Over a thousand warships formed up in neat battle formation and sailed into the main battleship. On the very bottom level of the main ship, the hatches on both port and starboard sides were thrown wide open, and cultivators filed in like an endless, snaking dragon.
But this main ship was simply too enormous. From above, those cultivators looked like ants—no, the tiniest kind of ants.
Fortunately, Bao Gu’s cultivation had advanced at a terrifying pace in recent years. Under Ba’s near-inescapable, sadistic sparring regimen, her divine sense had been tempered to an exceptional degree. Even from over a hundred zhang up, not a single movement from the cultivators below could escape her spiritual perception.
She swept her gaze across them.
Two to three hundred thousand people, lined up in a dragon-long queue—magnificent.
Then she focused a little closer and couldn’t help blurting inwardly:
“Oh my god.”
She almost couldn’t bear to look directly.
She’d worked as a miner herself and knew it was hard to stay clean underground, but these cultivators were actually filthier and more ragged than beggars. Some of them were dressed in clothes that could only be described as rags.
She wasn’t exactly generous with these people, but she definitely wasn’t harsh. She gave them more than enough rations, one day off every month, and even though cultivators had good stamina, she never made them work twelve hours a day. Six hours of labor, six hours free for cultivation. That was her standard.
Her first reaction was: did someone skim off the top?
Then she thought again.
Impossible. Who would dare?
Bao Gu narrowed her eyes and examined them more carefully. Although they looked worse than beggars, every face was ruddy, every pair of eyes bright. Their auras flowed full and vigorous, with no hint of weakness or exhaustion.
She thought for a moment and understood.
Two words—saving up.
Out here, the only source of energy was the rations she provided. She gave plenty, but everyone had a fixed quota, just enough to cover daily consumption. There was no surplus built in. If they didn’t scrimp and save a little every day, then any minor accident that cut them off from her food supply could cost them their lives.
Save a little normally, survive a crisis later.
As for cleansing their bodies, or using spiritual power to mend their clothes—waste of spiritual power. Mining every day in a place like this, and they still expected to stay clean with daily cleansing techniques?
Even so, looking at them made Bao Gu’s face burn.
They worked for her, and she’d let them end up without even a clean set of clothes.
Three hundred thousand cultivators flooded into the main battleship at once. They could still manage to line up while entering, but once inside, everything fell apart.
Over two hundred thousand miners—some covering their faces and bawling, some crowding around the steward handing out room plaques, shoving and begging for one, others who’d gotten their plaque but were lost, and still others who’d walked through the wrong door on the way in and ended up in the wrong section where their names weren’t listed at all.
Every possible problem appeared at once. It was pure, utter chaos, and not a single person capable of bringing order to it.
Even the foremen and stewards leading their groups had never set foot on the main battleship before. They were just as clueless about its layout and room assignments. Some stewards didn’t even know where to pick up the room plaques and could only order their subordinates to go find the steward in charge of distribution. Some people took a wrong turn into areas not yet open. One group followed stairs round and round, somehow climbing all the way to the top level—and squeezed right into Bao Gu’s section.
Bao Gu was already nursing a headache as she watched the chaos unfold in every direction when she suddenly sensed a group of cultivators wandering in and strolling around the audience hall as if they were in a scenic garden.
She was stunned.
Ba was sitting not far from Bao Gu, lazily drinking tea. She turned, tea cup in hand, and stared in disbelief at the group that had barged in. Her mind blanked a little.
Wasn’t this Bao Gu’s audience and living area?
Hadn’t Bao Gu explicitly said that idlers were not allowed in here?
That group drifted in, dazed and curious, one of them looking the hall over with interest. When their gazes moved from the tables and chairs to the projected images on the surrounding walls—formations showing the inside and outside of the battleship—their eyes went perfectly round with shock.
Through those projections, they could clearly see the situation outside the hull, as well as nine internal plazas, each utterly jam-packed with people. Other slower-moving scenes showed grasslands and lakes, so full of life that those who’d been trapped in the void for so long were completely captivated. Without even realizing it, they followed the shifting wall projections deeper inside, then unconsciously scattered.
Not a single one of them noticed the giant screen at the very front of the enormous audience hall, much less thought there might be a tearoom behind it. Nor did they see the Ba sitting in that tearoom drinking Bao Gu’s exclusive good tea—or Bao Gu herself, standing there with a pounding headache over the mess outside and now utterly dumbstruck at the sight of them.
It wasn’t until one man unconsciously drifted right across the hall and around the screen into the tearoom that he suddenly found himself face to face with a stunned Bao Gu and Ba.
He first thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Then he focused.
No mistake.
He saw Ba staring right at him with a half-smile that wasn’t a smile.
He froze on the spot, scared stupid, not daring to move a muscle.
Someone else took a side passage, bypassed the tearoom entirely, and ended up in Bao Gu’s private quarters.
The moment those few stepped through the wide-open Da Luo Scarlet Gold gates, they were greeted by a courtyard packed full of spiritual treasures and rare medicinal plants. Their eyes almost fell out of their heads.
