“Qin Shu, explain yourself! What do you mean a tsunami is about to hit?!”
Tang Rui Cheng’s collapsing voice came through the phone.
“Exactly what it sounds like. A tsunami is about to hit.”
Qin Shu floated above Hai City with his arms folded and gave a faint sigh. “Miscalculation, miscalculation. I didn’t expect the impact to be this serious… How many people from your class are at the port? Get them moving. Find the police and help push the tourists farther inland.”
Rapid footsteps rose and fell on the other end, and Tang Rui Cheng’s voice rose and fell with them. “What the hell did you do?! This is the field-practice trip I finally managed to get! I had to use an auto-clicker just to grab a spot!”
“Ahem… I accidentally caused an undersea earthquake.” Qin Shu drifted a little lower. “Relax. Hai City isn’t going to get flooded. But the passenger port here will probably have to close for a few days.”
Before Tang Rui Cheng could unleash whatever stream of profanity was coming, Qin Shu hung up with lightning speed and sighed again.
The ancestral deity of Living Water Village was already dead. It had been dead for many years. Truly dead, to the point that even the vacant divine position itself could barely be maintained because there were no longer any believers left in the world.
Only after comparing satellite maps did Qin Shu gain a much sharper sense of the consequences of a deity’s death. This modest coastal village, following the ancestor’s fall and Zuo Zhe’s scheme to seize the divine position, had long since silently collapsed completely into the deep sea and vanished without a trace.
One village was gone. One mountain was gone. Hai City’s territory had physically shrunk, and even its climate had quietly changed. Yet from beginning to end… apart from cultivators who kept silent and a handful of exceptionally sensitive people who suspected they had fallen victim to the Mandela effect, absolutely no one noticed anything wrong.
This was the cognitive barrier Heaven’s Dao automatically imposed after a deity died completely and a regional culture was nearly erased, preventing violent social upheaval and collapse of faith. Even if someone put old and new maps side by side in front of an ordinary person, the older one would simply be dismissed as an AI-generated fake.
But the facts themselves had not changed. The deity was dead, and the fracture remained. Without a mountain cave serving as a relatively stable anchor point, that hollow wrapped and concealed by seawater was essentially a hidden man-eating trap, ready to swallow anyone unlucky enough to step into it.
Not only people. It could swallow an aircraft carrier. Only the ocean itself, one of Earth’s sternest mothers, could still maintain the stability of the fracture’s entrance… and only so long as everyone refrained from approaching it.
This was a problem that had to be solved sooner or later, a major hidden danger. Unfortunately, very, very few people had the ability to solve it completely.
Of course, Qin Shu was not the only one who could see the problem. Lady Nüwa had long since sent instructions through dreams and brought a group of the younger generation from Fengqi Mountain to help with preliminary work, quietly adjusting Hai City’s feng shui and the circulation of its qi in preparation for the changes ahead.
Qin Shu was much better at breaking things and genuinely unsuited for this kind of repair work. He merely checked in with Chang Liu Yi from time to time and helped deliver useful construction materials… such as jade from Master Cheng’s family mine.
Pei Zhao’s eye for things really was excellent. At first Qin Shu had only thought it was worth a try. They had bought a huge wholesale batch from Master Cheng before, so he sent over a small bag of jade samples for Chang Liu Yi to inspect. Maybe she could use them somewhere.
Unexpectedly, the moment Chang Liu Yi received the shipment, she transferred two million yuan to him and then sent several one-minute voice messages in a row expressing her excitement. Qin Shu was startled. When he tried to return the money, she actually became unhappy.
Because in Chang Liu Yi’s eyes, that small bag of jade really was worth that much. Given the special circumstances of the age, it could even fetch several more zeroes at auction.
Because this was the same kind of stone her ancestor had once used to mend the heavens.
As an artifact refiner, finding suitable materials in a world where entire traditions had been broken was no easy task. Chang Liu Yi had already traveled across Huaguo and had even purchased quite a few mines overseas, yet never once stumbled into luck like this.
Who could have imagined it? An ordinary pastry chef in a Jing City restaurant could haul an entire truckload of heaven-mending material out of a little family mine back home.
Xing Yong seized the opportunity to make his case, confidently finding himself an excuse. “You’re always saying I stick my nose into too many things. Look at Qin Shu. He sticks his nose into things all day long, handles this, handles that, even cleans up the messes I create… And see? Somehow he already managed to meddle his way into finding your ancestor. Meddling up a few extra stones isn’t strange at all.”
