Chapter 101: Omni-Web Network

Red dismissed the blank communication screen, letting the dark expanse of the Void reclaim his primary monitor before pulling up the live feed of the eastern plains.

Gorr was completely wrong about his endgame, but Red had no intention of correcting her. Let the vassal gods think he was just obsessed with carts and travel time.

Zooming the camera past the roaring Bone Refinery and the laboring Crag-Goliaths, Red focused on the expedition vanguard miles ahead of the paving crew. The massive Treants carved a deep, continuous trench parallel to the projected path of the new road. Down in the freshly dug earth, the mutated Kobolds carefully unspooled a thick, pulsing white cable harvested directly from the root system of the Omni-Spore Tree.

Red smiled in the dark.

A few months ago, right after crushing Aurelius, the Omni-Spore Tree had secured the eastern hemisphere. It grew at a hundred times its natural speed, acting as a massive biological radar system. But continental expansion was a different beast. And Red wanted the omni-web network to spread across the entire globe to get his revenge on who had wronged him.

Pushing the tree’s sensory range across the entire map required a staggering, exponential amount of DP. The return on investment was completely illogical. Red refused to burn his economy on a single tree.

He had ordered Krug to find a biological workaround.

The initial tests had been total failures. Krug had the Treants hack a massive branch off the main trunk and plant it in the swamp. It just withered into dead wood. They tried burying severed root clusters in the mud. The roots simply rotted as the biology refused to replicate.

But logistics was often a game of accidental discoveries.

During one of the clean-up operations, a clumsy Shell-Kin had dropped a severed Omni-branch directly onto an exposed, living root-line extending from the main tree. Red remembered the exact moment his terminal had lit up.

The System had not registered a new tree. Instead, It had registered a hardware upgrade.

[ OMNI-NETWORK NODE ESTABLISHED ]

[ UPLINK SECURED. BANDWIDTH EXPANDED. ]

The severed branch had violently fused to the root. The subterranean root-line functioned perfectly as a high-speed fiber-optic cable transporting sensory data across the dirt, while the severed branch acted as a biological router and data center.

The new connection amplified the signal, pumping an invisible cloud of sensory spores into the surrounding atmosphere and instantly clearing the fog-of-war for miles.

On the live feed, a Treant carefully drove a thick, pale branch into the dirt and connected it to the root-line in the trench. A Crag-Goliath immediately buried the biological tower under a heavy mound of compacted ash and stone to protect the node before the pavers moved in to seal the trench under indestructible Leviathan asphalt.

“Toll booths and fuel taxes,” Red scoffed quietly, leaning back in his chair.

He was installing the physical infrastructure for a continental surveillance grid disguised as a simple highway. Every mile of the new road carried a hidden biological internet cable beneath the black pavement.

By the time the asphalt reached the western and northern borders, Red would possess a real-time, unblockable radar feed of the entire continent, allowing him to see every troop movement, feral horde, and rival god the second they approached his territory.

Red watched the massive labor camps through the terminal, his eyes tracking the thousands of Crag-Goliaths, Shell-Kin, and Troglodytes resting near the edge of the excavation site. A civilization of that size naturally generated a staggering amount of biological waste, refuse, and garbage. Mountains of discarded organic material piled up on the perimeter of the work zones, attracting scavengers and breeding disease.

Most gods viewed sanitation as a massive drain on resources as it wasn’t a good investment. Red viewed it as an unharvested fuel since he now had control over the entire eastern hemisphere, and naturally, the waste product would be much higher and bring good returns on his investment.

He opened the [ ARCHITECTURE ] tab and brought up the blueprints for the newly conquered territories. He had already scheduled the allied cities to be paved with heavy cobblestone streets connected to the highway to handle the constant traffic of supply sleds. Red zoomed in on the digital cross-section of the roadbeds and began drafting a secondary layer of infrastructure directly beneath the stones.

His fingers flew across the console, routing a complex subterranean network of pressurized waterlines and massive ceramic sewer mains. He linked the city plumbing directly to the trenches running alongside the new Leviathan-asphalt highways.

Red then dragged the camera feed toward a massive, empty canyon situated perfectly between the eastern quarries and the southern swamps. He designated the geographical depression as a centralized reservoir and immediately began designing the processing facility.

He layered the Swamp-Ooze’s acidic biology into a heavy industrial framework, drafting a massive structure capable of handling the entire eastern hemisphere’s refuse.

[ CUSTOM BLUEPRINT: OMNI-BIOMASS DIGESTER ]

[ SIMULATING BIO-CHEMICAL CONVERSION… ]

[ APPROVAL GRANTED. COST: -250,000 DP ]

The return on investment was astronomically high. The Digester would use the acidic ooze to rapidly break down millions of tons of raw sewage and garbage. The facility’s primary output captured the resulting pressurized bio-gas, creating an infinite, self-sustaining fuel source to permanently power the Star-Iron Foundries and the Bone Refineries. Red would never need to strip-mine coal or harvest timber for his furnaces again.

The secondary output was even more valuable. The chemical breakdown produced a hyper-dense, alchemically perfect nutrient sludge. By pumping that sludge directly back into the highway trenches, Red could feed the buried Omni-Spore roots, accelerating the growth of his continental radar network by five hundred percent without spending a single point of DP. The cities would unknowingly power the war machine simply by existing.

Red minimized the blueprint and opened the Conclave communication network. He selected the contact list for every allied and vassal god currently operating under the Red Spiral banner.

He typed out a mass mandate, his keystrokes echoing sharply in the Void.

[ I am transmitting the schematics for a localized containment reservoir and a subterranean plumbing grid. You will immediately halt your current vanity projects and begin excavating these reservoirs on the outskirts of your respective capital cities. My expeditionary forces will arrive within the month to connect your containment grids to the central highway mains. Do not fall behind schedule. ]

Red hit send, broadcasting the order across the continent.

He leaned back on his throne, watching the read receipts instantly light up his terminal as the other gods scrambled to process the sudden industrial mandate. The foundation of a true, fully automated empire was finally clicking into place.

The entire development project would take time, and since his strongest were leading the project, he couldn’t start another war just yet. However, he didn’t plan on sitting around either.

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