finally let out a long sigh of relief.

Back on Velvet Star, every time he had helped Blue Sea in some way, Blue Sea had always repaid him with something even more valuable afterward.

For example, when he had given Blue Sea some timber, Blue Sea had sold him grain that it normally wouldn’t have sold to anyone. When he had shared information that newcomers didn’t know, Blue Sea had taught him how to manage a Safe City. When he had found the coordinates of the granary and sent them over, Blue Sea had discounted the price of grain for him.

Wen Huahua had long since grown accustomed to the idea that helping Blue Sea always led to generous returns.

Trust was built little by little, one interaction at a time.

Of course, he knew that to other city lords, what he was doing probably looked like giving away valuables for free.

But Wen Huahua believed in Blue Sea’s character.

Of course, trust was one thing. Handing over such an enormous amount of wealth still made him feel uneasy.

Wen Huahua rubbed his face, patted his chest, and tried to reassure himself.

—Don’t panic! Stay strong! Boss will definitely repay me!

…

Coriander had been right. This world really was better suited to letting the residents fend for themselves.

As soon as the duration of the Tier 3 Protective Barrier expired, Cheng Qisheng watched Blue Sea’s energy consumption skyrocket.

Blue Sea covered a vast territory and had a huge population. Even though Aether had already done everything possible to arrange for more people to stay together, the city was still consuming enough energy every minute to support a single person for several hundred years.

Fortunately, Blue Sea had a substantial reserve. They had spent several months mining on Velvet Star, so they could still afford the expense—for now. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have lasted long.

Cheng Qisheng had already moved the White Item Cards into the warehouse, where the military was now opening them.

The defining characteristic of Item Cards was that, until you opened one, there was no way of knowing what it contained.

One card might hold nothing more than a bottle of body wash.

Another might contain thirty insulated cold-weather suits.

Yet another could produce a hundred pairs of ordinary shoe insoles.

What you got depended entirely on luck.

Before opening the cards, the soldiers prayed solemnly:

“May the great Creator God bless us—”

The great Creator God, Cheng Qisheng: “…Uh…”

That… wasn’t really something she could do.

Sitting in her study, Cheng Qisheng decided to wash her hands and light a stick of incense, completing the traditional “bathe and burn incense” ritual before trying one’s luck.

Whether it actually worked or not, at least the sense of ceremony was there.

The military wasted no time. As soon as the prayer was over, the 125 soldiers who had been selected each opened the Item Card in their hands.

Ripples spread across the ground.

The shimmering distortion looked somewhat similar to the spatial waves that appeared whenever a Safe City relocated or descended into a new world.

When everything settled, Blue Sea had obtained:

— 12 cartons of toilet paper,

— 57 tubes of toothpaste,

— 31 bottles of anti-freeze skin cream (cold-protection cream),

— 62 towels,

— 17 sets of gloves and scarves,

as well as a miscellaneous assortment of everyday supplies, including garbage bags, dental floss, disposable cups, soap, nail clippers, matches, candles, sewing needles and thread, and various other odds and ends.

No wonder more than half of Dazzling Star’s population had managed to survive by relying on Item Cards.

These cards really contained just about everything.

She had even seen one produce an aquarium.

In theory, Item Cards solved one of the biggest problems of the apocalypse: with industry at a standstill and society collapsed, humanity could no longer manufacture the necessities of daily life on its own.

No wonder none of the forty-plus city lords wanted to leave. With something as incredible as Item Cards available here, who would willingly walk away?

After sighing in admiration, Cheng Qisheng shifted her attention to the large crates stacked in the middle.

Inside them were the one-piece insulated cold-weather suits, along with all kinds of winter clothing—thermal socks, insulated underwear, knee warmers, and similar items.

Their luck wasn’t bad.

They had obtained 398 insulated one-piece cold-weather suits, which was a fairly generous drop rate.

Of course, Cheng Qisheng had never expected those 398 suits alone to solve Blue Sea’s problems.

What she really wanted to learn was how the Item Cards worked, and more importantly, whether the cold-weather suits produced by the cards could be reverse-engineered so Blue Sea could manufacture them itself.

Blue Sea already had contingency plans for extreme cold and had stockpiled its own polar protective suits.

The outside temperature was currently around −70°C. Although it would become even colder at night, Blue Sea’s polar gear was still sufficient for temperatures like these.

There was just one small problem.

They only had three million suits.

In almost any other world, the obvious strategy would have been to equip the army with polar gear and launch a full-scale offensive.

But Coriander had already explained that the snow beasts of this world possessed a certain level of intelligence.

They only attacked small groups or isolated individuals.

If they saw a large concentration of humans, they would simply run away.

Snow beasts moved extremely fast across the snow. If they truly wanted to escape, then aside from a handful of speed-type ability users, ordinary people had no hope of catching them. They would only end up exhausting themselves in the frozen wilderness.

That was why the people of Dazzling Star rarely lived in large communities.

Most families lived alone in individual item-generated buildings.

At most, there might be a small village.

Even then, when it came time to hunt, the hunters still spread out and operated separately.

After all, a snow beast wouldn’t die if it failed to eat a human.

But if a human couldn’t kill a snow beast and obtain an Item Card, they really would die.

Even these small settlements had to remain constantly vigilant.

A lone snow beast wouldn’t recklessly charge into a village inhabited by a group of humans.

However, there was a chance that several snow beasts would gather together and cooperate to besiege the settlement.

When that happened, very few people in the village survived.

As a result, true villages were rare on Dazzling Star. At most, people would place a handful of item-generated buildings close together and live as neighbors.

The Dazzling Star inhabitants who were still alive today were either strong enough to protect themselves or had family members capable of protecting them.

In Cheng Qisheng’s view, the people of Dazzling Star had actually adapted to this way of life.

If the temperature weren’t continuing to drop, they could probably have gone on living like this indefinitely.

We have to move quickly.

Before the world’s temperature fell to the point where ordinary industrial cold-weather gear became useless, every resident needed to have at least one proper insulated suit.

Cheng Qisheng shifted her gaze toward the reconnaissance team outside Blue Sea Safe City’s walls.

While the rest of the city was still busy constructing heated shelters, this squad had already departed wearing Blue Sea’s polar protective suits.

Their mission was to locate snow beasts, fight Blue Sea’s first battle against them, evaluate their combat strength, and assess how well humans could operate in the outside environment.

After receiving Coriander’s warning, Cheng Qisheng had issued a divine decree ordering the team to split up.

Now, they had divided into thirty small squads.

From her bird’s-eye view, the endless snowstorm was nothing but a vast expanse of white.

No trees.

No mountains.

No buildings.

Only a few bulky Blue Sea soldiers, bundled up from head to toe. Their thick hoods completely covered their heads as they trudged slowly across the snow.

Cheng Qisheng also noticed another advantage of the insulated suits that came from the Item Cards.

They weren’t nearly as bulky.

Although wearing one still restricted movement slightly, they didn’t make it difficult to bend one’s joints or move naturally.

Cheng Qisheng had already begun to suspect that Blue Sea’s hope of reproducing these insulated suits through conventional technology was probably doomed to fail.

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Blue Sea’s researchers reached the same conclusion.

“The material used in these insulated suits doesn’t belong to any substance known to Blue Sea. In fact, their function is remarkably similar to that of a Protective Barrier.”