Chang Liu Yi thought about it carefully and realized he almost had a point. If Xing Yong had not gotten himself hospitalized in the ICU, that god-inviting ritual might never have summoned her ancestor in the first place. Sometimes all that was missing was precisely this kind of mysterious karmic connection.
For a moment she had nothing to say. She was also a snake in an excellent mood after happy news, so with a wave of her hand she gave Xing Yong leave and approved his voluntary overtime arrangement, telling him to stop hovering around her, getting in the way, and interfering with her work.
Chang Liu Yi had genuinely been impossibly busy lately. She was close to giving birth, but the Living Water Village reconstruction project initiated by her ancestor was even more important.
The Jiangcheng police knew Xing Yong’s unusual family situation and knew Chang Liu Yi seemed close to giving birth. Using Xing Yong’s recent meritorious service as justification, they specially granted him an extra two months of parental leave so he could go home and care for and soothe this… slightly dangerous family member.
What the very concerned Captain Wu did not know, however, was that if Xing Yong truly stayed beside Chang Liu Yi day and night, he would be the one who ended up needing care.
She was busy laying foundations on the seabed. Even if Xing Yong carried a Water-Repelling Pearl down for a look, staying too long was bad for his body, and watching his wife casually carry enormous blocks of raw stone with one hand would make his anxiety explode.
More importantly, another person had become involved in rebuilding Living Water Village, and this one made Xing Yong frown just as hard.
The Emperor of Fengdu was extremely interested in the project and believed the hollow beneath the site was the ideal place to rebuild the underworld.
As for the reason?
Because the scenery in the deep sea was romantic.
Just hearing that was enough to make anyone angry. Add in the fact that this man was absurdly handsome, spent every day wandering around Hai City as if he had nothing better to do, sweet-talked several capable snake yao, and painted glorious futures about recruiting them as underworld officials… and he became even more irritating.
Still, aside from the bizarre reason of romance, there was nothing wrong with the Emperor of Fengdu’s actual plan.
Following the savage traces left by the collapse, they could open several new Yellow Springs Roads. Without spending too many materials on repairs, the terrain itself could be used to create the harshest possible city defenses.
Using seawater and native species for additional irrigation, they could also expand broader branches of the River of Forgetfulness, raise more varieties of vicious underworld beasts, increase biodiversity beyond poisonous insects and snakes, and strengthen the underworld’s long-term hard power.
There was another key reason. Heaven-mending materials such as jade were naturally compatible with both yin and yang.
Depending on how they were refined, their conductivity for spiritual qi and yin qi, storage capacity, and resistance to corrosion could far exceed ordinary construction materials. After all, even the two homeless ghost principals from Jing University were still living quite comfortably inside jade pendants.
Earth’s resources were finite anyway. Better to make one stone serve several purposes. Fengqi Mountain and the underworld could cooperate, provide each other with scarce resources, improve project efficiency through mutual support, and at the same time save the enormous cost of consuming precious materials.
…Mm. Everyone had read this report, which was so serious it barely seemed authentic. Every person involved in repairing the fractures received a PowerPoint file from the Emperor of Fengdu, complete with recorded narration.
If someone was too old to keep up with the times, could not understand electronic devices, or did not even know how to register an email account… they received attentive home delivery of a printed copy instead.
The Emperor of Fengdu personally delivered it to their door, read it aloud in public, then solemnly added at the end, “We live in the information age now. The moment I left prison I felt tremendous anxiety and could hardly wait to catch up with the times… How do you not even have a QQ account? Come. I’ll teach you.”
Ao Guang was one of the victims. After a long session of half-resisting, half-accepting, there was now a computer sitting inside a bubble in the East Sea.
Qin Shu received the email while slacking off in class. He listened to the whole thing with a stiff expression, repeatedly checked the sender’s name and email address, and nearly suspected he had encountered the strangest telecom scam in history.
After confirming the message was genuine, Qin Shu did not reply. It had nothing to do with him, and he did not want to become involved for no reason in case the Emperor of Fengdu found another excuse to scheme against him and drag him back into official service… In any case, Lady Nüwa had raised no objection, so the cooperation somehow stumbled into existence and soon became extremely active.
Given Qin Shu’s old personality, he really should have gone to watch the excitement much earlier. But ever since merging with the remnant soul that had wandered through the void for thousands of years… the change was not dramatic, yet Qin Shu had still become slightly different.
