83 Mud Pit

If ordinary internet users had the chance to step into the bus and see the videos and images displayed before Wu Qingchen, they would surely be astonished.

After all, when the intelligence officers and specialists consulted him and confirmed the urgent information Earth needed, the videos and images shown to Wu Qingchen differed greatly from the “medieval-world experiences of Wu Qingchen” being broadcast live on that cursed giant screen in the sky.

And that was only natural. Every frame shown to Wu Qingchen at this moment had been carefully assembled by leading film production teams from various countries, with top producers, renowned supervising teams, and celebrated directors selecting the source material, then top editors, special-effects artists, lighting experts, prop masters, cinematographers, colorists, and many others working together to complete the post-production.

So when Wu Qingchen answered their questions, his gaze would often drift, almost against his will, toward precisely the place those teams wanted him to look.

For instance, when the intelligence officer asked the first question, the main content of the video was a wooden cottage. In one corner stood a young man, while in the center a dozen villagers moved in and out, returning the farm tools they had just washed and dried back into the hut.

Under normal circumstances, in a video like that, the people most likely to draw attention would naturally be the villagers walking back and forth, carrying things, constantly changing position.

And yet, through the mastery of the director, screenwriter, editor, lighting crew, and the rest, attention was somehow fixed at once on the edge of the frame, on the young man who had almost no movement at all—the young man’s face belonging to Wu Qingchen, Ross, elder brother in the medieval world, Grace Moore.

To be perfectly frank, thanks to Wu Qingchen’s efforts, his family in the medieval world had been spared summer labor, borrowed draft oxen, had salt added to their food, eaten their fill of porridge, and could even occasionally taste delicious flour.

Compared with before, life like that was unquestionably better. Old William and Idra, as the main labor force, naturally had enough food and adequate rest, while Jaclyn and Grace, as secondary labor, ate better and slept more than the villagers who were helping in the wooden cottage at that very moment.

And yet, with the full cooperation of the finest lighting artists, cinematographers, and prop masters in the Earth film industry, the footage Wu Qingchen saw had been forced to present Grace as pale, exhausted, and haggard, every inch of him stamped with the word miserable. His misery index was several times higher than that of the villagers present, who were in fact even worse off.

The effect of this index was such that Wu Qingchen felt a deep surge of sympathy after looking for only a second.

When the intelligence officers asked the second question, the salt-adding video they played for Wu Qingchen was the same.

Although there were no villagers left as a point of comparison, after more than a dozen cinematic techniques were brought to bear at once—carefully designed camera angles, intensity of light, contrast between brightness and shadow, and many, many others—

In the frame: under the sunset glow, little Nina had just stepped into the wooden cottage from outside. The basket in her right hand looked extraordinarily heavy, and the cabbages piled inside seemed as though they might spill to the ground at any moment.

At the same time, a special-effects company that had been temporarily commissioned used supercomputer resources urgently reassigned to it, and for the live broadcast of the atmospheric event it conjured a breeze out of thin air in the originally still air. A few wisps of dust curled up lightly, then brushed in sequence over Nina’s outer robe. The patched garment she had inherited from her mother fluttered softly, and beneath those loose clothes her frail body was laid bare in devastating detail.

Such a desolate image struck straight at the place in Wu Qingchen’s heart reserved for sympathy and pity.

And so the officers continued to ask one question after another.

And so Wu Qingchen watched one video after another, one photograph after another.

Among them were William, Jaclyn, Idra, Grace, and Nina—Wu Qingchen’s family in the medieval world. These mostly emphasized the hardships of life, meant to stir sympathy and compassion in Wu Qingchen.

There were Playa, Andre, Ifrit, Espier, O’Connor, and Thor, the leading figures of Aikeli Village. These mostly emphasized how much the village’s ruling class valued Wu Qingchen, meant to awaken his sense of honor and achievement.

There were Richard, Freeman, Holset, Wayne, and Holman, the free peasants barely able to keep body and soul together. These mostly emphasized the envy of the village’s ordinary people toward Wu Qingchen’s family, meant to stir his sense of superiority and drive.

And there were many serfs Wu Qingchen did not know by name, their bodies half-clad, their hair disheveled, filthy, emaciated, and reduced to skin and bones. These mostly emphasized the utterly miserable lives of the very lowest stratum of the village, meant to heighten Wu Qingchen’s vigilance and sense of crisis.

Thus, while one side questioned him for intelligence and the other side indoctrinated him, the convoy rolled slowly onward. More than ten minutes passed before it came to a stop.

It stopped on a platform formed from countless stacked steel plates, an area nearly half the size of a football field.

The site for the fifth training session was still the enormous construction zone used to simulate Aikeli Village in the medieval world.

With the full force of national support behind it, the construction schedule of the Aikeli Village Simulation Base was advancing at a speed beyond imagination.

Wu Qingchen remembered clearly that when he had come here two days earlier, the core area of “Aikeli Village”—the settlement where most villagers built their wooden homes—was still being opened up by endless construction vehicles and heavy equipment, with earthworks and civil engineering underway.

Yet when he stood here again today, the winding village paths already had shrubs, brambles, weeds, and towering trees planted along both sides, so similar to the medieval world that they seemed nearly identical.

Following the line of the trickling stream, rows of “ramshackle” wooden cottages stood at irregular heights, while the open ground around them had also been planted with all kinds of vegetables in a convincing imitation.

Even more exaggeratedly, Wu Qingchen could see that the actors playing the corresponding medieval-world roles were already living in the wooden cottages before him, and in the “allotments” that had been opened up, “farmers” were already tending the crops. Not a hundred meters away, a “villager” in ragged clothing was carrying a wooden bucket away from the stream where he had just drawn water, carefully climbing the slippery path toward “home.”

If not for the fact that at the far end of the field, the “lord’s common land of Aikeli Village” was still a blazing construction scene, and beyond that, in the direction of the “undeveloped wasteland of Aikeli Village” that the naked eye could no longer reach, rows of heavy trucks were still endlessly passing by, then with this nearly complete, quiet, natural-looking ancient village before them and the peasants moving about inside it, any ordinary person who wandered in by mistake might well believe they had traveled through time.

As with the area outside the elevator at Wu Qingchen’s dedicated rest station, there was already a large crowd waiting in the parking lot of the Aikeli Village Training Base.

After Wu Qingchen stepped out of the modified bus, the chief engineer in charge of the project also came forward to greet him.

“Mr. Wu, long time no see!”

“Dean Zhang, long time no see.”

“Mr. Wu, the first item today is to inspect and accept several sections that will need to be started for the next phase of training. Do you have any questions?”

“None at all...” Wu Qingchen smiled and nodded to the chief engineer. With Huang Xing’s example before him, Wu…