PGVCW 12

Playing God in Various Catastrophic Worlds

By

siofra

Chapter 12: The State-Sponsored Construction of the Immortal Sect

Regarding how to distribute the bounty of agricultural provisions secured by Xia Wang'an, the directorate had already experienced a fierce, deeply emotional debate.

And why wouldn't it be emotional? Only days prior, every single official had been agonizing over the total environmental contamination of the civilization's final seed reserve. Now, not only were they endowed with pristine, hyper-viable seeds capable of rapid agricultural propagation, but they were actually gathered in a conference hall debating the distribution logistics of Xia Wang'an's harvest.

"Nobody can guarantee whether future interdimensional transmigrations will successfully yield food reserves. We should secure these provisions directly within the national granaries as emergency contingency stock, holding them in reserve until newly propagated crops are successfully cultivated and cleared for mass public release."

This proposal secured immediate consensus from a substantial faction; ever since the global mutations abruptly overturned civilization, Great Xia had survived precisely by hoarding rations and exercising ruthless fiscal discipline, clawing its way forward step by step.

Conversely, an opposing faction argued with equal fervor that the provisions required immediate public distribution.

"Distributing the entire harvest universally will provide our citizenry with barely a single communal meal. Our existing synthetic [techno-rations] can sustain baseline operational output for a while longer; if we exhaust the [natural rations] immediately and subsequent agricultural cultivation fails—or if future transmigrations yield zero provisions—what recourse remains?" "Alternatively... what if we distribute a fifty-percent tranche?"

Neither faction could persuade the other, prompting the Chief Commander to issue the executive verdict: "These provisions were secured directly through Wang'an's efforts; let us defer to her operational perspective."

Xia Wang'an required less than a single second of cognitive processing before casting her vote: [Distribute the entirety].

Facing the collective gaze of the leadership, the black-haired maiden offered a thoroughly self-evident rationale: "Wouldn't they also love to consume natural grain?"

Silence descended upon the chamber.

Indeed. Humanity had endured this unmitigated apocalypse for so long—so intensely long—that they had fundamentally forgotten their primal yearning for uncorrupted food and normal, dignified existence.

Amidst the stillness, entirely unburdened by geopolitical gravity, Xia Wang'an continued unperturbedly: "Furthermore, the volume of provisions we secure from future transmigrations will only compound exponentially. Holding them in granary storage serves no functional purpose beyond consuming valuable volumetric space."

Everyone: "......" The statement radiated an almost offensive, effortless luxury—veritable bourgeois grandiosity.

As they stared at Xia Wang'an, they encountered a young girl whose eyes remained locked in absolute sincerity, brimming with unshakeable conviction toward a viable future.

Anyone could perceive that she genuinely believed every syllable.

Inexplicably, a collective psychological tension dissolved within the hearts of the leadership. True enough—circumstances had fundamentally shifted. Great Xia possessed a nascent beacon of hope; the days ahead could only trend upward.

Ultimately, the Chief Commander pressed the affirmative authorization terminal: "I approve the universal distribution of the harvest."

Allowing a rare, relaxed smile to break across her austere features, she added: "Having endured such prolonged bitterness, it is long past time our people tasted sweetness."

"Relief rations? Weren't our monthly quotas already disbursed?"

The evening shift had just concluded, and residents across the Five Sectors were dragging their exhausted frames toward their residential blocks when the broadcast announced an unscheduled relief distribution, instantly illuminating weary eyes.

"Splendid! It appears this month's caloric intake might actually approach a tolerable threshold!"

Naturally, anxious voices immediately surfaced: "Given that ecological resources are completely exhausted, how can the state suddenly mobilize provisions for an unscheduled relief drop? Is this destined to be our final final supper?" "Even if it represents a final meal, it beats lying awake in torment from hunger pangs. I genuinely regret spending yesterday inside the holographic simulation engaging in historical gastronomy loops; the virtual immersion was exquisite, but my physical stomach is currently staging a violent revolt." "I heard the entertainment studios are preparing to sunset the culinary simulation modules specifically because the cognitive dissonance between virtual feasting and physical starvation is inducing severe psychological trauma. Frankly, I remain undecided on whether to support or oppose the measure."