Ten-thousand-year elixirs. Seventh- and eighth-grade spiritual herbs. The whole courtyard was full of them. There were even several ninth-grade spiritual herbs.
One of them, acting purely on instinct, had a single thought flash through his mind:
“Holy shit, a chance! Don’t let those two bastards next to me snatch it!”
Thought and action were one. He launched himself straight at the nearest ninth-grade fire lotus.
The other two who’d wandered in with him went white as sheets.
With this many rare spiritual herbs growing here, who else could this place possibly belong to?
One spun around and bolted for the exit, desperate to dive back into the crowd. The other had only one thought:
“You want to die, fine, but don’t drag me with you!”
He rushed forward at top speed to stop his companion. But just as he moved, he saw the man lunging toward the fire lotus suddenly go flying backward, slamming into the wall with a loud crack. His whole body twisted into a grotesque shape.
The would-be rescuer was so scared he ground to a halt, and then he saw Ba landing lightly in front of the fire lotus, glaring at the man curled on the floor.
“You trying to steal my rations?”
Yes, the spiritual treasures and rare herbs here were ones Bao Gu grew just to look at, but if Ba took a liking to a few and plucked them, Bao Gu wouldn’t complain. So as far as Ba was concerned, they were all hers.
Bao Gu snapped out of it, rubbed her forehead with a pained sigh, drew a deep breath, and sent her voice out with a sound-transmission technique.
“Had your fill of sightseeing yet?”
The sudden voice scared the dozen or so intruders half to death. They all froze, not daring to move.
Bao Gu walked to the front courtyard behind the main hall and glanced down at the man lying there vomiting and curled up. She turned to the one standing stiffly beside him and said,
“Help him outside.”
Then she returned to the audience hall and called to everyone who’d barged in, whether on purpose or by accident.
“All of you, come here.”
The cultivators who had strayed up here finally came back to themselves. They hurried over to stand before Bao Gu, so frightened they didn’t even dare breathe too loudly.
Bao Gu asked,
“How did you end up here?”
One of them, whose cultivation was a bit higher—late-stage Nascent Soul, right at the peak—forced himself to step forward and answer.
He explained that the line for room plaques was too long. The few of them decided to walk around and wait for the crowd to thin out before going back to get theirs. While they were wandering, they stepped on a teleportation formation without noticing and were sent to the foot of a long stairway. They followed the stairs up and eventually arrived…here.
When Bao Gu got the exact location of the teleportation array they’d stepped on, her expression went strange.
Her personal emergency escape array still had an active node open.
Ba walked over with a stiff face, jabbed a finger into Bao Gu’s arm, and said,
“Master, didn’t you say idlers weren’t allowed up here?”
Ba had called Bao Gu “Master.”
The cultivators were hit with another wave of shock. Their eyes went as wide as ox eyes.
Bao Gu flapped a hand at them feebly.
“Go back down.”
This wasn’t just a mess. This was all-out collapse.
In her mind, moving everyone into the main ship was a simple matter. She’d already divided the areas they were meant to occupy. The cultivators would follow their foremen and stewards, use their identity tokens to find the stewards in charge of housing allocation, collect their room plaques, and then go live where they were assigned. Done.
Now it seemed she’d been far too optimistic.
The most ridiculous part was that the vast majority of these three hundred thousand cultivators were once elite soldiers of various powers. Put them on a field and they were pure combat strength. But Bao Gu didn’t trust that person in charge of them; she only trusted Ba and herself. She had never once considered organizing a military force from among them. And now that everything outside was in chaos, she didn’t even have a proper guard unit she could send out just to maintain order.
Luckily, Bao Gu’s accumulated prestige was more than enough.
She headed straight for the control room and used a voice-transmission treasure to project her voice across the main deck of the battleship.
“All personnel, hear my command.
“If you are already in the ship’s cabins, in your rooms, or at your posts, stay where you are. No one is allowed to wander around.
“If you’ve only just entered the battleship, all of you are to gather at the nearest plaza.
“After one stick of incense, all areas will be cleared. Anyone still loitering outside will be thrown into the Blood Prison World.”
None of the cultivators knew that Ba had changed her diet and no longer ate people. To them, being thrown into the Blood Prison World meant one thing only—becoming Ba’s food.
Those wandering around rushed back toward the nearest plaza like their lives depended on it. Some of the ones who had wandered into the lake district had already leapt into the water to bathe. When they heard Bao Gu’s voice echo from the sky, they scrambled out naked, scooped up their clothes, and sprinted for the plaza while yanking their tattered garments back on.
Watching that scene through a formation projection, Bao Gu felt a physical pang in her liver.
That lake water was drinking water. These people, black with grime like charcoal, were jumping straight in to wash.
Didn’t they know how precious water was?
