Hanging Garden, a garden that hangs in the sky.

It is said that this is the name given by the people of the dynasty who lived in backward places in ancient times when they climbed from the bottom to the top of the Qiongqiu group and saw the hanging garden for the first time. After a few years, the name became his real name. And the names of the past remain in pamphlets that record history, and are only active in literary citations.

There are only occasional images of the serpent's relay, and the traveler arrives at the top of the mountain for the first time and sees this brilliant neon scene that illuminates all the sky.

The dragon fluttered two gusts of wind and flew away. The soldier lifted the canopy and led the traveler into the underground base of the land. This land is not yet a hanging garden, but only around the hanging garden. There were several ropeways attached to its edge, as if they were connected to one or two of the dozen or so landmasses of land where the Hanging Garden belonged.

A circular underground tunnel connecting two rows of rooms dug out of stone. It was not the glowing stone that illuminated the darkness, but the tubes that looked like glass and crystal glowed with a cold white light.

There aren't many people here.

He took Gu Chuan into a room and poured two glasses of water. He sat on a stone chair and asked:

"What's your name?"

The young man stood and replied:

"Gu Chuan."

In a completely exotic land, the name has no meaning. The guard wrote down two words on a piece of paper that read out as gù chuān in the Qiongqiu language.

"Where did it come from?"

"Nether."

"Behind the cloud wall?"

"Yes."

The guards were surprised.

There are very few explorers coming from behind the cloud wall. To be precise, he had only heard of it, and he had never actually seen it until now.

"Have you met other Qiongqiu people, passed through other regions, have you ever been tried?"

It took Gu Chuan for a while to understand the meaning, and showed the certificate given to him by the young soldier from the Buzi Border. The guard took one look, then got up and took a paper bag from the cabinet and stuffed it in.

"Okay, what are you going to do when you come to Qiongqiu?"

"Ask me if I can get some of the specialties here, and then move on."

Both reasons are commonplace.

"How long are you going to stay here?"

"I don't know...... How long can I stay? ……”

The guard put down his pen and said:

"This ...... Oh, depending on what you do. You're here for the first time, and you probably don't know much about Qiongqiu's condition. Don't worry, we are kind, we are also friendly, very welcoming to outsiders, willing to live as long as he wants, he can become a 'citizen', as long as he obeys the laws of Jonqiu and lives in a friendly hanging garden. ”

There is a special process for handling foreign visitors, and the guards spend a lot of time explaining the key to this to the travelers.

For example, he will be sent to an island, officially known as the Twenty-Third Island. The 23rd Island is a special foreign island of the Hanging Garden, which is not large, but it will provide limited help to the lives of outsiders and help them live in the Hanging Garden.

After completing the immigration investigation, the guards picked up the paper bags and led the visitors through the circular passage.

"Have you been surveying outsiders?"

Gu Chuan asked him.

In fact, he wanted to say that it was specialized, but he didn't know how to talk about it, so he said it all the time.

He said:

"I've done it many times."

"There are a lot of people like me?"

The young man was a little happy.

The guard didn't talk like the young soldiers or innkeepers he met, and glanced at Gu Chuan coldly:

"That's a lot, but there are very few people like you from the other side of the cloud. You may be favored. ”

He wanted to keep asking, but the guards said they had arrived and didn't want to talk to him more.

There was also a room within a room, a miniature room made of crystals or glass, also glowing with a cool white light, with seats, apparently manned, that could seat two or four people. On the roof of this small room, there is a complex mechanism, and a rope is embedded in the mechanism, and the rope leads to the outside world.

Two of the guard's colleagues press the trap together. The door cover at the top gradually opens. The shadows and glow of the outside world leak unreservedly into the underground interior.

When he looked up, he saw the direction of the rope and knew what the rope was for.

That's a suspension line between land and land.

He thought it was a kind of cable car, and looked around in disbelief, the faces of the people around him were normal, they were used to seeing such expressions. The surprise of the hanging garden made them naturally feel that the young man was not threatened, but they didn't know that the surprise they thought was not the same as Gu Chuan's surprise.

"Go inside, it will help you get to Twenty-Three Islands quickly."

They had expected the young people to shout and scream, like some people from backward places who were afraid.

But the young man didn't hesitate much, but obediently went in.

