Global Lords: Building the Strongest Civilization with SSS Rank Talent-Chapter 99: Analyzing the Fragments
Three weeks passed.
The Bone Refinery ran hot, belching acidic steam into the gray sky day and night. The Crag-Goliaths fed the grinding drums massive chunks of the Leviathan, and the automated vats spat out thousands of tons of heavy asphalt. A thick, indestructible black highway now cut across the eastern plains. It linked the Goliath quarries directly to the borders of the southern swamps.
The logistics were flawless.
Red, however, was no longer focused on the road.
During the first week of the harvest, he had secretly ordered Gorak to secure the second dark stone. A heavily armored Shell-Kin had marched the sealed payload all the way back to the Bastion, leaving the Warlord behind to run the highway project.
Once the second fragment arrived, Red issued a new mandate to Krug. He ordered the massive Treants to tear open the floor of the Vault of Whispers, the subterranean prison beneath the Bastion temple, and dig up the first fragment.
Bringing the two pieces together caused the psychic radiation to spike dangerously. Red could not risk exposing his growing population to the maddening hum. He had the Treants carry the shielded boxes out into the deadlands.
They marched into an abandoned, barren territory bordering the swamps. It was the former domain of a minor god that Aurelius had personally executed during the war.
Every native follower in that region had been slaughtered by the golden army, leaving the land completely empty. It was the perfect isolation chamber. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦
Up in the Void, Red stared at the two irregular dark stones through his monitors. He was trying to decode the psychic frequency. He needed more data on how the world reacted to the artifacts.
"Iron-Scale," Red commanded. "Go find the Goliath Chief. Ask him about the feral humans. I need to know exactly when they first appeared, how they migrate, and what specific territories they cross to reach the crater."
A few minutes later, the Inquisitor’s raspy voice echoed back through the tether.
"The Chief says they do not wander, Lord," Iron-Scale reported. "They never enter the Goliath quarries or the mountain passes. They march in a completely straight, mindless line from the northern borders directly to the Leviathan basin. They just throw themselves into the crater."
Red leaned forward on his throne as the pieces snapped together.
The feral pilgrims were not just wandering the wasteland aimlessly. The Void-Eater’s virus hijacked their biology and turned them into living compasses. They were actively tracking the psychic radiation. They were trying to reclaim the scattered fragments of ’The Hunger.’
But as soon as Red made the connection, a massive logical flaw derailed his theory.
He looked at the first fragment sitting on the ground in the deadlands. Before he claimed it, it had been resting at the bottom of the Lunar Spring for centuries. It was not encased in hundreds of feet of high-density, magic-dampening Leviathan bone. It was completely exposed in the shallow water.
"If the infected are drawn to the signal," Red muttered to the empty expanse of his domain, "why didn’t they ever march on the Bastion?"
The southern swamps had been completely ignored by the feral hordes. Something else had been masking the first fragment’s signal, or something terrifying had actively prevented the plague from crossing into the south.
He knew the reason for that.
He stared at the two jagged black stones on his glowing monitors. He mentally reconstructed the ancient history of the continent. The Leviathan. The Hydra. They were not just random boss encounters or environmental hazards. They were specifically chosen guardians.
He pulled up the old combat logs from the swamp ambush.
’The Moon-Crazed Hydra had been a Rank C+ boss. It was a brutal fight for my followers, but it was absolutely not a Pre-Calamity titan.
The original Hydra must have been an apocalyptic monster on the exact same scale as the colossal bone structure in the east. The beast sleeping in the Lunar Spring was likely just a descendant. It was a younger generation that had inherited the swamp and the duty of guarding the sunken tablet over the centuries.’
That brought Red back to the original question on the feral pilgrims. ’Why did the starving hordes march straight into the eastern crater but completely ignore the southern swamps?’
Two logical answers existed. Either the living Hydra’s passive magical aura had perfectly masked the psychic radiation of the first fragment, or the Void-Eater had only just arrived in the world.
If the Void-Eater had been actively hunting the fragments for centuries, the sheer volume of feral humans would have eventually overrun the Bastion. The glitch was a recent infection. The invading army in the north was slowly waking up the dormant code of ’The Hunger’ and activating the corrupted pilgrims to seek out the scattered pieces.
"It has to be the latter," Red muttered to the dark expanse of his domain. "I know for a fact that the void eater didn’t always exist and its first talks were during the Conclave meeting. Other gods, including myself, wouldn’t know the exact timeline since we can’t look into unexplored or other Gods’ territories."
Red looked at the item tags floating above the stones down in the deadlands. Fragment of the Forgotten (1/???) and (2/???). The System gave him absolutely no denominator. He had no idea if he was looking for three pieces or thirty. He would only understand the true nature of the artifact once the entire puzzle was assembled.
Finding the remaining pieces was going to be a massive logistical nightmare. The System console was entirely useless for the hunt. Deep orbital scans registered the dark stone as nothing but empty space. The game engine actively refused to acknowledge the Pre-Calamity code.
"But if it exists, doesn’t that mean it was supposed to be in the game? Even if it’s some kind of virus or a rogue God of some kind, it can’t just generate or create things like that... right?"
Red crossed his arms and stared at the holographic map of the continent.
