Chapter 804: City of Spirit

804. City of Spirit

Xiao Ling lay on Little Black, eating very little, just like a real cat.

Lin Ye didn’t return to the hotel until late afternoon, then chose to go back to the Shelter.

After returning to the Shelter, Lin Ye rested for a bit before pulling out the blue Boat Ticket and inserting it into the card reader.

[Blank Identity Card detected. Import a random identity?]

"Yes."

[Adding a title can influence the starting identity. Add a title?]

"Add title: Awakened Consciousness."

[Special Ability obtained: Sloth]

[While resting, you can perceive all factors that might harm you and greatly mitigate them.]

[Note: Everyone needs a place where they can rest easy.]

[Import complete.]

Lin Ye’s vision went dark, and he completely lost consciousness.

………………………………

When he came to, Lin Ye was already seated in a guest room on the cruise ship.

Outside the window was pitch-black seawater, devoid of life except for some ocean trash.

Lin Ye leaned against the bed, observing the scene outside.

‘This Special Ability…’

Lin Ye wasn’t quite sure how to go about being in a resting state.

‘Does it mean I have to fully relax my body?’

Lin Ye closed his eyes, no longer focusing on his surroundings.

When he completely relaxed his body, he suddenly sensed an extremely intense danger in the seawater outside the window—the water seemed ready to breach the window at any moment and flood the room.

Influenced by the seawater, Lin Ye couldn’t maintain that resting state, and the sense of danger quickly faded.

‘…What a garbage skill.’

Lin Ye was truly fed up with these shoddy abilities; he’d rather have a more controllable skill instead of one that required rest to maintain.

It’s hard for a normal person to stay relaxed in a crisis; this skill would need some practice before it could be used properly.

Just as Lin Ye was studying the skill, the attendant knocked on the door.

“You’ll be arriving at your stop soon. Please follow me to the Deck to wait for disembarkation.”

Lin Ye followed the attendant out of the room, walking down the corridor and onto the Deck.

The cruise ship docked at a city’s Port, with many passengers waiting below to board.

Lin Ye walked down the ladder from the cruise, and the Boat Ticket returned to his hand, now printed with the arrival time of the ship.

The area around the Port was bustling, completely different from the shore earlier.

This seemed to be a city within the mental world, and Lin Ye had never been to such a place before.

Just as he stepped off the cruise, a burly man in a pink miniskirt approached, his face lit up with a warm smile as he handed Lin Ye a flyer.

Lin Ye glanced at it—it was a flyer for a mental fitness gym.

A mental fitness gym was a facility for training mental energy, and from the description, it seemed like a basic one, of little use to Lin Ye.

Back on the Deck, Lin Ye had taken a quick look around; the city was filled with buildings of wildly different styles, as if from different Planes.

The passersby also wore diverse styles of clothing, and the burly man just now didn’t stand out among the crowd.

Lin Ye left the Port and walked onto the street. A few bloated orange cats crawled past him.

‘This place… probably won’t work…’

Lin Ye had taken the boat to find a mental world where he could plant the Seed of Spirit. With so many people here, planting the seed seemed unlikely.

A Phantom appeared beside Lin Ye, warping and morphing into Alice’s form.

“Are you that illusion, or Alice?”

Lin Ye asked, uncertain.

“I’m Alice, of course. This is the fee I charge for using my image.”

Alice looked around at the dazzling city blocks with curiosity. She rarely left the Great Hollow and had nearly forgotten what the outside world looked like.

“I’m new here too. Want to take a stroll around the city?”

The cruise would return to port in a few hours, and Lin Ye had no idea what else to do for now.

“Sure, I can take a little break today.”

Alice accepted Lin Ye’s invitation.

“Anywhere you want to go?”

The city was huge, surrounded by buildings of unknown purpose, and Lin Ye couldn’t decide where to head.

“Let’s just wander the streets for now. It’s my first time seeing such a lively city.”

Alice grabbed Lin Ye’s sleeve and led him toward a nearby street.

The street was lined with food stalls, and behind those stalls were a few general stores selling miscellaneous items.

Lin Ye glanced at the food stalls and noticed that transactions here seemed to use coins made of mental energy.

All the coins had a similar style, but the intensity and purity of the mental energy composing them varied.

The purer and more intense the mental energy, the more valuable the coin.

Lin Ye casually pinched out a few coins; his mental energy was extremely pure, making him highly skilled at producing such coins.

Alice also made a few coins and used them to buy some snacks from a roadside vendor.

The mental coins she produced were quite valuable, and the vendor gave her a bag filled with a mix of various snacks.

Lin Ye pulled out a popsicle-like snack and took a bite. These snacks reminded him of the fruit he’d eaten in Ward 419—both were food made from mental energy, yet they tasted completely different.

The young girl’s fruit was indistinguishable from real fruit, but these snacks carried an undertone of the mental emotions mixed into them.

“Disgusting. Who actually buys this shoddy craftsmanship?”

Lin Ye crushed the half-eaten popsicle and the snacks from the bag back into mental coins. Maybe because he often mined in the Rule Mining Area, he was good at purifying mental energy.

“Yeah, it’s a bit weird.”

Alice also crushed a snack she’d taken a bite from into a mental coin and tossed it into the bag.

“Still, this place is pretty friendly to me. I need to learn some techniques for using mental energy in the mental world, so I can study here.”

It was precisely because these items were poorly made that Lin Ye had room to learn. If everything here were crafted like the young girl’s work, he’d have trouble understanding the objects’ structure.

“We can head into the stores and find some goods to study with.”

Alice could use mental energy to create items inside the Great Hollow, but for her, it was as simple as eating or drinking—an almost instinctive skill. She didn’t know how to teach Lin Ye.

“Don’t worry about me too much. You can take a good rest here, treat it like a vacation. I’ll learn some mental techniques on the side; it won’t be hard anyway.”

For Lin Ye, deconstructing the structure of these items required no brainpower at all.