The next morning, when Roland walked out of his bedroom and arrived at the castle hall, the Taqila witches, their connection severed, all raised their elbows towards him, giving him the highest salute of the association.!
“Good morning, Your Majesty, thank you for your hospitality.”
“Last night was probably the most wonderful experience I've had in a hundred years.”
“I will be looking forward to another reunion with the dream during the final battle.”
“...What exactly happened last night?” Anna asked curiously after the God's Punishment Witches, with expressions of happiness and satisfaction, left the castle.
“A lavish high-end banquet.” Roland smiled. Duoduo, with Tong'en's cooperation, almost swept away nearly half of the food on the table. Fortunately, banquets of this scale never care how much guests eat; even if it's thrown away, new dishes are immediately replenished. In an ordinary buffet, they would probably be stared at by the staff. After all, with the consumption rate of an "invisible pocket," ten mouths wouldn't be enough to eat.
“Hearing that... I'm getting hungry.” Anna's stomach rumbled. “When will I be able to eat those things?”
Looking at her expectant azure eyes, Roland couldn't help but reach out and stroke her head. “In a few more years, you definitely will.”
High-end delicacies are mainly reflected in the ingredients. The reason why modern people can enjoy delicacies from all over the world is due to the developed transportation network. To eat fresh sea urchins transported from Clear Water Port in Neverwinter, the sailing speed of inland river ships would have to be doubled or tripled at least.
Of course, even if the technology can't meet the requirements in a short period, as long as the final battle is decisive and the devils are completely driven out of the Fertile Plains, it would be nice to go on a honeymoon around Graycastle on the Seagull and enjoy local specialties.
Breakfast was the usual eggs and bread, plus a cup of bland drink, which wasn't very tempting for Roland, who had also had a feast in the dream. However, thinking that the Taqila witches would still have to rely on the tasteless, high-calorie dry food to replenish their physical consumption, he cleaned his plate.
After breakfast, Anna quickly bid him farewell and set off for the North Slope Laboratory—whether in Neverwinter or on the front lines, she rarely had free time. In fact, most members of the Witch Union were like this. Returning to the French window in his office, he could see familiar figures passing by the front yard from time to time. The witches had fully integrated into this city and were creating the future they wanted together with ordinary people.
At this moment, Nightingale pushed open the door and walked in.
“A letter sent by the garrison of Great Celebration Port.” She placed a thick paper package on the desk. “I saw Shawn holding this downstairs, so I brought it over.”
“So heavy?” Roland picked up the paper knife.
“It should have been shipped by sea.” Nightingale walked behind him and took out a bag of honey-glazed dried fish from the drawer. “I've already checked it, and I haven't found anything unusual.”
Roland opened the paper package and poured out the contents—besides the letter and a stack of sketches, there were also several sealed bags of "stones." From the appearance, they were basically similar to the samples presented by Clex.
He quickly scanned the contents of the letter and couldn't help but frown. The First Army's report shocked him. The so-called ancient ruins were not just a small area of undersea caves, but a common occurrence throughout the cape!
After receiving his order, the Great Celebration Port garrison immediately took action. According to the guidance of the Mokin Sindbad, they buried a large amount of explosives in the sea cave, directly blasting the entire cave ceiling. The enraged Ironclad Giant Scorpion broke out of the ground, and then was besieged by several machine gun squads and mortar squads in the open sand, and was riddled with holes before it could crawl ten steps.
This result was not unexpected. What really surprised people was the subsequent cleaning and exploration work.
The engineering team's measurements showed that the blast caused the ground within a few hundred meters to sink to varying degrees, which far exceeded the expected effect of the explosives. From the attached hand-drawn drawings, he saw that the huge sand surface formed a sloping ramp, as if the entire earth had collapsed.
After that, the First Army carried out multiple blasts and organized manpower to
move sand and dig holes. Finally, sixteen exploration points were discovered near Great Celebration Port where "Matchstick Man relics" could be excavated, and if they were connected in a line, the covered area would be enough to hold seven seaports.
Due to limited manpower, the Sand People only cleared three collapse openings in a month, but the results obtained were surprisingly similar—the desert was covered with "stone tablet walls" five to ten meters thick, and where the stone tablets did not fill, clusters of budding green grass could be seen.
After flipping through those vivid hand-drawn scenes, Roland couldn't help but fall into silence.
First of all, it must be admitted that this is excellent news.
If stone tablets are regarded as resources to be mined, the more reserves, the better. Now that the finalization of tracer bullets has been fully completed, this news means that large-scale production is guaranteed.
Moreover, this special piezoelectric silicate must have more than one use. The things he can think of now include pressure gauges, lighters, quartz clocks, etc...
There is also the imitation of the sacrificial cube—although the exploration results show that the number of Radioactive relics is far less than that of the Matchstick Men, it is not a problem to put together a bunch of cubes. For example, the samples sent back this time are almost enough to meet Celine's research needs.
But the content hidden under the report is chilling.
So many "stone tablets" have been discovered just near Great Celebration Port, so how many stone tablets exist under the entire Endless Cape? If they are regarded as the remains of silicon-based creatures, the larger the number, the more tragic the war of extermination was.
Moreover, the soil structure of the three collapse openings is almost the same, indicating that they should have formed at the same time.
An incredible picture gradually formed in Roland's mind.
Perhaps the desertification of the extreme southern region was not caused by water shortage, and Silverstream was not originally an underground river. It used to be lush and green, no different from other parts of the continent.
Until the flames of war spread here.
A staggering number of Matchstick Men were killed by the Radioactive, their bodies spread all the way, covering the entire earth. This can be confirmed from the murals of the Cursed Temple. The Radioactive ultimately seized the relics of the gods and won the victory of the war.
The key lies in what happened after the War of Divine Will.
The corpses of silicon-based life will not decay as quickly as carbon-based ones, turning into nutrients for the soil and returning to the cycle of the biosphere. Layers upon layers of shells piled up on the grassland, perhaps several stories high. The rivers were blocked, the forests were crushed, and most plants lost their living space. Only vines could climb along the gaps, absorbing the precious sunlight.
The ecology of the extreme southern region was destroyed.
But nature is always full of tolerance.
Whether organic or inorganic, it will eventually become part of the world.
Hundreds of years later, the outermost shells gradually weathered and became sand, which then scattered down layer by layer. They moved with the wind until they filled all the holes. In this process, the vines growing in the cracks died one after another. Only open spaces that were not covered by the Matchstick Men survived—a large number of them resisted the erosion of wind and sand and turned the gravel back into soil.
Again, hundreds or even thousands of years of evolution.
Countless corpses gradually piled up into a desert, separating the lower corpses from the sea breeze and raising the original coastline by more than ten meters. And the flow effect of the sand dunes makes the pressure below always in a changing state. The stone tablets light up, go out, light up, go out. This extremely long alternation cannot guarantee the diversity of plants, but it allows some long-growing grasses to survive. As for those open spaces, they became the Silverstream Oasis and nurtured the Mokin Sand People.
In other words, the current Iron Sand City and Great Celebration Port are both built on weathered corpses...
This picture made Roland shudder.
He even hoped he was guessing in the wrong direction.
If the War of Divine Will really has no end, then how many sacrifices will there be in this world?
Under the earth, in the depths of the ocean...
I'm afraid there is no area that has not been stained with blood.