Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
In the Dark Desolate Domain, on the other side of the Thunderous Sound Mountain, the super warship Burning Prairie was struggling in the thunderstorm.
The clouds and thunders were not terrifying, but the turbulence of spiritual energy and the space gaps that occasionally appeared among it were like the fatal reefs in the shallow sea that Burning Prairie must avoid carefully. If the warship crashed into a space gap by accident and part of it was teleported to the other world, it would be the most horrible disaster.
Drowned in the endless night, Burning Prairie, which was dozens of kilometers long, was still nothing more than a canoe in the surging tides, unable to move fully at its own will. The lightning was hitting the spiritual shields and raising dazzling brilliance.
It was partly because of the crew members’ lack of experience and teamwork and partly because the mainframe crystal processor was jumbled recently and not stabilized yet.
But more importantly, Burning Prairie had never been a ground warship designed for the high-gravity environment within the atmosphere.
In the Flying Star Sector, other than Iron Plateau and Spider Den, everybody lived in the starships and world fragments. Heavenly Saints City, the largest city in the Flying Star Sector, was almost a metropolis made of countless star fortresses.
In the universe, gravity was not a problem. The only thing that needed to be considered was how to generate gravity stably from inside but not how to resist it.
Burning Prairie was produced in outer space. It was a classical starship that was adapted to the environment of zero gravity and high radiation.
The strong attraction of the Heaven’s Origin Planet and the complicated environment in the Dark Desolate Domain were unseen before for Burning Prairie.
However, since a lot of resource planets would have to be developed on a large scale in the competition against the Imperium of True Human Beings and many battles might be fought in the orbits of the major planets where the warships would be under the influence of gravity and weather, Burning Prairie, as the first-generation flagship of the Burning Prairie Fleet, was determined to make up for the shortcoming and educate the crew members to fight in high-gravity environments.
Therefore, the Flying Star Sector had sent Burning Prairie to the Heaven’s Origin Sector and even deployed it in such a complicated environment as the Dark Desolate Domain for practical training.
Such training was quite a challenge for the crew members of Burning Prairie. The warship that was as enormous as a mountain was fluctuating up and down in the thunderstorm.
But it was quite a different view inside the warship.
Since Burning Prairie was a warship designed to cross the universe, most of the crew members would spend their entire life on it. Inevitably, they would have to consider getting married and having children on the warship.
The Flying Star Sector was even planning to produce more super-large starships that could both support ‘life’ and ‘battles’ with Burning Prairie as a sample.
Such starships were not just meant to resist the Imperium of True Human Beings.
More importantly, should the resistance fail and the Imperium of True Human Beings occupied or even destroyed the Flying Star Sector, the Heaven’s Origin Sector, and the Blood Demon Sector, those super-large starships would be able to carry as many people as possible and flee deeper into the universe, turning into another ‘starship civilization’, a bigger, nomadic Flying Star Sector.
Everybody was saving the future based on their own experience from their own perspective in their own way. The Flying Star Sector had always been a starship civilization. It was not strange that they came up with such a backup plan.
Therefore, the middle part and the rear part of Burning Prairie was an enormous living area, where all kinds of facilities, including schools, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment places, had been established. It was an out-and-out independent town.
Other than the crew members and the boy scouts of the Burning Prairie Fleet, five thousand ordinary people had also boarded on Burning Prairie and arrived in the Heaven’s Origin Sector. They were mostly the families of the crew members, volunteers, and sociologists.
If possible, more natives of the Heaven’s Origin Sector would be invited to live on Burning Prairie to run the social experiment of ‘starship refugees’ in order to create a more comfortable living environment.
After reaching the Heaven’s Origin Sector, a lot of local entertainment facilities were moved to Burning Prairie, many of which were bizarre and new to the visitors from the Flying Star Sector. Therefore, the crew members after work and the boy scouts on holiday all liked to enjoy themselves in the living area.
Despite the thunderstorm outside, the living area was still peaceful under the control of the stabilization rune arrays.
In the living area, in an alley that was full of tubes and steam, more than ten teenagers were shouting even more passionately than the thunder outside.
“Six! Six! Six! Six!”
A transparent bubble was floating in midair, in which twenty dice, ten black and ten white, were flying, rolling, and crashing. Every once in a while, several dice would be blown away.
Two young men wearing the uniform of the boy scouts stood next to the dice. One of them was tall and strong. His arms were as thick as others’ thighs, and his thighs were as thick as other people’s waists. He looked ferocious and intimidating.
The other guy, however, was as slim as a skeleton. His hair was dry and yellow, his eyes were bloated, and he seemed to be dying of starvation. He was like a depilated mouse.
The two of them were like a troll versus a gremlin. They both bulged their eyes and stared at the bubble. One of them was rubbing his temples, and the other was twisting fingers and making seals quickly.
The dice in the bubble, under their manipulation, were fighting like twenty soldiers.