Did he not already know exactly what Fengdu looked like? He had planned prison breaks and rebellions, designed several different routes, and had even eaten evil creatures from the poisonous miasma forest beside Zhoujue Yin in advance for that purpose… raw.
Just remembering it annoyed him. Qin Shu truly had no interest in watching the whole thing get rebuilt again. As Lady Nüwa had said, the children should go home and play. It was time for the adults to shoulder responsibility.
Qin Shu deeply agreed and threw himself into enjoying university life.
Jiangcheng University was a little far from his house, but he and Pei Zhao still did not apply for dormitory housing, because they could simply fly to class.
Their comfortable flight speeds differed slightly, so they discussed it and took turns deciding who would fly each day.
Qin Shu strongly insisted on being carried princess-style. He not only liked carrying Pei Zhao that way, he also greatly enjoyed being held in Pei Zhao’s arms. Sometimes they ran into acquaintances in the sky and could drift over for a chat, making the other person deeply uncomfortable. Extremely fun.
As for adjusting to university after advancing from high school, there had never been any problem. Qin Shu had barely been supervised in high school to begin with, and university only gave him more freedom. Once his enrollment procedures were complete, even his academic adviser had no control over how he used his time.
He chose Satellite Communications as his major. His brain had gotten a little smarter lately, so he could master the foundational courses, understand the specialist courses, and as for practical labs… Qin Shu could see magnetic-field fluctuations ordinary people could not, which made equipment calibration especially convenient.
Some circuit structures even had striking similarities to formation design, so he would bring back little cheat sheets for Pei Zhao to look at.
Qin Shu was genuinely interested. Aside from occasionally slacking off by habit during physics class, he listened seriously most of the time. Since he was capable of learning something from it and the studying was not especially exhausting, there was no reason to waste the opportunity.
As long as the approach of the chaotic age continued to be suppressed, Qin Shu believed humanity was advancing fast enough. Perhaps one day, after future technological breakthroughs, Pei Zhao might even be able to video-call him from the opposite side of the galaxy. That was worth looking forward to.
The days of studying seriously were quite pleasant. Admittedly, his major had plenty of extraordinary classmates, but even when he encountered one, a simple concealment spell from Pei Zhao solved ninety-nine percent of the trouble… and Pei Zhao encountered even more extraordinary people than he did.
Because Pei Zhao chose Physics. Yes, no decorative qualifiers. Pure Physics. When choosing his major-track courses, he deliberately selected a branch with an even heavier emphasis on theory.
Once, Qin Shu secretly looked at Pei Zhao’s homework in the library, immediately sucked in a breath, turned around, went downstairs, and joined Jiangcheng University’s baseball club on the spot.
Ah. Beautiful physical activity!
Baseball was the safe zone he had selected with great care. The field was large, the running areas were broad, and outside the moments of running bases, there was rarely much physical collision.
Many ball sports involved too much bodily contact. Before the team developed proper coordination, Qin Shu was genuinely afraid he might accidentally slap someone to death. Holding a bat and striking a ball instead created a buffer for the bursts of strength in his body.
To make future club activities easier, Qin Shu specially asked Daoist Master Xu to customize a baseball bat for him. It could hit balls and ghosts alike.
At least, relatively speaking, a bat was less likely to kill a ghost.
Because Qin Shu hit harder after merging with the remnant soul. He swore it was not deliberate, but inside his mind, his muscles, his consciousness… there was simply an extra kind of habitual subconscious impulse.
Whenever he attacked someone seriously, he instinctively felt that he ought to kill at least something.
Compared with before, that thought was a little extreme.
Student Qin Shu had never personally killed a live chicken or fish. The only circumstance under which he would proactively take a life without hesitation was when the target genuinely was not a good thing and posed a threat to himself or the people around him.
For example, Nian beasts. In the past he had only ever heard about them as legends, but once he encountered one himself, a single look at the disordered fur and scraps around its mouth told him the creature truly ate children. He did not need to think. Kill them all first.
As for the female ghost at Jiangcheng No. 2 High School who liked secretly listening to other people play the piano, every time Qin Shu passed the music room he pretended he had never seen her at all.
But he had not been like this in his previous life.
That cloak Lord Qin used to wear, made of fox fur, tiger hide, and wolf hair… Mm. He had killed all of those animals himself. And whether the owners of those thick pelts had actually committed evil while alive was, honestly, impossible to say.
