Many things came without warning.
Like unrest and collapse, like disaster and death.
Even when countless subtle signs had already put people on guard, no one could know how those spreading traces would gather and knot together beneath the burial of Under the Nine Lands, nor when they would grow into such monstrous spores of calamity.
How much could repeated eradication and vigilance, again and again, scrutiny and deliberation, truly accomplish?
When it burst through the ground, when floodwaters overtopped the dikes, torrential rain came falling from the sky, and tsunamis swept forth in devastation, there was nothing left but what little preparation had been made—and passive resistance.
Just like now.
Ten minutes before the Quancheng anomaly.
Towering flames erupted from the wilderness beyond the outpost.
The Association's construction site.
The piercing alarm sound abruptly ceased as the circuits were destroyed. Across the vast construction site, enormous devices stretching skyward like The Tower flashed with dazzling Electric Light. Countless streams of spirit essence surged chaotically through them, and amid explosions and disorder, dyed the black night sky into a nauseating riot of colors.
What spread in its wake was a horror of pollution surpassing even that within Quancheng.
In the former material storage depot, huge storage tanks that had somehow been moved in had begun to burst in a chain reaction. Vast quantities of contamination and corrupted dust refined by the Recycling and Processing Department rose into the sky within the storm, instantly Turning the entire construction site into a Demon Domain.
The pollution that countless craftsmen and apprentices had painstakingly extracted and stripped away day and night over the past several days was now being dumped back onto everyone's heads in this form.
The anomalies sprouted like mushrooms after rain—from the ground, from the walls, from pipes and electrical