Chapter 252

Chapter 252: The Real Side of the Borderland

Yu Sheng spent a long while imagining Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain, the customs of the planets led by Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain in the Grand Void Spiritual Axis, and how a power ruled by cultivators might move and make deals beyond the Borderland; [this was just his occupational habit acting up, he thought he could write at least a couple million words about it].

Bai Li Qing could not guess what this personified entity was thinking, but she glanced at Yu Sheng with a bit of curiosity and said: “I feel you care a lot about Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain.”

He hurried to wave it off and said: “Uh, this is my first time dealing with a power from the ‘outside,’ and one of them gave me such an important clue, so I’m curious, that’s all.”

She looked like she had more to say, but a phone ringtone cut in and stopped her.

She answered, exchanged a few words, then looked up and said: “Since you’re here today, do you want to come with me to another lab? There’s something there you’ll be very interested in.”

Yu Sheng blinked and said: “What is it?”

She said lightly: “The recovery team that returned from outside the city finished their checks. What they brought back has been moved to a lab in a Containment Zone: the wreckage left after Anka Aila fell. We can see it now.”

Yu Sheng’s expression shifted, then he nodded, calm and serious.

“Follow me,” said Bai Li Qing, turning toward another corridor.

She stopped after a few steps at a vending machine, bought a piece of bread, and handed it to him as she said: “Sorry, make do for now. We may not have time to eat slowly in the cafeteria.”

He was startled, not expecting her to think of that, then smiled and took the bread as he said: “No big deal. I said I came to mooch your cafeteria mainly to feed Foxy. I saw her eating pretty happily just now.”

On his shoulder, Irene muttered: “Yeah, she’s happy with anything, as long as it’s food.”

Led by Bai Li Qing, Yu Sheng wound through several “handoff nodes” in this headquarters that felt like a space-time maze, then passed a corridor that always seemed slightly crooked, and finally reached the so-called Containment Zone.

More exactly, it was one of the hundreds or thousands of Containment Zones linked to this building.

The Special Affairs Bureau’s headquarters was like a giant tree grown at a cosmic transit hub. Most people, even many staff of the Bureau, only knew and saw its trunk in daily life, while its branches and roots spread through the Borderland’s tangled space-time, with nearly every tiny branch at The End Web linking to a different functional area: Deep Dive facilities, storage, harmless Otherworlds, hideouts for Otherkind, Containment Zones, customs ports, embassies built by aliens, abandoned stations, dangerous floors. Everything you can imagine and things you cannot are here, and Yu Sheng suspected that even Bai Li Qing, who had tended this giant tree for a hundred years, could not name every branch and the story behind it.

So when they passed the last Door and a huge cube hung in the dark void ahead, he was not surprised. He was already calm about whatever scenery could appear “inside” this building.

“This is the highest-security Containment Zone directly connected to headquarters,” said Bai Li Qing, raising a hand toward the corridor they came from, “most of its structure sits beyond the Borderland’s Border, on the ‘other side’ that the eye cannot see. Its ‘shell’ is captured by a star and held in balance. This corridor is directly under my mind’s control. If anything in the cube breaks containment, the corridor will detach, and the entire Containment Facility will drop out of the Borderland at once and fall into the star’s fire on the other side.”

Yu Sheng was amazed and a bit puzzled as he said: “Shouldn’t this be classified? You just tell me like that?”

“You are a friend of the Special Affairs Bureau,” she said coolly, “after you resolved the Dark Angels’ threat to the Borderland, we had very little left to keep from you, especially intel about the Dark Angels and containment mechanisms. You may not feel it yet, but in our future cooperation, sharing on this will be necessary for both of us.”

Yu Sheng listened, thoughtful, then looked up at the giant cube floating in Dark Space beyond the suspended bridge. He held it back for a long time, then finally asked a question he had been wanting to ask for ages: “Since you put it that way, I’m curious about one thing: what is going on with your technology level?”

She slowed and tilted her head toward him as she said: “You mean a lot of what you see here does not match the tech level of daily life in Boundary City, right?”

