Puna Bantu.
A remote corner of the southeastern Endless Sea, rarely visited by anyone. Places like this were generally lumped together as godforsaken wastelands where birds wouldn't even shit.
Apart from making the papers once in its lifetime when an enormous gold mine was discovered, it had never been popular at all. Even its name came from the navigator who discovered the gold mine.
Large numbers of outsiders and a small number of natives clustered together. During a riot more than a century ago, the local natives were slaughtered to the last, while the outsiders seized the region. Before long, they were fighting endlessly over religion, language, and ethnicity. With the gold mines serving as a catalyst, they had scarcely known a single peaceful day.
Once the shallow gold deposits had mostly been excavated and major corporations became unwilling to invest due to the region's complex circumstances, it quickly returned to poverty. Yet the chaos and contradictions remained.
In this world, living too close to the Federation made it hard to live well; living too far from the Federation made it even harder. They had failed to live well even with gold mines. Without them, things would only become worse.
Once gold no longer greased the wheels, the fighting did not subside. Instead, it intensified day by day, with large-scale conflicts of every kind emerging one after another.
Before the Spirit Plague erupted some time ago, they had gone through two presidents and four generals in a single month. Who knew how many Warlords had taken the stage in turn after the last had sung their piece? In the end, through collective wisdom, their earth-shattering brilliance, humanoid forms, and touching maneuvers, they had painstakingly built eighteen layers of hell inside a tiny snail shell.
And now, looking back...
The force