Chapter 1147: A Picture Underneath the Sand

When Roland strolled out of his bedroom the next morning and entered the castle hall, the Taquila witches all raised their arms in a kind of salute to pay their highest respects to the king.

"Good morning, Your Majesty. Thank you for your hospitality."

"I would say it was the greatest experience I've had in the past hundred years."

"I'll be looking forward to my next visit to the Dream World when the time comes."

"... What happened last night?" Anna asked curiously as she looked at the God's Punishment Witches who apparently had yet to come out of their blissful reveries.

"A sumptuous party," Roland answered smilingly. Dido and Dawnen had almost ravaged half of the table and crammed the invisible bag with tons of delicacies. Fortunately, nobody had really cared about the food they had taken. Had this been an ordinary buffet, they probably would have been thrown out of the party outright by angry waiters.

"That makes me hungry too," Anna said as her stomach protested mildly. "When can I have that kind of food?"

While staring into Anna's expectant blue eyes, Roland stroked her graceful head gently and said, "In a few years. I promise."

Ingredients were the key to accessing luxurious food. Fast transportation enabled people in the modern society to obtain food from all parts of the world. If they wanted to eat fresh sea urchin from the Port of Clearwater, the boats on the inner river should at least travel two to three faster than they currently did.

Of course, an alternative way was to drive the demons out of the Fertile Plains and fly around Graycastle on the "Seagull" to try out different food if the former method was not an option.

Roland had his usual breakfast that consisted of an egg, bread, and a glass of Chaos Drink, which was really not a satisfactory breakfast compared to what he used to have in his original world. However, considering that the Taquila witches were still relying on tasteless, high-calorie rations to sustain themselves, Roland emptied his plate.

After breakfast, Anna bade Roland a quick farewell and left for the laboratory on the North Slope. Like most of the members of the Witch Union, she now hardly had any leisure time in Neverwinter or at the front. Roland returned to his office and strode over to the French window. He saw a few witches pass through the front yard below. They had now completely blended in with the community and were working together strenuously with common people for the future of the human race.

Just then, Nightingale pushed open the door and entered.

"Mail from the garrison at Festive Harbor," she said as she dropped a thick paper bag on Roland's desk. "I met Sean downstairs. He wanted to give you this."

"Quite heavy, isn't it?" Roland said as he picked up a pair of scissors.

"They probably shipped the package here by sea," Nightingale said as she walked past Roland and drew out a bag of pickled dried fish from a drawer. "I checked it. It's safe to open."

Roland unwrapped the package and dumped the contents on his desk. Apart from a letter and a stack of drawings, there were also some "stones" sealed in a few bags. They looked pretty similar to the samples provided by Rex the other day.

Roland's brows furrows as he skimmed through the letter. The report by the First Army startled him. The so-called ancient ruin was not just confined to the underwater cave but it actually infiltrated the entire Endless Cape!

Under Roland's order, the garrison at Festive Harbor immediately followed Simbady into the ruin and blasted the entire cave. Infuriated, the Giant Armored Scorpion came out of hiding and was later bombarded by the machine gun squad and the mortar unit before it could launch an attack on the soldiers.

This result was by no means surprising. What surprised him, however, was the subsequent exploration to the cave.

The engineering team noticed that the ground within a radius of several hundred meters sank to various degrees as a result of the explosion. From the enclosed drawings, Roland saw the beach slope downward as though the ground had caved in.

Shortly afterwards, the First Army conducted a few more explosions and excavated the ground before they found 16 similar ruins in the vicinity of Festive Harbor. The area covered by these ruins was as large as seven or eight ports put together.

Due to the limited manpower, the people of the Sand Nation had only cleaned up three ruins. The findings at the three locations were amazingly similar. Tablet walls five to ten meters' thick were found at each ruin underneath the desert, whereas the area uncovered by the walls was carpeted with leafy grass.

Roland fell silent after he saw the drawings.

First of all, he had to admit that this was great news.

With so many tablets, they could now produce as many tracers as possible.

In addition to manufacturing tracers, Roland also thought of many other potential applications of these unique electric silicides, such as pressure gauges, lighters, quartz clocks, etc.

Also, Celine would now be able to replicate the Magic Cube with the tablets discovered in this exploration.

However, the implications behind these findings sent a chill down Roland's spine.

How many tablets in total were there at the Endless Cape if there were already so many at Festive Harbor? If these tablets were really the bodies of some ancient silicon-based creatures, what kind of massacre occured?

The fact that the geological features of the three ruins were almost identical indicated that they had been formed at around the same time.

Roland used his imagination to see how these ruins had come into being.

The desertification was probably not caused by the evaporation of water. Perhaps, the Silver Stream used to be a fertile land rather than an underground river.

Everything had, however, changed when a massive war had broken out.

The tablet men had been slaughtered by the radiation people, whose bodies littered the entire continent. According to the murals in the Temple of the Cursed, the radiation people had won the God's relic and obtained the final victory.

What concerned Roland most was the aftermath of this huge Battle of Divine Will.

As those bodies were silicon-based, they did not decay like those of carbon-based animals. These bodies had thus formed towering walls, which had subsequently blocked rivers and crushed trees. This rendered the whole land uninhabitable for all vegitation, except for some vines that struggled to live in the cracks of rocks.

The Southernmost Region had been, hence, destroyed.

Nevertheless, mother nature was kind.

Whether organic or not, everything would eventually become a part of this world.

Hundreds of years later, the bodies were reduced to sand after years of exposure to wind, and that was how the desertification had begun. The vines living in the cracks of rocks had gradually died out over the years. Plants were obliterated except those who were not covered by bodies. The plants that survived strived and thrived in the desert and turned sand back into earth.

The whole process had taken thousands of years.

During those thousands of years, the bodies on the top turned into the desert they saw today. The lower ones, however, piled up and formed the bank. Since the sand on the top constantly moved about, the pressure applied to the tablets below were subject to constant change. As such, those tablets illuminated and extinguished alternatively, which made it really hard for plants down there to grow. Nonetheless, some species did survive the harsh environment. As for the land uncovered by the tablets, they had eventually become the Silver Stream Oasis where the Ironsand people of the Mojin Clan had settled down and prospered.

In other words, both Iron Sand City and Festive Harbor were sitting on the top of weathered corpses.

Roland shuddered at this hypothesis.

He really hoped that he was wrong.

If the Battle of Divine Will would never end, how many people would have to die?

Down in the earth and in the depths of the ocean...

There was probably not a single acre of land that hadn't been soaked in blood.