Chapter 392
Chapter 392: A Very Different Alien City
Dragging a long foxfire plume behind her, the silver nine-tailed demon fox plunged into Shu Ji’s dense atmosphere. Yuan Hao and Xuan Che followed in sword flight like meteors. They entered the deceleration phase near the equator and soon slammed into an astonishingly thick cloud bank.
The clouds surged at them like endless curtains, growing darker the deeper they went. Sunlight vanished behind them. Foxy carried Yu Sheng through thunderclouds heavy with moisture and fine ice crystals. Irene clung to Yu Sheng’s arm, hanging off him like a koala, eyes wide as she stared past the demon fox’s back—wind howled, lightning split the clouds, and in the sudden flashes, rain poured down like an ocean flipped across the sky.
Shu Ji’s poles were cold and dry, but its equator was trapped in an almost eternal rainy season. A thousand years ago, pioneers came for rich mineral deposits and built their first formations and mines in the downpour. Many of those grand extraction facilities had been shut down, but their skeletons still stood tough in the torrential rain, rising into the clouds like monuments.
Most of the cities built later clustered around those ancient giant stations, huddling like ant nests in the vast shadows cast by refining towers and orbital elevators.
Foxy burst out from beneath the cloud base, sliced through the rain curtain, and flew toward the largest city on the equator: Ink City.
A magnificent structure—huge as a sky-piercing tower—flashed past nearby. Rusted transport machinery and a complex pipeline system still clung to its sides. Many more towers like it were scattered in a ring between mountains and plains. Massive cableworks and ancient transit rails cut through land and sky, linking the towers together; some rails extended down to ground level and connected to the great city built between twelve refining towers.
Lights still burned on most of those ancient towers, propping up streams of brightness that seemed to stitch heaven and earth together in a rain-dark that felt like night. Now and then, medium celestial ships or oddly shaped small craft sliced through the downpour, following air lanes marked by those lights as they entered and exited the city’s airspace. It looked busy.
Foxy followed the traffic pattern. With Yu Sheng’s guidance, she entered an air lane and approached one of the sky checkpoints into the city. A large ring-shaped facility floated there near an extended platform on one of the ancient towers. The ring itself was built from glowing rune-bricks suspended loosely in midair, while cultivators in black raincoats hovered nearby, watching as craft of all sizes—and mobile immortals—passed through and into Ink City.
These raincoat cultivators wore the mark of the Ink City Aerial Control Bureau. Each had a wide black bamboo hat; a faint glow shimmered along its edge, and the field it gave off blocked the cold sheets of rain. The ring automatically recorded flying units entering and leaving the city’s airspace and performed basic security checks. Try to slip in without passing through, and you’d trigger the city protection array and bring soldiers down on your head.
Yu Sheng’s group passed through smoothly. A nine-tailed silver fox and two sword-flying immortals—one of them on a chainsaw sword—earned a few extra looks, but no trouble.
Just as they cleared the ring and prepared to descend into the city, a burst of noise made them pause.
A rune-brick on the ring flared, and a sharp alarm rang out. Two raincoat cultivators moved at once, stopping a middle-aged man with messy hair and a gray short shirt who was riding a flying sword.
The man argued loudly.
Irene immediately poked her head out from under Yu Sheng’s arm and craned toward the platform. “Ooh, drama!”
Yu Sheng looked as well and heard one of the raincoat cultivators cut the man off sternly. “No sword flight when drinking, and no drinking when sword flight. Daoist friend, the rune-stone has already verified you’ve been drinking. There’s no point arguing. Come with us.”
The man’s eyes went wide, indignant. “I’m a wine sword immortal! A registered, proper wine sword immortal from the Grand Void Spiritual Axis! Drinking is part of my school’s cultivation! I have a license!”
The two raincoat cultivators exchanged glances. After hesitating, one of them said, “Then show us your documents.”
The self-proclaimed wine sword immortal handed over a jade token.
The raincoat cultivator poured spiritual power into it to check and immediately shook his head. “That makes even less sense, Daoist friend. Your registered vehicle as a wine sword immortal is a purple-gold gourd, not this flying sword.”
“I was in a rush and grabbed the wrong thing from my daughter,” the man said, scratching his hair, suddenly sheepish. “I was just about to go get my gourd back…”
“Then you should be entering the city by ground route,” the raincoat cultivator said, unmoved. “Your vehicle doesn’t match what your documents allow. Daoist friend, you have to come with us even more.”
The man opened his mouth, then shut it again.
The disturbance ended quickly, and Yu Sheng and Irene lost interest in the show.
