Chapter 10: Heroes And Spirits In Running City, Pure-folk Taixi City
Time was limited, so Yuan Zhu reluctantly left the manor owner’s bedroom under the game sprite’s repeated urgings, taking a small amount of valuable treasures with him as he departed from this Western-style mansion.
“Let me tell you, the items you pocketed may not be numerous, but each one is a fine piece. Every single one contains polluted aura, and they are exquisite and compact, easy to carry for transport. I’ve figured it out now—aside from the shadow system-related powers temporarily added to the White List, everything on Du Ling Star, from supernatural items to supernatural powers, is a pollution source in the eyes of the Old Immortal Scripture Master. It’s just divided into generally dangerous, extremely dangerous, and fuck-this-defies-heaven-level dangerous!”
When Yuan Zhu and the game sprite were ransacking the mansion, it was thanks to the pollution perception built into the Immortal Scripture that they unexpectedly discovered multiple hidden compartments in the bedroom, scraping out these treasures.
When he held these small items in his hand, his Great Desolation Immortal Scripture Ordinary Edition continuously issued danger warnings, constantly refreshing on the retinal data panel:
[Warning! Suffering unknown pollution erosion, mental pollution -1. Resistance check in progress… Passed, immune to this attack.]
[Suffering mental pollution attack -2, check passed, ignored.]
[Soul pollution -1, damage shielding in progress…]
Although the objects in his hand couldn’t pierce his passive defense at all—about as threatening as a gentle breeze—the constantly refreshing mental pollution and mental attack prompts still made him somewhat concerned.
In Yuan Zhu’s view, if these items truly possessed some polluting nature or curse that could cause harm to people, then the manor’s owner absolutely wouldn’t have hidden them in the bedroom used for daily living.
The reasoning is simple: while taking a stroll downstairs at home, you accidentally pick up a beautifully packaged nuclear waste material marked with a special radiation symbol, discarded by a nuclear power plant, and bring it home with the idea of selling it for profit, planning to take photos and list it on Xianyu.
You absolutely wouldn’t hide the nuclear waste under your pillow to aid sleep. Even if you’re a sports student who hates studying, you know this stuff is radioactive and will harm the body and cause hair loss.
By the same logic, the house owner placed these items in the bedside hidden compartment. This could only mean they were beneficial to the body. Or perhaps they could ward off evil, maintain sleep quality, or provide other buffs?
Yuan Zhu reminded the system sprite: “We need to pay attention from now on and not lump all ‘pollution’ together. We must make more precise distinctions, figuring out which are truly dangerous, and which the Immortal Scripture sees as dangerous but are actually harmless to the body—or even beneficial. By the way, can you do that?”
The game sprite confidently replied: “Of course! I’m a professional at this. The Immortal Scripture has built-in professional detection programs for it. If you successfully reach the Immortal Path Universe, the Immortal Scripture will directly enable environmental detection, spiritual energy spectrum, biological gene sequencing… and other functions. Now that we’ve switched worlds, all those built-in parameters are obsolete, but the basic functions remain.”
“Just give me some time to adapt, and I’ll gradually recalibrate the parameters, helping you quickly integrate into the new environment and deeply explore this world’s secrets. Your predecessor, Youngster Yuan Zhu, knew nothing about the supernatural system, stubbornly charged in, and died. Look at us—we cleverly used the Immortal Scripture’s keen sensitivity to pollution to scrape out these treasures.”
The game sprite was blindly optimistic about the future, but Yuan Zhu was more calm. He still had one hurdle ahead (proving innocence) that he hadn’t cleared, so he needed to make more plans.
After leaving the mansion, Yuan Zhu stood on the empty lawn, taking a deep breath and feeling refreshed.
He raised his wrist; the dial of the scavenged mechanical watch showed 4 PM. Under normal circumstances, he would have finished clearing this manor by now and it was time to return to Running City.
But now, he had no intention of fleeing; instead, he stayed here, waiting for the police to arrive.
“Fortunately, this world has already invented the telephone, so I can just dial to report the crime.”
This manor, being a private mansion, naturally had a remote contact device called a dialer. And the police station’s unified number 7711 was common sense, so his self-surrender went smoothly.
Now he had arrived in the front yard, finally having the energy, time, and mood to appreciate the scenery of this strange planet: “So beautiful!”
Looking up, to the right of the north-facing courtyard were endless mountains rising abruptly from the ground, with peaks layered in overlapping ranges continuously rising, the highest peak shrouded in clouds and mist piercing straight into the sky.
In his predecessor’s memory, Running was a tier-2.5 city on the west coast of Geng Continent. It was built in a basin, surrounded by the endless Misty Mountains.
