Running City, Where Great People and Spiritual Lands Flourish; Tai Xi City, Where the Folk Are Simple and Honest

With time running short, Yuan Zhu reluctantly left the manor owner's bedroom under the Little Elf's repeated urging, taking a small number of valuable treasures with him as he departed the Western-style mansion.

"I'm telling you, while you didn't pocket much, every single item is a fine piece. Each one carried the aura of pollution, and they were all delicate and compact, easy to carry away and fence. I get it now—apart from Shadow System-related powers that have temporarily been added to the 'Whitelist,' every extraordinary item and extraordinary power on Duling Planet is a Pollution Source in the eyes of that Immortal Scripture Old Geezer. The only difference is whether it's generally dangerous, extremely dangerous, or goddamn Heaven Rank dangerous!"

When Yuan Zhu and the Little Elf had been looting the mansion, they had relied on the Immortal Scripture's built-in pollution detection to accidentally uncover several concealed compartments in the bedroom and strip them of these treasures.

The moment he held these little objects in his hands, his Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture, ordinary version, continuously issued danger warnings. The data panel on his retina kept refreshing: Warning! Unknown pollution erosion detected. Mental Pollution -1. Resistance check in progress... Passed. Immune to this attack.

Mental Pollution attack -2 detected. Check passed. Ignored.

Soul Pollution -1. Damage being blocked...

Although the objects in his hands could not breach his passive defenses at all and felt no more threatening than a breeze blowing in his face, the endlessly refreshing notices of Mental Pollution and mental attacks still made him take notice.

In Yuan Zhu's view, if these items truly possessed some kind of pollution or curse capable of harming people, then the manor's owner would never have hidden them in the bedroom where he lived every day.

The logic was simple. If, while taking a walk downstairs from your home, you happened to pick up nuclear waste discarded by a nuclear power plant—beautifully packaged and stamped with a special radiation symbol—and brought it home thinking it was a rare treasure, intending to photograph it and sell it on Xianyu—

Then you definitely would not hide that nuclear waste beneath your pillow to help you sleep. Even if you were a sports student who hated studying, you would still know that the thing was radioactive and could damage your body and make your hair fall out.

By the same token, the owner had placed these items in a hidden compartment beside the bed. That could only mean they were beneficial to the body. Perhaps they warded off evil and preserved sleep quality, or perhaps they provided some other benefit?

Yuan Zhu reminded the system sprite, "We need to be more careful in the future. We can't lump all 'pollution' together. We need to distinguish more precisely—find out what is genuinely dangerous, and what the Immortal Scripture considers dangerous but is actually harmless, or even beneficial, to the body. By the way, can you do that?"

The Little Elf replied confidently, "Of course! I'm a professional in this area. The Immortal Scripture comes with specialized detection programs. If you successfully reached the Immortal Dao Universe, the Immortal Scripture would directly activate functions such as environmental scanning, spiritual energy spectrum analysis, biological gene sequencing... But now that we've changed worlds, all those built-in parameters are invalid. The basic functions are still there, though."

"Give me some time to adapt, and I'll gradually recalibrate the parameters, helping you quickly blend into this new environment and explore this world's secrets in depth. Take the Yuan Zhu from before you, for example. He didn't understand the Extraordinary System at all, yet charged in headfirst and got himself killed. Look at us instead. We simply made clever use of the Immortal Scripture's sharp sensitivity to pollution, and we were able to strip out these treasures."

The Game Sprite was blindly optimistic about the future, but Yuan Zhu was much calmer. He still had one hurdle to clear—proving his innocence—so he needed to make more preparations.

After leaving the mansion, Yuan Zhu stood on the empty lawn, drew a deep breath, and felt refreshed.

He raised his wrist. The mechanical watch he had picked up showed four in the afternoon. Under normal circumstances, he would have finished clearing out the manor by this time and should have been heading back to Running City.

But now, he had no intention of running away. Instead, he would remain here and wait for the police to arrive.

"Thank goodness this world has already invented telephones. I can just dial a number to report the case."

This manor was a private mansion, so it naturally had a long-distance communication device called a dialer installed. The police station's universal number, 7711, was also common knowledge, so surrendering himself went very smoothly.

Now that he had come to the front yard, he finally had the energy, time, and mood to appreciate the scenery of this unfamiliar planet. "It's beautiful!"

Looking up, he saw an unbroken mountain range rising from the ground to the right of the north-facing, south-backed courtyard. Peak after peak overlapped and climbed ever higher, while the tallest peak was wrapped in cloud and locked in mist, spearing straight into the heavens.

In the memories of his predecessor, Running was a tier-2.5 city on the West Coast of Barren Continent. It had been built in a basin and surrounded on all sides by the endless Mist Mountain Range.

The entire city was shrouded in clouds and fog year-round, and the air was extremely humid. On average, it rained for one-third of the year. Of the remaining two hundred and forty-plus days, most were sunless overcast days, foggy days, or brilliantly clear days so damp that they still felt wet.