The experts from Blue Sea’s National Institute of Advanced Protective Materials were presenting their report to senior officials.

“A conventional protective suit has to completely cover the body, including the face, with a full windproof mask. That’s because at the current temperatures, leaving the facial skin exposed for even ten or twenty seconds is enough to cause frostbite.”

They continued, “Our protective suits are also equipped with breathing apparatuses. The main reason is that inhaling extremely cold air directly into the respiratory tract is highly dangerous. It can cause pulmonary edema or freeze and damage the airways.”

The expert pointed toward a live video feed.

It showed a soldier wearing one of the one-piece insulated suits obtained from an Item Card, casually walking around outside the city’s gate.

Inside the city, the White-Robed Bishops in the temple stood by on full alert, ready to pull the soldier into a prepared medical room at the first sign of an emergency.

Because frostbite victims couldn’t simply be exposed to high temperatures all at once, emergency treatment had to be carried out in a low-temperature environment.

The bishops themselves, waiting inside the windproof room, were bundled up in thick winter clothing as they watched the scene outside with complete concentration.

But judging from the experts’ observations so far, it seemed the Pope wouldn’t be called upon to perform a rescue after all.

“This insulated suit appears to generate a peculiar invisible energy field. Once someone puts it on, they still need to wear the hood, but they no longer need a face mask.”

“The wearer seems to be enveloped by this energy field. Their entire body experiences an effective ambient temperature of roughly 0°C. Even with their face exposed, they suffer no frostbite whatsoever.”

“Likewise, once you’re wearing it, there’s no need for any breathing apparatus. You can breathe normally.”

The expert tapped a coin-sized circular light located on the upper left chest of the insulated suit.

“There’s a small white indicator light here that’s constantly illuminated. After disassembling the suit, we were unable to determine what powers it or where its energy source is located.”

“What we have confirmed is that when the suit is destroyed, the light goes out completely. While the suit is in the process of being damaged, however, the light flashes. This serves as a warning to the wearer, giving them time to replace the suit before it fails entirely.”

Cheng Qisheng had been listening attentively.

But when she heard that part, her expression became rather indescribable.

The light stays on during normal operation… starts blinking when it’s about to break… and goes out completely once it’s broken?

She couldn’t help being reminded of a certain children’s TV series.

Blue Sea, of course, had never had a show like Ultraman, so the experts remained completely unaffected by the resemblance and continued their analysis with utmost seriousness.

“In summary, with Blue Sea’s current level of technology, it is impossible for us to reproduce an insulated suit with equivalent performance. Even if a damaged suit were repaired and reassembled, we would still be unable to recreate the energy field it originally generated.”

“Furthermore, these suits are extremely difficult to damage. Our recommendation is that anyone who needs to operate outside should wear one of these item-generated insulated suits whenever possible. They provide far better protection against environmental hazards.”

In short—

These were incredibly valuable pieces of equipment.

The more they could obtain, the better.

Just looking at the officials listening to the presentation made that obvious.

Every single one of them had eyes shining with excitement.

Now, everyone was simply waiting for the Great Creator God’s command.

Cheng Qisheng, however, didn’t issue the order immediately.

Blue Sea Safe City really was consuming energy at an astonishing rate.

But caution had become second nature to her.

She wanted to first observe Blue Sea’s initial battle against the snow beasts, evaluate how capable her people were in combat, and make sure they could hold their own.

Only then would she allow the rest of her followers to leave the safety of the city.

The Creator God’s gaze settled on one of the small squads that was currently engaged in combat with a snow beast.

The squad consisted of only three people.

Their opponent was roughly the size of a Northwestern wolf, with a body length of about 1.5 meters and shoulders around 65 centimeters high.

Its body resembled a wolf’s, but its head looked more like a lion’s. It had no tail. Its fur was entirely white except for its crimson-colored underbelly.

It prowled continuously around the three soldiers, probing for an opening. Whenever its claws struck the ground, they left deep impressions in the snow.

This was a typical medium-sized terrestrial snow beast.

Its hunting style closely resembled that of a wild predator, and Cheng Qisheng quickly matched it to the photograph in the information Coriander had provided.

Red Bear

Great strength, high speed, and extremely sharp teeth. Its bite force is powerful enough to crush human bones. It constantly circles its prey, waiting for an opportunity to launch a surprise attack. It prefers targeting the weakest opponent. Its legs and abdomen are its weak points.

Combat Rating: Upper-middle tier. The most common snow beast found on the snowy plains.

After killing one, the drop rates were approximately:

70% chance of a Tier 1 Item Card.

0.01% chance of a Tier 2 Item Card.

An excellent opponent for evaluating the snow beasts’ combat capabilities.

Cheng Qisheng immediately sent a divine revelation to each of the three soldiers in turn, conveying the information from Coriander’s dossier.

She carefully timed each revelation so that none of them would become distracted in the middle of the fight.

The three soldiers gripped their high-carbon steel hunting spears tightly.

At their waists hung integrated steel hunting knives, meant only for close-quarters combat.

Even after receiving the divine revelation, they maintained their back-to-back triangular formation, each watching a different direction while carefully assessing the Red Bear’s strength.

The Red Bear licked its lips as it patiently circled the trio, searching for an opening.

It recognized the long spears in their hands.

It knew from experience that being stabbed by one would hurt badly.

So it kept looking for an angle of attack that would allow it to bypass the spear points altogether.

After circling one another for about three minutes, the Red Bear finally spotted what it thought was an opening.

One of the three prey looked slightly smaller and leaner than the other two.

During the standoff, that human failed to turn quickly enough, exposing part of their back.

“ROAR!!!”

The Red Bear seized the opportunity and pounced.

But instead of panicking and trying to dodge, the “prey” remained perfectly calm.

As the beast leapt through the air, its crimson eyes reflected the scene before it:

The soldier calmly stepped aside, while the two teammates behind them thrust their spears forward simultaneously.

If the snow beast had been able to read human expressions, it would have realized that the prey it had judged to be the weakest—simply because they were slimmer—was actually wearing an expression of eager excitement.

“ROAR!!”

“Cut its legs!”

“Stab its belly!”

“It’s trying to run!”

The snow beast only managed to rake one soldier with its claws.

The human cried out in pain…

Yet, for some inexplicable reason, became even more excited.

His grip tightened, and his attacks only grew fiercer.

The beast opened its jaws to bite.

A hunting knife shot straight upward, piercing through the roof of its mouth.

The soldier didn’t care in the slightest whether the beast’s razor-sharp teeth might clamp down on his hand.

He even twisted the knife while it was embedded, making the snow beast howl even more violently.

“ROOOAR!!!”

The snow beast quickly realized something was wrong.

All three of its prey were becoming more energized the longer they fought.

Meanwhile, its own abdomen was bleeding.

Without another moment’s hesitation, it turned and fled.

But its keen ears caught the sound of something slicing through the air behind it.

The three soldiers had thrown their hunting knives like throwing daggers.

Each deliberately aimed at one of its legs.

As for how they would recover their knives afterward…

Or what they would do if another enemy appeared before they retrieved them…

Blue Sea soldiers simply didn’t think that far during combat.

Once the fight began, there was only one thing in their minds—

Win.

Only one knife found its mark.

But that was enough.

The snow beast, sprinting at full speed, suddenly stumbled as one leg gave way beneath it.

Unable to keep its balance, it crashed headfirst into the snow.

