Chapter 981: Chapter 981: Going Out
Where there are people, there is dark history—this theory is surprisingly applicable to both the Xyrin Apostles and the Divine Race.
As the two most dazzling factions among the three major forces of the Void, the first meeting between the Huron Divine Race and the Star Domain Divine Race was not a pleasant one. Due to a little joke of fate (if indeed such a thing could affect these gods), the space between the territories of the Star Domain Divine Race and the Huron Divine Race was not filled by the Void, but rather by thousands of Abyss Gates stretching endlessly, resulting in their first great expedition devolving into a black humor that lasted millions of years: after soaking in the Abyss environment, the first thing they did upon meeting was enthusiastically beat each other half to death, encountering life forms they’d never heard of before, with power levels closely matching their own, and bodies entirely marked by Abyss reactions. It was, indeed, the only possible outcome. Of course, another reason for all this was that both sides’ expeditionary forces likely fell somewhat under the control of the Abyss towards the end. While gods are hard to corrupt entirely by the Abyss, spending too long in the dense Abyssal Aura can still make them excessively aggressive, irrational, and belligerent. Two divine army groups soaking in an environment like this for a million years was indeed a calamity.
However, I must admit, these guys with severe out-of-specs were all cheating, because the result of the battle between the two sides wasn’t mutual destruction but the elimination of all local Abyss Gates. The last thing they did was scatter the cloud mist and then glare at each other—can you think of anything more badass than that?
“After all, that was the combined forces of both the Star Domain and Huron Divine Races,” Father God recalled that period with eyes seemingly still burning with leaping flames, clearly, that era was an exciting time, “by the end, we all thought we might be on the verge of completely destroying the Abyss’s lair, so we used almost all the strength of our race. In the face of divine armies of this scale, thousands of Abyss Gates—even large ones—were not much of a storm. At that time, there were not many high-level intelligences controlled by the Abyss in the Void, and there certainly were not those now difficult-to-deal-with Fallen Apostles. Original Abyss creatures were brainless, much easier to handle.”
I quietly bowed my head, pretending to scratch Lan’s ear.
In the end, Father God recounted the dark history between the Huron and Star Domain but skipped over the thing I was more interested in—how he and the Huron’s Divine King ended up as frenemies—yes, frenemies. I think only this word can describe the relationship between these two old seniors, especially seeing Father God’s expression when mentioning the “crazy girl,” which looked like he’d eloped…
It seems that for Father God personally, his entanglement with the “crazy girl” is an even darker dark history than the battle between the two races, something he won’t speak of, no matter how close I am to him. This, I understand. Back when I first confirmed my relationship with Qianqian, I refused to admit it in front of Big Sister for days. Using a scientific term, that’s called being covertly passionate.
Possibly after the excitement of the first couple of days, Xiaoxue finally started feeling tired. Just after nine o’clock in the evening, she was yawning, syncing her biological clock with the little ones. Rubbing her eyes, she approached quickly pecking both me and Lin Xue on the face: “Dad, Mom, and Second Uncle over there, nothing else to ask, right? I’m a bit sleepy.”
“You’re not going back tonight?” I nodded, somewhat unaccustomed but not resistant, then turned to say to the still blushing Miss Xue beside me. She looked at the clock on the wall, then exclaimed, “Oh no! I forgot to go home!”
“Finally, after being called ‘Mom’ all day, she got into character.”
Xiaoxue, with arms crossed, concluded. Her mom promptly gave her a sound flick on the ear, which made her cry out.
Prophet Lin awkwardly slipped back home, while Big Sister started urging Little Baobao, who was still busy playing with the graviton generator, to hurry back to bed. Xiaoxue, with her arms crossed and interest apparent, snuggled closer: “Hey, Dad, why don’t you and Mom find a way to bring me out early, so there will be two of me before the Great Void Cataclysm. Then I can nurse myself, wouldn’t that be fun…Hey, Dad, don’t twist my ear! Mom already twisted it before! Whee! It’s going to come off! Second Uncle, Mother Qianqian, Mom Sandora, Big Aunt, Second Aunt, help me! Dad’s hitting me!”
