Chapter 400 - 399: The Internet Exploded
Public opinion exploded!
A massive explosion!
Let’s recount the instances where the old Daoists of Daluo Palace, including Gu Zhao, revealed their miraculous powers to the people of Blue Star.
The Berkeley Incident: The goal was to awe the top brass. Although Taoist Ming Yu summoned Five-Colored Thunderclouds, revealed a Celestial Warrior, and destroyed a building with a Thunderbolt, Berkeley is a small city. The event took place in the early morning hours, so only about a hundred people managed to capture it on their phones. Outside of Berkeley, not many people believed it.
Rainfall in the drought-stricken Northern Lands: They didn’t reveal their forms, simply gathering clouds to make it rain. Besides personnel in various national meteorological and satellite departments who could see the bizarre weather patterns, ordinary people were unaware.
The Mongolian Mine Disaster: This was the first time they appeared before ordinary people in the country, rescuing over a hundred trapped miners. It was also the first time rumors of Daoists practicing Cultivation emerged domestically.
The Lao Mountain Rainbow Incident: On a whim, Gu Zhao added another legend to Lao Mountain. Some relatives of the few people involved posted about it online, but ultimately, it didn’t cause much of a stir.
The Celestial Master’s Mansion Incident with the Crazed Sakura Person: A Sakura Paste Yin-Yang Master attempted to morally blackmail him, but Gu Zhao trapped him in A Dream of Millet Porridge. He was forced to experience the tortures of that era, causing him to go insane in public and sparking all sorts of speculation online.
Perhaps none of these miraculous displays caused a huge sensation on their own, but there were just too many of them. Add to that the Vajra Profound Talismans Daluo Palace provided to the "office" for its front-line personnel. As time went on, more and more clues surfaced, and speculation ran rampant.
The Shu Province Airliner Incident: This event could be called a crucial turning point. The cabin door broke, but there was no wind pressure. The plane’s engines shut down, but it remained stable. It even landed without taxiing. To say nothing Extraordinary was involved would be to completely humiliate the intelligence of everyone concerned.
After the airliner incident, Incense offerings at Shu Region Taoist Temples boomed. Combined with previous legends and rumors, the existence of Extraordinary Beings had become an open secret in certain circles.
The Northern Sandstorm Incident: This sent a message to certain people—harming Celestial Xia’s environment is also not allowed!
The West Mountain Rescue Incident: Another event to further lay the groundwork for ordinary people to accept the concept of Extraordinary Beings in the world.
The Kabia Rescue Incident: By this point, Taoist Yan Song wasn’t holding back. He revealed himself in broad daylight, faced a military Attack, destroyed all their armaments, and finally eliminated the enemy leader. In a broad sense, you could even say he single-handedly destroyed a nation.
Unfortunately, Kabia was a remote foreign land. On top of that, the Western nations, harboring ulterior motives, shelved the videos and photos, refusing to release them. This left only scattered videos from independent bloggers. Although they generated a lot of buzz, they ultimately lacked any official endorsement.
However, the international impact of this incident was even greater than the domestic impact of the Shu Province airliner incident. After all, you can’t fake the truth. No matter how remote Kabia was, it wasn’t completely isolated from the world.
Whether it was the military equipment Taoist Yan Song had crushed into a giant iron ball, the multi-angle videos circulating on the foreign internet, or Kabia’s subsequent actions, everything pointed to the existence of Extraordinary Beings.
As this public outcry grew louder and the Celestial Xia System remained silent, the nations of the world grew restless and began frequent probing. The exposure of Jingyi’s identity was the last straw.
In the eyes of the world, the Western nations, including the Huaqi Grand Commander, were ignoring the facts and telling blatant lies. The Celestial Xia System was also ignoring the facts, but it was just playing dumb with its eyes closed!
You’re the elephant in the room, and you’re about to burst the house, yet you remain silent and pretend nothing is happening. ’Just keep on pretending...’
And so, a Western journalist broke the story on the truth of Kabia, and with that, the existence of Extraordinary Beings received an official endorsement.
Then, just as the entire world was frantically discussing Extraordinary Beings and a crowd of real and fake ones were revealing their identities to cash in on the traffic, the Huaqi Grand Commander decisively piggybacked on the hype. He announced the existence of the Superpower Special Service Bureau, letting Huaqi Country "win" once again!
Since no one was pretending anymore, Gu Zhao naturally followed his heart and stopped holding back.
And so...
Taoist Yuan He, Taoist Xu Ning, Taoist Yan Qi, and Taoist Ming Chong!
The four old Daoists appeared together in the sky above cities about to be struck by torrential rain. They revealed their forms, activated their Storage Gourds, and absorbed all the dark, oppressive rain clouds, before releasing the water over the arid Northwest of the country.
This time, it wasn’t like Berkeley with only a hundred or so videos, or the Shu Province airliner incident with its few hundred witnesses, or Kabia with its thousand-plus videos from different angles.
The places where the old Daoists appeared ranged from east to west, south to north, from small county towns to large metropolises, with populations from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. Far more than a million videos were captured, and they spread across the entire domestic internet in less than an hour!
Different cities, different angles, different backgrounds, different off-screen commentary.
On this day, from morning till night, anyone scrolling through their phone was bound to come across one of these videos!
"Holy f—ing shiiit!"
"So it really is Daoists who pray for rain and clear skies!"
"A Storage Gourd! That must be a Magical Treasure that can contain a universe in a mustard seed, right?"
"Ahhh! My poor heart can’t take it! So there really are Cultivators in the world!"
"I want to practice Cultivation!"
"If there are Cultivators in the world, then does that mean Immortals are real too?"
"Are there dragons? Is the Celestial Court real?"
Besides the various debates, some people recognized the old Daoists who had taken action.
"I know who it was that dealt with those human traffickers in Jin Province! That’s Taoist Yuan He, the old Daoist from the Lü Zu Temple in our little county town. He even told my kid the story of the Eight Immortals crossing the sea."
"That’s Taoist Xu Ning, Han Jingyi’s master!"
"Of course the Celestial Master’s Mansion has powerful experts! That’s Taoist Ming Chong from the Celestial Master’s Mansion!"
"That old Daoist... I think I’ve seen him at the Qingcheng Mountain scenic area?"
Beneath that last comment, several accounts belonging to young members of the Qingcheng Mountain Taoist Sect replied.
"Our respects to Elder Yan Qi!"
"Our respects to Grand-Elder Yan Qi!"
"Greetings, Senior Yan Qi!"
That confirms it. He really is a Daoist from Qingcheng Mountain.
The internet erupted in celebration as the videos spread to the rest of the world at lightning speed.
"Celestial Xia’s Extraordinary Beings have shown themselves. Where are ours?"
"Europe has been suffering from a continuous heatwave this year, and hundreds have already died. Can our Extraordinary Beings make it rain a little?"
"A hurricane is tearing through Kazhou in Huaqi. Can any Extraordinary Beings help us?"
"Where is the Superman of Metropolis? Please, help us!"
The West is made up of smaller systems. The systems don’t care about the pleas of the populace, so the people pin their hopes on ethereal superheroes.
Since superheroes are ethereal and pose no threat to the systems’ rule, the systems naturally don’t bother with such useless thoughts from the populace.
But now, Celestial Xia suddenly has real superheroes appear, and the videos show them saving their own people from the threat of torrential rains devastating their cities.
And that made things awkward.
What were they to do now?
Looking at how the Celestial Xia System still hadn’t said a word, the Western systems had a collective flash of insight and decided to follow suit!
Play dumb!
’If Oldzi can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist!’
But would they get their way?