Seized by the System

When the Azure Dragon gave these people its instructions, they quickly agreed.

After completing this mission, even though they could yet become gods and saints, they should be considered as Heavenly Soldiers and Generals at the very least…

With the Heavenly Book serving as the central liaison, Fang Ning felt more at ease. Fortunately, they had already integrated the Ultra Spatio-temporal Communication. Otherwise, such a broadscale mission would not have been possible.

The first step would always be the hardest. Once they had successfully tested the waters with the first two nodes, the following steps would be much easier to accomplish.

Fang Ning studied the star chart of the Milky Way Nets Above Snares Below and started to come up with a plan.

He delegated the unimportant hubs to the various clans on Earth for them to worship and offer sacrifices.

As for the important hub nodes, he left these to his own core group of people to worship.

After all, only those who gave worship and offered sacrifices would possess the right to speak at their respective star mansions later on.

He was not a fool who would set himself to an arduous yet fruitless task. He might be lazy, but he would never give his opponents the opportunity to hold greater power than him.

Incidentally, in order to set up one thousand and eight stars throughout the Milky Way Nets Above Snares Below, the entire giant maelstrom of the Milky Way could be included as well.

Meanwhile, in terms of the most important central nodes, there would only be eighty-one of them, and Fang Ning wanted to gain control of all eighty-one of these central nodes.

If a problem were to arise with any one of them, the entire Milky Way Nets Above Snares Below would be lost. On the contrary, the other nodes could replace one another in the case of any damages, so they would mostly function as backup alternatives to each other.

Among the twenty-eight star mansions, the Heart of the Azure Dragon, the Claw of the White Tiger, the Tail of the Vermillion Bird, and the Shell of the Black Tortoise were some of the hubs.

The Northern and Southern Dippers, the Northern and Southern Polaris stars, as well as a few other important constellations from the myths and legends also belonged among the eighty-one central nodes.

Fang Ning planned to make all of these famous star mansions the territories of the Whitestone people since they had no shortage of people right now.

“It is indeed important to plan ahead. If we hadn’t taken them in previously, where would we be able to find so much support and assistance now? A good team is always stronger than an individual after all.” After he was done with his planning, Fang Ning began to give himself credit.

“Oh, yes. As long as none of my money is spent here, it’s all good,” Sir System said gratefully.

After the planning stage, Fang Ning directed Sir System to pave the way for their project. If they wanted to get the others to perform well, they had to make an initial path for them first.

Of course, the preparation they had to make was to construct portals on the planets attached to the relevant stars.

Then, the follow-up work could be assigned to the various clans, which included many trivial affairs such as the tasks of setting up the formation of the Nets Above Snares Below, of constructing Vitality Transformation Equipment, and of offering sacrifices to the stars that they would become spiritualized…

As they worked their way to the thirty-fourth star, Fang Ning came upon a difficulty.

This was a star that was a thousand light years away from Earth. It was a second-class star. ¹

These were not the source of the problem.

The issue was that there were seven planets attached to this particular star.

Among these, the two planets that were nearer to it were inhabited by lifeforms of the same clan.

Their technological skills seemed to be more advanced than that of the humans from the Era of Technology, and they had already realized colonial development projects within a stellar system, which was something unachievable by humankind back then.

The night side of the two planets was illuminated by sparks of light, although there were more light sparks on one planet than on the other.

The Azure Dragon hid itself as it observed the more brightly lit planet, which was obviously the Mother Planet.

“Mr. Rich Boss, what should we do now?” Sir System asked anxiously. “This place is already taken. I can’t just forcibly occupy their sun, right? We’re heroes. We can’t resort to such tyrannical ways.”

“Let observe the situation first. This problem is bound to pop up again,” Fang Ning said seriously. “Later on, we still have over a thousand more nodes to set up, so from now on, we’ll need to have two ways of managing the inhabited and uninhabited stellar systems, and there has to be an overall standard to distinguish between the two methods.”

While he was speaking, he looked outside through the System View. With the strong dragon sight, he could see as clear as day even under the dim lighting.

The areas covered with sparks of light were concrete jungles made of reinforced concrete.

If he had not checked again to see that they were really in outer space, Fang Ning would have mistaken himself to be back on the Earth before the Era of Mystery.

“How lucky they are that the mysterious side hasn’t extended its reach to this place,” Fang Ning sighed as he watched the large group of creatures go about their activities on the planet surface.

They were walking around in the concrete jungle, clearly enjoying their nightlife.

Of course, this was how things looked like on the night side of the planet. Correspondingly, on the other side of the planets, there were others living their daytime lives.