The entire city was perpetually shrouded in clouds and fog, with extremely high air humidity. On average, one-third of the year was rainy, and of the remaining 240+ days, most were sunless overcast days, foggy days, or extremely humid clear days.
In short, daytime could actually be very bright with excellent visibility, but you couldn’t hope to see a ray of sunlight.
Due to the excessive humidity, Running also had the titles of Rain City and Rain Capital. As for why not Fog Capital? Because just 100 kilometers away was Taixi, the economic and cultural center of the New Federation, the largest super-tier-one city on the west coast. Every morning, the city was often enveloped by thin fog slowly drifting down from the Misty Mountains.
In a sense, Running City had always served as Taixi’s ‘satellite city + accompanying capital’ role.
Taixi was a coastal trade port city, connected to Running by a jade belt river.
When the first batch of Geng Continent new immigrants arrived at the New Continent, they immediately selected what is now Running as the colonial pioneering point.
Because it was surrounded by mountains on all sides, maximizing isolation from typhoons, ocean monsoons… Additionally, though the rainfall was heavy, a river ran through the city center, winding along the mountains, meandering all the way, and eventually flowing into the sea—that is, today’s Taixi City. Thus, water transport was quite convenient.
Furthermore, the abundant precipitation combined with suitable temperatures led to abnormally lush vegetation. The nearby mountains had been felled for over 200 years, but the distant areas remained dense primitive forests, extremely rich in flora and fauna resources.
Today, Running remains Taixi’s fruit and vegetable supply base.
Besides convenient water routes and abundant flora and fauna resources, and a safe geographical environment, the biggest reason the new immigrants chose this place back then was the rich underground mineral resources.
The mountains and underground around Running were riddled with natural fissures large enough for humans to pass through. And within these fissures existed vast amounts of coal, metal minerals, and other rare gem veins.
The new immigrants of that era had experienced dynastic collapse, been beaten down by aliens who mastered magic, and when they finally decided to immigrate and flee, they caught the tumultuous ‘Second Magical Industrial Revolution’.
The reason Xi State’s ‘old aristocratic faction’ failed to defeat the Red Dragon Empire, which now controls the oriental societal divine artifacts, was that the latter decisively abandoned the outdated magic of the era and proactively embraced the emerging ‘elemental steam engine + alchemy’, sweeping away those antiques playing at ‘magic power cultivation’.
Although Xi State’s old nobles shamefully lost again and were forced to develop new lands far away, they were still willing to progress. So before arriving at the New Continent, they sent out multiple geological survey teams, selected Running for its coal and metal resources, and built the first ‘magical industrial’ city.
Thus, Running has a complete but outdated full set of old industrial system. Masses of mines dug to collapse, abandoned mining areas that could cave in at any moment. And the gem processing industry and high-end jewelry manufacturing that once boomed alongside the mining boom and remain prosperous to this day…
In short, Running was once wealthy, but due to the limited basin area, it was ultimately drained dry by the emerging Taixi City.
The new immigrants first established themselves in Running, opening factories and frantically mining and smelting, then transporting supplies via river to the coastal new urban area to build an even more prosperous port city.
And over the past century, the ‘Second Magical Industrial Revolution’—like the First Magic Resurgence—also flourished briefly before being rapidly iterated.
After all, Du Ling could connect to not just one or two universes; as more strange universes connected to Du Ling, the local natives’ horizons expanded, no longer satisfied with merely optimizing existing technology systems, but demanding the best from each, fusing them into a superior and unique supernatural system.
The reason is simple: if Du Ling’s humans had stubbornly stuck to the magic system from the start, trying to make magic power complete a new natural cycle on this planet and fully enter the magic civilization era, then Du Ling might well have become a colony of the Crystal Wall Magic Universe.
Similarly, the second flourishing ‘Magical Industrial Revolution’ was based on the steam universe’s original alchemy, magically modified and infused with the newly learned magic system, producing the micro-innovative elemental steam engine.
After that, Du Ling’s major nations all began reckless modifications, causing Running, this ‘classical industrial city’, to quickly become obsolete and eliminated. By the time they wanted to transform, it was already too late.
In recent decades, Running has been supplying blood to Taixi City, sending high-educated technical talent… While Taixi sends back its eliminated backward production capacity and those useless people who can’t compete in the big city.
As a result, Running’s crime rate has continued to soar, with heavy prisons for housing Taixi City’s criminals built a full three! Additionally, various evil spirit cases frequently outbreak, then get cleared by professional teams and dumped into Running City.
Because beneath this city are numerous natural or man-made fissure tunnels; just select a deep enough pit, toss in the pollution sources, evil spirits, demonic creatures, then throw in a bundle of explosives to detonate, artificially causing collapse and burial, self-deceptively covering up the disaster.