Father God, arms crossed and beaming: “Your daughter is really cute. I increasingly feel that Cynthia and she could get along well.”
Why is it that Void creatures can particularly easily develop into such strange little girls? Is this what they call the Naughty Kid halo?
I was just about to ask Father God how he educated children, when suddenly a girl’s shout came from next to the sofa, and then someone bumped into my leg. Looking down, I saw Lan Zheng darting around the sofa in panic, as fast as a jumping gold Light Ball. If not for my good eyesight, I wouldn’t have realized this fast-moving fluff ball was actually the Nine-tailed Fox of the family, and behind this ball of light, Xiaoxue was enthusiastically chasing the fox, running wildly all the way… Wait, wasn’t she going to sleep?! How is this girl becoming more spirited!
“Help… Help!” The fox girl jumped up and down for a long time, finding no way to escape from someone inheriting the Prophet Power, so she clutched the coffee table leg, not letting go. With her head raised, she looked at me pitifully, her ear fur standing up like needles. Xiaoxue was behind her, pulling on her tail with effort, muttering, “Hey, I wondered why I’ve been sleeping so restlessly lately. I apparently forgot about you—Sister Fox, time for bed!”
I quickly patted Xiaoxue’s hand away: “Ahem, what are you doing idly bullying a fox?”
“No way, I’m inviting her to sleep—Fox Sister brought me up for a third of my time, she accompanied me to sleep, oh yes, hugging this pile of tails was so comfortable. She would weave her tails into a cradle and rock it. Otherwise, I couldn’t sleep soundly—Fox Sister, let go, let’s go upstairs to sleep!”
“I want to go home, I want to go home… wuwuwu… Lord Zi save me…”
Xiaoxue slung Yakumo Lan’s tails over her shoulder and dragged her towards the second floor. The Nine-tailed Fox Fairy, who had devolved to a bizarre level, was tear-eyed, scratching claws on the ground, ripping carpet fluff, eventually being pulled upstairs by her tail.
Everyone: “…”
Father God doesn’t seem too demanding on living conditions, but it’s still worrying to arrange a room for such a big figure. It suddenly occurred to me, as the most remarkable family in the Empire, is our living space too small—Dingdang, as a township cadre, even has a World Tree Temple the size of dozens of Buckingham Palaces as her palace, yet the average living space per person in the Imperial Family is only twenty square meters. I felt uneasy housing Father God in an eighteen-square-meter bedroom. Shadow City has high-standard houses though: I set up a Gothic-style castle in the suburbs for a few little ones because Qianqian mumbled that a princess should live in a castle, but now that castle has almost turned into a playground open to all city children. I don’t think it’s right to have Father God use cartoon slides to go up the stairs.
However, when Father God mentioned wanting to taste omelet stuffed pancakes again the next morning, I felt the problem was solved.
No word was spoken overnight; perhaps it was an illusion, but I felt I slept more soundly than usual this night. It appears my previous thought that Father God himself wards off evil might be correct. In my dreams, I even felt enveloped by a light, a particularly serene and intimate feeling, though a bit chilly—the next morning, I found Anwina lying beside me.
“Safe beside the master.” The Little Ghost said pitifully, her entire body flickering like she was out of power.
I really don’t know how to console this glowing entity to believe that Father God won’t accidentally send out a Dynamic Light Wave and purify her. After all, when Yelsen first came over for a meal, it took her an entire week to adjust. It’s hard to say how long it will take her with Father God’s high presence.
