42: Chapter 42: Release of the Karma and Destiny Platform 3.0

He first picked up the skill book. He opened it.

Indigo light surged from the pages, pouring into his consciousness like a river. The underlying logic of space was dismantled in an instant into a language he could understand—it wasn't about shortening distance, but folding dimensions. Between two points, space itself was pinched like a piece of paper, folded, and pierced through.

The information was vast.

A normal person would need months or even years to digest this into muscle memory.

Yang Hang didn't have that kind of patience.

The Power of Causality surged, drawing nearly one hundred million units of essence, energy, and spirit from his energy pool. Amidst countless future Karmic lines, he precisely locked onto the possibility line where the "skill is fully imprinted into muscle memory" and dragged it into the present.

The future him had already learned it.

So, the present him knew it too.

On the panel, a new line appeared in the talent column:

[Infinite Horizon (Gold · Talent) — Spatial folding movement, ten thousand miles in a single thought.]

Yang Hang closed his eyes and felt it for a second.

He "saw" his younger sister Yang Yue's Houseboat—ten thousand and twenty-seven nautical miles to the southwest.

If he wanted to, one step. Just one step.

Space would fold into a line beneath his feet, and he would only need to step across. It wasn't flying, it wasn't running at super speed; it was that there was no longer any distance between "here" and "there."

He opened his eyes.

He picked up the sustenance table and the life spring, beginning to examine them carefully.

The core logic of the sustenance table was simple—converting energy into food. Whether raw or cooked, semi-finished or finished, it could handle it all. The more refined the finished product, the greater the energy consumption. The energy gap between a bowl of white rice and a full Manchu-Han Feast could reach a hundredfold.

The life spring was more special. Its conversion mode was similar to the sustenance table, but it produced Life Spring water—drinking it healed wounds, purified all negative status effects, and provided continuous recovery for twenty-four hours. Even better, it could automatically absorb free-floating energy within its range to slowly produce water, acting like a semi-perpetual motion machine.

The underlying logic of both artifacts was actually the same: energy input → material output.

And energy was the one thing Yang Hang did not lack.

With the daily deduction of karma points from 1.4 billion people subscribing to the compass, and the daily sacrifice of essence, energy, and spirit from visualizing the Karmic Void Realm, day after day, his energy pool had swollen to a level he didn't even dare to examine closely.

Besides, he certainly wouldn't be supplying the energy for this thing himself.

Enough. The infrastructure was all in place.

He began to build the framework in his mind.

Core functional area—Karmic Trading Realm.

A primary functional entrance parallel to the magic sea compass.

After a user clicked on it, their consciousness would directly enter an independent Karmic Void Realm space.

The space wasn't large, but the aesthetic was top-tier.

In the center stood a high platform made of black rock. A virtual operation screen appeared on the surface, responsible for listing, ordering, matching, and finalizing transactions. Sellers would deposit items into the trading platform's virtual storage, buyers would select them and pay karma points, and the items would be instantly transported from the seller's hand to the buyer's hand through a spatial folding channel anchored by Infinite Horizon.

Shipping costs were calculated in karma points based on the distance between the two parties: one point for within a thousand miles, five points for ten thousand miles, twenty points for a million miles, with a cap of fifty points—though such distances should be rare, unless a Yanhuang Civilization survivor was stranded in the territory of a foreign civilization camp. Both the buyer and seller would pay half each.

To the right of the trading platform was the access point for the Life Spring—"Life Spring." A jade-white spring was embedded in a golden base, with the spring water flowing silently. Users could directly exchange karma points for Life Spring water; the price was calculated by quantity—about twenty karma points for one drop of Life Spring water. It was expensive, but absolutely worth it; a trump card for saving one's life.

On the other hand, it would provide a certain amount of living space for President Shen Qing's Little Life Society. The Little Life Society had played a significant role in the stability and development of the Yanhuang Camp. A big family of 1.4 billion people couldn't be managed by him alone in every detail; learning to delegate and utilize talent was the way to long-term success.

To the left of the trading platform was the access point for the sustenance table—"food god shrine." It was shaped like an altar, surrounded by golden inscriptions. Users would input the desired food category and portion, and the System would automatically calculate the karma points. A bowl of rice was 0.5 points, a grilled fish was 1 point. Want a Buddha Jumps Over the Wall? Multiply by ten, 10 karma points. If one wanted to eat extravagantly, the price naturally had to be high; otherwise, if a culture of luxury spread, it would be detrimental to the overall survival atmosphere of the Yanhuang Camp.