The water in the Xuantian Mountains couldn’t be touched. The water on the main ship was a small lake she’d moved here after obtaining a water essence in the Primordial Desolation Mountains. That was all they had. That water still had to support fish, aquatic beasts, and water-type demon beasts.
Did they not see the fish flipping belly-up where they were bathing?
And if jumping in the lake to bathe wasn’t enough, someone had already grabbed one of the pasture rabbits from the grasslands and roasted it before it even had time to cultivate into a spirit beast.
The people being moved this time were sorted by type of work. Smiths, artifact refiners, talisman makers, and formation masters had largely already moved onto the ship earlier, when certain sections were completed, so they could work more conveniently.
This wave was almost entirely miners.
Even among the miners, things were strictly organized by mine district. Each district had one chief steward, under whom were ten senior stewards. Each senior steward oversaw ten stewards. Each steward managed a hundred men, broken into groups of ten, each led by a foreman.
Miners followed foremen, foremen followed stewards, stewards followed senior stewards, senior stewards followed the chief.
With that structure, how could they possibly screw this up?
Bao Gu summoned the chief stewards of each mine district and the chief steward responsible for housing allocation to the audience hall.
After one stick of incense had burned, she sent Ba to clear the grounds. Anyone still wandering about outside would be tossed into the Blood Prison World.
When Bao Gu saw the housing steward responsible for allocation, she stripped him of his position on the spot.
You lined up over two hundred thousand people in a giant queue just so you could look impressive while handing out room plaques?
If you have the nerve to show off, you better make sure nothing goes wrong.
Bao Gu took the rosters for each mine district and the remaining room plaques, then handed each district’s set to that district’s chief steward to distribute personally. Each one also received a map of their assigned residential area—so no one would get lost again.
At the same time, she issued a new order: anyone who’d refused to wait for their room plaque and run around randomly instead, and now couldn’t be found at plaque distribution time, would not be issued a room plaque at all.
They could sleep on the streets.
As for the mine district chiefs, senior stewards, stewards, and foremen—she would settle accounts with them after Ba finished hauling people back from outside. For now, they were to go down and get their own men settled properly.
After that, Bao Gu went to the main control room.
A battleship this size was far beyond what she could operate alone. She’d already assigned over thirty dedicated operators, each responsible for a different section. She was very curious.
Who had opened all the doors?
Even her private escape routes had been fully unlocked.
When she reached the main control room, she found the door to the array core’s chamber wide open. Stepping inside, she saw a group of formation masters clustered around the Da Luo Scarlet Gold pillar that housed the array’s core.
She went closer for a look—and her face darkened.
On the Da Luo Scarlet Gold core pillar, a whole patch of inscription patterns had been wiped away. The pillar that formed the spine of the main array had a depression carved into it a full inch deep, three feet long, and one foot wide.
That chunk of Da Luo Scarlet Gold looked like someone had gouged it out with their claws. Three large characters were scratched across it: “Qing Ying.”
She didn’t know who “Qing Ying” was, but she knew only one person had claws strong enough to carve a Da Luo Scarlet Gold pillar like that.
Ba.
And that smug, dancing calligraphy—if it wasn’t Ba’s handwriting, whose could it be?
Bao Gu very nearly summoned the Xuantian Sword on the spot, just to drag Ba over and chop off that damned claw.
This was the array eye of the battleship’s main control formation. If this pillar collapsed, the entire main ship would shut down.
This room was supposed to be the single most heavily protected location on the entire ship.
And Ba—after Bao Gu had personally taught her formation arts—had used that knowledge…for this?
They were on the verge of departure, and now they couldn’t go anywhere.
With a chunk this big gouged out of the core pillar, how were they supposed to repair it?
The entire pillar had to be replaced, and every inscription on it would have to be recast from top to bottom.
Bao Gu was furious, but her expression barely shifted. Her gaze only grew darker.
She asked,
“How long will it take to repair? When did this happen? Why wasn’t it reported?”
The formation masters all jumped at her appearance and hurried to bow.
The chief formation master cupped his fists.
“Reporting to Lord, we only just discovered it. When we found all the main doors on the ship standing open, we began a full inspection. We traced the problem here and only then realized the issue was with this…this…”
This Da Luo Scarlet Gold pillar, protected by formation shields, its defensive barrier shattered and that section chewed out worse than a dog gnawing on a bone—looking at it made this group of people, each of whom had lived at least several hundred to a thousand years, simultaneously want to curse, cry, and laugh.
And under it all was a deep, lingering fear.
Bao Gu asked,
“How long to fix it?”
The chief formation master replied,
“We have a spare pillar ready to be installed, but to fully swap it out, then inspect the entire formation to ensure there are no other faults…we’ll need about one month.”
Bao Gu nodded slightly.
“This is a critical matter. Don’t rush. Just make sure it’s done properly and every hidden danger is eliminated.”
They’d already waited fifty years. One more month didn’t matter.
Worried that the opened doors in various sectors would let people blunder into restricted areas, she sent formation masters out with control tokens to manually shut every door in any area not open to the public, one by one.