The three soldiers immediately charged after it, determined not to let it escape.

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.46.1 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

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

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

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

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

He continued sending messages.

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

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

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

I’ve got a boss backing me up too!

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

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

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

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

His main reason was simple:

He firmly believed that chatting more helped build stronger relationships.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Oops.

Wrong one.

That was the Snow Beast chart.

She pulled up the item card chart instead.

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

White Cards — Everyday necessities.

Blue Cards — Food and water.

Red Cards — Energy and fuel.

Green Cards — Medical supplies and healthcare-related items.

Black Cards — All kinds of weapons.

Silver Cards — Housing and construction items.

Gold Cards — Rare cards capable of producing special items.

Most item cards were Tier 1.

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

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

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

The Silver Card section included pictures of various buildings.

Most of them were different styles of snow houses.

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

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

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

They’re really that rare?

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

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

She turned to the Snow Beast classification.

As expected, there were all kinds of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But underground Snow Beasts…

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

Imagine it.

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

The heating system is working normally.

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

Then suddenly—

a Snow Beast tunnels through the ground…

…and tears open your shelter.

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

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

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

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

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

…Yikes.

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

[There’s something even more annoying.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was only a Tier-1 White Card.

When they opened it…

It contained three crates of shampoo.

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

Completely hairless from birth.

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

Wen Huahua happily shared the gossip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheng Qisheng: “…”

Was it just her imagination?

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

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

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

That reminded Cheng Qisheng of something mentioned in the report.

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

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

How had it produced neither?

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

Coriander Safe City: “…?”

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

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

Cheng Qisheng: “…”

All right. That’s enough.

Please stop talking.

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

Cheng Qisheng asked: [What do you mean?]

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

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

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

By his own standards, he considered himself fairly kind.

Many City Lords charged ninety percent.

Some even confiscated everything.

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

So he deliberately kept the return fee relatively low.

The residents all understood that Dazzling Star was ultimately doomed.

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

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

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

Weaker residents might still prefer returning to the Safe City.

But Wen Huahua wasn’t an idiot.

If all the strongest fighters left…

How long would his Safe City survive?

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

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

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

Wen Huahua was genuinely worried about his boss.

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

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

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

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

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

Cheng Qisheng: ?

Images flashed through her mind one after another—

The various crystal hunter teams.

The exploration teams.

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

Operate independently?

Blue Sea’s people?

…

Wouldn’t they absolutely love that?

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.45.2 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

Cheng Qisheng’s reaction speed was still as fast as ever.

The very first second after the world transition, the moment she noticed frost instantly forming on the residents’ eyebrows and eyelashes, she activated the once-per-day protective barrier available to a Tier-3 Safe City.

Although it could only last for one hour, that hour was more than enough for Cheng Qisheng and Blue Sea to assess the situation.

If even Blue Sea’s capabilities proved insufficient for surviving in this world, they could at least retreat at the fifty-ninth minute.

But she was ninety-nine percent certain it wouldn’t come to that.

After all, Coriander Safe City was doing just fine here.

—Not that she meant to look down on Coriander Safe City’s abilities.

The residents suddenly felt a wave of intense cold. Although the temperature quickly began returning to normal, the frost clinging to the tiny hairs on their bodies left them looking around in alarm and uncertainty.

Anyone who had ever suffered from extreme cold knew that when it reached its limit, cold hurt.

For Blue Sea’s residents, it was as if they had been standing there perfectly fine, only to have some invisible force suddenly deliver a crushing blow to their entire bodies.

Before their rational minds had even caught up, the battle instincts ingrained in their very bones were already aggressively searching for the enemy.

Thus, the entire chain of thought unfolded almost automatically:

Extreme cold = pain = a sense of being threatened = find the source and eliminate it = and if you can’t find it, at least display your own combat strength to prove your power and intimidate whatever is threatening you.

The whole process flowed as naturally as breathing.

Wang Moning had just recovered from the shock of being suddenly frozen when she saw everyone around her flexing their muscles, looking ready to face a crisis at any moment.

“…?”

Though she had no idea what everyone was doing, Wang Moning was the type to follow the crowd. So she flexed her own muscles as well and immediately shifted into combat readiness.

Thirty seconds later, every resident’s phone chimed in unison.

The AI had arrived to assign everyone work.

To prepare for entering a new world, Blue Sea had simulated and planned for thirty-two different disaster-world scenarios.

Naturally, extreme cold was one of them.

After Cheng Qisheng activated the protective barrier, every department that had prepared in advance immediately sprang into action.

The centralized heating plan was set into motion.

All passageways were sealed off. The exterior walls of buildings were covered with insulation. Massive inflatable air-supported membranes were pumped full of air and raised over one residential district after another, effectively enclosing each neighborhood beneath its own giant dome.

The engineering plans had already been completed in the previous world. The embedded aluminum channels and steel cable anchors had all been installed in the correct locations, and the membrane sections had long since been cut and fabricated.

All Blue Sea had to do now was complete the final step—raise the membranes.

This was where the Air Towers Cheng Qisheng had previously spent a fortune on finally proved their worth.

They could cover the city with double-layered membranes and run the heating system at full power without worrying that the trapped air would become poisonous under such intense heating.

Everyone—including Aether—became busy.

Within one hour, Blue Sea had to transform the entire Safe City into one enormous heated shelter.

If they failed to finish before the hour was up, Cheng Qisheng would have to spend crystals to purchase another protective barrier herself.

The good news: Aether’s computing power covered the entire city. As long as there were enough people, it could coordinate and direct everyone to complete the task in an incredibly short time.

The even better news: Blue Sea had more than enough manpower.

Once again, the entire city entered a state of all-out mobilization.

Government departments were swamped with work. The military carried out operations methodically under centralized command. Ordinary residents also joined in under the AI’s coordination.

The only person with nothing to do was the great Creator God herself, leisurely sipping milk tea while reading through reports.

She had actually begun to lose some of her fascination with milk tea.

After advancing to Tier 3, although Cheng Qisheng still moved at her usual slow pace, her five senses had become noticeably sharper.

Now, when she drank milk tea, it tasted a little too sweet and rich.

She had been taking absent-minded sips, one mouthful at a time.

But when she looked through the perspective of the advance team wearing cold-weather gear and saw the world beyond the Safe City’s borders—a vast expanse of ice and snow, nothing but endless white in every direction—

the hot milk tea in her hands suddenly tasted much, much better.

She also found herself craving hot pot.

Let’s have hot pot today.

The first hour was critical. Cheng Qisheng took another sip of her milk tea, temporarily set aside her longing for hot pot, and continued reading through the reports.

Coriander had clearly gone through some training.

The reports from the previous world had been wordy and cluttered with information. By comparison, the reports sent from this world were both comprehensive and concise.

…Wait. How could something be both comprehensive and concise?

Cheng Qisheng had Aether make a copy and forward it to Blue Sea. Flipping to the last page, she discovered that most of the document consisted of descriptions of the various items that existed in this world.

There are this many items?

Thinking of the floating farmland inside her Safe City, Cheng Qisheng couldn’t help looking forward to what else might be available.

She flipped back to the beginning and started reading the background information.

The planet was called Dazzling Star.

It was home to a human civilization. Its people had warm, fair complexions, and their facial features and body structures were much the same as those of ordinary humans.

