Dragon City.
Atop the Looking Dragon Platform.
The man seemed never to have called Wu Kuang just now. Instead, he calmly studied an extraordinarily unusual document in his hand.
Calling it a document was not quite appropriate.
It was a strange fragment condensed from mental strength.
It was also a sequence of images, formed like a recording.
Within the images stood a vast golden hall.
Inside the hall, however, were strange, illusory screens, each displaying flickering numbers.
Every flicker of every number quickened the breathing of many people below, as though every change affected their fortunes and their very lives.
Yet within these images, behind those flickering numbers, lay a fluctuation others could scarcely comprehend. Everything converged within the enormous, equally golden, peculiar core above this vast hall.
Only the man before it could detect something amiss merely through a video like this.
At the same time, he gradually came to understand the changes these shifting numbers brought to the world.
Every change in a number might send some group somewhere in the world into bankruptcy or propel it to prominence.
The world influenced this place, while, in some unseen way, this place also influenced the world.
"The Heart of Gold..."
The man watched the fragment repeatedly, murmuring softly.
Then his sea of consciousness seemed to follow this mental fragment into the Golden Palace, into that peculiar core that, at first glance, somewhat resembled an enormous computer assembled from mechanical cores.
Just what was inside it?
Why had such an organization emerged in Eagle Country across the ocean during these two hundred years of mechanical development, even reaching the point where it could contend with Eagle Country's legitimate authority, the parliament?
Most importantly, it now even seemed intent on steering the parliament and all of Eagle Country.
So much so