A weary resident drifted past like a phantom, clutching a stack of files: "Perhaps my hunger threshold has simply calcified into permanent apathy; I harbor zero emotional investment in relief rations, viewing them with active hostility."

His neighbor nodded in profound sympathetic understanding: "Your psychological baseline hasn't calcified; your palate has simply been tortured into submission by industrial monotony. Every iteration of relief paste tastes as though my dental enamel is engaging in mortal combat with the packaging."

"Frankly, eclipsing my desire for food rations is an overwhelming urge for extended leave," the weary resident muttered. "Why on earth must corporate labor quotas persist during an unmitigated planetary apocalypse?"

The community administrative director caught the rhetorical inquiry as he passed, silently completing the thought in his internal monologue: Naturally, to prevent civilians from securing unmonitored leisure time that inevitably precipitates a psychological descent into fatalistic despair.

A cursory review of external sovereign states currently gasping through their final existential gasps confirmed that maintaining structured nine-to-five operations with standard weekend furloughs represented an astonishing, miraculous luxury.

Naturally, voicing those grim geopolitical realities aloud to chronically malnourished residents would achieve nothing beyond amplifying national despair.

"Xiao Fang, shed the melancholy," the director said, manufacturing an enthusiastic grin as he clapped the resident's shoulder. "Word has arrived that today's relief allocation deviates significantly from historical baselines." "Historical relief distributions have consistently maintained an unvarying baseline of misery," Xiao Fang sighed.

Possessing a hyper-sensitive palate relative to the general population, his experiential engagement with the apocalypse carried a sharper sensory edge. Whether an allocation tasted of mineral soil, damp cardboard, structural timber, or spicy fish scales, the sensory assault remained an unadulterated torment.

Yet what provoked genuine panic wasn't the volatile flavor profile, but the undeniable, quantifiable downward trajectory of national distribution volume.

Everyone recognized that the administrative apparatus was rapidly exhausting its structural endurance.

With mutant entities dominating the landscape—though national defense forces could successfully repel incursions—the planetary crust remained barren wastelands. While the state had engineered the Five Protected Sectors to shelter humanity, once genetic seeds suffered terminal corruption and water tables vanished, the state could hardly dispatch starships across interstellar vectors to harvest alien biospheres.

As Xiao Fang's thoughts spiraled deeper into existential dread, his cognitive processing stuttered to a halt as he observed an official transport vehicle gliding to a halt directly beneath his residential block, disgorged by a squad of military personnel unloading substantial wooden casks.

"Catastrophe!"

Experiencing an acute psychological break, he lunged forward, locking his fingers around the community director's collar: "My cognitive matrix has officially fractured! I've transitioned directly into hallucination vectors! I am visually registering massive quantities of unrefined paddy rice—actual, legendary cereal grains! Dispatch an emergency psychiatric unit to my location immediately, please!!"

The director rubbed his eyes aggressively—closing them, reopening them, and scrubbing them a second time: "I am registering identical optical data... rice, massive quantities of unrefined rice!"

Scanning the courtyard, he noted that every surrounding civilian was locked in identical catatonic shock, staring with unblinking ocular fixation toward the transport convoy. He seized the nearest elderly resident by the arm: "Auntie Wang, are your optical sensors registering this phenomenon?"

Auntie Wang nodded with vacant solemnity: "The data aligns with yours." Drawing upon decades of accumulated survival wisdom, she whispered: "Director... have our sectors suffered a biological infiltration by cognitive-hazard mutants, locking us into a synchronized mass hallucination cycle?"

Xiao Fang interjected frantically: "If this constitutes a terminal cognitive illusion, it represents a magnificent exit vector! Can I be permitted to ingest a single grain of authentic rice before the mutants consume my consciousness?"

For a harrowing, suspended second, the community director found himself actively debating the philosophical merits of surrendering unconditionally to the hallucination versus panicking to preserve sanity.

