Mother City

Hesta suddenly recalled the anthropology books she had read in Director Elma's sitting room, recalled Mina Delid and the femur fossil she had mentioned. She suddenly realized that, back at the abbey, she had already touched the door leading to the time before the Great Blackout Era—she had simply overlooked that key term then.

"Does the legacy of the Golden Age mean books?" Hesta asked.

"Far more than that." Liz sat down at a nearby table. "Our world is divided into sixteen major districts. Do you know why there are sixteen?"

Hesta shook her head, and Liz began to explain.

"At the end of the Golden Age, war drove the entire world to ruin. Resources ran scarce, the population plummeted, and less than a century after the Great Blackout Era began, all public facilities had been destroyed. Buildings were burned down or bombed apart. You could no longer find schools, hospitals, or churches...

"No antibiotics, no vaccines. A sudden epidemic could wipe out nearly every newborn in a settlement at once. The maternal mortality rate during childbirth reached 15%, while child survival rates were below 40%.

"After the education system was lost, literacy rates rapidly declined from generation to generation. The books in libraries gradually became meaningless to most people, and one after another, they were burned for warmth to survive the winter. But once summer came, people had no answer to the heat. If temperatures of 40 degrees persisted for two weeks, it spelled disaster for everyone in a settlement over seventy...

"Everyone believed the world was ending. The old people, barely clinging to life, mourned everything about the civilized world and tried to call for order to be rebuilt. But the young people who had grown up amid the tide of ruins no longer cared about such things. They had their own jungle logic, obsessed with redrawing territories... In less than two hundred years, human technology had fallen back to an agrarian level—until the world's first Mother City appeared."

"...Mother City?"

"Yes." Liz's voice brimmed with warmth, as though she were speaking of her own homeland. "It was a dreamlike city, covering 34.12 square kilometers. Like a seed breaking through the earth, the vast city was empty of people, yet perfectly orderly.

"It was a surviving jewel of old civilization. Nuclear energy and solar power kept it running, while roughly two thousand robots constantly maintained the entire city. From the well-preserved buildings of the Mother City, people finally realized that the legends of the Golden Age were no dream—they had truly existed, and had suddenly descended among us like a miracle.

"After that, sixteen Mother Cities appeared around the world over the course of a single year. Relying on the libraries, research institutes, and automated factories within them, humanity recovered the flame of civilization. Many technologies inside the Mother Cities are still black boxes to us—we only know how to operate them, not the principles behind them, let alone how to reproduce them... But humanity had, after all, regained civilization's flame.

"It was only by relying on these sixteen Mother Cities that we reached where we are today. Districts 1 through 14 were named in the order their Mother Cities emerged. Districts 15 and 16 are rather special. To this day, humanity has not found a way to enter those two Mother Cities without causing damage, so they were set aside for the time being."

Liz looked at Hesta. "The Great Blackout Era began with the 'Star-Seizing Night' incident in 3812 and ended in the spring of 4001, when the first Mother City descended. It was a brief yet agonizingly long Darkest Hour in human history. Now every district is racing to decipher the technology of its own Mother City, but their focus is always on energy and military industry. Literature is merely an insignificant embellishment among them..."

Liz ended her introduction with a long, regretful sigh, then led Hesta over to a world map.

The first thing Hesta saw was District 3. It had been rendered with raised relief, and she reached out to lightly touch the elevations representing mountain ranges before slowly shifting her gaze nearby.

"What's the blue area? Why is it so big?"

Liz laughed. "It's the sea, Jane."

She gazed at the map. "We aren't far from the coast—only an hour's drive. It's just that applying for travel permission is terribly complicated. If I get an assignment opportunity later, I can take you to see it."

Then Liz pointed out the different regions on the map one by one. Hesta listened without a word, as though she were seeing this world for the first time today.

She saw that District 3 covered an enormous expanse, totaling 11.47 million square kilometers. It was the second-largest district on Earth by area, yet its Habitable Zone amounted to only 640,000 square kilometers—the rest was undeveloped "wasteland."

According to Liz, District 3's population distribution was extremely uneven. Tanyi City was the district's fourth-largest city, yet it housed roughly one-third of the district's population.

And District 14—in Hesta's imagination, ten districts ought to have lain between District 14 and District 3. Yet no—District 14 directly bordered District 3.

District 14 was enormous as well. If one calculated the absolute distance between here and District 14, it was still exceedingly far. Its total area reached a staggering 24.73 million square kilometers, nearly covering all the land on its continental plate from south to north. Its Habitable Zone covered 1.86 million square kilometers, nearly three times that of District 3.

She saw the boundless snowfields in northern District 14. Across that permafrost that never thawed year after year, there were almost no symbols marking towns or roads.

The world map merely hung quietly on the wall, yet Hesta, standing before it, felt as though she had been violently washed over by a flood.

At first, she tried to find Duanming Alley or Saint Anne Abbey on the map. Liz told her those places were too small to possibly be found on a world map.

So she turned to search for Severn Mountain, only to see a vast Severn Mountain Range. It gradually rose from the coast in northern District 3 and slowly extended inland, stretching to a jaw-dropping length.

Liz laughed again and said that Severn Mountain merely happened to share its name with the Severn Mountain Range. Severn Mountain outside Tanyi City was still too small to be marked on this map. If Hesta insisted on seeing it on a map, they could look for it on an electronic map later.

Hesta froze. When Liz had spoken of literature's purpose earlier, she had only half understood. When Liz mentioned the Golden Age's space exploration, she had not reacted much either. But now, as she silently faced the land and sea on the map, she clearly felt some part of her awareness of this world shatter.

She thought of the place where she had once lived, of the towering ridges beyond the abbey and the endless chain of mountains stretching beyond sight.

Severn Mountain was still small?

Then how large... was this world?

Hesta raised her head.

Staring at the map of the world, she felt her own smallness for the first time.

Thank you to Linglan yeh, Shihuai, Book Friend 20170520, Jinx ii, and Heya o for the tips and monthly votes (ω)