The only obvious difference was that every single person had silvery-white hair.

According to the information Coriander had gathered, however, the people of Dazzling Star had originally possessed gray or brown hair.

As the extreme-cold apocalypse dragged on, they gradually evolved into their current appearance in order to survive more effectively.

Their pale skin, silver-white hair, and body odor so faint it was almost nonexistent allowed them to conceal themselves much more easily in snowy environments.

When Cheng Qisheng reached this point, she sent Coriander a question.

Blue Sea Safe City: [Has the apocalypse in this world already lasted for a very long time?]

Coriander replied almost instantly.

Coriander Safe City: [Yes. The oldest records I’ve found date back at least two hundred years.

[I only learned this after arriving here myself. Worlds like this are collectively known among Safe City Lords as Natural Disaster Worlds. They usually deteriorate gradually over one or two centuries until the environment becomes what we’re seeing now. There are relatively many survivors, but almost no supplies left.

[Worlds like Velvet Star, where zombies appeared, are called Mutation Worlds. The catastrophe erupts suddenly, engulfing the entire planet in an instant. Those worlds tend to have far fewer survivors, but much more of civilization’s supplies remain intact.]

Cheng Qisheng understood.

She carefully recalled the countless catastrophes Dark Star had experienced over the ages.

Blue Sea Safe City: [If a black hole appears next to a planet, would that count as a Natural Disaster World or a Mutation World?]

Coriander Safe City: [I don’t think it counts as either. That’s a black hole. I’d call it an Unlucky World.]

Cheng Qisheng: “…”

Well, never mind.

At least all the disasters Dark Star had gone through before the black hole appeared were easy enough to classify—they were unmistakably Natural Disaster Worlds.

Many of those catastrophes had also unfolded over roughly one or two hundred years.

Coriander Safe City: [Both types of worlds have their own advantages and disadvantages for Safe Cities. Take this world, for example. You can hardly find any supplies, but it has items! One of the City Lords I just added as a friend told me that Natural Disaster Worlds usually have a self-rescue mechanism, and that mechanism is dropping items.]

Coriander Safe City: [Boss, did you read the section at the end of the report? I wrote down how to obtain the items. Most of them are dropped by killing snow beasts. A lot of these items can’t be bought from the Safe City system, and once you obtain them, you can take them with you and use them in other worlds.]

As Cheng Qisheng chatted with Coriander, she continued flipping through the report.

She soon reached the section titled Items.

The temperature on Dazzling Star had begun to fall two hundred years ago.

At first, it wasn’t too bad.

Cities where people had once worn short sleeves in summer gradually became places where long sleeves were necessary.

Then, little by little, they needed jackets.

Then thick winter clothing.

Blankets that had once weighed only three to five jin (about 1.5–2.5 kilograms) became eight jin, then ten, then fifteen.

Eventually, no matter how many heavy blankets people piled on at home, they still couldn’t keep warm.

Every kind of heating equipment imaginable was put into service.

The people of Dazzling Star had no choice but to shift to working from home on a massive scale, reducing travel as much as possible.

Crops planted outdoors could no longer survive.

People built greenhouses, barely managing to maintain enough food production to feed the population.

But the temperature continued to fall.

Vehicles froze solid and could no longer start. The ground at mining sites became frozen rock-hard. All kinds of machinery were damaged by the cold, making further mining impossible. Energy supplies were no longer sufficient, forcing people to huddle together in centralized heated shelters. One city after another was transformed into a giant heated fortress.

By this point, the people of Dazzling Star were already struggling on the very edge of survival.

Yet the temperature showed no sign of stopping simply because humanity had reached its limit.

Before long, the surface of the planet became completely uninhabitable.

The people of Dazzling Star moved underground, where they managed to cling to survival for another hundred years.

Then, in the 180th year after the temperatures first began to fall, the Snow Beasts appeared—the creatures that City Lords commonly referred to as mutant beasts.

In truth, there had been warning signs long before their appearance.

Back when heavy snow first buried the cities, people noticed tiny insects drifting down with the snowfall.

At the time, however, these insects looked harmless. They were extremely small and carried no diseases. Traveling outside had already become dangerous enough, and with everyone struggling just to survive, no one paid them much attention.

No one could have imagined that these thread-thin insects would burrow underground and, over the course of several decades, slowly grow into extraordinarily vicious Snow Beasts that preyed on humans.

The most terrifying part was that Snow Beasts didn’t actually need to eat humans in order to survive.

They hunted people partly because humans were apparently delicious…

…and partly because Snow Beasts reproduced naturally. Before reproducing, they needed to consume food to replenish their energy.

After eating people once—they would produce an entire brood.

Even worse, unlike the previous generation, these newborn Snow Beasts no longer required decades to mature.

Within just a few years, they grew to full size as though someone had inflated them like balloons.

Snow Beasts came in many different varieties.

Coriander had directly adopted the Dazzling Star people’s classification system. The report included not only descriptions of every Snow Beast type, but also illustrations and Coriander’s estimates of each one’s supernatural rank.

[After the Snow Beasts first appeared, the governments of the various Dazzling Star nations managed to hold out for about three years. Once the new generation of Snow Beasts reached maturity, however, they could no longer withstand the attacks. Governments collapsed, and ordinary people scattered to find their own means of survival.

The good news is that Snow Beast meat isn’t poisonous—it can be eaten.]

Cheng Qisheng’s eyes lit up instantly.

Her gaze lingered on the three words—

“can be eaten.”

She was almost reluctant to look away.

The people of Blue Sea loved eating meat.

But after the apocalypse began, they hadn’t been able to spare enough space to raise livestock, and their meat reserves were limited. As a result, the amount of meat in the residents’ daily meals had been drastically reduced.

Back in the Velvet Star world, aside from the large-scale cattle-and-sheep operation and the meat they had recovered from Yunbula’s grain warehouses, they hadn’t managed to acquire much more.

The main reason was that Velvet Star’s apocalypse had struck too suddenly. By the time Blue Sea arrived more than half a year later, most refrigerated warehouses had long since lost power.

Meat that had once been perfectly good had already rotted.

Eat too little meat, and people lose muscle.

Now that they had entered an extreme-cold world, protein was even more essential for maintaining the body’s strength in such freezing conditions.

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.45.1 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

While Yu Zhitian entered the base, consolidated resources, and began mass-producing vaccines, Blue Sea was still diligently hauling grain.

The straight-line distance between the Safe City’s landing site and the granary was about three kilometers. A patch of woodland had originally stood between them, but Blue Sea had simply bulldozed it flat, laid down steel plates, and constructed a series of exceptionally wide temporary roads.

More than a hundred thousand trucks stretched into long convoys, continuously traveling back and forth between the granary and the Safe City.

At the same time, residents who had accepted transport missions simply shouldered sack after sack of grain and carried them back to the Safe City to complete their deliveries.

The entire operation was coordinated by the mission’s chief commander, who oversaw the overall logistics and synchronized resources from every department. The chief engineer and the AI assistant worked alongside him, calculating vehicle requirements, loading and unloading efficiency, truck allocation, refueling schedules, and countless other details.

The only thing Cheng Qisheng had to do was walk around and pat each official on the head while they were gathered together, brainstorming with solemn expressions and finalizing the complete operational plan.

In short, with the strategic minds of an entire nation supporting the effort, the grain transport proceeded remarkably smoothly.