Before his internal deliberation concluded, two armored soldiers stepped forward: "Are you Director Lin of the Hope Community?" "We represent the regional Food Bureau, executing emergency relief distribution protocols. Kindly organize the civilian roster into an orderly queue for allocation processing."

The director's cardiac rhythm spiked exponentially. Clearly, cognitive-hazard fauna lacked the sophisticated institutional bandwidth to accurately simulate standardized bureaucratic protocols; meaning the transport vehicles, the military personnel, and the mountains of unrefined rice possessed absolute empirical reality.

"A-Are... are these massive quantities of rice genuinely designated as baseline relief rations???"

The soldiers nodded affirmatively: "Affirmative."

Total, shell-shocked disbelief blanketed the director and assembled residents as he squeaked out a secondary verification: "Distributed directly to our residential registry?"

"Affirmative."

Clearly accustomed to processing these exact psychological breakdowns across preceding deployments, the soldiers maintained practiced professional poise, urging smoothly: "Kindly expedite queue formation; our deployment schedule mandates servicing adjacent community sectors."

Operating with unprecedented, lightning-fast logistical efficiency, the residents of Hope Community formed a disciplined queue. Xiao Fang, positioned at the vanguard of the assembly, received a compact textile grain pouch.

Pristine, gleaming white, and exuding a faint, intoxicating fragrance of natural harvest, the raw grains tumbled into his trembling palms under a gaze charged with immense devotional reverence.

In that micro-second, Xiao Fang felt as though his personal timeline had reached its absolute zenith.

"Allocated volume remains constrained per capita, but inventory thresholds will scale upward in subsequent distribution cycles," the soldier stated, offering an encouraging smile before querying: "Does your household register an octogenarian dependent?"

Xiao Fang nodded vigorously: "Indeed! My grandmother recently celebrated her eightieth milestone."

Instantly, an additional half-root vegetable—a robust, unblemished radish segment—was dropped directly into his grain pouch.

Xiao Fang: !!! Fresh produce! An actual botanical vegetable specimen?!

Overwhelmed with acute sensory gratitude, he lifted his gaze in trembling disbelief, terrified the soldier would retract the allocation as a administrative clerical error.

The soldier clarified: "Households maintaining dependent elders or pediatric minors receive supplemental produce allocations. Transport this supplementary nutrition home for your grandmother's consumption."

"My deepest gratitude! Thank you, truly!" Tears of unadulterated emotional release swimming in his vision, Xiao Fang cradled the radish fragment as though handling a sacred artifact, sprinting back toward his residential block under a barrage of intensely envious stares from neighboring residents.

Every civilian securing cereal rations replicated identical, sacred transit rituals; they could no longer suppress an unbridled urgency to return home and boil fragrant pots of rice porridge.

Throughout that evening, the atmospheric density of Hope Community practically saturated with the olfactory markers of natural grain. Even households maintaining notoriously austere caloric discipline succumbed to the temptation, bubbling small batches of clear rice broth to share intimately across family circles.

That specific evening marked a profound cultural milestone: Great Xia’s premier virtual holographic simulator, [Divine State], registered an unprecedented, historic surge in concurrent active users.

[Divine State] operated as an immersive psychological stabilization initiative engineered by the First National Research Institute, designed to preserve civilian mental fortitude by projecting idealized simulated environments amidst severe external privation.

Initially, the platform enjoyed massive civilian adoption; [Divine State] flawlessly rendered pre-apocalyptic residential complexes, botanical gardens, commercial malls, and amusement infrastructure, enabling displaced civilians enduring cramped, lightless subterranean bunkers to inhabit sun-drenched architectural estates within the virtual matrix.

Yet as protracted operational timelines ground forward, [Divine State]'s therapeutic efficacy experienced catastrophic degradation, eventually mutating into a reverse-psychological stressor.

The more breathtakingly idyllic the virtual landscape appeared, the more brutally acute the psychological whiplash became when users logged out and confronted their grim, impoverished physical reality.

Crucially, the foundational variable remained unaddressed: the populace lacked adequate nutritional calories!

