We Reclaimed the City-Though There Was Still Some Trouble

The towering, majestic golden pyramid stood silently in an unusually vast plaza, so vast that calling it a small plain would not have been an exaggeration. After enduring hundreds of thousands of years, the Shilin Mother Nest had become a historical ruin, and history had inevitably left its marks upon it. Ancient vines coiled around the pyramid's exterior, while thick moss spread across the Mother Nest's foundation. Beneath those coverings, the pyramid's metallic superalloy shell still gleamed brilliantly, though many places bore mottled scars—the wounds left by the flames of war hundreds of thousands of years ago. After the Shilin Mainframe within had fallen silent, the Mother Nest's self-repair systems had also shut down. Over the countless years, it had merely continued operating as a city-dispatch machine with immense computing power, never again producing a single builder to repair the glorious city as it steadily decayed.

After asking the City Guard beside me, I learned some secrets about this "temple," as well as ancient customs that had been passed down among this ancient civilization for hundreds of thousands of years.

Since leaving their homeland, the people of Atlantis had never altered the Mother Nest in any way. Even the vines and moss growing upon it were protected as sacred plants, because they had been brought out from their homeland after the apocalypse. For a considerable period, the twin temples—Daylight Hall and Midnight City—had served as "factories" where Atlanteans selected newborn citizens and elevated gifted warriors into "divine servants." After every Atlantean baby was born, they had to receive "divine grace" near the outer energy vents of one of the twin temples according to their gender. That meant exposing a small part of their body to the Mother Nest's external psionic radiation. They firmly believed that this low-dose radiation would temper