Times had changed. Many things they had done back then, if dragged into the modern world, would have Qin Shu and Pei Zhao sitting side by side in prison wearing matching shackles.
Precisely because of that, when two soul fragments shaped by different eras merged, changes in every area were inevitable. Added to that, Xiao Zhu’s curse was long-term in nature and absolutely not something that could be uprooted so easily. Qin Shu thought it was perfectly normal that he would be affected.
Qin Shu specifically consulted Daoist Master Xu, who had awakened his past-life wisdom and had once been Yi-2, and received reassuring news. No matter how many past-life memories Qin Shu possessed, only the relationships and experiences of his current life were the decisive force shaping the development of his personality.
By the time Qin Shu obtained his complete memories, he was already an adult with far too much life experience, and only a few years remained before his prefrontal cortex finished maturing.
Under those circumstances, if Qin Shu’s personality still underwent a severe transformation, then they could start considering the possibility of an inner demon.
That kind of danger could never be completely guarded against. Nothing had happened on New Year’s Eve, but if he suffered another powerful stimulus someday, the curse could still catalyze a wild outbreak of flesh growth.
Still, Qin Shu realized he was not particularly anxious about the hidden danger. The old tendency to overthink everything and quietly consume himself with worry had almost never appeared again. Instead, in his free time, he paid attention and actively recorded the changes occurring in himself.
The most obvious change: he could drink alcohol now.
His metabolism was so fast that alcohol had completely stopped affecting Qin Shu.
Unless it was aged liquor swiped from the Dragon Kings, Qin Shu simply could not get drunk. But he could pretend… and his behavior while pretending to be drunk was just as terrible as ever, if not worse. Usually there was only one victim: Pei Zhao.
From this, Qin Shu could infer his second change: his moral standards had declined slightly.
At the same time, his chances of falling for various scams had dropped, while the number of things capable of inexplicably inspiring murderous thoughts had increased.
If Ms. Qin ever learned about this, she would probably cry tears of joy. After all, when Qin Shu was little and went out carrying his own money, eight times out of ten he would somehow spend every cent. Buying the most expensive premium ribs for stray dogs was one thing. Getting conned by professional beggars was genuinely infuriating.
All in all, judging from the present, none of these changes were particularly severe and none had caused serious consequences… Qin Shu remained very popular after entering university. His terrifying social ability to talk with absolutely anyone for three hours had not faded in the slightest. Even when the cafeteria cleaner’s son got married, she specially gave him a wedding invitation.
Until a deep-sea harbor that had remained peaceful for centuries suddenly faced a tsunami crisis.
Qin Shu truly had not done it on purpose.
To avoid making trouble for the adults, he had never interfered with the reconstruction project throughout the past year. But Chang Liu Yi became stuck over the design of Fengdu Prison, while the Underworld Emperor was a hands-off boss who never cared about details. After agonizing over it for long enough, she simply summoned Qin Shu and Pei Zhao over.
After all, both of them had genuinely been imprisoned before. If they really wanted to compare experiences, Qin Shu had seen even more varieties of hell than Pei Zhao.
Naturally, they had no reason to refuse a design-consultant role where they could help without doing much actual work. They left on Friday, planned to spend the weekend playing in Hai City, then return to Jiangcheng. A convenient little trip.
…The departure had been spontaneous. The incident happened that same afternoon. Compared with the dark, desolate seabed at the beginning of construction, the underwater landscape had changed beyond recognition.
Fengdu’s main city was beginning to take shape. The overall style remained dim and oppressive: red pillars, black brick, threads of gold winding through it all, radiating a chilling and eerie severity.
Even the lighting equipment was highly local in style, consisting of blood-red candles, pale ghost fire, and deep-sea anglerfish wearing light bulbs on their heads.
As for the luminous pearls that were local specialties of the seabed, aside from the largest one hanging from the ceiling as a fake moon… all the others were currently restricted to offices for underworld officials and the construction crews.
According to the Emperor of Fengdu, luminous pearls were too large, too round, and too white. Too romantic. They would ruin the oppressive atmosphere the underworld was supposed to create.
Newly arrived dead souls had to be frightened a little before they would behave. Otherwise no one would willingly reincarnate. Before their ghostly lifespan ran out, they would rather continue living in a comfortable, spacious ghost city, buying houses and vehicles, dressing in gold and jewels, and relying on paper offerings burned by family to maintain a luxurious afterlife…
Qin Shu thought about it carefully and discovered that this actually made some sense. The underworld had been stalled for too long, leaving far too many ghosts wandering the human world. Right now was precisely when operations needed to restart and fresh population needed to be supplied to the Six Paths.
