Over more than two thousand years of continual expansion and development, Twilight City had become a bizarre, deformed behemoth.
It had originally been several city-states in the heartland of the Midgard continent. In those days, a city-state was fairly limited in size. Even if several city-states and all their territories were connected, they would only have been about the size of a modern megacity on Earth, and a single Twilight Barrier would have been enough to cover the whole area. After the Barrier rose, however, the survivors on this land could only build their homes beneath that dome of sky. Since the available land was limited, they had no choice but to develop their city upward.
They first joined the city-states together, developing every inch of wasteland between them as thoroughly as possible. Once the ground had been filled, they began stacking the city upward layer by layer. This method of construction was only possible with the help of a technology that had long since been lost on Earth—perhaps something left behind by the Vanir.
Resources gathered from the Dark Wilderness were constantly transformed into steel and adhesive, filling every inch of space beneath the Twilight Barrier bit by bit over two thousand years. In the end, they formed the city's peculiar conical structure. By now, the city's upper district could almost touch the pale-yellow energy shield overhead. Standing on the highest platform in the upper district, one would feel as though the Twilight Barrier was within arm's reach. In fact, if one had strong enough arms, throwing a small stone into the sky would make ripples spread across the Barrier.
The city had no room left to develop.
Deep within this grotesquely piled-up nest, ancient steam turbines and networks of pressure pipes still turned slowly, like the aging internal