The largest meteorite in this cluster is as big as the entire Qingzhou region. The slightly smaller ones are at least the size of a prefecture or a county. If you converted that area into territory in the cultivation world, it’d be enough for hundreds of millions of people to live on.
If not for the fact that meteorites sometimes smash into each other here, making it far too dangerous to actually inhabit, this really would be a perfect place for three hundred thousand people to settle down.
It might not be suitable for living, but the resources buried here… if you moved this haul into the cultivation world, every major faction would go insane over it.
In the past, the biggest bottleneck in building warships and war-boats was metal construction materials. Now, metal was the one thing they had in ridiculous abundance. The ships they were building now were a matter of survival itself, and had to shoulder the burden of crossing the void. Naturally, they were built as solid as possible, with no regard for cost—only for practical value once completed.
Bao Gu had the Kan Gang’s warship blueprints in hand. Within the cultivation world, the Kan Gang’s ships counted as fairly top-tier. But given their current situation, they were completely inadequate and unusable.
Just fitting three hundred thousand cultivators onto a ship capable of crossing the void was already something cultivation-world warships could never achieve, never mind adding space for planting crops and raising livestock on board.
Now that she had already taken these cultivators into her own hands, there was no way she was going to send them back into Ba’s Blood Domain world each time they migrated. Whether these cultivators were afraid or not was secondary; Bao Gu simply did not have the habit of entrusting her belongings to someone else for safekeeping.
As for her oversized storage pouch, it could indeed hold that many people. But three hundred thousand people! Not thirty thousand, not three thousand. If it were only three thousand, she could just open the mouth of the oversized pouch and let them climb in slowly.
For three hundred thousand to go in at once, though, she would have to take the storage pouch off her arm and use it separately.
If she removed the oversized storage pouch right in front of Ba, wouldn’t that be like shouting at him:
“Come rob me! Take my oversized storage pouch and everything I own will be yours, then you can kill me whenever you feel like it!”
So, for the next migration, all three hundred thousand cultivators had to be loaded onto a ship.
A ship that could hold three hundred thousand cultivators…
Just thinking about it gave Bao Gu a headache.
She had considered building a fleet before, but if she split people up among various ships, the number of uncontrollable variables would multiply.
First was internal strife. Right now, all of them had become her slaves. Not only did they not dare oppose her or talk back, they were racking their brains for ways to curry favor with her, hoping to catch her eye and be put to important use, so they could occupy a high position among the three hundred thousand and keep living a glorious life.
She didn’t reject that mindset; in fact, she understood it. People naturally wanted to climb higher and live better. And with that ambition, they would work harder and more eagerly to please her.
But there were only so many positions to go around. When everyone wanted to sit in the seat above everyone else’s head, conflict was inevitable.
With her and Ba personally sitting in town, they didn’t dare make trouble. Everyone was desperately trying to perform and earn merit instead. But once they were assigned to different ships, and her flagship was separated from the rest of the fleet during migration through the void, if fights broke out aboard any of those ships, she might only notice when people started dying and their blood-oath life tokens shattered in her hand—or when the ship itself exploded.
During migration, if a ship got separated and lost in the void, all she could do was accept the loss. Aside from counting the ships before departure and again after arrival, if anything happened in between, she had no way to intervene.
She had managed to stumble on this meteorite field and resupply. Who could say those cultivators, if they escaped, wouldn’t also go looking for a meteorite field to resupply themselves?
With Ba, this terrifying existence that the cultivators feared to their very core, staying by her side, it would be downright strange if no one tried to secretly pilot a ship and flee through the void.
After weighing things over and over, Bao Gu finally decided: they would build a fleet, but at the same time they would also build a single colossal flagship capable of holding all three hundred thousand cultivators.
During migration, the entire fleet and all the cultivators would gather inside the flagship.
Anyone who dared harbor treacherous thoughts or stir up trouble right under her nose—once she noticed, she could just crush their blood-oath life token and kill them on the spot.
When Bao Gu summoned the cultivators in charge of shipbuilding and announced that she was going to build a colossal warship, everyone present was stunned.
How big would this thing have to be?
And how were they even supposed to build something that big?
No one dared refute Bao Gu’s decision. No one even dared to ask her how such a ship was supposed to be constructed.
If Bao Gu told you to build a ship, who would dare say they didn’t know how? The moment you admitted you couldn’t do it, someone else would immediately step up to take your place.
Sitting in a relatively safe spot building ships was infinitely better than going out onto unprotected meteorites with no defensive formations to mine ore while constantly risking getting smashed flat by falling rocks.
There were so many meteorites and the area was so vast that mining was being done everywhere. There was no way they could cover every meteorite that might be mined away at any time with defensive formations. It was enough to protect the important locations with defensive arrays. As for the rest, they only posted some lookouts. If a meteorite came crashing down, everyone just had to run. If they couldn’t get away in time, they died.
Shipbuilding was a matter of life and death. Bao Gu couldn’t just give a single order—
“I want a super-ship that can hold three hundred thousand cultivators and an entire fleet inside it.”
—and then sit back and wait for them to hand her a finished product.
A project like that would consume an enormous amount of manpower and materials. Every aspect had to be tightly coordinated. Without someone centralizing command and scheduling, chaos was guaranteed. This ship was directly tied to her own safety, so there was no way she was going to hand it off to someone else to run.
Besides, she was quite idle at the moment. She had plenty of time and energy to pour into it.
Given their actual needs, the ship’s exterior and interior had to be completely different from the warships of the cultivation world.
Warships in the cultivation world were built like boats; they had to consider ventilation, natural light, and so on, so they were semi-enclosed.
