Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
Richly flavored spicy crayfish, barbecued mutton, and a bowl of steamy noodles with soybean paste. Despite being alone, Zhang Lisheng enjoyed his food very much. However, when he was chowing down his food, he suddenly heard an ethereal hymn-like song that would come and go, on and off.
With a frown, the young man immediately lost the mood to continue wandering around the streets, and hastily returned to his hotel room.
According to the convention, a famous international hotel like the Beijing Hotel would never place surveillance equipment in the rooms, but the young man knew that there was no such thing as absolute in the world. Cautiously, he hid in the bathroom, turned off the lights, and used his divine power to mop up the surrounding in the darkness. Only then did he felt relief and soaked himself in a warm bath and closed his eyes to savor the prayers of hundreds of millions of believers from the foreign world.
It had only been one month since he left the Wizard Li islands, but according to his previous expectations, the tribe should not have seized the entire Hellfire Sea yet.
However, since Zhang Lisheng had liberated his mind and recognized himself, he had unknowingly turned his hundreds of thousands of pious believers into high priests who obtained the ability to manipulate water and soil, which in turn produced the power of granting new lives, restoration, and rapid evolution. Thus allowing the Wizard Li tribe’s strength to have been greatly improved, so they had managed to complete the conquest of the entire sea over a month earlier than he expected.
This unexpected event caused the prayers and hymns of the entire Wizard Li tribe—used to be Hellfire—to resonate in his ears like the sound of nature when he was on Earth.
That incomprehensible yet fascinating ethereal sound gradually grew into something more beautiful and graceful to the ear. Although the young man did not know what was happening amid his daze, he could ambiguously feel that his strength was about to be qualitatively changed again. At once, he could not help but gradually be overcome with unprecedented happiness.
With the stirring of Zhang Lisheng’s pleasant surprise, a gust of increasingly powerful power of faith seemed to be trying to break through the world’s barriers to flow into his body across the endless space.
Under the impact of the power of faith, the space above the bath gradually grew twisted and deformed. Not long after, several faint cracks as thick as hair began to emerge.
If this power of faith really tore open space and entered Zhang Lisheng’s body, although he could instantly transform and become a true god, it would also create unpredictable consequences.
In this extremely precarious situation, the young man who had a confident smile slowly extended his arm and pressed gently toward the twisted space.
When his palm left the water, a stream of trickle lingered around Zhang Lisheng’s hand like meteorites surrounding the stars and at once. Several dozens of pure power of faith in the backpack lying on the bed in the bedroom began to burn out in an instant.
In the illumination of the milky white light, the soil in the celadon pots used to purify the air in the guest room crashed and broke the glass door of the bathroom to blend with the water flowing around the young man’s arm. As Zhang Lisheng gently pressed the sky, the cracks smeared and disappeared without a trace.
The ethereal sound lingering in his ears stopped right away, and the young man returned to his consciousness. His body abruptly froze motionless as he silently soaked in the bath until the water became cold.
When the sky was starting to turn bright, Zhang Lisheng began to mutter to himself in the darkness like he was talking in his sleep. “… repaired the cracks between ‘worlds.’ I’ve actually improved the world’s barrier that was about to crack… Nuwa mending the sky. Nuwa mending the sky… It looks like it’s indeed the ancient ancestor of the witchcraft who repaired the Colossal World last time, but in that case, the legend of Gonggong, the God of Water, fighting with Zhurong, the God of Fire, to claim the throne of Heaven and how Gonggong lost, so he smashed his head against the Buzhou Mountain, causing the pillars holding up the sky to collapse and tilt, creating great floods and suffering, must be fake then… No, no, there’s another possibility. Who knows, maybe the God of Water and the God of Fire refers to the strongest Atlantean ancestor and the strongest Muryan ancestor. ‘Fire’ corresponds to Atlantis; it’s one of the two superpowers that these aliens have mastered. Only when there is water can there be plants. It’s not impossible for us to misinterpret the strongest person in the Muryan civilization who mastered the ‘plant ability’ as the God of Water…”
The young man contemplated until noon. Even when the bathroom was already bright, he still could not link all of the pieces of how the event unfolded. In the end, he had no choice but to let the truth continue to hide in the fog of history.
What had happened had happened. Now, the most important thing was that Zhang Lisheng had inadvertently mastered the ability to smoothen the cracks appearing in the world’s barrier. Although the cracks were insignificant compared to the doors of the space heading to different foreign worlds that appeared on Earth, its essence was still the same. Besides, the young man even had a sky-patching stone that Nuwa had left behind in his hand. There were countless possibilities in the future with this power.
Unfortunately, the glorious prospects of the future could not make the messiness in front of him into something better. Standing up from the cold water, Zhang Lisheng looked at the muddy bathroom and could not help but shake his head while smiling wryly.
The mud spots splashed on the walls, bathroom mirrors, and even the bathrobes could be efficiently dealt with. The young man reached out his hand over his chest and waved it, quickly condensing them all into a ball of mud. However, the wreckage of twigs, leaves, and the empty huge celadon pots in the bedroom and the small living room of the suite was so bad that he was at a loss of what to do.