The reason Taixi produces so many criminals and demonic creatures isn’t purely due to outstanding people and geography. It’s because it’s the largest and most prosperous city on the west coast, attracting talent from all federation nations of the New Continent, with a population exceeding 12 million.
More people means more scum and villains, which in turn attract more evil spirits and demonic creatures… Ultimately, the city management, for convenience, simply sweeps all the garbage into Running City.
As former twin cities and brother cities, haven’t you been shouting about outdated production capacity, obsolete industrial chains, and inability to transform industries? Now it’s good—we in Taixi have decided to vigorously support Running in developing the ‘prison industry’, shipping over half the west coast’s criminals to achieve urban transformation!
A brand new ‘prison-type city’, plus some ‘competitive projects’ like prison fitness, cage death matches, death racing, arena beast fights… Anyway, they’re all serious offenders; dead ones won’t hurt.
If the sports competitions do well, it could evolve from ‘prison city’ into ‘tourism city’, with prison tourism industry—tell me, does it have potential? Can it boost the economy?
Even Yuan Zhu’s Fire Fang, which massacres the rampant underground goblins, owes it to major pharmaceutical groups eyeing the cheap prisoner resources, successively moving their laboratories here.
Du Ling Star is plagued by goblins everywhere, but only Running’s masses are enthusiastic about hunting and selling goblins—why? Because pharmaceutical companies have clustered here one after another, medical resources gathering, leading to outbreaks and technical breakthroughs.
Why do pharmaceutical companies come? Because there are abundant and cheap prisoner resources for drug testing. Some companies even directly sponsor the prisons’ fighting tournaments.
Before the matches, prisoners use our magic potions to complete the green grass trials, greatly improving strength, enhancing match spectacle, and showcasing drug effects externally.
After the matches, the half-wrecked prisoners are pulled back to the company for rescue and recycling reuse. This verifies drug effects a second time, summarizes side effects, and provides practice for newcomers, cultivating excellent doctors to serve nobles and the wealthy.
Closed loop, a complete closed loop! Running City is genuinely transforming! Prison competitions + medical tourism + traditional gems, plus Taixi City’s continuous reverse output of toxic blood, keeping Yuan Zhu’s hometown vibrant with unique vitality.
…
Yuan Zhu now stood on the lawn, gazing at the endless undulating mountains, sharp and upright peaks, lush green forests, and the wondrous scene indistinguishable as cloud or fog, finding it extraordinarily beautiful—this was practically an immortal realm!
Then he turned his gaze to the left side; the manor at mid-mountain had slightly higher elevation, overlooking Running City, where the urban area was emitting plumes of black smoke, densely converging and mixing with white cloud-fog clusters, evoking the interplay of Taiji transformation.
This city was like a green curtain with a glaring black mold spot stuck on it.
Though Running was far less advanced, prosperous, or developed than Taixi, it wasn’t actually bad. But like Mexico in America, it was too close to Taixi, influenced everywhere, unable to be independent, developing more and more deformed, not qualifying as a normal city at all.
Perhaps it’s because Taixi crazily dumps garbage into Running that a single sacrifice can produce over a dozen third-rate evil gods?
“Could the underground of this city be burying endless treasure mines?”
The original Yuan Zhu’s greatest desire was to strive hard, achieve class leap, become someone superior to others, then leave Running to settle in Taixi, living the big boss life of feasting on meat and fish.
But for the current Yuan Zhu, he instead felt Running City had great potential!
His Great Desolation Immortal Scripture didn’t seem like clean stuff either and couldn’t see the light; perhaps staying in Running City was a very good choice. After all, this side continuously receives pollution produced across the entire west coast—he could blend in without standing out, maybe even snag a bite to ‘eat’.
The game sprite perceived his thoughts and immediately couldn’t hold back, complaining: “Is the Old Immortal Scripture Master so unworthy in your mind? Reduced to stealing polluted garbage to eat?”
Yuan Zhu retorted: “You dare say mutated spiritual root isn’t something the Immortal Scripture ate garbage to produce?!”
“Uh…, binding special spiritual energy—how can that be called eating garbage? Hurry and hide these things; that direction is good, bury them at the forest edge, come retrieve them later when there’s time.”
Lacking experience in this area, Yuan Zhu complied, wrapping the few special items along with some gold rings and jewelry, burying them. Only then did he return to the door of the sacrifice hall, find a step to sit on, and quietly wait.
Around 4:30, noises came from outside the manor; someone opened the yard gate from outside, followed by a retro-styled blue-gray old car belching black smoke and emitting clanging harsh noises as it slowly drove in.
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