“You’re pretty strict,” Yu Sheng said to the two immortals as they continued toward Ink City. “I was wondering what you’d do if you ran into a wine sword immortal with a ‘no drunk sword flight’ rule. Turns out wine sword immortals still need a license here?”
“Of course they need a license,” Immortal Yuan Hao said with a laugh. “Otherwise, if some boozehound cultivator goes around sword flying while drunk, then claims he’s a wine sword immortal whenever he gets checked, wouldn’t that be chaos?”
Xuan Che chimed in, dead serious. “Exactly. There are ten thousand paths to the Dao, and everything in the mortal world can enter the Dao. Wine sword immortals are an ancient, legitimate tradition. But even so, that road isn’t easy—your insight has to be high enough, your temperament has to fit, you need some luck with worldly tribulation, and in the end you need a good body.”
Yu Sheng blinked. “A good body?”
Xuan Che nodded. “Otherwise you’ll drink yourself to death before the foundation establishment stage.”
Yu Sheng paused. “…After the foundation establishment stage, you’re not afraid anymore?”
“After the foundation establishment stage, you’ll still drink yourself to death,” Xuan Che said with a straight face. “But usually you can treat it in time with an elixir. Our Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain specialty, Wine God Powder, is made for exactly this. We’ve got long-term partnerships with major immortal brew houses—they sell the wine, we sell the medicine. Cultivators who enter the Dao through alcohol are all our customers.”
Yu Sheng was stunned. “Wait, is that even reasonable? In my head, a wine sword immortal should be some free and unrestrained expert—tempered by the mortal world, naturally settled into… you know. The kind who’s seen through everything. But here you’re talking like it’s a supply chain.”
He trailed off, unable to find a tactful way to phrase his confusion.
Immortal Yuan Hao clearly understood anyway. The old man only smiled faintly. “Sure. The first one was.”
Yu Sheng fell silent.
“But from the second one onward, it wasn’t,” Immortal Yuan Hao said softly, shaking his head. Nostalgia flickered through his voice, and then something calmer. “The Dao is profound, and insight depends on fate. But cultivation can be reproduced. Daoist friend Yu—what you describe belonged to the early, simple pastoral days. The pastoral days of the Grand Void–Featherwing civilization circle ended thousands of years ago.”
Yu Sheng didn’t reply. He only lifted his head, thoughtful, watching the alien scenery beyond the rain.
Refining towers from a thousand years ago rose into the clouds. A vast city crouched across the land, blazing with lights. Celestial ships bearing the Stellar Express mark descended through the storm, loaded with alien crafts from the Alglade Starfield. Above the city, misty illusion arts projected fairy mountains and auspicious clouds—a tourism promo video broadcast from the distant capital planet.
Something stirred in Yu Sheng’s chest, but he couldn’t quite name it.
They landed in the city. Immortal ark platforms of all sizes were built among the forest of high-rises. Foxy picked one at random, and on the way from the platform down to the street, she bit into a mouthful of flyers.
There were flyers selling hotel stays, recommending the duty-free mall, advertising supermarket deals, and even one promoting fur grooming and care for immortal beasts. The last one was handed out by a young woman. When she saw a nine-tailed silver fox staring blankly as she walked down from the platform, she froze—then worked up the courage to stuff the flyer into Foxy’s paw.
It advertised a new tail-care promo: for a single guest, no matter how many tails you had, you only paid the price of one.
The moment Foxy heard that, she wanted to go.
In the end, Yu Sheng talked her out of it. Small businesses had it hard, and if Silly Fox went over there and did a ten-thousand-tails paying homage, the shop would probably go bankrupt on the spot.
“This really isn’t the same style as Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain,” Yu Sheng said, standing on an Ink City street and gazing at the rain-soaked traffic and hazy towers in the distance. “The vibe and the look are totally different. If you ignore certain details on the buildings, it even makes me think of Boundary City. Even near the parking station, people are handing out little ads.”
“If you had to say it, a sect headquarters like Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain is the unusual one,” Immortal Yuan Hao said with a smile, shaking his head. “It gathers cultivators. Even in the enlightenment hall, everyone is an initiated cultivator. But in the Featherwing Starfield, most people are ordinary people who only practiced the basics and have weak power. By outside standards, our ordinary people are still somewhat extraordinary, but in the end, the cities they gather in are different from an immortal mountain.”
“Where are we going next?” Foxy mumbled through a mouthful of flyers. “Benefactor, I’m hungry.”
“Master has arranged lodging for us,” Xuan Che said at once. “It’s near the city center—and there’s food there too.”
Foxy immediately tipped her head back, swallowed the whole stack of flyers, chewed a few times, and gulped them down. Then she brightened. “Okay, okay! Let’s eat first!”