After brushing my teeth, washing my face, changing clothes, and mainly combing Mercury Lamp’s hair, I knocked awake all the boxes under the window. When I went downstairs, I found Xiao Xue already early at the big dining table slurping soy milk. Father God and the Divine Clan’s Five were sitting in a row on the other side of the table, each with a stuffed egg pancake and a big bowl of spicy soup. It seemed like the scene outside a train station at half past eight in the morning. Lan was leaning weakly against the stair railing in a daze. As soon as she saw me coming down, she threw me a resentful white eye. I noticed her tail was once again braided into three twists like when she first came, only this time, there was a big bow tied at the tip.
No need to say, this was Xiao Xue’s handiwork.
It wasn’t difficult to help the fox untie her tail; the only incident was that I almost got bitten. Maybe it hurt a bit when I was pulling. I felt it necessary to educate Xiao Xue about this even though she has a ‘Sister Fox’ who raised her from a young age, while my fox has no such experience. Suddenly messing around like this can easily cause an animal uprising and human injury—look, she wanted to bite someone again.
“Dad, let’s eat,” Xiao Xue got up and served me breakfast, and brought out a plate of fried tofu to greet Yakumo Lan, “Sister Fox, eat—don’t be angry, the bow actually looks pretty.”
I was just about to remind this girl that the ‘Sister Fox’ here can’t take care of children or braid her tail into a cradle. Xiao Xue suddenly excitedly waved her chopsticks and said, “Right, Dad, Xiao Qian is even better at playing than me. Once Sister Zi came home looking for Sister Fox, she secretly untied the two bows on the gap—turns out those can actually be untied, then we got Sister Zi back from Canis Majoris…”
Yakumo Lan, who was ready to eat, suddenly plunged headfirst into the tofu. This poor fox, I couldn’t bear to watch.
Bingdisi raised her head from the steaming spicy soup, glanced silently at Qianqian who had just washed her hands and was running over to eat, her lips moved slightly, the lip-reading meaning was: genetic issue.
I was heartbroken: “…”
After eating, Father God suggested going out for a walk, saying he wanted to see this special world. I called over Qianqian and Bingdisi, who were bored rolling around on the ground. Anyway, these two at home could only accompany a bunch of girls in mischief; they couldn’t help Sister with household affairs or Sandora with state affairs, and would even greatly enhance the destructive power of the Divine Clan’s Five. Father God asked about interesting places in the city. I thought it over and really didn’t have any idea: as a supposedly “new commercial landmark” that developed rapidly in the last two years and had no fame in the previous years, K City shares the distinct characteristics of all such cities nationwide: it demolished every old relic that had anything to do with culture, leaving exaggerated cement city sculptures. The most magical thing this place did was the planning bureau ordered the demolition of three old archways in the old town, and then erected identical ones made of steel and organic glass, thrusting them there. I couldn’t really take Father God to see those things, right?
But Father God’s meaning was that he was curious about everything here, and it didn’t matter what we saw.
Finally, I could once again drive my precious seven-thousand-billion out for sightseeing, feeling quite excited. This lone car at home had long been used as a grocery cart by Sayaka and Sister. They took this car street shopping for groceries easier than driving any of Lin Xue’s various flashy extended sports cars—it’s common knowledge, a three-million luxury car typically wouldn’t risk life and limb to compete for space with a vehicle whose trunk has four big holes and whose front and rear wheels aren’t even the same width, even if the R&D costs of this vehicle could send half the people in the White House to the moon.
As soon as we drove out of the street entrance, we encountered numerous elderly folks returning from morning exercise. Our post-modernist styled car was quite famous in the area. The elders stopped in their tracks at the intersection to nod and greet us. I felt they might be afraid of walking too fast and accidentally wrecking my car. Father God enthusiastically rolled down the window to nod and greet the elders, piquing the curiosity of many old ladies. Under the questioning of the townsfolk, I could only explain this friendly young man was my long-lost second brother.
The townsfolk’s comments were surprisingly consistent, usually only two sentences: “Wow, Little Chen sure has a lot of estranged relatives.” and “Looks kind of similar, just can’t say how.”