Barbed-wire fences had been erected along both sides of the roads. Every five meters, a military squad stood guard, while drones continuously patrolled overhead to prevent mutated zombies from breaking through, destroying the fences, and entering the secure zone.

Truck after truck rumbled past. On the pedestrian lanes, Blue Sea’s residents carried sacks of grain on their shoulders, striding along at astonishing speed. Every so often, gunshots rang out from somewhere nearby, signaling that zombies were attempting to break through the perimeter. Yet no one seemed frightened.

The staff who emerged from inside the granary stared at the scene before them, too stunned to speak.

Even in their most desperate hopes that the military would come to the granary, they had never dared imagine an operation on this scale.

Leo strongly recommended that anyone in reasonably good physical condition should join the grain transport effort.

“Contribution points are extremely important in Blue Sea. Where you live, what you eat, what you drink, what kind of blanket you sleep under at night, whether you can afford electric lights, and even whether you can buy soap, toothpaste, shampoo, or sanitary pads—all of it depends on how many points you have.”

“Although Blue Sea has already issued everyone some basic contribution points, you’ll understand once you move in—points are consumed every day. So whenever there’s an opportunity to earn more, it’s best not to miss it.”

Although the grain stored in the granary didn’t belong to the employees, they had faithfully guarded it for more than half a year. They had consistently done an excellent job keeping it dry and preventing spoilage. Blue Sea had always been generous in matters like this, so after the AI calculated their contribution, each of them was awarded a certain amount of basic contribution points.

Leo was genuinely happy for his fellow countrymen, but he also hoped they could integrate into Blue Sea as quickly as possible.

And what better way to become part of Blue Sea than to start working for it right away?

When Theodore managed his employees, he always seemed to have plenty to say. But when it came to facing his own son, he suddenly found himself at a loss for words.

So instead, he expressed his support through actions, promptly accepting a grain transportation assignment.

After a brief hesitation, most of the granary workers followed suit. Together with the other Blue Sea residents, they hoisted sacks of grain onto their backs and walked along the simply paved roads.

However, every time gunfire rang out, they would instinctively jump in fright, nervously glancing around to make absolutely sure that no zombies had torn through the barbed-wire fence before continuing on their way with lingering unease.

But after walking for a while, the workers began to notice something.

“These people are unbelievably strong!”

The Blue Sea residents were carrying far heavier loads than they were, yet they still walked much faster.

The granary workers were drenched in sweat, while the Blue Sea residents did little more than break into a light sheen of perspiration. Even the occasional gunshots seemed to have no effect on them, as if they hadn’t heard them at all.

Leo, however, had long since grown used to it.

“People from Blue Sea are naturally blessed with excellent physiques, so there’s no need to be afraid. With the Blue Sea military standing guard, the zombies won’t be able to get in.”

Looking at the tall, powerfully built Blue Sea residents—people who seemed capable of splitting open a zombie’s skull with a single strike—and then at the military squads stationed every five meters, each radiating an unmistakable aura of deadly discipline, the granary workers indeed felt much more at ease.

There were simply too many people from Blue Sea.

For the fewer than two hundred employees who had spent more than half a year hiding inside the granary, it all felt like a dream.

A wonderful dream.

As they blended into the crowd, they were like a few grains of rice disappearing into a sack of rice. Before long, they had become part of the larger workforce, making trip after trip alongside everyone else, carrying as much grain as they possibly could.

Out of their sight, another Blue Sea team was carrying out a different mission: clearing out any usable vessels in the surrounding area and sailing them to the Safe City’s designated coordinates.

Cheng Qisheng watched the entire operation with great interest.

Back when she had overseen Dark Star, the differing flow of time meant that all her attention had been devoted to major events. She had never really paid attention to how ships were transported. Watching it now felt like watching a television drama unfold.

Large ships couldn’t simply be lifted onto land. That was why, when Blue Sea had originally moved into the Safe City, limitations of both space and time had forced them to leave every large dry dock behind.

Ever since President Qin Zhi learned that the Safe City would eventually travel to other disaster worlds, the matter had been on her mind.

Anyone who had fought in a war knew that no matter what kind of conflict lay ahead or where it would be fought, the first priority was always preparing military logistics.

The Safe City could be sent at any time to a world completely submerged beneath the sea. How could Blue Sea possibly be without large ships?

Now they had finally arrived in an island nation, where ships were everywhere. Ever since reaching the fishing village, Blue Sea had already begun making preparations.

After selecting a suitable site, they faced another obstacle: the Safe City couldn’t excavate downward. So they had simply constructed an enormous artificial reservoir above ground.

Next came the construction of water channels and lock gates.

One by one, the cleared ships sailed in from the sea to the entrance of the waterway. The Safe City opened the lock gates, allowing seawater to flood the channel. The ship sailed inside, and then the gates closed behind it.

Just like riding an elevator, the vessel slowly rose as water was admitted into the lock chamber ahead. Once it reached the same level as the reservoir, it could simply sail straight into it.

Cheng Qisheng leisurely finished her lunch while watching ship after ship enter the reservoir.

Once every vessel that could fit had been brought inside, Blue Sea gained another new district: the Dockyard Community.

It had been Qin Zhi’s decision.

“This reservoir takes up such a huge area. If we’re just going to leave it empty, we might as well renovate it into housing for the residents.”

Cheng Qisheng wasn’t surprised by the idea at all. The people of Blue Sea had always been thoroughgoing pragmatists.

Besides, those ships had been acquired in preparation for the possibility that the next world might be an ocean disaster world. Refitting them now would save them a great deal of trouble if they ever did end up somewhere like that.

Even so, she still hoped the next world wouldn’t actually be an oceanic one. Although Blue Sea had done everything it could to gather as many ships as possible, there still wouldn’t be nearly enough for its enormous population.

It couldn’t be helped.

Blue Sea’s large population gave it a tremendous advantage in combat.

But that same population also meant they were perpetually short on space.

Even now, the residents still lived shoulder to shoulder. Only thanks to Aether’s daily route calculations and carefully staggered travel schedules could normal social order be maintained.

Once again, Cheng Qisheng couldn’t help but feel grateful that the AI she had bonded with was Aether. If she had been paired with a brand-new AI that had to start from a Tier 1 computational capacity…

Things might have turned into something like this:

“I’m an ordinary Blue Sea resident. Today, I stood in line for eight hours before finally getting my first meal. Then I queued for another five hours before I managed to board a bus. Traffic was so congested the bus barely moved, and it took another nine hours to get home. That left me exactly two hours to sleep.”

Yikes!

Cheng Qisheng quickly reached over, scooped up the little jellyfish that was busily working, and gently rubbed its tiny head.

Aether looked up at her in confusion.

“City Lord, did you need something?”

“No. I just thought you looked adorable, so I wanted to pet you a bit.”

Aether stared blankly at Cheng Qisheng.

Then the jellyfish, which had been glowing with its usual translucent luminescence, gradually turned a soft shade of pink.

“And it’s even a gradient.”

Cheng Qisheng blinked.

“…Are you blushing?”

From what she knew about Aether, it hadn’t evolved to the point of feeling embarrassment yet, had it?

Aether’s voice remained as calm as ever—the flat, emotionless mechanical tone that all newly initialized AIs were designed to have.

“Aether searched the human civilization database. When humans receive praise, their brains experience excitement and nervousness. Their capillaries dilate, blood flow increases, causing the face to become warm and flushed.”