"It's quiet."

"It's good, it saves us the effort, doesn't it?"

The guard and one of his colleagues then sat in. They sat across from the young men and began to talk about the trivialities of their lives, their parents, who they had eaten with yesterday, who they had eaten with yesterday, who had done what they had heard today, and the councillors in the square proclaiming that the new kingdom should not be crowned without a king. The young man did not dare to interject, but only dared to sit and listen.

In a few moments, the "cable car" swayed, and then sped upward, making a series of slight noises on the rope of unknown material.

He was back on the ground, but in a small cage.

Gu Chuan had taken the cable car of the earth, so he was not panicked.

He looked out, and saw again the hanging garden with the dome on top.

The Hanging Garden was silent, it was in the dark air, it barely made any sound, as if it were completely different from those lands, and it had never changed. But it only takes a little more to see that it connects more than a dozen landmasses, and that it is always making an ideal and silent rotation in the highest air.

Brilliant lights flickered up and down the hanging garden, swirling with an infinite stream of light. For a moment, Gu Chuan actually recalled the feeling of the bright city on the ground when he was sitting on the plane.

Light is not a color. For the hanging garden, this light-emitting transistor is a newly learned technology in the last generation or two generations, so they used the technology of the light-emitting transistor to make thousands of different colors of light to decorate a certain corner, in order to try each color combination.

This also includes the "cable car".

After a moment of upward movement, the gravity changes and shakes violently, changing from vertical to horizontal.

The new traveler was also shocked, and shook his body unexpectedly, and his face froze. But his performance was enough to surprise the two guards.

"You're a brave man."

"...... courage?"

"Yes, few first-time visitors to the Hanging Garden can get used to our new means of transportation." It's just that the face is stiff enough to be considered remarkable, and there are people who are scared and crying on the spot.

As soon as the guard finished speaking, the "cable car" slid all the way down the rope.

The transistors are translucent, glowing a cold white at first, and soon glowing a sweet pink. They seemed to be wrapped in a cloud of pink and white light, because the rope did not emit light, and the light really seemed to hang in the air, floating in the uncertain air.

The wind was blowing outside, and inside were young men listening to two people chatting.

There is more than one such ropeway, and he has dozens of them, maybe hundreds. As a result, there are many lights that swing back and forth between the land like them.

In some places, the light is very dense, dense into a nearly straight line, like a series of bright light bands, arching and guarding the hanging garden. When we arrived at the destination, the new car began to be released, and the light spots floating in the air flashed constantly due to the traffic coming and going.

The sun, between morning and dawn, hung in the dark eastern sky, dimmering like a disc. And the artificial brilliance underneath is boundless and shining, like making a new sun.

The Hanging Garden has a main island.

When they were closest to the Hanging Garden, they saw a small pipe running from the sky to the invisible ground.

"What is this?"

At that time, young people felt that the shape of the hanging garden resembled an umbrella, a colorful umbrella with a shimmering light.

"That's a well."

The guard replied succinctly. The guard didn't know much about the well either, saying only that it was "a little important, but it didn't seem to be very important".

He also wanted to ask, but was attracted by the increasingly splendid scene. The "cable car" accelerated, and the light outside looked like it was turning from a halo to a straight line. It's just that Twenty-Three Islands seemed to be far away from their starting point, and they crossed the neon mid-air, and after sitting in the car for a while, the direction of gravity turned again.

But at this time, the young man was already prepared and no longer panicked.

The cable car smoothly descended into a glittering cavern. Dedicated staff untied the cables. The stranger, led by two guards, came to a different grotto.

It's not so much a grotto as a real underground building. The rough surface of the stone was replaced by a flat paint, like wallpaper, which was smooth and tight to the touch. The walls were no longer bare, but there were countless paintings of different people, and he saw people of a similar race to him or the Qiongchu, and more strange guests who had visited the Hanging Garden, who could not tell whether they were snakes, eggs, beasts, or durians.

The unbridled use of the transistors made the colored lights fill the entire room, and the neon splendor shone on everyone, just to leave a shadow underfoot.

Excessive color makes modern people from the earth uncomfortable, but for the hanging garden, it is still the freshest and most beautiful time.

His uneasiness was seen as a kind of ignorant dazzle.

He asked:

"...... here?"

