The End of the Universe Is Live-Streaming E-commerce – CH75

Chapter 75: The 75th Day of Livestream Selling

Whether Lin Xiang would move out later was hard to say, but Reinhardt was the one who got sent out first.

Because clearly, Lin Xiang had something to say to Lin Zhao. Lin Zhao understood his younger brother. One look at Lin Xiang’s expression told him that what he was about to say was no small matter. It felt a bit like New Year’s Eve, when Lin Xiang had been preparing to tell him that the entire world might soon possess supernatural abilities. And just as clearly, Lin Xiang had no intention of letting Reinhardt, an alien, know about these things.

It was not that Lin Zhao had chosen his younger brother over love.

Rather…

“I really want to eat that viral yak beef burger from the Sichuan-Shu station. You can only buy it in the second waiting hall of that high-speed rail station. If someone could let me eat it on such a special day as today, I would definitely, especially, especially like him.”

After Lin Zhao said this with a sigh, he did not even need to explicitly look at Reinhardt. His Royal Highness the Prince could no longer hold back and immediately said, “No need for anyone else. I’ll go buy it for you.”

The only person Lin Zhao could like was him!

“But it looks like the line is really long.” Lin Zhao pulled up the Little Red Book post he had seen. In front of the counter, a long queue stretched out, countless tourists joining in on the hype.

Reinhardt’s answer was to kiss Lin Zhao once, then head straight out. If he went earlier, he could finish waiting in line earlier and come back sooner. He knew very well that Lin Zhao was using this as an excuse to send him out, but he also knew very well that Lin Zhao had indeed come across that video several days ago. He had looked like he really wanted to eat it.

Juicy meat filling, fluffy bun, and most importantly, if one arrived late, it would be sold out.

As a mental body, Reinhardt was not limited by transportation when going out. This finally let the Special Management Bureau, who had been following him all along, learn how exactly he had appeared at that nursing facility across the ocean back then. Naturally, the Special Management Bureau’s people could not keep up with Reinhardt, but fortunately, they had Lin Xiang’s message and knew the destination of this key person who needed to be closely guarded.

The local Special Management Bureau personnel had already headed to the high-speed rail station, and they very warmly asked whether they should simply queue up in advance and buy it for him, saving everyone the trouble.

In the end…

They ran into some traffic issues on the way. By the time they arrived, Reinhardt was already there.

Amid misfortune, there was one small blessing. In this brand-new modern era where flying through the sky and burrowing through the earth was no longer anything new, Reinhardt moving at such high speed in broad daylight did not attract much attention. At most, people discussed whether natural energy users should at least follow basic traffic laws.

In short: “All right, he’s gone. What did you want to say?”

As Lin Zhao asked, he handed Lin Xiang a cup of coffee. He had recently bought a semi-automatic coffee machine and had been studying all kinds of beans at home every day.

His intentions were already very clear. If the higher-ups still had not finalized the content for the livestream classes, he was going to start a latte art mini-class to fill up his streaming time.

Lin Xiang did not waste much time either. After all, he knew Reinhardt’s speed all too well. Crossing the Pacific twice in one night and passing through three countries was nothing to him. Lin Xiang was afraid that if he spoke even a little slowly, Reinhardt would come back with that burger before he finished. Rather than let his brother rack his brain again to say something like “I like you the most” to send him out, Lin Xiang might as well speak faster.

Lin Xiang actually had quite a lot to say. He had to start from the beginning.

That was, his speculation about Blue Star’s current situation. This idea had begun with the romance novels provided by Grand Duchess Elowen. Those novels did not only contain the definition of mental power and basic methods of improvement. They also contained other things.

Works of literature always reflected the society they came from. This was not to say that what appeared in literary works must all be true, nor that every artistic work would display the social landscape. Rather, after reading enough of them, one could always summarize certain common features of that society, things the authors unconsciously revealed.

For the simplest example, in earlier CEO novels, the CEO’s company was usually in coal mining, real estate, or financial investment. Nowadays, CEOs tended toward high technology and new energy.

That was a reflection of social change.

After highly condensing the contents of those interstellar romance novels from Grand Duchess Elowen, Lin Xiang had uneasily extracted some things he felt might reflect the mainstream of the universe.

For instance, the Yasa people’s fanatical pursuit of destined partners. This gave many CEO novels the simplest and most reasonable protagonist template: beautiful and powerful, naturally devoted in love, searching for hundreds and thousands of years, then for no apparent reason glancing once at ordinary, weak little me and falling so desperately in love that they could not live without me…

Honestly, it gave Lin Xiang a headache just reading it.

Setting aside whether these Yasa traits were real or not, even if they were real, just put yourself in their shoes. You were a long-lived species who was beautiful and strong in combat, spending your entire life searching the universe for your one and only destined lover. When the two of you finally fell in love, would you allow them to change their mind?