My understanding of the second sentence was: having a common face, it’s very normal to look like anyone.
Regarding the vehicle we were using, Father God very tactfully reviewed: “This thing is quite distinctive, the cars I saw on the road earlier weren’t like yours. This might not fit this world’s mortals’ aesthetic view, right?”
“Not just not fitting,” Bingdisi said from my backseat, reaching to try and press the button on the console, “Even when parked, you often have to stick a ticket on the front windshield first, or it may be towed away as a scrapped vehicle.”
Watching the street scene glide backward outside the window, Father God was amazed as he spoke to Bingdisi: “You’re quite familiar with these?”
“After living here for quite some days, this world is quite amusing, mortals are really good at playing,” Bingdisi said animatedly, lucky the car’s internal space was grand; otherwise, I wondered if after putting down her XX there’d still be room for her, “You should see sometime how they toss around, twenty-two people fighting over one ball with over ten thousand fans cheering blindly, without even getting out of the Earth-Moon system they’re plotting to shoot down alien spaceships, someone who can’t paint scribbling randomly on paper has a crowd under it lost in enchantment. The funniest is the TV show, about a temple making strange noises every night, things inside moving on their own at night, and after four experts analyzed for three days the conclusion was the wind’s too strong there—Monina wasted two weeks faking haunting in the temple, and she ended up losing to me half a month’s pocket money for it; I said even if she showed Chaos Sky to twenty thousand people those experts would ascribe it to recent murky weather advising fewer outdoor activities…”
I increasingly felt sweat pouring down, explaining to Father God while driving: “These are social phenomena—nothing to do with me, we don’t manage Earth affairs.”
“Mortals are cherished by Gods precisely because they are full of variables,” Father God smiled, looking out the window, “What does ‘legitimization’ mean? It seems like that paper we passed had your military emblem.”
I gritted my teeth, stepping on the gas towards the suburban area. At least find a place far from the radiation zone of black sunglasses, in this region it’s too easy to be driven to internal injury by Father God’s sharp questions: was he doing it on purpose?
In the smoke raised by the seven-thousand-billion, roadside pedestrians and vehicles stopped to watch. I felt they might have remembered that urban legend: reportedly, in a certain obscure street of this city, occasionally appears a concoction turned from a tricycle into a tractor, wrapped in an Audi shell, no one knows what it burns, only knows it has twenty-one exhaust pipes at the rear, and never exhausts…
Along the way, Father God was highly interested in any scenery outside the window, whether a telephone pole pancake stall or the increasingly abundant roadside trees brought smiles to him. I felt perhaps as long as it’s something that exists in the world, it could delight this big brother. He didn’t specify any fixed place to go, just asked me to drive in whatever direction intuitively seemed most satisfactory. Though uncertain of his intent, there was surely no harm. Thus, I opened the car’s navigation system searching for a nearby good environment. The seven-thousand-billion’s navigation system is quite magical, its welcome page features Google Earth, but upon entering large map mode, the homepage shows the entire Star System; you can even search a direct route from Earth to Vega, more astonishingly, this route includes toll stations—the Imperial Interstellar Navigation Administration recently opened space civil aviation business within the Capital World, though it requires toll.
Thus, the identifying card stuck on the seven-thousand-billion’s windshield drew puzzlement from major toll stations in K City. Actually, it’s a monthly pass, allowing smooth journeys through over two thousand three hundred worlds, though in frontier worlds, it’s unusable, they don’t have toll stations yet…
Locking the map into micro mode, the new-generation navigation system designed by Qianqian showcased the user-friendly aspect of this electronic map; its route recommendation options are quite advanced with usual driving/public transport journey, even including a tricycle travel option. I don’t know what utility these route maps provide… (To be continued. If you enjoy this work, welcome to Qidian () to cast your recommendation votes, monthly tickets, your support is my greatest motivation.)
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