The guard laughed:

"Our New Kingdom, Hanging Garden, Our Foreign Affairs Division."

Hanging Garden, this is the Hanging Garden.

A place like Sunset City, longed for by the people of Qiongqiu, but often fleeing.

He was led forward.

However, the guard looked at some kind of counting device on the wall, which at first glance appeared to be a board stuffed with transistors, but by lighting up the different transistors, different text symbols appeared.

The guard took his hat off. He said:

"We're going to change shifts."

"What do you mean?"

Gu Chuan didn't know the word shift change in Qiongqiu's language.

The guard's face looked much more joyful:

"It means that our life here today is over!"

It turned out that the guards were going to rest. Before leaving, a new guard took over Gu Chuan. They took Gu Chuan to the reception office of the Foreign Affairs Department. The reception room was empty, except for the last person, holding a stack of books, about to turn off the brilliant lights.

"Friends, you didn't come at the right time, everyone is gone, I'll take some books and go back to read."

It was a girl who looked so young that it even made people wonder if she was an adult. There were no gussets in her hair, but glowing transistors, and Gu Chuan suspected that this was a popular decoration here, just like all the glowing transistors that were popular here.

She looked at the young man who was brought by the guards and looked different from the people here, and winked playfully:

"I'm done today!"

"So what should he do?"

There is a shift change for the guards, but obviously this foreign affairs department, at least for this position, they don't have a shift system.

"It used to be." The girl thought for a moment and said, "Let's go to an empty reception room first, but you can't go out during this time!" ”

The latter sentence was said to Gu Chuan.

He didn't have time to say a word or two to ask about the situation, and he was taken away again.

The hurried change of circumstances was dizzying, and he was locked up in a simple room. The guard said to come back to him tomorrow. He settled, looking at the bed in the room at a loss.

There were beds, cabinets embedded in the stone walls, small tables and chairs, on which there were four or five picture books of the Qiongqiu and the Hanging Garden, and some simple ones whose names were not known and which might be eaten like fruit plates, and countless lamps scattered in a vague color, and a friendly skylight overhead.

Skylights may be non-luminous crystals that have been ground to be transparent. If you look outside, you can see the surface of the huge dome of the hanging garden, and under the umbrella, you can see countless colored lights, and the land of different sizes illuminated by the light. The light strips are connected, the lights are brilliant, and it is a dream situation in the sky. Everything is thriving.

The Cogwheel Man used to show an unrivalled sophistication compared to Sunset City, but the sophistication of the Hanging Garden was on a different level entirely.

The young man fell in front of the window and suddenly thought of the history of the earth.

In the history of the earth, the feudal era and the industrial era have coexisted. The chiefdoms of Africa or the more ancient hominid tribes of the forests of South America have coexisted with the glittering nations of the modern world.

"Did I come from a backward place to such an advanced place?"

He looked into the distance, confused.

Huge dragons fly slowly between the light strips. The snake said that this was the dragon battleship of the hanging garden. It was this dragon that brought the Dead or Alive here.

He sat in his chair, his mood calming down.

None of this has anything to do with him. The glorious world or the gloomy world is just a kind of scenery that you will encounter on the road. The key is the other:

"Death or Birth, Dream Life, First Cloud, and Wangyuan, Pinion Machine, and Zaiyi."

The child and mother were motionless and did not make any sound.

He waited here for the Foreign Affairs Department to deal with him, so that he could rightfully meet the alien dragon in the first mission, following the serpent's procedure.

But he waited until he slept twice, and before the door opened.

When he woke up for the third time, he read the literacy picture book on the table for the sixth time when there was a sound outside the door.

He clutched his hazmat suit and backpack, dressed in normal old clothes, and cautiously opened the door.

There was a whole team standing outside the door, and there were many people, as if they were patrolling. There were also guards in the crowd, and with the girl, they looked panicked.

"I forgot there was someone here......"

It turned out that he was forgotten.

Standing at the front was an elderly man with horns in his hair.

The old man first rebuked the sloppy fools a few times, and then he scanned the young man's whole body with a scrutinizing gaze, and said:

"Neglect, guests from afar, welcome to the Hanging Garden."

Then, not without self-sufficiency, he went on to say that this was the highest and greatest place in Qiongqiu.