In short, daytime could be very bright and visibility could stretch incredibly far, but catching even a single ray of sunlight was out of the question.

Because it was so damp, Running was also known as Rain City and Rain Capital. As for why it was not called Fog Capital? A hundred kilometers away stood Tai Xi City, the New Federation's economic and cultural center and the West Coast's largest super-tier-one city. Every morning, the city was often enveloped by thin mist slowly drifting down from the Mist Mountain Range.

To some extent, Running City had always served as Taixi's "satellite city plus secondary capital."

Taixi was a coastal trade port city, connected to Running by the Jade Belt River.

When the first batch of new immigrants from Geng Continent reached the New Continent, they immediately selected present-day Running as their colonial frontier settlement.

The reason was that it was surrounded by mountains, which could block typhoons, ocean monsoons, and more to the greatest extent possible. Furthermore, although this land received heavy rainfall, a river ran through the center of the city, winding along the mountain range before wandering all the way to the sea—present-day Taixi City. Water transport was therefore quite convenient.

Moreover, abundant rainfall and suitable temperatures caused vegetation to flourish wildly. The surrounding mountains had been logged for more than two hundred years, yet dense virgin forests still covered the distance, with extraordinarily rich animal and plant resources.

Even now, Running remained Taixi's supplier of fruits and vegetables.

Besides convenient waterways, abundant animal and plant resources, and a safe geographical environment, the greatest reason the new immigrants had chosen this place was the rich mineral resources underground.

The mountains and underground regions around Running were riddled with natural cracks wide enough for humans to pass through. These fissures contained massive amounts of coal, metal ores, and other rare gem veins.

The new immigrants of that era had already lived through the collapse of a dynasty, been brutally beaten by aliens who wielded magic, and then, just as they decided to flee through immigration, happened to encounter the sweeping Second Magic Industrial Revolution.

The reason Xi Kingdom's Old Gate-Valve Noble Group had failed to defeat the Red Dragon Empire, which now held the sacred instruments of the Eastern state, was that the latter had decisively abandoned magic, which had been eliminated by the times, and actively embraced the emerging "Elemental Steam Engine plus Alchemy," sweeping aside those antiques who played at "magic-powered immortality cultivation" in one stroke.

Although Xi Kingdom's old nobles had once again disgracefully lost and been forced to travel far from home to develop new lands, they had still been willing to progress in principle. Thus, even before arriving on the New Continent, they dispatched several geological survey teams, chose Running with its coal and metal resources, and built the first "Magic Industrial" city.

Thus, Running possessed a complete yet outdated Old Industrial system. There were vast abandoned mining zones excavated to the point of collapse, liable to cave in at any moment, as well as its gem processing industry and high-end jewelry manufacturing industry, which had risen with mining and remained prosperous to this day...

In short, Running had once been rich, but its basin had limited space, and it was eventually bled dry by the rapidly emerging Taixi City.

The new immigrants first gained a foothold in Running, opened factories, and mined and smelted like mad. Then they transported materials by river to the new coastal district, where they built a more prosperous port city.

Over the past century, the Second Magic Industrial Revolution, like the First Magic Revival, had enjoyed a period of flourishing before being rapidly superseded.

After all, Duling had access not merely to one or two universes. As more unfamiliar universes became connected to Duling, the horizons of the native inhabitants rose higher and higher. They were no longer satisfied with simply optimizing the existing technological system. They wanted everything, taking the strengths of every school and fusing them into a superior and unique Extraordinary System.

The reason was simple. If Duling's humans had initially chosen to stubbornly pursue the magic system, finding a way to make magical power complete a new natural cycle on this planet and fully enter an age of magical civilization, then Duling would likely have become a colony of the Crystal Wall Magic Universe.

Likewise, the Second Magic Industrial Revolution had flourished by taking the Steam Universe's original Alchemy as its foundation, magically modifying it and adding the newly learned magic system to create the modest innovation known as the Elemental Steam Engine.

After that, the major nations of Duling all began making wild, reckless magical modifications, which also caused Running, this "classical industrial city," to rapidly fall behind and be eliminated. By the time it wanted to transform, its tail had grown too large to wag.

Over the past few decades, Running had constantly been supplying Taixi City with blood, sending over highly educated technical talent... Meanwhile, Taixi sent back its eliminated and outdated production capacity, along with those useless people who could no longer compete in the big city.

As a result, Running's crime rate kept soaring. No fewer than three heavy prisons had been built specifically to incarcerate criminals from Taixi City! On top of that, all kinds of evil spirit incidents frequently broke out, were packaged up and cleared away by professional teams, then dumped into Running City.

This was because beneath the city lay huge numbers of natural and artificial fissure tunnels. All one had to do was select a sufficiently deep pit, toss the Pollution Source, evil spirits, and Demonic Beasts into it, then throw in a bundle of explosives and detonate it to create an artificial collapse and bury everything. It was a case of covering one's ears while stealing a bell, burying disaster along with the evidence.