In peaceful epochs, humanity aggressively pursued higher-order psychological and spiritual self-actualization; but within a cataclysmic era saturated by cheap or entirely gratis holographic distractions, citizens universally prioritized raw physiological survival, occasionally howling into the void: "Keep your abstract spiritual self-actualization! Starvation renders all philosophical paradigms utterly meaningless!!"

As nutritional quotas plummeted, civilian volatility spiked, triggering a progressive mass exodus away from [Divine State].

Yet tonight, the virtual server clusters of Divine State reached absolute structural saturation.

Buoyed by successful grain distribution, the populace logged into the simulation en masse, their avatars radiating celebratory ebullience—some executing joyful acrobatics across public concourses, others trading enthusiastic greetings in central plazas, while central administrative nodes triggered synchronized virtual fireworks displays.

Brilliant, cascading constellations bloomed across the digital firmament. Perched atop the architectural apex of the central plaza's monumental clocktower, Xia Wang'an gazed down at the laughing, cavorting throngs below.

"I have never personally traversed a holographic simulation network. So this constitutes the internal operational architecture."

The accompanying logistics archivist silently reflected that had she accessed the matrix a mere week prior, the atmospheric baseline would have read entirely differently, defined predominantly by the hollow, vegetative numbness of the user base.

Naturally, the sudden behavioral pivot directly mirrored the emotional uplift delivered by the morning's rice distribution.

While Xia Wang'an remained oblivious to the reality that this collective ebullience stemmed directly from her agricultural haul, she thoroughly appreciated witnessing public joy.

In truth, while state leadership perpetually agonized over civilian psychological decay, Xia Wang'an privately concluded that the societal mental baseline exhibited robust resilience.

At the very least, Great Xia constituted the singular surviving civilization across her transmigrated footprint that had successfully preserved the sacred institution of academic examination papers.

"Exquisite aesthetics," the young maiden murmured, swinging her lower limbs rhythmically over the architectural precipice, her internal affective state soaring.

007 chimed in with uncharacteristic behavioral curiosity, observing the dynamic grid: [Host, this digital theater exhibits remarkable vibrancy.]

Down below, a passing user glanced upward, spotting a silhouette poised on the clocktower pinnacle, and bellowed a cheerful challenge: "Hey!! How on earth did you scale structural elevations?! Is the rendering zone upstairs entertaining?!"

Xia Wang'an projected her vocal output across the acoustic plane with matching volume: "Extremely entertaining!!!"

As for the tactical methodology governing her ascension, the operational clearance was secured directly through her supreme status as the civilization's Savior.

Minor-aged citizens technically remained restricted from accessing the full-dive [Divine State] matrix, primarily out of administrative concern that immature cognitive architectures might struggle to segregate digital simulation parameters from physical reality.

However, the moment Xia Wang'an signaled her casual curiosity toward experiencing the virtual platform, the Director of the First National Research Institute personally initiated an executive override directly to the Software Engineering Bureau; within five physical minutes, a state-of-the-art full-dive holographic capsule—retaining exorbitant black-market scarcity value—was delivered directly to her quarters.

Ten minutes post-delivery, Xia Wang'an successfully initialized her neural link into the [Divine State] matrix.

Yuanning, having recently attained his eighteenth operational milestone, had likewise navigated the verification protocols without friction.

Seated adjacent to her along the clocktower balustrade, he swept his gaze across the horizon: "Historical records indicate that pre-apocalyptic simulation parameters were engineered to replicate pristine peacetime ecologies."

Pre-apocalyptic technological velocity lagged behind contemporary applied mechanics, yet that era possessed uncorrupted skies, unpoisoned topsoil, and vibrant expanses of untamed flora.

"It bears structural parity with Ming County," Xia Wang'an observed, tracking the architectural variety sprawling below. "Hypothetically speaking, if we commissioned the First National Research Institute to construct a macroscopic, naked-eye holographic replica of Ming County directly within our physical territory, could their engineering cells execute it?"

Though Yuanning's primary academic track lay outside software engineering, his active research placement within the Institute enabled immediate technical assessment: "Without structural impediment."