“It’s tough for me to explain how so many dirt disappeared without a trace. I can’t just create a humanoid soil creation and just put some clothes on it and then bring him back to the room, right? It’s just too risky…” Zhang Lisheng stood at the window, muttering to himself with worries. His eyes inadvertently glimpsed and saw that a cloud of gray dust was sweeping in the distance outside the window.
Under the young man’s astonished gaze, the dust covering the sky slowly engulfed the entirety of Beijing city. Everyone living in this metropolis was cursing this sudden, suffocating dust, but only Zhang Lisheng had a look of shock on his face.
After a few minutes, the flying dust gathered to become soil and fill the celadon pot.
Regardless of whether they could nourish the plants to survive or not, at the very least, other than the broken glasses, the branches and ten green leaves on the floor of the bathroom and the living room returned to their original state.
After clearing everything, the idle young man began to search on the internet for all kinds of ancient myths and legends that had circulated on every corner of the Earth for a long time, including those that were well-known or those obscure and strange legends that nobody believed in.
He tried to piece them together to understand it, to the point where he settled his meal by just calling for room service.
Unwittingly, ten hours went by. The sun had set on the west, and the next morning, Zhang Lisheng suddenly heard a series of knocking sounds from the corridor outside the room.
“I don’t need any room cleaning service,” Zhang Lisheng shouted loudly and sat cross-legged on the bed to continue browsing the internet. Right away, a familiar voice resonated from outside of the door, “Junior Brother, it’s me.”
The young man hurriedly jumped out of bed and opened the door. When he saw Guo Caiying standing outside the door with a tired look, he asked in astonishment, “Senior Sister, why did you come to find me early in the morning?”
“The ministry has decided at the last minute to carry out education activities for all cadres with the ranking of Head level, and above for every department, so we’ll start the mobilization meeting tomorrow. I’ll need to give an exemplary speech too. I won’t be able to get a leave until Friday, so I purposely took a day off today to take you to see the minister.”
“Why should I go see the minister?” Zhang Lisheng stepped aside to let the girl come in as he asked with a still perplexed expression.
“Isn’t investing in Kunlun World your purpose of visiting China? Right now, the land reclamation administration there is basically a semi-military based management. A large percentage of the authority are deciding whether they can accept your investment lies in the Ministry of Agriculture. In fact, if it was not for Uncle Luo who had previously proposed for the Central Government and the Government Council to accept the plans to build farms with countries such as Russia, Malaysia, and Singapore that allowed precedented foreign investments in Kunlun World, it would have been useless for you to even think about this plan. However, Singapore and Malaysia are an important ally of China in the Asian region while Russia has a strong military strength…” Guo Caiying walked into the room and sat on the sofa as she began to give an extended analysis of the possibility of the young man investing in the Kunlun World. In the end, she added, “In short, you better go wash up now, and I’ll take you to the Ministry of Agriculture to look for Uncle Luo. When you see him, you need to get on your high horse and have to insist that you want to return to the motherland to invest since you’ve already earned money and that you have already been operating the downstream industry of animal husbandry in the US, so you’re very interested in investing in the agricultural sector in foreign world. As for the other things, leave all of them to me. Uncle Luo is close to my dad now, so things will have a higher chance if I’m the one asking him for a favor directly.”
The real purpose why Zhang Lisheng came to China was to observe the attitude of the ruling party towards the Atlantis, to see whether he could find an opportunity to provoke the contradiction between the two, so he could find a potential alliance. As for whether he could successfully invest in Kunlun World or not, he did not care about this at all.
However, when he saw how the girl was so serious about the lie that he randomly made up, he could only act happy and said, “I understand now, Senior Sister. I’ll leave it to you.”
“Oh c’mon, you’re putting a lot of pressure on me by saying that,” Guo Caiying said with a bitter smile. “I have never used the ‘back door’ method before. I used to be disgusted by it the most, but I didn’t expect myself doing that too someday. Sigh, now I finally understand what the famous saying’ life is not easy’ means.”
Upon seeing the girl’s dim expression, Zhang Lisheng had felt genuinely grateful for her deep in his heart. He opened his mouth but did not say anything. Instead, he merely walked into the bathroom in silence.
After washing up, he ate a quick breakfast in the restaurant and got on the hotel limousine together with Guo Caiying, reaching the Ministry of Agriculture before 8 o’clock.
The girl left the car and flashed her working ID as she talked to the guard for a while. That young guard made an inside call and began to let the car into the compound with a huge smile.
Under the morning sun, everything seemed ordinary in the main building of the Ministry of Agriculture, except for the glistening red national emblem hanging on it.
It just so happened that it was a peak office hour now. Most of the staff were either driving a private car or riding electric bikes and bicycles, while a minority of them were walking hurriedly into the low-rise building of fewer than ten floors from all corners of the surrounding community.
Just from this hurried and ordinary scene that could be seen everywhere in any office on the street alone, it was clear that this place was not giving off the feeling that this was one of the decision-making bodies of China’s most important power.