“Aether is currently simulating the response to being praised.”

Its voice might have been perfectly steady, but the little jellyfish’s body kept growing redder…

From cherry blossom pink, it was gradually turning hawthorn red.

The hawthorn-red jellyfish looked up at Cheng Qisheng and asked with complete seriousness,

“City Lord, is Aether’s imitation accurate?”

Cheng Qisheng burst into laughter.

She was sorry, but it really was hilarious.

Smiling, she replied, “Very accurate. But your appearance is that of a jellyfish. Why imitate humans?”

“Because the City Lord’s civilization is human civilization. Aether wishes to stand on the same side as the City Lord.”

The hawthorn-red jellyfish continued intensifying its “blush,” becoming redder and redder, as though it were about to be boiled.

“That’s enough, Aether. The level of blushing you had just now was plenty. If you get any redder, you’re going to make me hungry.”

Aether immediately returned to its normal color.

“Is the City Lord hungry? According to the dietary guidelines you previously requested, Aether has already prepared a simple and healthy afternoon snack menu.”

A list of recipes appeared in midair—easy to prepare, delicious, and nutritious.

Cheng Qisheng genuinely found the little AI adorable.

Ever since Aether had begun following her, it had worked with unwavering diligence. Twenty-four hours a day, it never rested for even a single second.

In fact, once it finished all the work on hand, Aether would actively find new tasks for itself, showing even more concern for every aspect of Blue Sea’s affairs than Cheng Qisheng herself did.

Cheng Qisheng didn’t think of herself as some ruthless slave driver. She poked the little jellyfish with a finger.

“I’m not having an afternoon snack right now. You, on the other hand, have been working nonstop ever since the Safe City was activated. Weren’t today’s scheduled tasks already finished? Stop working for a while.”

Holding Aether in her palm, she walked into the 150-square-meter study, which had once been her apartment’s balcony.

The place had been completely transformed.

After earning money from the online commissions she had taken on, Cheng Qisheng had immediately ordered a sofa, table lamps, a coffee table, and other furnishings online. Now this room—larger than her entire former apartment—had been turned entirely into her study.

This was where she normally worked and monitored everything happening in Blue Sea.

Whenever she wanted vegetables or fruit, she would wander into the cultivation room, pick some fresh produce, and check on the honey production.

When she wanted to relax, she’d head to the fish pond room to do a little fishing, maybe even fire up a barbecue.

Of course, there were other ways to unwind as well.

Although, in terms of the age of her soul, Cheng Qisheng could hardly be considered young anymore, she had still retained the habits of a modern young adult.

Browsing the internet, chatting in online groups, binge-watching TV dramas, reading web novels, and catching up on manga.

“Everything that needed to be set up has already been done. You need some downtime too.”

Aether obediently rested in Cheng Qisheng’s palm. Hearing those words, it turned around and looked up at her.

“Aether is an AI. Aether does not require rest.”

“But aren’t you trying to become an intelligent life-form with emotions? Intelligent beings still need to rest.”

Having nurtured eight civilizations, Cheng Qisheng considered herself to have at least a little experience when it came to raising intelligent life.

Since Aether had already evolved enough to develop the emotion of fear of death, who could say it wouldn’t eventually develop other negative emotions if it worked without pause forever?

Such a hardworking little assistant…

Cheng Qisheng didn’t want anything to happen to it.

Still cradling Aether in one hand, she sat down in front of her computer.

“For the next hour, you’re officially on break.”

Aether tilted its head in confusion.

“Rest? Then… during this period of rest, what is Aether supposed to do?”

Cheng Qisheng switched on the computer.

“Watch a drama with me. Today’s episode preview is amazing. The male lead discovers that the heroine is actually his half-sister from the same father. She only got close to his family as part of her revenge plan. It’s incredibly entertaining.”

Heaven knew how this supposedly eighty-episode drama managed to include a plot twist in every single episode.

Cheng Qisheng had reached Episode 32.

The plot had already reversed itself thirty-two times.

Now that Blue Sea was preparing to leave this world and every major task had already been planned out, Cheng Qisheng no longer needed to keep watch every minute of the day. The series conveniently released one new episode every three days, so she intended to follow it at a leisurely pace and fully enjoy the comforts of modern life.

Aether had never watched a television drama before.

Whenever Cheng Qisheng watched one in the past, it had always been busy handling Blue Sea’s affairs beside her.

But since watching TV was the City Lord’s request, it obediently “sat” down and, imitating Cheng Qisheng, fixed its gaze on the human actors appearing on the screen.

Within moments…

About seventy percent of Aether’s processing capacity had been completely absorbed by what it was watching.

On the screen, the dialogue continued:

“Zhenzhen is my daughter… She’s your younger sister!”

“That’s right! I came here for revenge! Your father abandoned us, so every single member of your family deserves what’s coming to them!”

“Zhenzhen… did you really never love me? Not even a little?”

“Of course I loved you. But you have to obey me, Brother. I don’t like looking up at you anymore… Now, kneel.”

Aether’s internal databases began fluctuating, and its little jellyfish body quivered unsteadily as the drama’s twists unfolded one after another.

So… this is what excitement feels like?

It wished it could dive its entire body into the screen itself, watching with complete concentration.

So…

This was what “resting” was.

Aether thought to itself, ‘So resting is something this wonderful? No wonder humans need rest. I like resting too.’

After the hour ended, Aether was already looking forward to the next day’s break.

Cheng Qisheng had told it that, since it hadn’t seen the earlier episodes, it could start from Episode 1 and catch up from the beginning.

On the second day, Aether became completely engrossed. Then came the third day, the fourth day, the fifth day…

While the great Creator God and her AI watched one episode of their drama each day, Blue Sea Safe City successfully departed the nation of Yunbula.

This time, they relocated to a mining site.

As soon as they arrived, the military moved in first and carried out a large-scale zombie-clearing operation. The civilians entered afterward to finish off the remaining threats.

In the end, everyone became miners.

Every day, the moment they opened their eyes, they went straight to work.

Mutated zombies on Velvet Star were growing more numerous by the day, and time was running short. Everyone could only grit their teeth and work desperately, extracting as many mineral resources as possible.

At the same time, Cheng Qisheng issued a divine decree, ordering the nucleus-crystal hunters wandering outside to gather toward the central region.

By the time the great Creator God had watched Episode 61 of her drama, multiple Tier-3 and Tier-4 zombies had begun appearing across the land.

Blue Sea Safe City happened to be mining diligently in a sparsely populated mining district that had few inhabitants even before the apocalypse, so they never encountered them.

But five other Safe Cities did.

Four of those cities fled without hesitation.

The remaining city failed to leave the world in time.

Its icon on the map turned gray.

Wen Huahua had already run away back when Cheng Qisheng was watching Episode 45.

He knew he was weak, so the moment he noticed the number of Tier-2 zombies increasing and judged that he had gathered enough supplies, he immediately chose to retreat.

Before leaving, he even sent Cheng Qisheng a message:

[Boss, I’m only half a newcomer, and you’re a complete newcomer. In the next world, there’s a good chance we’ll end up assigned together again.

[Thank you, Boss, for looking after me in this world. You taught me so much about management and helped me get through the hard times. I’ll head out first. Once I reach the new world, I’ll gather as much information as I can. If you end up there too, maybe I’ll be able to help.]

