Chaos City.
After the upheaval in the Divine Court.
The population here had fallen by nearly half.
That was only because Will-Bukelin had sacrificed himself to save them. Without him, even saying one in ten survived would have been optimistic.
It could well have been one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand.
The surging flood was only one part of the disaster. The other was the tremor that shook the entire Barbarian Lands!
Most people had died in the tremors.
After that catastrophe, Chaos City had only a little over five hundred thousand residents left.
Only one city remained: the Chaos City Main City.
It encompassed the Four Guardian Cities to the east, south, west, and north, with the Inner City at its center.
An Kai had proposed this layout, and Wayne had made a few "minor adjustments"...
The former desert had become an isolated island.
Stranded in the ocean, it now covered only half the area of the former Bukelin Duchy.
How large had the desert originally been?
An Kai did not know. He only knew that before the Divine Court appeared, the Goodness Home had marked 5,342 oasis rest stops across the desert.
But now...
After checking, only 333 oasis rest stops remained...
The [side story] said the [Divine Court] ocean had swallowed four-fifths of the desert...
But An Kai felt that figure was wrong. Forget four-fifths-even nine-tenths was possible!
Less desert meant fewer magical beasts, which meant fewer sources of magic cores for An Kai.
Moreover, the changes in the Divine Court had submerged the trade routes built with the flesh and blood of countless orcs. An Kai no longer had a source of lower-grade magic stones.
Now, despite having [Spell Fusion] to greatly reduce the cost of increasing spell proficiency, An Kai no longer