The Yasa people’s racial trait was loyalty, but their partners might not necessarily be the same.

Feelings were hard to say. It was not that someone being good-looking, powerful, and loyal meant a person would always like them. What if they liked them today but stopped loving them tomorrow? What would happen then?

The Yasa officials certainly would not report that kind of negative news.

But Lin Xiang could almost imagine that the ending would not be pretty. Even if the two people stayed together forever, did that mean they would definitely be happy? A Yasa had only one choice, while their lover had countless options. That bone-deep unease could not be erased, and it could easily create a paranoid person. Lin Xiang did not care how other people solved this kind of issue. He only cared about his brother. He did not want his brother to be hurt.

But now was not the time to talk to his brother about these things. Lin Xiang understood Lin Zhao. Before choosing to be with Reinhardt, his brother must have already learned about the Yasa people’s traits and understood the consequences.

Even so, he was still willing to date Reinhardt. That proved his brother had already prepared himself mentally.

Although Lin Xiang would rather his brother had not thought so much about it.

In short, aside from the Yasa traits that were relatively famous and suitable for artistic creation, the two social phenomena most frequently mentioned in those novels were, first, the struggle among major star systems for energy, and second, a special competition called “planetary combat.” Of course, different books had different names for it, and different causes too.

In any case, without exception, the participating planets would be restricted within a certain area, then engage in one or several rounds of struggle aimed at enhancing their respective species’ strength, stellar energy, and interstellar status.

In fact, many web novels also had similar settings. It was not limited to interstellar fiction. Cultivation novels, Western fantasy novels—there were always many variations of battle royale-style competitions.

What made Lin Xiang uneasy was: “Don’t you think our current situation looks a lot like we’re in some kind of competition?”

While Lin Zhao had still been wondering why the trading system only gave him twenty-two planes to choose from, Lin Xiang had already figured it out.

“Because there are only twenty-two contestants in this beast arena. I know you’ll definitely say that excluding ourselves, it should only be twenty-one, but what I’m saying is, the universe represented by Yasa is also an option. It’s not the planet of some technological plane you thought it represented, but the entire universe outside of us.”

“You mean we’re trapped beasts about to enter the arena, while they’re the noble lords sitting in theater boxes, ready to place bets?”

Lin Xiang nodded. “At least, that’s what I used to think.”

Until Lin Zhao connected to the plant plane, Miye. The expert group contacted Mr. Dandelion, whose avatars had already traveled to more than a dozen planets. From its descriptions of those planets, the expert group summarized the characteristics and current evolutionary states of all the planets they knew so far.

The conclusion was that the Cosmic Alliance was probably not waiting for them to discover one another, fight each other, and select a single king of poison like raising gu. Rather, regardless of how many years or hundreds of millions of years each planet itself had existed, all of them were newly emerging planets that had just evolved a unique power system of their own.

Most of the planets were either like Blue Star and the orc plane, the Pagar Grassland—still in the initial stage of just awakening their powers—or like the Western fantasy plane, Falris, and the cultivation plane, the Small World of Zuowang, where they already had a certain level of understanding in using their own powers, but their entire society had remained stagnant.

“If we use the simplest levels to divide them,” Lin Xiang drew a few simple lines on the tablet, “suppose a world with no power awakening at all is Alpha-level, a world like ours that has just awakened is Beta-level, and Reinhardt’s people are at least already a rather mature Gamma-level.”

Lin Xiang sketched out a simple pyramid.

All twenty-two of their Beta planets were in the second layer.

“Having power is the admission ticket. Whether you can use it proficiently and possess great strength determines whether we will be admitted into the Gamma circle. If we cross over, then we cross over. If we don’t…” They both thought of Kai’s hometown, Belgi.

“This is also the conclusion we summarized. Including us, all twenty-two planets are facing some kind of, uh, you can call it difficulty, or you can call it a test, world-level problem. For example, our genetic collapse, the wasteland Kaman’s apocalyptic radiation. But we think the worst off among them are actually Falris and the Small World of Zuowang.”

“What they’re facing is stagnation. No matter how much magicians can move mountains and drain seas, no matter how much cultivators can fly through the sky and burrow through the earth, their societies have always been standing still.”

Falris was even more miserable in some ways. It was not merely standing still; its magic power was declining.

Lin Zhao had once thought that no matter how he looked at it, Wei’an the marmot from the orc world had it the worst. Now, hearing his younger brother Lin Xiang say this, he suddenly realized in surprise that it was not the case. As a newborn civilization, the orc world could actually be said to be developing at a tremendous pace. Everyone could see the direction of its future efforts. Yesterday, they were still four-legged beasts; today, they could already transform into humans and walk upright. The ones that truly could not see a future were instead Falris, stuck in a dead end where they did not even know which direction to work toward in order to break the stalemate.

The End of the Universe Is Live-Streaming E-commerce