The Creator's communication devices, which had allowed the Sanghaans to contact every corner of the Empire, had gone silent. But the Sanghaans had their own low-tech communications system, designed and built by themselves. It was somewhere between a telegraph and a telephone, and had originally been intended to supplement the Creator's network.
So it wasn't fair to say the Sanghaans lacked foresight. It was just that the Creator's inventions were so convenient and so outrageously well-made that the Sanghaans hadn't felt much urgency to develop technological alternatives. But as it turned out, preparing early for anything was never a bad idea. Now that the Creator's system had gone down, their homemade devices still allowed the Pharaoh to maintain his influence and rule across the Empire, even after the Creator had withdrawn his power.
And yet, overnight, the once rock-solid Sanghaan Empire seemed to have entered the first stirrings of a chaotic age.
From morning until afternoon on the day after the Pharaoh's assassination, the news coming into the already locked-down royal city of Ptolemy and Palace Hill had been nothing but grim.
The Wraith Abyss defense line was on the verge of being breached. The Origin Vanguard had vanished without a trace. Origin Harbor had come under attack. Several oases across the Empire had risen in revolt. And of the thirty-three Pilgrim families whose pharaohs had been housed in embassies throughout the royal city, nearly half had "vanished into thin air" from their rooms. After their disappearance, the great oases they ruled had cut off all contact with the royal city.
It meant that an even more terrifying sandstorm was about to batter the thousand-year-old Empire.
Palace Hill was in chaos from top to bottom. No one could step forward and take charge at a time like this. The Pharaoh's