Chapter 34: Fate
At the city gates of Dawnlight City.
Guards in combat uniforms scanned every entrant with hawk-like eyes. As a friendly faction, Dawnlight City naturally had to prevent desperadoes from evil factions from entering. If it were just desperadoes, that would be manageable, but if a notorious villain like Hungry Wolf Carlo or Ghoul Norwood slipped in, trouble would follow.
As for who Hungry Wolf Carlo and Ghoul Norwood were, take Hungry Wolf Carlo—he was the top trusted subordinate of Twilight City's Hundred Eyes Vilawa, essentially his underling. And who was Hundred Eyes Vilawa? He was the most trusted subordinate of Blackheart Goode. As for who Blackheart Goode was, he was the overall captain of the Second Brigade of the Hunting Group under Great Noble Luciwa, meaning he was Luciwa's second-in-command underling.
After sorting out this hierarchy, one could basically understand why, when Su Xiao previously asked Luciwa to pass a message that he wanted to visit Dawnlight City, the city's reaction was so intense. Dawnlight City's response at the time was: "If you two dare come here, we'll fight you to the death. We don't believe you can kill all of us before your stamina runs out!"
The Dawnlight City before him was different from both Twilight City and Holy Heart City. It had a more technological feel. Though it didn't reach the level of Witch Realm's Moon Ring City, it was still more advanced than this world's Spirit Crown City. With a population of over eighty million, while it lacked Twilight City's historical depth, it was undoubtedly prosperous.
Su Xiao stepped onto an automatic walkway about several dozen meters long. The track moved forward as he passed through several layers of security checkpoints. After flowing with the crowd through the inner gate, he presented his Apocalypse Paradise contract brand as identification and successfully entered Dawnlight City's arrival hall.
The arrival hall resembled a civilian airport, except here it was filled with teleportation arrays. Each array portal could carry 150 to 200 passengers per trip. The entire Dawnlight City had 26 districts, and traveling to different districts required taking different batches of teleportation arrays, with each batch waiting 40 seconds to a minute.
Additionally, Dawnlight City had issued a highly reputable currency called Glimmer Silver Coins, more commonly known as Moon Silver Coins. The reason for this name was that the coin's manufacturing technique was obtained by Dawnlight City's first city lord before founding the city, when he accidentally acquired the currency manufacturing process of the Dark Moon Faction, and it had been used ever since.
Don't think issuing a currency is simple for a major power. When transcendent beings are desperate enough, 99.99% of anti-counterfeiting technology can't stop their greed. The ultimate anti-counterfeiting technology for currency is called "existential characteristic currency." To put it in highbrow terms, it's currency infused with "existential concepts." To put it simply, it's currency injected with a small amount of World Force. Moon Silver Coins were this type of currency.
Having only metal coins was inconvenient for daily circulation, so individual Moon Silver Coins were high-denomination currency. They could be exchanged at the city center bank for paper notes called Jiao Si. The current exchange rate was 1 Moon Silver Coin = 295.72 Jiao Si.
Having strong anti-counterfeiting alone wasn't enough for Moon Silver Coins, as they were essentially silver coins with no inherent high practical value. However, if enough Soul Coins were stored and the exchange rate between Moon Silver Coins and Soul Coins was certified through the Void Tree—certifying 10 Moon Silver Coins = 1 Soul Coin—then the value retention of Moon Silver Coins wasn't just stable; it became constant. As long as Dawnlight City maintained its Soul Coin reserves, Moon Silver Coins would have no fluctuations.
On Blazing Sun Star, which resembled a massive prison, Dawnlight City contained the only large-scale entrance and exit. More precisely, the second city lord had applied to the Void Tree to certify teleportation permissions. This wasn't about breaking a hole in Blazing Sun Star's seal. As the city lord of Dawnlight City, he naturally knew that would be suicide. The ancient world seal of Blazing Sun Star was less a prison and more a massive barrier protecting the entire star. Beyond the seal lay ultra-high-concentration Abyss Energy that had undergone dark, corruptive transformation.
However, when it came to wealth, Witch Realm was still the most impressive, using Soul Coins as its basic currency. This required an extraordinarily exaggerated amount of Soul Coins to achieve such a feat.
As for being wealthy, Witch Realm didn't even rank in the top five. The five most wealthy major powers recognized across the Star Realm were: