Chapter 668: Nature

Grey walked aimlessly ahead, hardly paying attention to what was going on around him. He had already decided that trying to move three hundred and seventeen populations one by one was stupid.

The Fog of Chaos was the only reason the thought hadn’t died there, since for all of the trouble it caused, the thing was exceptionally good at one very specific task. Space inside it became difficult to traverse, difficult to stabilize, and sometimes outright impossible to cross without something strong enough to force order onto it.

Usually, that was exactly what the catacomb formations were designed to do.

The structures beneath Melix weren’t simply giant teleportation pads buried underground, their reach extended throughout the territory, continuously pushing against the Fog of Chaos and forcing the space enclosed by the formation to remain stable. The cities above were nodes built on top of that foundation, places where the stabilized space could be used, reinforced, and eventually connected together once Grey began expanding the teleportation network.

But what if the formation stopped trying to push the Fog away?

Grey’s eyes slowly narrowed as the idea became clearer.

Instead of treating the Fog like water flooding into a sinking ship, he could control where it was allowed to remain. The formation could continue clearing the space people actually needed, but rather than expelling everything beyond its range, Grey could redirect part of the Fog into carefully shaped boundaries around the territory itself.

That would change what the formation was doing without changing the basic thing it was built around.

A wall restrained movement by existing in the way, and the Fog could accomplish something similar on a much uglier level. If Grey could shape enough of it around a region, he could isolate that region’s space from whatever surrounded it, then link the stabilized interior to another region being treated the same way.

Do that across every place holding Earth’s people and, theoretically, the Genesis System would stop looking at hundreds of isolated populations scattered through foreign territories.

It would see one connected piece and pull them together. Or at least, that was the idea.

Grey’s expression soured almost immediately.

"Yeah, that’s fucking impossible."

He had nearly cooked his brain the first time he seriously studied the formation beneath Melix, and that was when all he wanted to do was understand it well enough to extend the teleportation network. Changing its fundamental relationship with the Fog of Chaos was an entirely different problem, one that required Grey to redraw a formation built on a scale large enough to affect an entire territory.

Granted, the Grey standing here now wasn’t the same Grey who had struggled with it before.

His mental capacity had gone through several ridiculous jumps since leaving with Amunet, and the difference had become especially noticeable after Soul Link and Prometheus finally caught up to his other Frames. Even the air around him looked different now, faint variations in pressure and energy appearing almost like translucent washes of color once his senses settled over them.

He might actually be capable of calculating the changes to one catacomb formation now.

That wasn’t the problem.

Grey could sit down, map the structure beneath Melix, account for its nodes, the way energy cycled through them, the points where the Fog was expelled and the places where space was reinforced, then eventually produce a blueprint for something new. Depending on just how badly the Genesis System hated him that day, he might even manage it without bleeding out of every hole in his face.

But actually changing the formation was another matter entirely.

There were physical structures beneath the territory, enormous stretches of circuitry and material that weren’t going to politely rearrange themselves just because Grey had a prettier drawing. Even with access to Melix, manpower, materials and every mech he could reasonably build, carrying out the modification properly could take months, but he had three days.

And there weren’t one set of catacombs.

There were three hundred and seventeen.

"Cooked," Grey muttered.

He ran both hands through his white hair and kept walking, barely paying attention to where his feet carried him as the problem turned over in his head. Even assuming the impossible and giving himself enough time to redesign every formation personally, he’d still need to reach every territory, modify every underground structure, synchronize them and somehow finish before the veil disappeared.

But none of his ideas would work once those three days were up. Those territories would settle into whatever relationship the Genesis System ultimately recognized, the temporary isolation keeping everything malleable would disappear, and ripping pieces of sovereign empires out afterward would likely become an entirely impossible.

Grey stopped, his gaze suddenly flickering.

His index finger rose in front of his face, then he pushed it forward. There was nothing there, but Grey moved his finger again as though knocking over the first piece in a line of dominoes.

One. Then the next, and then the next.

His eyes sharpened as a new idea formed.

"There is only one way."

He couldn’t change three hundred and seventeen formations personally. So he wouldn’t.

Grey needed one change, one trigger capable of producing the next change on its own, which produced another after that, and another after that until whatever he started beneath Melix swept across every surrounding territory. A chain reaction large enough to cross the entire region and precise enough that when it finally stopped, every formation had been altered in exactly the way he needed.

The thought was insane.

Grey lowered his hand slightly as the next problem arrived almost immediately. How the fuck was he supposed to calculate the trigger?

He might have the mental capacity to understand one formation now, but a catalytic reaction spanning that kind of distance would need to account for every change produced along the way. The slightest error at the beginning could amplify hundreds of times over, and Grey didn’t even know whether the formations beneath the other territories matched Melix’s in the first place.

Maybe their basic purposes were similar, but that didn’t mean their layouts were.

Different populations, different territories, different energy densities, different sizes, different construction methods. For all Grey knew, some ruler three hundred years ago decided circles were ugly and rebuilt half his catacombs into a fucking triangle.

Grey rubbed a hand down his face.

"Okay. Think."

He needed information first. Not rough maps, not borders drawn by the Genesis System, but the actual land, the underground structures and enough detail to compare the formations beneath every region at once. Without that, there was no chain reaction to calculate, if he even could in the first place.

Virtueless pulsed against his back.

Grey’s hand stopped halfway through his hair.

The pulse came again, deeper this time, and the black rod seemed to grow strangely heavy as something old stirred inside it.

Then a woman’s voice echoed through Grey’s mind.

"I am Pleione, where endless waters cradle root and stone, and I am Hesperis, where evening lays her veil upon the western earth. I am Nymph, lower than a god, holier than a mortal, born from Gaia herself. From sea to soil, from fading light to sleeping grove, the living world has never hidden its shape from me."

Grey slowly lowered his hand.

His eyes narrowed.

"Nymphs...? Nature?"

Something clicked.

Grey’s eyes brightened as he pulled Virtueless from his back and looked down at the rod.

"Hey, lady, if you’re finished playing mysterious, what are the odds you can map out all the land in three hundred and seventeen regions at once?"