Rare People Mansion

A sweet female voice came over the train broadcast.

"Passengers, the train is approaching its next stop—Rare People Mansion."

"Passengers in Cars Four, Eight, and Eleven—Niu Xiaocui, Wang Kang, Ryugu Yumiko, and Ben Klein—please prepare to disembark in advance. After you leave the train, station attendants and security personnel will contact you and arrange a three-day sightseeing tour of Rare People Mansion."

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your contributions to the troubleshooting work at Nine Realms Station."

"Other passengers who have not received a named notice, if you are also disembarking at Rare People Mansion, please make way for the named passengers mentioned in the broadcast. Thank you for your cooperation."

"This train will remain at the station for ten minutes."

"Passengers whose destination has not yet arrived, please do not disembark or move about freely, so as not to delay your journey."

"Please carefully check your belongings before leaving the train to avoid forgetting anything onboard. We wish you a pleasant journey."

Golden magma reflected off the train cars' red-and-black exterior.

Xue Ming leaned against the window and watched the city and its station bridges draw nearer in the distance.

It was an island in a lava lake. Its level ground and enclosing walls sank deep into the molten lake, as though its foundation had been painstakingly built block by block from sturdy, heat-resistant clay at immense cost. Above it stood a magnificent mansion.

It resembled a gigantic beehive. Apart from the railway platform in its main chamber, it was divided into layered residential districts. Dense elevated highways packed its eastern and western sides, with motorcycles traveling through them from the entrances and exits of every market district to other places. They were also the citizens' primary means of transportation.

"Wow." A Xing moved over to Xue Ming's row, afraid he would not get a good look at the city. He looked like an endlessly curious child.

The guy was practically pressed against Xue Ming's face.

"Rare People Mansion," Xue Ming murmured. This was also the first station he had reached by train since arriving in the underground world.

"The passenger log says this place is a trade hub for the underground world." A Xing patted his shoulder and explained, "Look, that tallest market entrance leads to a commercial street."

Xue Ming asked, "What can you buy there?"

Bu Liuxing answered, "The log didn't say." A Xing continued, "But you can get a shopping guide at the Rare People Mansion reception center. They have everything under the sun, and you can even buy strange things entrusted by the Star Realm People."

Star Realm People—Xue Ming had seen that term in the log.

In the understanding of the Research Station staff, they were more like prehistoric creatures from an ancient age.

Very few Star Realm creatures could communicate directly with humans. For both sides, the thought patterns and social structures of different species were vastly different, making mutual understanding nearly impossible. Though both were intelligent lifeforms, the cognitive gap between them was even greater than that between humans and dogs.

These lifeforms existed in all sorts of bizarre forms. Some were as large as mountains, while others were as tiny as dust. Their organs were equally strange and varied. Just the illustrations in the passenger log were enough to make Xue Ming dizzy.

In short, anything connected to the Star Realm meant both danger and opportunity.

The train records documented one such contact with the Star Realm, and it had ended in an exceptionally tragic and horrifying result.

Sixty-four years ago, humanity came into contact with a Star Realm creature called Panini.

This creature looked like layers upon layers of stacked jellyfish. It floated through the air using bizarre, inexplicable rectangular force fields, like balloons.

When humans first discovered them, they thought they were merely low-intelligence lifeforms like Wool Sheep.

But after sixteen months of observation, the Research Station discovered that these alien creatures, which looked like panini sandwiches, could use invisible, intangible rectangular force fields to draw and write on rock walls. They could also perform basic mathematical calculations.

These Panini did not use numbers. Instead, they used their force fields to strike rhythmic beats through the air and stimulated the glowing moss underground with powerful bioelectricity, producing high-frequency pulses of light.

It was as if they were singing, expressing these rational and mathematical concepts through song.

They gathered around the station's infrastructure power towers, and they communicated with one another as though they were huddled together discussing the towers, wondering how such a large, bright thing had appeared in their territory.

Their exquisite rectangular force fields could carve scaled models of the power towers from rock.

Unfortunately, the Panini could not detect human bioelectricity.

And when humans first made physical contact with the Panini, severe Star Realm contamination occurred.

The human immune system contained many beneficial bacteria and symbiotic parasites from the surface, as well as viruses that had battled the human immune system for five hundred million years.

After many Panini came into contact with humans, their fragile physical bodies were ravaged by these things, immediately triggering a highly severe epidemic.

Seven months later, all six Panini settlements had suffered through several devastating plagues.

In the end, an extremely ordinary infectious disease from the human world wiped out every Panini in the Fifty-fifth District.

As they died, those invisible, intangible force fields turned into rings of radiation signals spreading outward.

From then on, people never saw the singing little jellyfish again. No Panini were discovered in any other districts either, as though terrifying legends had spread through the Panini population.

With their final strength, they sent out shrieks to the rest of their kind, telling them to leave this place and flee deeper into the underground world.

The core structure of Rare People Mansion was that power tower, also known as Panini Tower.

The meaning of "rare people" referred to races with extremely small and exceedingly rare populations.

It reminded every intelligent lifeform in the underground world that before making contact, they had to remain vigilant. It was not only hostility that could destroy both sides.

The train slowly began to move.

Xue Ming watched the resplendent mansion recede into the distance and asked again, "A Xing, can we buy a Universal Elixir in that city? The log didn't mention it."

Bu Liuxing's eyes lit up. "In the underground world, people use Hui Stone Currency for trade. Nine Realms Station sometimes issues Blood Butterfly Shopping Coupons too, mostly to exchange for Universal Elixirs. If necessary, BOSS should give us rewards. Hui Stone is clean energy for the underground world. This train can run so fast because it uses that energy too."