Xia Wang'an pivoted her head toward him: "And what if we integrated an authentic, fully functional Immortal Cultivator Sect directly within that architectural matrix?"

Yuanning blinked in momentary surprise before an amused smile curved his lips; lifting his hand, he executed a synchronized palm-strike against Xia Wang'an's extended palm within the digital space.

"Wang'an, you possess an unadulterated genius for strategic scaling."

"Constructing a physical architectural replica of the Heaven-Saving Sect, and superimposing advanced naked-eye holographic projection arrays across Ming County?"

The Chief Analyst slammed his palm against the conference table: "An exceptional strategic vector! While we lack the technological maturity to comprehensively manifest authentic immortal cultivation mechanics across the populace, we possess absolute systemic capability to manifest a monumental, hyper-realistic cultivator sect! Outstanding initiative—I shall initiate cross-departmental tasking matrices immediately!"

Xia Wang'an interjected: "Is the timeline sufficiently compressed to support deployment?"

"Rest assured," the Chief Designer practically thumped his sternum in pledge: "My professional affiliation with the Director of Divine State runs deep; I shall personally interface with him to negotiate parameters. Obstruction metrics remain negligible."

—"I anticipate catastrophic structural obstruction!"

Confronted by the nocturnal operational demands presented by his academic peer, the Chief Executive Director of Divine State nearly clawed out his own hair: "Examine this structural schematic you've transmitted—the spatial footprint is astronomical, the design density is psychopathic, and you expect our engineering cells to finalize fabrication within this hyper-compressed operational window??"

Chief Designer: "What if I authorize absolute, unconditional override clearance granting access to the national strategic energy grids?"

Director: "Are you entirely unhinged? Absolute energy grid mobilization—do you possess any cognitive comprehension of the systemic strain metrics associated with that authority?"

Chief Designer: "What if I guarantee the immediate secondment of any specialized engineering talent pool you requisition across sovereign state sectors?"

Divine State Director: "......Verify the authenticity of that assertion. You aren't merely hallucinating from sleep deprivation during a nocturnal shift, are you?" "Assembling the aggregate resource capacity of the continental grid exclusively to render an elaborate array of holographic architectural set pieces??"

The Chief Designer slid a Class-Special Security Authorization Token across the steel desk: "If I formally advise you that this operational mandate is directly tied to global civilizational preservation, does that calibrate your operational urgency?"

The Divine State Director experienced an instantaneous cognitive flashback to the exquisite, natural fragrance of the morning's rice distribution, cross-referenced against the surging frequency of high-level emergency directives cascading across administrative directorates.

Civilizational preservation... could the terminal decline genuinely be reversed?

"Execute the protocol!"

Simultaneously, deep within a residential high-rise, a senior virtualization industry specialist jolted awake as her personal comms terminal shrieked an override tone: "Understood. Commencing transit to primary operational nodes immediately."

Her spouse blinked heavy eyelids: "Who is initiating contact at this unorthodox hour?"

"Class-Special Security Mobilization Order," the specialist replied, an unexpected surge of adrenaline clearing the residual sleep fog from her nervous system. As a high-ranking technical authority, she naturally possessed deep professional competence; yet she had never once entertained the hypothesis that within the contemporary geopolitical twilight, her specialized skill set would be directly conscripted by state command. "Cease inquiries; I must mobilize."

Within the adjacent residential block, a structural engineering consultant similarly rushed through dressing protocols while military personnel maintained disciplined perimeter watch outside the apartment entry: "Mother, Father—Class-Special mobilization mandates state financial subsidies; official compensation registers tomorrow morning. I shall be detached from the household sector for the duration of this assignment."

Across the metropolitan grid, identical silhouettes detached from residential doorways into the predawn gloom, boarding pre-positioned tactical transport vehicles.

Throughout that nocturnal cycle, comms chimes and urgent door strikes echoed relentlessly across the urban core.

Deep within the subterranean ring of the monolithic administrative tower, lighting arrays blazed at absolute luminescence.

Operational Target: Construct the Heaven-Saving Sect.