With the Joint Declaration signed by the nations in Isara, order had largely returned to the world.
Lenburg had united the Southern Central Nations of the Northern Continent, turning the continent's former four major powers into five.
But no one knew what standard to use to rank the nations by military strength, overall power, or anything else.
By troop numbers, Lenburg had only a little over a hundred thousand regular soldiers, and that number was still shrinking. Its Beyonder Marionette units across the various branches numbered only tens of thousands, which hardly sounded like much.
Yet the recent war had proved that those tens of thousands of Beyonder troops, together with Lenburg's Beyonders, were enough to fight three wars at once.
Lenburg's arms factories had not stopped for a moment. They kept producing new weapons and Beyonder Marionettes.
After receiving payments from the other nations for technology and machinery, Odys allocated most of the money to national defense.
In Odys's judgment, the world war that had just ended resembled the First World War he remembered. The fighting was over, but tensions between nations remained acute.
He also seemed to see the first signs of another Divine War. In the Lord of Mysteries World, disputes between nations alone generally were not enough to start a war. If tensions between Gods escalated, however, war could break out.
So Odys kept preparing for war. At the very least, he wanted Lenburg's conventional forces to be able to take on two opponents at once.
News that Lenburg was still expanding its military soon reached the other nations, and they began expanding theirs as well. Though the war had ended, none disbanded their armies. Instead, they held frequent exercises.
Lenburg did not sell its military technology, so the other nations increased investment in military research.