“Give up!” the muscular teenager shouted. Another several white dice were blown away, but the bubble suddenly exploded. The remaining dice all fell to a tray below.
All the bystanders craned their heads and observed. The black dice, which belonged to the muscular teenager, had eight left, while the white dice, which belonged to the slender one, had only three. In terms of numbers, the muscular teenager had fix sixes. He was a winner either way!
“Hahahaha!”
The muscular teenager burst into laughter and rubbed the slender guy’s head hard. “Where does this one come from? You talked big, but your skills in the ‘Ten Square Victory’ are too bad! A losing streak of three! Come on. Do you still have any money? Do you want a comeback?”
Ten Square Victory had been a popular gamble game among the space pirates on Spider Den in the Flying Star Sector.
Both participants of the game would control ten special dice and attack each other in midair. The dice that were blown out of the bubble were considered ‘dead’. When the time was up, the bubble would break, and the dice would fall. The numbers on the remaining dice would decide the final winner.
It was a game where skill really mattered, not just luck. For the beginners who just touched spiritual energy and telepathic thoughts, it was a great exercise, too. Therefore, the game had been rather popular on Spider Den.
However, Burning Prairie was the place to raise the future stars of the Flying Star Sector. Naturally, the gambling game among space pirates was strictly forbidden.
But a certain someone brought the game to Burning Prairie. In only half a year, it spread like an unstoppable wildfire.
Even the descendants of the noble families in the Burning Prairie Fleet, who were top-tier training geniuses, found it difficult to resist the temptation and often came to gamble in the living area during their holiday!
The muscular teenager was named Hei Xing. He was in the fourth level of the Refinement Stage despite his young age. He also had special skills to remotely control objects based on his family’s secret arts. In only several months, he had become a top expert of the Ten Square Victory. His companions were too scared to gamble with him anymore.
Therefore, he often came to the living area and looked for the other boy scouts who were not familiar with him. After all, more than ten thousand boy scouts were on Burning Prairie in different areas. Nobody could know everybody very well.
As a disguise, he often pretended to have more brawn than brains to fool the fools.
Today, an idiotic boy fell into his trap again.
Everybody was shouting to let him continue the game. The slender teenager was hesitating, too, but his pockets were empty, and he could only scratch the glittering pendant on his neck subconsciously.
Hei Xing had been born in a noble family. He had seen through the value of the pendant. Otherwise, he would not have bothered to gamble with such a poor boy. Seeing that the kid had been tricked, he laughed aloud. “Brat, get out of here if you don’t have any money. Do you want to play or not?”
All the bystanders were cheering again.
The slender teenager was caught in a dilemma and almost cried out.
Hei Xing chucked and played with the dice. “How about this? I can tell that my level is slightly higher than yours. I’ll be bullying you however we play the game. How about I use eight dice and you use ten? If I win, I will take away your Purple Sand Stone Pendant. If you win, you will take away this Silver Blood Dagger of mine and all the money here. How does that sound?”
The slender guy looked at him, the dagger, and the shouting bystanders around. Greediness beamed out of his eye, and even the air he breathed out was getting hot. He gritted his teeth and nodded!
“Excellent. Straightforward enough. A real man!”
All the bystanders were cheering.
A new game, eight black dice versus ten white dice, began!
The eighteen dice slowly popped up in the bubble. Both parties held their breath nervously, as if they were in a real battle. Sweat was popping up from their forehead, indicating that they were both doing their best!
But the legs of the slender teenager were shaking hard, and his teeth were clattering. He gave every sign that he would be the loser.
Right at the moment—
“Mouse Bai!”
The slender guy suddenly changed his face color and sneezed. Inside the bubble, a series of explosions were taking place at the same time. All eight black dice were crashed into pieces within a moment!
Hei Xing was dumbfounded!
All the bystanders were dumbfounded!
The slender guy, however, already crawled through Hei Xing’s pants as quickly as lightning while snatching all the money, crystals, and the Silver Blood Dagger. In the blink of an eye, he dashed into the air and dived into a tube of spiritual energy.
“Thank you, brother. Generous and unhesitating. You are truly a man!”
He grinned toward Hei Xing and disappeared in the tube.
It was not until this moment that dozens of boy scouts, carrying sticks and yelling, came close.
Seeing that Hei Xing and the rest of them were stunned, the newcomers immediately asked, “Did you play Ten Square Victory with him?”
Hei Xing nodded in a daze. “What—what about it?”
The newcomers were all eyeing him as if he were the biggest idiot in the world. “What’s wrong with you? How did you dare to play Ten Square Victory with Mouse Bai? This bullsh*t was brought to Burning Prairie by him!”
“Huh?”
“Also…” A pissed teenager grabbed Hei Xing by the neck and asked him rudely, “Did you see a Purple Sand Stone Pendant? It was my family treasure. The boy scammed me out of it!”