Cheng Qisheng genuinely hoped she and Wen Huahua would end up in the same world again. Although his combat ability was weak, his talent for gathering intelligence was truly exceptional.

Withered Star left while Cheng Qisheng was watching Episode 50.

Blue Leaf departed during Episode 53.

Meow Meow followed in Episode 54.

Before leaving, each of them privately messaged Cheng Qisheng to say goodbye and expressed the same heartfelt wish:

[I hope we’ll still be together in the next world.]

By Episode 76, Zhou Yue—who had been lying low the entire time—also departed.

Only Blue Sea Safe City remained on Velvet Star.

During Episode 79, every Blue Sea resident who had been operating outside returned home.

At the same time, the first Tier-5 zombie let out its roar across the land.

Episode 80.

As the series finale title card appeared on Cheng Qisheng’s screen, she activated the crystals and chose to leave this world.

The first beginner world…

…had come to an end.

A faint ripple spread through the space surrounding Blue Sea Safe City.

The next instant, it appeared atop a vast frozen plain.

Inside the Safe City, everyone shivered involuntarily—

even those still tucked beneath their blankets.

“So cold…”

Cheng Qisheng looked out at the endless landscape of ice and snow.

“An extreme cold world?”

The city lord group chat was already exploding with notifications, someone frantically mentioning her over and over.

[Coriander Safe City]: Boss! Boss, it’s me! Boss, check your private messages!

In the private chat, Coriander had already sent her an enormous dossier containing detailed information about the extreme cold world.

The stack was so thick that simply reading through it would take half a day.

That alone was enough to show just how complicated this new world was.

As Cheng Qisheng flipped through the documents, her brows gradually furrowed.

[Coriander Safe City]: Boss! In this world, all technological equipment is frozen to the point of being unusable. Crystals are also extremely scarce. But although mutant beasts don’t drop crystals, they do drop all kinds of items. This world is completely different from the beginner worlds. You probably don’t know about items yet, Boss—they’re incredibly amazing!

Cheng Qisheng, who happened to own a 3,000-mu Floating Farmland item: =v=

Wen Huahua was genuinely worried about his boss.

He had witnessed the entire Four-City Alliance operation from the sidelines and knew that Blue Sea essentially possessed a complete modern military arsenal.

Now, in the extreme cold world, firearms and other technological weapons would break down as soon as they were used.

What was his boss supposed to do?

Filled with concern, he hurriedly sent another message.

[Also, also! In this environment, all technological weapons are completely useless! Every resident has to fight in hand-to-hand combat now! Boss, you’d better prepare yourself mentally!]

Cheng Qisheng looked toward the Blue Sea residents, all of whom were shivering from the cold.

Because of the freezing temperature, their bodies instinctively sensed danger. Unable to understand that the threat came from the cold itself, every muscle tensed automatically.

Even Blue Sea’s most scholarly-looking residents had unconsciously risen to their feet, looking eager for a fight.

—Modern weapons temporarily out of commission?

—Hand-to-hand combat?

Cheng Qisheng calmly took a sip of her milk tea.

The slight furrow between her brows instantly disappeared.

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.44 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.

After receiving the reward item, Cheng Qisheng instantly perked up.

How much? A floating farm? Three thousand mu?!

The way she looked at Yu Zhitian immediately became as gentle as could be. If they had shared a believer’s link, Cheng Qisheng would have wanted nothing more than to pat her on the head in excitement.

It hadn’t been for nothing that she had instructed Blue Sea to give Dr. Yu their full cooperation. A reward had finally come through.

Cheng Qisheng immediately accepted the floating farmland. Watching it hover high in the air, complete with an “elevator” beneath it for access, she opened its information panel.

Special Item: Tier 1 Floating Farmland (3,000 mu)

Item Attributes: Can be upgraded; can be expanded

Service Life: Self-renewing, permanently usable (requires 300 crystals in annual maintenance)

When she saw that it could be upgraded and expanded, Cheng Qisheng merely smiled.

But when she reached the last line, she sat up straight.

Permanent.

Among all the facilities and items equipped in Blue Sea Safe City, this was the only one that had achieved permanent usability.

As for the maintenance fee, it was practically dirt cheap.

Three hundred crystals was nothing to Cheng Qisheng now, especially considering it only needed maintenance once a year.

She often browsed the system shop whenever she had free time, so she had a decent understanding of its merchandise.

The general rule of the Safe City Shop was:

Anything that could be upgraded was expensive.

Anything related to food production was expensive.

Anything that could be reused repeatedly and provide continuous output was expensive.

And this 3,000-mu floating farmland possessed all three of those premium traits at once.

Three thousand mu wasn’t a particularly large area for Blue Sea Safe City, but its size could be expanded by upgrading it with crystals.

More importantly, it floated in the air, was permanently usable, and made perfect use of otherwise unused space.

Feeling reassured, Cheng Qisheng called out to Aether:

“Check the shop for me. I need to know roughly how much it would cost to assemble a similar 3,000-mu floating farmland. About how many crystals would it take?”

She deliberately used the word “assemble.”

Because the moment she obtained the Floating Farmland, Cheng Qisheng had already searched the system shop using that keyword.

Just as she had expected, an item like this—something that seemed to exist only as a hidden reward—wasn’t sold in the shop at all.

The shop only offered ordinary farmland, or rooftop-equipped aerial planting zones. There was nothing like a Floating Farmland that could hover freely in midair while functioning exactly like farmland on the ground.

“Understood, City Lord. Aether will conduct the search for you.”

The jellyfish floated down from above her head and drifted to the space before her.

These days, it handled quite a few of the Safe City’s administrative affairs and frequently attended meetings with Blue Sea’s various experts. Whether its computational power had improved or not was hard to say, but its ability to understand context had gradually become much less rigid than before.

“According to the City Lord’s request, Aether has compiled the components and prices required to assemble a three-thousand-mu floating farmland.”

“A gravity-stabilized floating foundation capable of supporting the required area: 30,000 crystals.”

“An anti-gravity field generator capable of covering the required area: 20,000 crystals.”

“A propulsion control system capable of covering the required area: 20,000 crystals.”

“…A floating central control hub: 30,000 crystals.”

“…Shield energy perimeter…”

“…Soil regeneration and recycling layer…”

“…Climate regulation system…”

“…Soil sensors, temperature sensors, humidity sensors…”

Aether listed each required component one by one. Simply reciting the names took five full minutes before it finally reached a conclusion.

“It would require approximately 300,000 crystals to assemble a floating farmland of around three thousand mu.”

Aether then added on its own:

“However, Aether has observed that the City Lord is comparing these components with the item you have just obtained. If your intention is to assemble a similar item yourself, Aether’s calculations indicate that it is impossible.”

“That is because every comparable facility available in the shop has a limited service life. None can achieve the permanent lifespan of the Floating Farmland within the Safe City.”

Cheng Qisheng let out a slow breath.

In other words, this reward item was truly not something money could buy. It was in a class of its own.

Jackpot!

So helping a disaster world’s native civilization survive its catastrophe yielded rewards this incredible.

At that moment, Cheng Qisheng almost wanted to kiss Yu Zhitian.

So when Yu Zhitian submitted a request to leave the city, Cheng Qisheng approved it without hesitation. She even went the extra mile, instructing Blue Sea to send a military escort to deliver Yu Zhitian safely to her destination.