Those crawling creatures each had six limbs, of which four were used for crawling. The remaining two limbs grew on the front of their bodies, and had eight fingers on them. It was overall a rather odd sight to behold.

Nonetheless, Fang Ning got used to it very soon. After all, he had come across various types of strange-looking creatures in the recent years, and had grown accustomed to their appearances.

Moreover, the form of these creatures was not particularly extraordinary, even during the days before the arrival of the Era of Mystery.

For instance, the typical crab had ten jointed legs.

Eight of the ten legs were used for walking sideways while the other two front claws served the usual functions of the human hand, such as to hunt, attack and defend.

‘In that case, let’s just call these civilized creatures crab people…’

Fang Ning was too lazy to come up with a better name, so he decided to name them after an earthly being that resembled them the most.

These crab people were moving about in the concrete jungles in an orderly fashion. Some went into bar-like places while the rest of them appeared to be heading home.

Their mode of transportation was a very long type of public bus, and there was rarely any private vehicles on the streets unlike back on Earth, where private cars could be found everywhere.

“Hmm, I’ll have to observe this place more closely. You stay here first and wait while I go down there to take a look.” Fang Ning was interested to go down there to explore further.

“You really want to go outside? Aren’t you afraid of getting into trouble?” Sir System said hesitantly.

“What are you talking about? I’m just going there to investigate, and these crab people are still in the Era of Technology. There’s no need to worry about my safety,” Fang Ning said confidently.

“As expected, you’re thinking of going there to show off.” Sir System hit the nail on the head.

Fang Ning ignored these words and called his Heavenly Book baby over before transforming into a cloud of shadow and exiting the System Space, drifting downward to the planet.

He had rarely come across such an opportunity to travel in such a safe manner at public expense, so of course, he should not miss it.

He quickly ran one round around the planet first. The entire planet only had one large mass of land and its land-to-sea ratio was more or less equally distributed between the two.

However, the gravitational force felt higher than that of Earth, which might be one of the reasons these intelligent beings had chosen to crawl instead.

After all, the gravitational force they had to bear when standing on two legs was way heavier than when standing on four legs.

After studying the overall condition of the planet, Fang Ning decided to experience the civilization of the crab people, just as he did when he had first encountered the society of magnetic people before.

The magnetic people’s society was thoroughly ruled by slavery, for theirs was a magnetic field life form that entirely different from humanity’s way of living. The crab people, on the other hand, seemed to have a civilized life form like that of humankind.

The environment of the whole planet seemed like the Earth with only slight differences in their gravitational force and air composition.

These crab people were also a kind of carbon-based organism, and was, therefore, very much similar to humans. Otherwise, Fang Ning would not have called them crab people.

After giving it some thought, he decided to start Shadow Mode…

He chose a big city with the most sparks of light on the night side, which should probably be the top city among the first tier cities… Then, he chose young-looking crab man on the side of the street who seemed to be still working hard at life.

“#@￥##…” said the crab man who was no taller than 80 centimeters to his companion before boarding the long public bus by the roadside.

Each of these public buses was 20 meters long, and had a very high-frequency service, which was one bus every three to five minutes. This was totally different from the low bus frequency back on Earth.

“Uh, baby, do you understand what this guy’s saying?” Fang Ning said in frustration.

Was this not like playing a game without a Chinese version release? How would that be fun?

“I don’t understand, Master,” the Heavenly Book baby replied honestly.

“Ugh, I should’ve asked your System Daddy to prepare a language pack for me beforehand. It seemed to be more linguistically-talented than me,” Fang Ning sighed.

“It’s not too late to ask now,” the Heavenly Book baby quickly suggested.

“Okay, I’ll talk to it then.”

Fang Ning began to communicate with Sir System through the Heavenly Book.

Of course, he also remembered to tail the young crab man.

“Sir System, please help me translate the language of these crab people.”

“No can do.”

“Didn’t you manage to translate the language of the octopus people right away the last time? This shouldn’t that complicated as well.”

“That’s because they followed a template. The octopus people used Morse code to communicate, but I don’t know what template these crab people are using,” Sir System justified.

“Then, hurry up and ask Anderson to develop a temporary Chinese language pack. Get them to work overtime today,” Fang Ning demanded.

“Okay then.” Sir System immediately conveyed the Warden’s request to Anderson. In any case, it was happy that it did not have to work.

Therefore, before the Chinese language pack was completed, Fang Ning could only go along with this gibberish version first…

In the meantime, the crab man had already taken one of the empty seats on the public bus. None of the crab people on the bus were standing as they were all seated. In fact, there were many seats and even bunk beds on the bus…

The bunk beds were located at the back of the bus, where a few crab people were sleeping at the moment.