Chapter 154: Upgraded Facilities

Red tapped the primary console, shifting the display from the macro-server map to his localized domain registry. His eighty vassal gods had spent the last three years building the outer continental defenses, but Red had focused entirely on upgrading his personal territories.

With his traits amplifying the entire continent’s base resources, his personal infrastructure had completely transformed.

He brought up the visual feed for the Bastion. The starving kobold mud-village was a distant memory. Now, it was a massive fortified citadel protected by high walls of living stone and heavy Treant-wood.

The original bunker, built inside the colossal Hydra skull, sat heavily at the very center of the city. Deep within that temple, the ancient Omni-Spore Tree pulsed. Its root system spread across the entire landmass like subterranean fiber-optic cables, maintaining the Omni-Web network and keeping the fog of war permanently lifted.

Red swapped the camera to the City of Spiral. Aurelius’s former golden capital was now a heavy industrial state. The fifty-foot obsidian and violet crystal statue of Red flipping a coin still towered over the city center, but it was now surrounded by sprawling black glass greenhouses.

The Obsidian-Terrace Hydroponics utilized perfect alchemical fertilizer to produce mutated agricultural yields at a hundred times the normal rate.

Nearby, the Ash-Forge Crucible operated without pause. The massive foundry broke down divine metals and organic matter to constantly stamp out heavy Star-Iron plating for his troops.

He checked the logistics feed for Onyx Hall. The subterranean Troglodyte city pulled deep-core Star-Iron ores to feed those very forges. To sustain the heavy industry, his recycling loop worked in the background.

The Omni-Biomass Digester utilized acidic swamp-ooze to break down the continent’s raw sewage and garbage, capturing bio-gas to permanently fuel the foundries.

Meanwhile, the Bio-Reactor that was built around the Heart of Rot processed biological waste and meat, churning out dense alchemical nutrient paste that fed and evolved his core army.

Mobility was no longer a bottleneck. Red pulled up the map of the Leviathan crater. The Bone Refinery had been heavily upgraded. Its massive Star-Iron grinding drums and chemical vats worked faster now, pulverizing fossilized bone into indestructible wasteland asphalt. Because of it, the continental highway system was completely finished, linking every city, forge, and military outpost on the map.

He reviewed the strategic nodes next. The Lunar Spring was fully secured, generating steady passive Divine Points and utilizing its 200% accelerated growth effect for nearby flora and fauna.

In the swamps, the Deadlands Quarantine Zone remained strictly isolated. The remains of highly radioactive, mind-rotting Fragments of the Forgotten were locked away, keeping the corruption entirely contained. It was the upgraded and bigger ’Vault of Whispers’ now.

Finally, Red looked at the outer perimeter of his personal domain. The Continental Moat, also known as the River of Immortality by the followers, flowed brightly. The massive trench was flooded with the freezing northern sea and heavily infused with Aegis Spores. The water glowed with a bioluminescent teal hue, providing extreme hyper-cellular regeneration to any of his units stationed along its banks.

Red tapped the console, shifting the primary interface away from the architectural grid and opening the population registry.

Infrastructure was useless without the bodies to operate it.

When the continental war ended three years ago, his core demographic had hovered around three hundred and fifty thousand.

The absolute peace that followed, combined with the extreme agricultural output of the Obsidian-Terrace Hydroponics, had triggered a massive biological boom. The streets of the Bastion and the City of Spiral were currently flooded with toddlers and newborns. Because they lacked the cognitive development to offer true faith, the system didn’t register them as active, Faith-generating followers yet.

But they were his population, rapidly growing under the continent’s new hyper-dense alchemical environment.

However, the toddlers weren’t the reason his official system counter was currently sitting just shy of a million.

The regional lock shattering had broadcasted the Seventeenth Continent to the apex predators of the macro-server, but it had also broadcasted it to the victims. Over the past three years, the borders had seen a continuous influx of refugees, deserters, and abandoned castoffs fleeing the endless, grinding wars of the central landmasses.

Beyond the Continental Moat, he had systematically secured a cluster of small, uncharted islands dotting the surrounding ocean. These landmasses were swiftly conquered, heavily fortified, and transformed into forward military bases and naval staging grounds, extending his absolute control over the regional waters and creating a massive buffer zone around his main territory.

Smugglers’ ships had washed up on the western shores. Unstable, one-way spatial tears had dumped thousands of starving exiles into the northern tundras.

Red had taken them all in. The Bio-Reactor produced enough nutrient paste to feed millions, and the Ash-Forge Crucible needed hands. Anyone who swore the oath of the Vanguard and integrated into his empire was granted asylum.

Within the Seventeenth Continent itself, the scattered, godless tribes that had spent centuries hiding in the deep wilderness were finally brought into the fold.

Red had dispatched his Vanguard messengers to every forgotten corner of the landmass. They approached the wild settlements with alchemical nutrient paste, heavy Star-Iron plating, and the undeniable proof of the Bastion’s prosperity.

They showed them the path of the Spiral.

Recognizing the sheer power and absolute stability of his empire, similar races naturally gravitated toward each other, merging their fractured tribes and integrating directly into his massive industrial machine.

Suddenly, the infant Void-Weaver woke with a high-pitched chirp, stretching all six of its legs in a long, exaggerated yawn. It hopped down from the armrest, its paws hitting the invisible floor of the sanctuary.

It immediately bounded into the open, empty air of the void, chasing after drifting motes of digital static. It played in the zero-gravity environment, occasionally blinking out of existence for a fraction of a second only to reappear a few feet away, batting at the floating system interfaces.

Red watched the anomaly for a moment before swiping open a minor system shop window. He spent a negligible handful of Divine Points on a cut of high-tier alchemical beast-meat. The snack materialized directly into his palm.

“Here,” Red said, holding the meat out.

The fox completely ignored him. It continued to tumble through the air, completely fixated on a glowing speck of dust near the ceiling, its tails swishing in the anti-gravity.

Red lowered his hand and let out a quiet sigh.

“Glitch. Come here.”

The silver fox’s ears instantly perked up. It abandoned the floating dust, blurring across the sanctuary in a streak of silver light, and landed perfectly back onto Red’s lap. It snatched the meat from his fingers, happily chewing on the alchemical treat.

Red stroked the silver fur between its ears and stared out at the empty void of his sanctuary.

“I have spoiled you by pampering you too much.”

Red scrolled through the updated demographics.

[ DIRECT DOMAIN POPULATION REGISTRY ]

[ TOTAL ACTIVE FOLLOWERS: 996,045 ]

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