The next morning, when Roland walked out of his bedroom and into the castle hall, the Taquila witches, who had just disconnected, raised their elbows to greet him with the highest etiquette of the Union.
"Good morning, Your Majesty. Thank you for your hospitality."
"Last night was the best experience I've had in a century."
"I'll look forward to my next reunion with the Dreamland in the final battle."
"... What happened last night?" Anna asked curiously after the God's Punishment Witches left the castle with happy and contented faces.
"A sumptuous, high-end banquet," Roland said with a smile. With Dawnen's help, Dodo had gobbled up nearly half of the food on the table. Fortunately, a banquet of this scale would not care about how much the guests had eaten. Even if the food was thrown away, it would be immediately refilled. If it had been an ordinary buffet, the waiters would have long been eyeing the food. After all, according to the consumption rate of the "Invisible Pocket", even ten mouths would not be enough.
"You're making me … hungry." Anna's stomach rumbled. "When can I eat those things?"
Looking at her blue eyes full of expectation, Roland could not help but reach out to touch her head. "In a few years, you'll definitely be able to eat."
High-end delicacies were mainly reflected in the ingredients. Modern people could enjoy delicacies from all over the world because of the developed transportation network. If they wanted to eat fresh sea urchins from the Port of Clearwater in Neverwinter, they would have to travel at least two or three times faster on the inland river.
Of course, even if they could not meet the requirements in a short time, as long as they could drive the demons out of the Fertile Plains, they could take the "Seagull" to various places in Graycastle for their honeymoon and enjoy the local delicacies.
Breakfast was the usual eggs, bread, and a cup of Chaos Drink. For Roland, who had also eaten and drunk in the Dreamland, it was not very tempting. But when he remembered that the Taquila witches still had to rely on high-heat dry food to replenish their energy consumption, he ate everything on the plate.
After breakfast, Anna quickly said goodbye to him and set off for the North Slope Research Laboratory. Whether in Neverwinter or at the front, she rarely had free time. In fact, most of the members of the Witch Union were the same. Returning to the French window in his office, he could see familiar figures passing by from time to time in the vestibule. The witches had completely integrated into the city and were building the future they wanted together with the ordinary people.
At this moment, Nightingale pushed open the door and walked in.
"A letter from the garrison at Festive Harbor." She placed a thick paper bag on the desk. "I saw Sean holding this when I was downstairs, so I brought it over."
"So heavy?" Roland picked up the paper cutter.
"It should have been sent by sea." Nightingale walked behind him and took out a bag of dried fish from the drawer. "I've checked it, and I didn't find anything strange."
Roland opened the package and poured out its contents. Other than the letter and a stack of sketches, there were also a few sealed bags of "stones." From the looks of it, it was basically similar to the sample that Rex presented previously.
Roland quickly skimmed through the contents of the letter and could not help but frown. The report from the First Army had shocked him. The so-called ancient ruins were not just a small area like the underwater cave, but a normal one that covered every corner of the sea!
Upon receiving his order, the garrison at Festive Harbor immediately took action. Following the instructions of Simbady, they buried a large number of explosives above the sea cave and directly blew up the entire cave. The enraged Giant Armored Scorpion broke out of the ground and was surrounded by several machine gun squads and mortar squads. It was shot into a hornet's nest before it could crawl out more than ten steps.
This result was not surprising. What really surprised people was the subsequent clean-up and exploration work.
According to the survey by the engineering team, the explosives had caused the ground within a radius of hundreds of meters to sink to different depths, which was far more than the effect of the explosives. From the attached sketches, Roland saw that the huge sand surface formed a slippery slope, as if the whole earth had collapsed.
After that, the First Army carried out several more explosions and organized people to move sand and dig holes. Finally, they found 16 exploration sites near the Festive Harbor where the "Matchstick Man's Relic" could be found. If they were connected in a line, the area covered by the "Matchstick Man's Relic" was large enough to contain seven or eight harbors.
Due to the limited manpower, the Sand Nation could only clean up three cave-ins in a month. However, the results were surprisingly similar — the bottom of the desert was covered by a "Stone Tablet Wall" that was five to ten meters thick, and in the places that were not covered by the Stone Tablets, there were clusters of sharp green grass.
After looking through the lifelike sketches, Roland could not help but fall silent.
First of all, he had to admit that this was excellent news.
If the Stone Tablets were used as resources for mining, the more the better. Now that the tracer bullets had been finalized, with this news, the large-scale production was guaranteed.
Moreover, this strange piezoelectric silicide must have more than one use. Roland could think of pressure gauges, lighters, quartz clocks, and so on...
There was also the imitation of the Magic Ceremony Cube. Although the exploration results showed that the number of the Radioactive Clan's Relic was far less than the Matchstick Man's, it was not a big problem to gather a bunch of Magic Cubes. For example, the samples sent back this time could almost meet Celine's research needs.
However, the content hidden in the report was chilling.
There were so many "Stone Tablets" near the Festive Harbor. How many Stone Tablets would there be in the Endless Cape? If they were the remains of silicon-based creatures, the greater the number, the more tragic the war was.
Moreover, the soil structure of the three cave-ins was almost the same, indicating that they were formed at the same time.
An incredible picture gradually formed in Roland's mind.
Perhaps the desertification of the Southernmost Region was not caused by the lack of water, and the Silver Stream was not an underground river from the beginning. It used to be lush and green, no different from other places on the continent.
Until the war spread to this place.
An astonishing number of Matchstick Men were killed by the Radioactive Clan. Their bodies were spread all over the ground. This could be confirmed by the murals in the Temple of the Cursed, where the Radioactive Clan finally seized the relics of the gods and won the war.
The key was that after the Battle of Divine Will.
The bodies of silicon-based creatures would not decay as quickly as the bodies of carbon-based creatures. Instead, they would become nutrients for the soil and return to the biosphere. Layers of the bodies were piled up on the grass. The thickness of the bodies might be several stories higher than that of a building. The river was blocked, the forest was crushed, and most plants lost their living space. Only vines could climb up through the cracks and absorb the precious sunlight.
The ecology of the Southernmost Region was destroyed.
But nature was always tolerant.
Whether organic or inorganic, they would eventually become part of the world.
Hundreds of years later, the top layer of the bodies gradually weathered and became sand, which then fell down layer by layer. The sand moved with the wind until all the holes were filled up. During this process, the vines growing in the cracks died one after another. Only in the open space that was not covered by the Matchstick Men survived. The large number of plants resisted the erosion of the sand and turned the gravel into soil again.
Hundreds or even thousands of years passed.
The countless bodies on the top layer gradually piled up into a desert. They isolated the bodies on the bottom layer from the sea wind and piled up the shoreline more than ten meters high. The flowing effect of the sand dune kept the pressure on the bottom layer constantly changing. The steles glowed and extinguished again and again. This extremely long alternation could not guarantee the diversity of plants, but it allowed some grasses with a long growth cycle to survive. The open space became the Silver Stream oasis and nurtured the Ironsand people of the Mojin Clan.
In other words, the current Iron Sand City and the Festive Harbor were built on weathered corpses...
This scene made Roland shudder.
He even hoped that he had guessed the wrong direction.
If the Battle of Divine Will really had no end, how many people would be sacrificed in this world?
Under the earth, in the depths of the sea...
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