“Exactly,” he said, spreading his hands, “I’ve seen Boundary City. It’s modern, sure, but things are… normal. Cars still run on wheels along the ground, there isn’t strong artificial intelligence, and so on. But look at this place: this bridge, a giant floating space structure, and that thing I saw in the cultists’ prison, an energy barrier. It’s a pile of black tech.”

He paused and made a hand motion showing a clear gap as he said: “With such a mismatch, we’re talking several generations of tech difference. There has to be an explanation. Or is that classified too?”

“I thought you never asked because you didn’t care, or didn’t notice,” she said after watching him for a moment and shaking her head, “it’s not hard to explain. What you see in this ‘building’ isn’t black tech. In fact, this is the real level of technology owned by the Council and the Special Affairs Bureau. What you see in ‘Boundary City’ is the Borderland in a baseline state.”

“…Baseline?” Yu Sheng frowned, confused, and said: “What do you mean?”

“You can think of it as an anchor,” said Bai Li Qing, “Boundary City is a society built on ‘normal,’ ‘rational,’ and ‘orderly’ foundations, advancing slowly and controllably without outside interference. Based on that, it was designed to be a massive cognitive stabilization anchor. This anchor nails the entire Borderland to L-0 depth. Without it, how deep do you think the city would sink?”

“What the heck?” said Yu Sheng.

Irene slapped his cheek at once and said: “Vulgar!”

“You talk more vulgar than me most of the time,” Yu Sheng pushed the little doll’s hand away, then stared wide-eyed at Bai Li Qing as he said: “Wait, if human society inside Boundary City is an anchor that keeps the Borderland at L-0, then that wave from Anka Aila…”

“Yes,” she said, “for us that was the most terrifying night in our history. Outside the Borderland, we have massive armed forces and countless lines of defense to resist threats. We have always maintained Boundary City’s calm, safe, interference-free pace to keep our home from collapsing. But the Dark Angels ignored reason and drilled straight into the heart of the Council.

“Many of us prepared for the worst. I even considered shattering a part of the Borderland to temporarily banish Anka Aila. Fortunately, we did not need to do that.

“In scope, the Descent of Anka Aila might have destroyed a single city. In effect, the city it would have destroyed was the core of the Borderland’s strength: a unique core that cannot be replaced.”

She stopped and looked quietly into Yu Sheng’s eyes as she said: “So now you should understand how big a thing you did that day.”

Yu Sheng rubbed his forehead.

He had thought the intel on Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain was the biggest thing he would learn today, but now he saw he was far too early with that guess.

[Borderland truly is a land of Earth Spirits… just how many secrets does this strange place still hide?] He hesitated, then asked: “Can I slip in one more question? How big is the Borderland?”

From the power the Special Affairs Bureau had shown so far, and from bits Li Lin and Xu Jiali had mentioned about the ‘outside,’ he had already sensed that the Borderland, as a force, might be very different from what he had imagined.

“If you mean a simple geographic idea,” said Bai Li Qing, “the Borderland is what you know now: one huge Boundary City, plus the wide wilderness beyond it, and the ring of the Boundary Stele forming the Border. That’s all, a ‘hub space bubble’ in a special space-time structure.

“But if you mean how large the Council’s control is as a force… then it is very large.”

A faint smile had appeared on her face at some point as she said: “Treat the Borderland as an egg floating in the universe. The Council’s branches spread from this egg and hold a place among the stars. You’ve already seen a small part of those branches with your own eyes: the passages to the outside, the customs posts, the ports. They are the vascular lines that carry nourishment between the branches.

“This is easy to reason out. We sit on the largest natural transit hub in the universe. We host the biggest trade platform for Otherworld products. Countless species build liaison stations here and, relying on the order the Council set, lay out their own trade lines. We keep equal relations with great old powers like Terra Academy and the Alglade Astrologers’ Consortium.

“With so many advantages and the Borderland still at peace, why do you think that is? It can’t be that every species in the universe loves peace.”

Yu Sheng thought it over, the corner of his mouth twitching as he said: “Right, that makes sense.”