After the new cultivation system began to spread, the Alliance's Hope Crusade forces even deliberately slowed their advance to give Alliance citizens more opportunities to hone themselves.
This approach proved effective, allowing many of the Alliance's combat citizens to acquire valid concepts such as "participant in such-and-such battle."
But faced with overwhelming numbers of Ageless Ones-or rather, Realspace Demons-the various Enemies of Humanity had no means of fighting back.
Even with the Alliance deliberately slowing its advance, all that did was prolong the time it took to crush them.
In the year 870, Alliance forces reclaimed the last star system in the Maelstrom Core Zone.
After roughly ten years of tireless effort, the Alliance had fully reclaimed the core zone, an area centered on the Maelstrom itself with a radius of over five hundred light-years.
And that was before counting the territory the Alliance had expanded into beyond it.
Tens of millions of star systems, hundreds of millions of psychic planets, trillions of Dawn Towers, and fourteen Lights of Hope were arranged in succession, forming a less-than-perfect spherical region.
At the center of that sphere lay the Maelstrom, the second-largest warp rift.
Under the suppression of the psyker field jointly generated by countless psychic installations, the warp rift's influence had been reduced to a minimum.
Alliance citizens could even clearly see the boundary between the Warp and Realspace, distinct yet intertwined.
Throughout this crusade, which had lasted over ten years, not a single Alliance combat citizen had died. There had only been a negligible number of wounded, and the vast majority of the dead had been reinforcements from the Imperium.
Even so, none of those Imperial reinforcements believed the Alliance was deliberately using them as cannon fodder.
The death toll for the entire crusade, after all, amounted to only a