Love letters are not allowed in the exorcism notebook!-Chapter 1054 - 5: Welcome to the Information Age

This year’s graduation exam at Qinghe Middle School was moved up by a month, and Wang Yunxiao almost didn’t make it.

This was certainly not because Principal Zhou had any special favor for him as someone preparing to jump ship and go solo, but rather due to changes in the social environment.

With the arrival of the Four Seas Commerce Guild, Tianmen City, with a permanent population of 1.5 million, surprisingly faced a labor shortage problem within just a few months.

Factories sprang up one by one, beginning frenzied construction at an unprecedented pace.

All highly qualified personnel—more specifically those with at least an elementary school education—had their salary standards doubled in the past two months. Some factories even posted recruitment ads at the school gates.

Xingguo Bank issued large amounts of interest-free loans, injecting a surge of passionate energy into the rapidly developing urban economy.

Market prices changed thrice weekly, and if it weren’t for the government’s forced grain price controls, there might have been a horrifying situation where food prices soared into the sky.

The school had to hold the graduation early because many parents had already found their children incredibly rewarding jobs that were unimaginable before and were now urgently waiting for them to start work.

Wang Yunxiao inside the school didn’t deeply feel the changes in society, but just by reading the newspapers filled with continuous news, it was apparent that the situation was unusual.

The first domestically produced radio appeared.

The first generation radios were about the size of half a refrigerator, extremely cumbersome, difficult to move, and still a novelty for the people.

Previously, even if you bought one from abroad, you could only keep it at home for show, as there were no broadcasting stations domestically.

Now Tianmen City has its own broadcasting station, a wireless broadcast station under the Tianmen Municipal Transportation Bureau, which loops various overseas popular music and current news daily from 8 AM to 7 PM.

The newspapers stated—built with foreign investment.

At this time, domestic universities hadn’t even established a radio major, and the few talents who studied abroad were absorbed by the military.

This radio station, from equipment to team, came from Cypher across the ocean.

They even gave their broadcast channel a very pleasant name, Tianmen Voice.

Besides, the school also introduced a newly published magazine.

This magazine, titled "Universal," used color print for the cover, and its content was varied and quite splendid, including essays, serial novels, humorous jokes, character biographies...even comics.

Comics with Tianmen’s modern-day legendary woman, the "Holy Mother of Red Lotus," as the main character.

It’s about the legendary leader of the Red Lantern Society who heroically led local women to burn churches and kill foreigners before the President rose to prominence.

Later, due to various reasons, she disappeared from sight; there were rumors she was killed in a plot by the Brocade-Clothed Guard.

However, such rumors did not have much audience market and were hard to convince the general public, because the Red Lantern Society had been active on Tianmen’s streets and alleys for decades until they publicly announced disbandment last year.

An even more popular saying is that the Holy Mother of Red Lotus traveled across the seas, reopened her altar in Cypher across the ocean, set up a branch altar, and was called the Guiding Bodhisattva by locals, creating an Overseas Netherworld, specifically responsible for leading lost souls of overseas wanderers back home.

This story has been passed around in the mouths of many overseas immigrants, and foreigners call this goddess "Netherworld Angel Anhelica," stating her talisman can protect their safety on the sea.

This serialized comic called "Red Lotus Legend" starts by telling the massive farmers’ uprising that almost swept across the country fifty years ago.

All one can say is that this comic came out late; if it had started serialization a year earlier, Mephisto might not have been tricked until he lost even his last stitch of dignity.

It’s not just him, an outsider Demon Lord; many local people were only half-aware, or completely ignorant of this part of history, and had no idea what the Heavenly King Divine Sect was about.

Uninformed individuals even cannot distinguish between the Holy Mother of Red Lotus and the President, they only knew both are female, and when hearing others talk about the Holy Mother of Red Lotus, they conjure up bizarre scenes in their minds, then turn around and go to the Governmental Office to report and expose...

The first Chapter of the comic talks about the decay of the Imperial Court back then, leading to rampant opium trade, and later, after the investigating commissioner headed south to ban the drug trade, he touched the interests of local prestigious families, leading to collusion between insiders and outsiders, foreigners prying open national borders, and signing humiliating treaties, among other things.

The people of Tianmen are still relatively familiar with this segment of history, after all, the oral storytelling of the three major cases had been circulating for many years, so it was briefly covered.

Ten years passed in the blink of an eye, the rampant opium trade in the South grew more intense, officials and elite colluded to force villagers to plant poison grass on good farmland, food production gradually decreased, and natural disasters and human misfortune ravaged thousands of miles, moral decline leaving people destitute.

Thus, from the impoverished mountains and treacherous waters of Gui State, a down-and-out scholar gained enlightenment from the Western Gospel, received heavenly mandate, and called himself the Son of God, founding Protestantism.

Protestantism gathered the villagers, broke through the Prefectural Government, recruited troops, steadily growing, until spreading across states and counties, overthrowing the Southern Country, becoming the grand Heavenly King Divine Sect rebellion event of that year.

Mephisto’s ritual magic failed precisely because this local Sect Hierarch took the position originally belonging to the "Son of God," and indeed ascended the throne back then, supported by national fortune and dragon vein.

The comic used two or three pages to briefly introduce the rise and fall of the Heavenly King Divine Sect from its birth to its prospering and eventual decline. During its peak, it sent two expeditions, targeting the Central Plains and the Qilu Region, both ultimately failed due to various reasons.

In another blink, ten more years passed. A group of Western missionaries ventured deep into Jin State, seeking holy objects left behind by the Western Expedition Army of the past but due to unfamiliarity with local customs inadvertently released the Vanguard Demon General of the Western Expedition Army suppressed in Taihang Mountain.

Ten years of extremes, everything had changed.

Having learned that the Divine Sect had long vanished, the Demon General was initially disheartened and wanted to hide in the mountains, but before leaving discovered old bloodlines, rescuing a young girl from a brothel, who was a descendant of a General from the Northern Expedition Army, kidnapped and sold here.

This was the original background of the Holy Mother of Red Lotus.

The subsequent story, simply put, is about the Holy Mother of Red Lotus growing up, returning to Tianmen to search for family traces, witnessing traitors oppress women and children, and taking action in anger, founding the Red Lantern Society to engage in a battle of wits and courage with Western missionaries.

Her efforts to save the world moved heaven, drawing heavenly guidance in dreams from the Heavenly Empress, and she journeyed across the ocean alone, seeking the Western scriptures.

The amount of information was full, and it was all new stories never heard by the Old Tianmen People before, so it became explosively popular at the start. Reportedly, it was in short supply on the market, the republished copies continued to sell out.