The End of 016's Long Night

For the past fifty years, Nomi Anderson Guersett had traveled between the Outland and the borderlands of the Four Nations.

She had seen Outland residents who, after suffering through twenty years of war, still remained warm and hospitable, showing her, a foreigner, their battered machine guns and rocket launchers.

She had seen warlords who forced the people of settlements to grow hallucinogenic, addictive crops for obscene profits. After she strangled them to death, their corpses were thrown to wild dogs to be devoured.

The coldest, the warmest, the gentlest, the cruelest—this world was diverse and colorful. If it could contain beauty, then it was bound to contain ugliness as well. All of it was part of nature.

Everything was only natural.

During that long march, Nomi grew from less than 1.6 meters tall to gradually becoming taller. She began training and studying, growing stronger than those old Frostplate women who claimed to be "oppressed by the male gaze" while depending even more heavily on men and society to support them.

Her muscles gradually developed, and defined abs appeared on her stomach. She transformed from a pale, skinny pseudo-loli into a passionate young woman standing 1.87 meters tall with a straight-backed frame.

Then, after she entered her thirties, the era underwent another major change.

First, the first generation of citizens after Dai Weilin's reforms came of age.

The new citizens were also called "Unspecified Citizens." They had been born entirely for the needs of the nation and society. Every one of them had been precisely selected by AI before birth, then subjected to long-term genetic cultivation and surgical enhancement.

Their qualities far surpassed those of Frostplate men and women from the previous era. Under Credism, there was neither unemployment nor poverty. Although this also caused people to frequently fall into spiritual