Jiang Xueming had originally held out a faint hope that he could pay someone at the Rare People Market to get him a Universal Elixir. Now even that childish hope was gone—he had no Hui Stone Currency.

The sweet female voice came over the broadcast again.

"Passengers, the train has departed."

"Next stop: Seventy-first District, temporary border zone designation: SW—Mr. Jiang Xueming and Mr. Bu Liuxing in Car Fifteen, please wait forty minutes, then prepare to disembark."

"The train will pass through Twilight Pass. During this time, a natural phenomenon of day-night alternation will occur. Passengers arriving at Twilight Pass for the first time, please do not panic."

"Passengers with albinism, please draw down your window shades in advance to avoid direct exposure to intense light. If you experience allergic symptoms, please proceed to the connection between train cars. The attendants will contact a physician for you."

"Thank you for riding this train. We wish you a pleasant journey."

"Day-night alternation?" Jiang Xueming did not quite understand what that meant.

A Xing added, "I don't know either. It wasn't written in my notebook. When I was wandering around the station before, I heard people say it seemed to be a strange phenomenon that had only appeared recently."

The angle outside the window grew steeper and steeper. It felt as though they were climbing uphill.

A few minutes later, the entire view outside the window brightened.

"What's going on?" Jiang Xueming looked outside. The train had already rushed out of the lava lake district, as if it had burst through a mountain pass in a cliff wall.

The train's roar echoed across the vast plains. The previously pitch-black dome had turned into an expanse of white clouds and mist.

In the dry, frigid air, fierce winds knifed into the train car and cut painfully across Xue Ming's cheeks.

"Whoa! Is it daytime?!" Bu Liuxing stared wide-eyed at the clouds and mist in the "sky."

Less than a minute later, a gigantic fireball slowly drifted across the sky. Like the sun, it illuminated the endless plain.

"What is that?" Jiang Xueming did not think it was a real sun, because it was absurdly huge.

Using his arm for comparison, the enormous orange fireball in the sky was nearly the size of a fist.

"No idea." Bu Liuxing answered casually, "What the hell is going on? Did you bring your phone, Ming Ge? Can you take a picture and search it on Baidu?"

Jiang Xueming had just taken out his phone to snap a photo when the lens was instantly burned out by the warm light emitted by that bizarre sun.

He said nothing and could only give up in frustration.

He asked Bu Liuxing, "A Xing, why didn't you take one?"

A Xing slapped his palm. "My phone camera burned out too. I thought it was an accident, so I wanted you to try."

"You knew the camera would burn out, and you still had me take a picture?" Jiang Xueming felt that this guy was truly a little unreasonable.

A Xing looked utterly innocent. "Now we've tested it, haven't we?"

"You!" Xue Ming saw A Xing's sincere, harmless expression and ultimately said nothing.

At that moment, this supreme troublemaker rummaged through his huge backpack and pulled out two new phones.

"Here, Ming Ge! Use these for now. Think of them as compensation."

Jiang Xueming stared at the new phone pushed across the table and froze. "Huh?"

There was no trace of A Xing's previous regretful expression. His face was full of energetic smiles.

"I always bring several phones when I travel far! When I'm rock climbing, mountain climbing, or skydiving, what if I fall into the Unmanned Zone and only have one phone on me? What if it breaks? I'd lose my life!"

Jiang Xueming wanted to interrupt. "But—"

But he could not interrupt him.

A Xing muttered, "Don't 'but' me."

Jiang Xueming still tried to interrupt. "But... why are they a couple's set?"

"Oh! One was originally for me, and one for my safety officer." A Xing did not seem to care much about it, his expression utterly casual. "The safety officer said the GPS navigation on these had better pairing performance than military-grade rugged phones. His wife has one, and he can find her wherever she goes. So later, I started buying these specifically."

"I understand that." Xue Ming asked again, "Why did you give me the pink one?"

A Xing narrowed his eyes, grinned, and said with a smile, "Do you care that much?"

Xue Ming's face was expressionless, but he could clearly feel it.

The air around this man was gradually growing colder.

Sometimes, the urge to kill was impossible to hide in one's eyes.

A Xing immediately grinned and pushed over the other dark-blue phone. "Hehe! I was just messing with you! I'll use the pink one! My shirt is pink too! I like pink!"

Jiang Xueming silently swapped his SIM card, opened the phone's functions, and sure enough, he could check A Xing's location at any time. The positioning was extremely precise and could even generate maps accurate to the decimeter—at the time, he wondered whether using such precise navigation to catch a cheating partner was somehow a little wrong.

But he quickly got over it, because the phone was very useful. Every function was far better than his old basic phone.

Xue Ming said, "Thank you."

"You're welcome! Hey! You're my lifesaver!" Bu Liuxing's expression was extravagantly animated, and he looked incredibly happy.

Xue Ming asked again, "I'll pay you back later. Is there anything you want to buy? If we get the chance to go to Rare People Mansion, how about I treat you to a meal?"

"Go where? I don't like eating." Bu Liuxing hunched down until they were the same height, speaking face-to-face on the same level. "How about this, Ming Ge?!"

He spoke to Jiang Xueming with great seriousness.

"I don't want anything else. I just want to see whether the Rare People Market has any girls from the Star Realm, from those ancient races. I want to sleep with them."

Jiang Xueming said, "What?"

"I want to sleep with intelligent lifeforms from other species." Bu Liuxing declared solemnly, "I think that's every human's ultimate dream. What do you think?"

Jiang Xueming's hands moved with incredible speed. He worked the SIM ejector like a magician and immediately switched back to his old phone.

He figured that a broken camera would not affect its usability.

Then, with an elegant and timeless gesture, he pushed A Xing's gift back.

"Sorry. I was being presumptuous."