The twelve trillion troops of the Castle Faction entered the core area of the Light Empire at noon, and the difference from the western territories was immediately apparent. The cities here were genuinely wealthy. The minerals were abundant, including energy mines, the strategic resource that the Castle Lords couldn't pass up.
Every occupied area left behind a garrison and a mining detail. The supernaturals who had guarded these cities had died on the Nivara battlefield. The wealthy citizens had fled to the Imperial Capital. What remained were ordinary people who surrendered quietly and, for most of them, simply became subjects of whatever Castle Lord arrived first.
On the world chat channel, the mood was expansive.
[The core area makes everything west of the Nivara look like wasteland. Even with most resources pre-evacuated, what's left is worth more than everything we captured before combined.]
[This is just the beginning. Most of the core territory hasn't been touched yet.]
[It's a shame we're running out of time. The Demon Monarchs are on the Blood Moon, the Burning Legion is coming. If the Divine War weren't so close, we could take the entire central region.]
[Speaking of which, when Haru gets the God King's Throne and becomes a God King, his goal should be to sweep the entire universe. The Endless Continent is just one planet out of countless. When Haru moves on, who do you think would run this place?]
[Us. Obviously. We ask him to hand it to us to manage. In the eyes of a God King, the Endless Continent is just one planet. He's not staying here forever.]
[The vast universe has thousands of planets. That's the Great Aetherium's actual journey. The Endless Continent is just where it starts.]
This was the shape of the Castle Faction's thinking now. Haru as the inevitable ruler of the Endless Continent wasn't even debated, it was assumed as the baseline from which everything else followed.
No Castle Lord or Ranger would oppose him, not because they were forced to agree, but because Haru and the Great Aetherium had become something closer to faith for the entire faction. Any enemy of Haru would immediately become an enemy of every Castle Lord and Ranger on the continent.
There even seemed to be a mysterious force at work beneath the rational calculation, something subtly reshaping the Castle Lords and Rangers, orienting them toward Haru in a way that went beyond conscious choice. Whatever its nature, the effect was the same: the Castle Faction moved as one, with Haru at the center.
The strategic reality underneath was equally clear. The Castle Faction had millions of Gods, but no High Gods and no Supreme Gods. Any local empire could send out a single High God and cause catastrophic casualties to the castle faction's divine contingent.
A Supreme God could simply destroy it whole. The Great Aetherium was the umbrella that made everything possible. Three million Gods from the castle faction followed the Astral Cities specifically because without that umbrella, their entire army was vulnerable.
Together they were unstoppable. Alone they were at risk from any God-level native faction.
…
Three million Castle Faction Gods trailed the three Astral Cities through the sky above the core area, making no moves of their own. Below them, the army spread through the territory like water through a broken dam. Thousands of large-scale legions pushed in every direction, occupying cities and noble territories as they found them.
The contrast with the Dark Empire's advance was total. The Castle Faction bypassed civilians entirely. Remaining supernaturals who surrendered were kept alive. Ordinary people who chose to join the castle faction rather than flee to the imperial capital were accepted. The castle lords didn't kill what they could convert, and they had nothing to gain from killing civilians.
The Dark Empire left nothing alive. The cities it passed through were stripped bare and depopulated. Civilians killed or converted into undead and alchemy puppets, every scrap of resource taken.
The difference was becoming increasingly visible to the Light Empire's common people caught between the two advancing forces, and the math was simple: surrender to the Castle Faction and live, or be found by the Dark Empire and die.
Large numbers of Light Empire civilians who couldn't reach the Imperial Capital were drifting toward the Castle Faction's occupied areas specifically because of this.
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