In the remote southeastern reaches of Puna Bantu's Endless Sea, few ever ventured there. Places like this were generally lumped together as godforsaken holes where even birds would not shit.
Aside from making the papers once in its life when an enormous gold mine was discovered, it had never seen the spotlight. Even its name came from the navigator who had found that mine.
Large numbers of outsiders and a small number of natives had gathered there. During a riot more than a century ago, the local natives had been slaughtered to the last, and the outsiders seized the region, soon falling into endless strife over religion, language, and ethnicity.
With the gold mine as a catalyst, they had scarcely known a single peaceful day.
And once the shallow gold veins had nearly been exhausted, and major corporations refused to invest due to the area's complicated circumstances, the place swiftly sank back into poverty—while its chaos and contradictions remained.
In this world, living too close to the Federation made life difficult; living too far from the Federation made it even worse. They had failed to live well even with a gold mine. Without one, things could only become worse.
Once gold was no longer there to grease the wheels, the fighting did not subside. Instead, it intensified, with every kind of large-scale conflict emerging one after another.
Before the Spirit Plague erupted not long ago, they had replaced two presidents and four generals in the span of a single month. God knew how many Warlords had taken the stage one after another. In the end, through collective effort, their earth-shattering wisdom, humanoid forms, and touching maneuvers, they had painstakingly crafted an eighteen-level hell inside a tiny snail shell.
And now, looking back...
The one pushing things from behind the scenes