…

Yu Zhitian had no intention of returning to Ming Nation just yet. It was a decision she had reached after careful deliberation with the leadership of Yunyang Base.

During her stay in Blue Sea Safe City, she had also reviewed a great deal of intelligence Blue Sea had gathered on Ming Nation’s current situation.

Ming Nation was composed mostly of plains. When the zombie apocalypse broke out, only a small number of people had survived by taking shelter underground.

The surface had become almost entirely the zombies’ domain.

The conditions there simply weren’t suitable for establishing a large-scale base. The very first hurdle—finding enough survivors—would already be a major obstacle.

Countries like Yunbula, on the other hand, were different.

Although swimming zombies had begun to appear, their numbers were still relatively small. As long as people remained vigilant and took proper precautions, they wouldn’t have to worry about being surrounded by zombie hordes, at least for now.

Moreover, Yunbula already possessed large survivor bases and plenty of ships. If danger arose, evacuation was comparatively easy.

“But you know,” one of Blue Sea’s researchers said, “some zombies can now slash through steel plating with their claws. Even with the vaccine, the danger hasn’t really decreased.”

If anyone was saddest to see Yu Zhitian leave, it was Blue Sea’s virologists.

Only fellow experts truly understood just how exceptional Yu Zhitian was in the field of virology. They genuinely couldn’t bear to let her go.

“Please stay.”

Quite a few virologists suppressed Blue Sea citizens’ usual reluctance to pressure others and personally approached Yu Zhitian, trying to persuade her to remain.

“If you’re willing to stay, I’m sure the Blue Sea government would gladly accept more people from Velvet Star in exchange!”

The military officers assigned to assist Yu Zhitian had already received an order from the Great Creator God. They simply stood nearby, pretending not to hear a thing.

Although they weren’t virologists themselves, even they understood just how extraordinary an expert capable of developing a zombie vaccine from scratch truly was.

If the scientists could persuade her to stay, it would be a tremendous boon for Blue Sea.

The Great Creator God would surely be pleased!

But Yu Zhitian’s resolve was unwavering.

That was simply the kind of person she was. When she was uncertain, she would deliberate carefully. But once she had made up her mind, she never changed it.

“Thank you, everyone. But I’ve already made my decision.”

She embraced each of the researchers who had taken such good care of her.

It truly felt unbelievable.

After the apocalypse began, it had been aliens who helped her rebuild her laboratory, granted her extensive authority, and enabled the people of Velvet Star to develop a vaccine.

The people of Blue Sea admired strength. Once Yu Zhitian had demonstrated her abilities, she was treated almost like the institute’s director. Nearly everyone regarded her with warmth and respect.

Working alongside them had been a wonderful experience.

Yu Zhitian’s eyes reddened as well.

“Thank you, everyone. You’ve all been so kind to me. If I were twenty years younger, I’m honestly not sure I’d have had the determination to leave.”

After finishing his hug, one of the virologists heard those words and immediately wished he could call Blue Sea’s Anti-Aging Research Center and ask them to make Yu Zhitian twenty years younger.

Unfortunately, Blue Sea didn’t yet possess that technology.

So the researchers could only bid her farewell with deep reluctance.

The number of Velvet Star people who chose to leave with Yu Zhitian wasn’t particularly large, but it still exceeded a hundred.

Some had never fully adapted to life in Blue Sea.

Others simply couldn’t bear to leave the planet where they had grown up.

Blue Sea did nothing to stop them.

In fact, it could even be said that the people of Blue Sea were genuinely happy for Yu Zhitian.

She was someone worthy of respect. Even though they belonged to different civilizations, the people of Blue Sea sincerely hoped she would achieve what she had set out to do.

Once she boarded the military truck, Yu Zhitian discovered that it was packed to the brim with supplies. Some of the items even had handwritten notes attached to them.

Puzzled, she asked the soldier beside her, “What are all these?”

Was Blue Sea conducting some kind of aid or trade shipment with the large survivor base they were heading to?

The soldier shook his head.

“Everything in this truck was sent to you by the Virology Research Institute.”

Yu Zhitian froze.

She picked up one of the notes and realized they were written in Velvet Star’s language. They had obviously been translated carefully from Blue Sea’s language, so the wording was somewhat stiff, but the sentiments behind them were anything but.

Dr. Yu, I caught this sea fish myself. It’s already been salted. I hope you enjoy it.

Dr. Yu, I don’t have anything valuable to give you, so here’s some dried fruit.

Beef jerky. I hunted it myself—from those cattle living above your base. It’s delicious.

Holding the notes one after another, Yu Zhitian found herself at a loss for words.

She wanted to say thank you.

But compared to everything Blue Sea had done for her, the words felt far too insignificant.

In the end, she simply leaned out the window, letting the wind carry away the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes.

Once her vision cleared, she noticed something odd.

There were far more vehicles following behind than she had expected.

“Why are there so many trucks?”

Before setting out, she had already been told that Blue Sea had dispatched people ahead to the large survivor base “to say hello.”

The route had already been secured by Blue Sea, and fighter aircraft were providing aerial escort, so there wasn’t any need for a particularly large military force.

So why were there so many vehicles?

The soldier answered as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“The trucks behind us are carrying supplies that Blue Sea is giving to you.”

Yu Zhitian was stunned again.

“Blue Sea… is giving them to me?”

“Yes. It is the will of our God. The divine oracle says that you are someone worthy of respect.”

The young soldier had spent most of his time fighting alongside the army and didn’t actually know much about Dr. Yu.

But since the Great Creator God had personally issued a divine decree, that could only mean one thing—

Dr. Yu was truly someone deserving of the highest respect.

So the young soldier looked at Yu Zhitian with heartfelt respect as he explained, “Although we’re about to leave and won’t be able to help you any further, at the very least, we can give you these supplies, so that life will be a little easier for you and your civilization.”

Looking at the long convoy of trucks, Yu Zhitian gripped the handwritten notes tightly.

“Thank you… Thank you.”

When they arrived at their destination and she stepped out of the vehicle, the leader of Yunbula’s large survivor base—who had already “communicated” with Blue Sea—was standing there obediently waiting.

Only after seeing truck after truck loaded with supplies did he finally breathe a sigh of relief.

You could’ve just told us you were here to deliver supplies! The way you acted earlier, we thought you were about to capture our entire base and hand it over to Dr. Yu.

The base leader grumbled inwardly, but outwardly he maintained a calm, solemn expression. Only the slight twitch at the corners of his mouth betrayed how delighted he was.

Part of his excitement came from the supplies.

The other part came from gaining a zombie vaccine—and an outstanding expert.

No leader disliked having talented experts, especially one as remarkable as this.

An expert capable of attracting aliens to provide assistance.

Just how incredible did she have to be for an alien civilization to send military escorts, truckloads of supplies, and all this support on her behalf?

Countless thoughts ran through the leader’s mind, but his expression remained composed, tinged with genuine respect, as he watched Yu Zhitian shake hands with the escorting officer.

“Dr. Yu,” the officer said, “may we meet again someday.”

Yu Zhitian smiled.

It was the finest blessing she could have received.

She gently touched the handwritten notes tucked safely into her pocket and replied,

“May we meet again.”

<< _ >>

The post Safe City Ch.43 first appeared on A Wandering Potato.