A warship sailing through the void had no light to admit, no wind to catch. Every need had to be met by the ship itself, so naturally the entire structure had to be fully enclosed.
Bao Gu remembered how the Flood-Dragon Large Ship had been snapped in half by Ba and destroyed just like that. Then she would look up and see random meteorites drifting by, smashing into the meteorite field and causing terrifying collisions.
She couldn’t help worrying: what if some part of the flagship was damaged and dragged the entire ship down with it?
In the cultivation world, if a ship was destroyed, you could just jump overboard to escape.
In the void, if the ship was destroyed, those three hundred thousand people…
The scene that flashed through Bao Gu’s mind made her shiver.
When Bao Gu raised this concern, everyone involved in the design of the ship became extremely serious about it.
After all, Bao Gu still had her own mount that could cross the void, and the Xumi Treasure Realm with its endless cultivation resources. She’d have ways to escape and survive.
They, on the other hand—if the ship went down, they would almost certainly die along with it.
After repeated consideration and discussion, they finally divided the ship’s interior into multiple zones.
Each zone could be detached to exist independently as a separate piece, or combined to form one complete colossal flagship.
If only a small section was damaged, they could immediately seal that zone off to prevent the damage from spreading and deal with repairs or replacements later.
If a zone was too badly damaged, it could be detached from the flagship and abandoned.
If the damage was catastrophic and the flagship was irreparably compromised, they could break it down entirely—split the whole thing apart and separate every zone, turning them into several dozen ships of various sizes.
This way, when the flagship was damaged, both the ship and the people aboard could be preserved to the greatest extent possible.
When the flagship was combined into a whole, all the zone bulkheads and hatchways would open up and form a single integrated structure.
Of course, this design multiplied the difficulty of building the flagship. But since it was tied directly to their own survival, no one had any objections. On the contrary, they worked with painstaking care and full dedication.
Anything Bao Gu hadn’t thought of or overlooked, they did their best to cover and make thorough.
From Bao Gu’s specific requirements for the flagship, these cultivators could truly feel how much she cared about their safety. To them, it was like swallowing a calming pill.
Just drawing up the flagship’s construction blueprints took more than a year.
Once the blueprints were complete, they spent another three years building a scaled-down prototype for testing, just to make sure there were no unforeseen issues.
Sure enough, the test run revealed plenty of problems. After a round of revisions, they finally finalized the flagship designs and began official construction.
During that time, a steady stream of warships between thirty and a hundred zhang in length were also completed.
Life in the void was pitch-dark and endless. When you looked up, aside from the people around you, all you saw were pitted, cratered meteorites battered by countless impacts. You couldn’t see the slightest trace of other life.
And there was that man-eating Ba, drifting in and out unpredictably from time to time.
Originally, these cultivators had only one thought: live one more day if they could, and just hope they didn’t die too miserably. Yet in this grim environment, they slowly settled down.
Before, they were terrified they would be eaten by Ba. But years had passed now, and all Ba ever ate were the rations from her Blood Domain world. She had not touched a single slave working for Bao Gu.
Before, they worried that Bao Gu would seek revenge for past grudges with her, with the Xuantian Sect, or with the Kan Gang, that she’d torment them.
But Bao Gu did nothing of the sort.
She didn’t even use their current status as slaves to torment or toy with them. She didn’t treat them like livestock or tools, less than human.
In the cultivation world, slaves were often beaten and cursed at will by their masters, or kept purely for entertainment, as insignificant as ants and dust.
Even if one wasn’t a slave, it was commonplace for those of lower status to be “used” by those of higher status.
If Bao Gu wanted to humiliate them, they wouldn’t dare show even the slightest resistance. If she wanted to kill them, they’d still have to count it as their good luck that they weren’t thrown into a cauldron to be slowly stewed alive.
But Bao Gu didn’t humiliate them. She didn’t use them for fun. She didn’t treat them as less than human.
Even reduced to slavery, even stranded in the void in such a harsh situation, she still allowed them sufficient resources to live on. She never let their environment become an excuse for starving them of what they needed to survive.
As long as they didn’t cause trouble and didn’t get killed by falling meteorites, their lives were guaranteed.
They certainly didn’t have to worry about anyone picking on them and picking fights, either. Ba was right there, watching them like a tiger stalking prey, just hoping someone would stir up trouble so he could add to his food supply.
Many cultivators gradually grew used to this way of life, working honestly and living peacefully, even quietly looking forward to the day the flagship was finished and the meteorites were mined out—curious what kind of fate would await them then.
Some with great ambition and drive wanted to get closer to Bao Gu and be heavily relied upon by her.
A few of them, relying on real talent and hard work, were indeed given important posts and treated better. But that treatment amounted to nothing more than slightly better housing and slightly higher-grade pills and spirit fruits.
The days of having flocks of slaves, piles of concubines, wanton indulgence, and deciding others’ life and death at a whim were gone forever.
Not only that, everyone here was Bao Gu’s slave, Bao Gu’s private property. If anyone dared to use their higher cultivation or stronger combat power to bully others and damage Bao Gu’s property, there were strict regulations for minor offenses. As for serious ones—
Well, given Ba’s need for food, there was no such thing as “too serious.”
Some tried to get to Bao Gu by playing to her likes and dislikes. That group didn’t dare act rashly. They first carefully observed Bao Gu, trying to figure out her temper and preferences so they could cater to them.
Then they… quietly gave up and went back to working honestly.
Because their discreet probing and observation led them to a single conclusion:
Bao Gu only had one preference—she liked peace and quiet.