For every transaction, Yang Hang would take half.

He ran through the complete process in his mind and found no obvious loopholes.

An unprecedented material circulation System. The supply and demand of 1.4 billion people were connected at this moment.

President Shen Qing would no longer have to risk her life to treat every wounded person—the spring water could share her burden.

Zheng Yuanshan would no longer have to worry about rations for three hundred thousand mouths—the food god shrine could provide for them.

Those isolated survivors scattered to the ends of the earth would no longer have to hold up signs saying "Help" and wait for the wind. As long as they had something in their hands to trade and karma points to spend, survival would no longer be an extravagant hope.

Yang Hang leaned back against the sofa, his lips already curling. He reached out, the Power of Causality spreading, and began to officially weave the underlying architecture of the Fate Platform 3.0—then he stopped.

His brow furrowed slightly.

This inexplicable intuition...

The Power of Causality surged, and white whirlpools appeared in his eyes. He calculated a segment of Karma for himself.

The Karmic lines in the void realm crazily branched, intertwined, and collapsed.

Seconds later, Yang Hang saw the result.

He was silent for a moment.

He sighed.

Then he reached out and sealed the entrances to the two sub-modules: the life spring and the sustenance table.

In the trading space, the spring and the shrine on both sides of the stone platform dimmed simultaneously, their golden inscriptions dissipating and being covered by a layer of light gray mist. Replacing them was a line of small text: [Coming soon, please stay tuned.]

Yang Hang leaned back on the sofa, staring at the ceiling for three seconds.

"It's not that I won't give them to you."

He muttered to himself, his voice very soft.

"It's just that now is not the most appropriate time."

He didn't explain further.

But his fingers didn't stop. The Power of Causality continued to spread—the main architecture of the Trading Realm was finished, and with the remaining energy, he casually did another thing. The video connection feature for the Fate Platform, which many Yanhuang Civilization survivors had been calling for, would be launched today as well.

Text is too cold. Posts, private messages, echoes—it's all text. Through the screen, you don't know if the person on the other side is a human or a ghost, you don't know if they were laughing or crying when they sent that message, you don't know if the "safe" they mentioned is truly safe or if they are just holding on. He needed to give 1.4 billion people a more intuitive way to connect.

The Power of Causality was re-woven, and a new protocol was imprinted into the social foundation of the Fate Platform—Video Calls.

It wasn't anything too complex. The Karmic Void Realm already carried consciousness projection; video was just converting the user's consciousness projection into visual signals and then transmitting them bi-directionally through the Karmic link. The technical difficulty was far less than the spatial folding of the Trading Realm.

He casually added a few rules: video calls required mutual consent to be established, no daily limit, billed by time, one karmic point per hour. While he was at it, he also added "Video Release" and "Video Livestream" features to the personal homepage of the Fate Platform. Users could upload pre-recorded video content, visible to the public or only to friends; this was free. As for the video livestream function, it was a paid feature: three merit points per hour—a bit heartless.

Yang Hang made a simple feature announcement and embedded it into the 3.0 update notification. He didn't think much of it. Just a small social feature.

With a flick of his finger, the Cause and Effect Fate Platform 3.0 update notification, carrying the full introduction of the new feature "Karmic Trading Realm," as well as the launch announcement for the three social features of "Video Calls," "Video Release," and "Video Livestream," was synchronously delivered to the consciousness of nearly 1.4 billion Yanhuang Civilization survivors.

[Ding—Cause and Effect Fate Platform has been updated to version 3.0.]

[New primary functional partition added: Karmic Trading Realm. All things can be traded, with Karma as the voucher.]

[New social modules added: Video Calls · Video Release · Video Livestream. Within reach, the ends of the earth can be seen.]

— The first three seconds after the announcement popped up, the Fate Platform was silent for a moment. Everyone thought they were seeing things.

Then, starting from the fourth second—all discussions about tomorrow's camp ranking predictions, top ten individual rankings, recruitment posts for various organizations, material posts, ship repair guides after the beast tide, whose house opened a silver treasure chest—no one looked at them anymore.

The entire Yanhuang Camp exploded.

It wasn't a metaphor.

It was that the volume of messages flooding in every second, including the World Echo, regional echoes, group chats, private messages, and every communication realm, directly washed the scroll into a white line; even individual content couldn't be displayed completely before being pushed away by the next one.

There was only one cause—Fate Platform 3.0 update.

[Karmic Trading Realm] is online.