The Emperor of Fengdu might have a strange personality, but when it came to important matters, he had ideas and capability.
His greatest contribution to the project was the method for dealing with the fracture beneath the seabed.
The Emperor of Fengdu turned the fracture into an energy center and built his luxurious palace directly above it. More precisely, he used the Emperor of Fengdu’s throne to seal the opening.
As long as he remained inside the palace, his own divine domain could purify the energy flowing from the void and put it to use. The moment he planted himself on the throne, the contamination inside the fracture had absolutely no chance of leaking outward. The seal was airtight.
Chang Liu Yi did not understand the energy structure of the void and initially thought he had gone insane. But he was the emperor of the underworld. What use would her objections have been?
Unexpectedly, once Chang Liu Yi gritted her teeth and finished building the palace, the flow of qi in the deep sea changed abruptly. The restless snake baby in her belly, which had been eager to come out, actually settled obediently back down.
This was an enormous and unexpected piece of good news, because the future potential of Fengqi Mountain’s snake yao had a great deal to do with how long a snake egg matured. It was a little like Nezha, only much easier on the mother: almost like a second inner core inside her body that could promote the growth of both their yao power.
The longer the baby remained inside its mother, the longer its later incubation period would be. And the longer the incubation period… the higher the baby snake’s starting cultivation would be when it finally hatched.
Chang Liu Yi had originally worried that because her child was mixed-blood and would be born too quickly, it would fall behind other yao at the starting line. But once the Emperor of Fengdu’s throne was set in place, every sign of premature birth vanished instantly.
Her opinion of the Emperor of Fengdu improved considerably because of that. When Qin Shu heard the story, he honestly felt the same.
Other people did not know, but Qin Shu and Pei Zhao both knew the Emperor of Fengdu intended to rely entirely on himself to suppress the excess vitality pouring from this fracture and prevent it from disrupting the world’s balance.
The truth that contamination was actually vitality was something Qin Shu and Pei Zhao decided together to reveal. They did not tell anyone else at first, only secretly informing Lady Nüwa.
Although Lady Nüwa did not seem especially fond of the Underworld Emperor, she did not monopolize critical information that needed to be shared. Personal feelings would not be allowed to interfere with cooperation.
And apparently, the Emperor of Fengdu’s years of “studying abroad” in the void had not been wasted after all. The moment he learned the truth about the contamination, he was actually able to use it directly, proving he had already researched the matter and formed his own ideas. The blueprint had been finished. It had only lacked this final touch.
Keeping the underworld’s energy circulating was not especially difficult. But with Lady Houtu missing, sending dead souls back to the human world to reincarnate also required enormous amounts of vitality.
Where would that vitality come from? From the void.
How could they prevent excess vitality from causing severe mutations after souls reincarnated? That was precisely the kind of responsibility gods were supposed to worry about after accepting incense offerings.
The Emperor of Fengdu did not evade that responsibility. At the same time, he ensured his palace was magnificent enough, his throne luxurious enough, his lifestyle extravagant enough, and that he could lie flat, slack off, and stay home without going anywhere… Honestly, there was almost nothing left to criticize.
Qin Shu personally toured the palace. At first he was genuinely shocked and impressed, but after speaking with its owner for only two sentences, his fists nearly clenched again and he developed a powerful urge to poke a large hole through the man’s throat.
Under the special environmental bonus of the underworld, Qin Shu discovered that his temper was not especially good. To prevent a bloody incident, he hurriedly grabbed Pei Zhao and retreated.
And the accident that caused the tsunami began just as the two of them were leaving the palace.
Construction of the ghost city was not completely finished, but the irrigation project rerouting the River of Forgetfulness was nearly complete. A broad moat also wound around the palace, shadowy and sinister, before gathering behind it into a bottomless dark-red Blood Sea.
Qin Shu was not thinking anything in particular. He merely looked up at the Blood Sea out of curiosity.
Then he saw an umbilical cord.
A bloody, enormous umbilical cord as thick as an adult elephant, its entire length a strange, vivid fleshy red, like fresh human tissue that had only just been cut away.
The umbilical cord flew toward Qin Shu.
He slapped it straight back.