Chapter 421: The World
Below it, a large group of low-level mutated beasts, herded together, were mostly paralyzed with fear by this majestic power of nature. A considerable number had even soiled themselves.
Their beastly instincts urged them to flee immediately, but reason compelled them to remain in place. The conflict between their animalistic nature and rationality left them utterly drained, both mentally and physically.
The pungent odor quickly reached Bahamut's incredibly sensitive nostrils, causing it great displeasure. With a sweep of its paw, it conjured a violent current of air.
The fierce wind acted as a scavenger, sweeping away the pathetic creatures below, along with the liquids they had secreted, to a distant place, out of sight and out of mind.
The originally fiery red sky gradually deepened in color, from a shimmering red to a deep crimson, and finally to an inky blackness, as if an immensely vast maw was slowly preparing to swallow everything...
"It'll take about fifty years." Bai Mo, controlling the entire process at the junction, murmured to himself, observing the two subspaces that remained nominally connected but essentially separate.
What he was doing now was merely forcibly linking these two subspaces, then allowing them to slowly erode and assimilate each other, until they finally merged into a single entity.
At the current pace, the time required to complete all of this might exceed fifty years.
Yet, all of this was essential. According to Bai Mo's vision, the layered Nine Netherworlds would become the transfer station connecting all subspaces and every planet he could reach.
"The Land of White will eventually connect countless worlds..."
"What is this thing?" Bahamut noticed some mist seemingly spreading from the dark side towards Yaojie, where they were located.
"Something's not right; it seems to want to flow in," Ludwig, nicknamed the White Tiger, said as he lightly scraped a bit of the mist with his claw to examine it.
"It's a bit like the Field of Curses." As for Phoenix, also circling in mid-air, it occasionally flapped its wings, wreathed in dark green flames, dispelling all the faint mist within several hundred meters around itself that attempted to approach.
In front of Bai Mo, it might have been a tiny bird that could be held in one hand, but to the mutated beasts below, Phoenix, who styled itself the Vermilion Bird, was undoubtedly a veritable god.
The mere air currents stirred by its wings in mid-air had already transformed into terrifying shockwaves capable of destroying buildings by the time they reached the ground.
Under the sweep of the gale, wooden fragments and bricks scattered everywhere. Many of Yaojie's buildings were teetering precariously, revealing their fragile internal structures after their outer layers had peeled away.
Modern construction requires foundational industries like reinforced concrete to support it, and also needs to address various advanced and profound problems such as structural mechanics.
However, for the overly young Yaojie, even with knowledge learned from human society, the difficulty of accumulating all of this from scratch was still astronomical.
It was as unreliable as an ordinary person with a search engine but no understanding of technical principles suddenly transmigrating to primitive society and leading their tribe to modernization in ten years.
Yaojie was such a peculiar world, filled with backward technology. From equipment discarded by humans to imitation medieval machinery, it was haphazardly pieced together to form this nation, possessing a distinct steampunk feel.
However, the vast majority of its members, under the influence of the internet, possessed modern societal mindsets, making them entirely at odds with their environment.
If not for the elder council, led by the Four Holy Beasts, deliberately concealing all of this and creating the illusion that mutated beasts were still living in a primitive, savage age, Yaojie would simply be the best choice for a human colony.
Culturally completely assimilated, with their productivity also crushed, it would be a perfectly ideal market for raw material export and product consumption.
...
Several Six-Tier calamity beasts, due to the astonishing destructive power of their every movement, stayed far from the main pack, each occupying a corner.
But no matter how they tried to drive it away, endless mist continued to surge from the darkness generated at the junction of worlds. The resistance of the mutated beasts, in a way, even accelerated the spread of the mist within Yaojie.
"Alert: Please lower your defenses. Repeating, please lower your defenses. This is a normal assimilation procedure." Just as they realized this wouldn't do and were about to fly to the source to investigate, they suddenly received a prompt from the system.
"Assimilation procedure? What does that mean? Requesting inquiry," Bahamut said.
All Six-Tier Four Holy Beasts possessed extraordinary information processing capabilities without exception.
Although they had only had access to the system terminal for a day, they had meticulously read the Destiny System's manual, which ran for millions of words, and were now quite proficient in the system's use and operation.
"Based on your permissions, you may read the following content..." The system's emotionless voice immediately responded to his question.
"Only non-spiritual beings who have undergone the baptism of mist possess the right to freely enter the Nine Netherworlds?" After listening to the system's explanation, Bahamut had even more questions.
"What is that mist?"
"Insufficient permission for inquiry."
"What about the Nine Netherworlds?"
"Based on your permissions, you may read the following content..."
"A world connecting the illusory and the real?" From the system's reply, Bahamut only grasped this one piece of information that was meaningful to him. "How very..."
Being quite knowledgeable about various human nations, it was aware of the virtual reality network that originated in the Huaxia Federation and later spread throughout the world, and thus couldn't help but draw an association between the two.
"What are the consequences if a creature enters without undergoing the baptism?" Its curiosity piqued, it posed another question.
"Slowly digested."
"If it were me, how long could I last?" Prompted by a strange impulse, Bahamut continued to ask.
"Five hundred years, if only on the first layer." After a brief one-second pause, the system provided this answer.
The Nine Netherworlds, composed of many layers, still possessed physical material structures in its outer parts, and its ability to digest intruders was still weak.
However, the further inward one went, the more illusory it became. Once a life form other than a spiritual being intruded, the matter composing its body would suffer immense wear and tear every single second, until the intruder also transformed into a spiritual being.
"According to the human side's modeling analysis, their Six-Tier existences generally have a natural lifespan of about two to three thousand years. Calculating it this way..."
In the initial foundational construction of the Nine Netherworlds, Bai Mo referenced the principles of the flesh and blood refining array invented by Black Crow back then. After modifying it, he slowly extended the activation time to units of decades and centuries...
"What about the second layer?" Bahamut remained persistent.
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