Taixi produced so many criminals and Demonic Beasts not merely because it was a place where great people and spiritual lands flourished. It was because it was the West Coast's largest and most prosperous city, attracting talent from the federation states of the New Continent, with a population that had surpassed twelve million.

With more people came more scum and villains, which naturally attracted even more evil spirits and Demonic Beasts... In the end, to save themselves the trouble, the city's administrators simply swept all the garbage into Running City.

As former twin cities and brother cities, hadn't you always complained about outdated production capacity, obsolete industrial chains, and industries that could not transform? Well, now Taixi had decided to strongly support Running in developing the "prison industry," transporting half the West Coast's criminals over to achieve urban transformation!

A brand-new "prison city." While they were at it, they could run "competitive events"—prison fitness, cage deathmatches, death racing, arena beast fights... They were all serious criminals anyway, so no one would feel sorry if they died.

And if the sporting events went well, the "prison city" could evolve further into a "tourist city." Prison tourism—didn't that have potential? Couldn't it develop the economy?

Even Fire Fang, where Yuan Zhu was located, slaughtered huge numbers of Goblins overrunning the underground because major pharmaceutical groups had taken an interest in the cheap prisoner resources and moved their laboratories here one after another.

Goblins caused trouble everywhere on Duling Planet, but why were only the people of Running so enthusiastic about hunting and selling Goblins? Because pharmaceutical companies had gradually clustered here, causing medical resources to gather here as well, until they could accumulate, erupt, and achieve technological breakthroughs.

Why had pharmaceutical companies come? Because there were huge numbers of cheap prisoners here to test drugs on. Some companies even directly sponsored the fighting tournaments held by the prisons.

Before the matches began, prisoners used our company's magic potions to complete the Green Grass Trial, greatly boosting their strength, improving the spectacle of the matches, and publicly demonstrating the medicine's effects.

After the matches ended, the half-scrapped prisoners were hauled back to the company for treatment, recovery, and reuse. This could both verify the drugs' effects a second time and summarize their side effects, while also serving as practice material for newcomers to train a group of outstanding doctors who could serve nobles and wealthy people.

The loop was closed. Completely closed! Running City really was transforming! Prison competitions plus medical tourism plus traditional gems, combined with Taixi City's ongoing reverse export of poisoned blood, allowed Yuan Zhu's hometown to maintain its unique vitality.

Yuan Zhu stood on the lawn at that moment, gazing into the endless mountain range, its sharp upright peaks, its lush green forests, and the marvelous sight that made it impossible to tell cloud from mist. It was exceptionally beautiful, practically a fairyland! Then he turned his gaze to the left. The manor sat slightly higher on the mountainside, and from there he could look toward Running City, where plumes of Black Smoke rose from the urban district, gathering densely and mixing with the white clouds and fog in a scene that carried the artistic conception of yin and yang transforming into each other.

This city was like a glaring black patch of mold stuck onto a green curtain.

Although Running was far less advanced, prosperous, and developed than Taixi, it was not actually that bad. It was simply too close to Taixi, much like Mexico in the Americas. It was influenced by Taixi in every respect and could not stand independently, causing its development to become more and more distorted until it could not be considered a normal city at all.

Perhaps it was precisely because Taixi crazily exported garbage into Running that a single sacrifice could produce more than a dozen insignificant evil gods?

"Could it be that endless treasure mines are buried beneath this city?"

The original Yuan Zhu's greatest desire had been to work hard, rise through the social classes, become someone above others, then leave Running and settle in Taixi, living the lavish life of a big boss with mountains of meat and fish.

But to the current Yuan Zhu, Running City seemed to hold great potential instead!

His Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture did not seem like a clean thing either, and it could not stand in the light. Perhaps remaining in Running City was an excellent choice. After all, this place continuously received the pollution produced by the entire West Coast. If he blended in here, he would not stand out at all. He might even be able to scrounge up a bite to eat.

The Little Elf sensed his thoughts and immediately could not hold back its complaint. "Is the Immortal Scripture Old Geezer really that shabby in your eyes? Has it fallen so low that it needs to sneak bites of polluted garbage?"

Yuan Zhu retorted, "Do you dare say the Aberrant Spiritual Root wasn't produced by the Immortal Scripture eating garbage?!"

"Uh... How can binding special spiritual energy be called eating garbage? Hurry up and hide these things. That direction looks pretty good. Bury them at the edge of the forest, then come retrieve them when you have time later."

Lacking experience in this area, Yuan Zhu readily followed the advice. He wrapped up the several special items along with some gold rings and jeweled ornaments, then buried them. Only then did he return to the outside of the sacrificial hall, find a set of steps, sit down, and begin waiting quietly.

At around four-thirty, sounds came from outside the manor. Someone opened the courtyard gate from beyond it, and then a vintage blue-gray automobile slowly drove in, belching Black Smoke and making harsh clanking noises.

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