"Yes, they should be here. I saw a few of their people disappear when we were first summoned here," said Arin, looking around the gathering place as he tried to remember exactly where he had seen them go. He had noticed several people vanish almost immediately after their arrival.
"Good, then I suppose that we should get proper rotations worked out, as I don't believe that any of us can fight for more than a week straight," said Jordan as he looked around the open field. His expression was casual, but the point he was making was rather important, especially considering the number of people involved and the uncertainty surrounding how long they would need to remain in the area. No matter how strong someone was, there were still certain fundamental needs that even the System had not removed. The people here might be capable of fighting for far longer than ordinary humans, but none of them had somehow become beings that no longer needed rest.
Everyone nodded at that. Sleep was still necessary, and while some of them had discovered ways to reduce the amount of time they needed to spend resting, nobody had completely escaped the fundamental requirements of having a physical body. Even cultivators had limits, especially when they were expected to maintain constant combat readiness. Fighting continuously for days could be managed, but doing so for weeks without proper rotation would eventually cause exhaustion to accumulate. That was something none of them could afford when they did not know how long this operation would last.
"Great, then I suggest that we split everyone up into three shifts so that we can properly rotate everyone," said Jordan. He looked around once more, clearly expecting the others to understand the general idea without needing him to explain every little detail. Three shifts would allow one group to remain active while another rested and the third could prepare, recover, or handle whatever other responsibilities needed attention. It was not a perfect system, but it was considerably better than simply allowing everyone to fight until they collapsed.
"Now, I don't know the best distribution of everyone's members, so I expect all of you to set up proper shifts for your own people," Jordan added. With that, he began walking away, laughing as though he had just managed to avoid a particularly annoying piece of work. He had given them the basic framework, but the actual organization had conveniently become someone else's responsibility. The others watched him leave for a moment before slowly realizing exactly what he had done.
"Damn it, he pushed his own work onto us," someone muttered as the rest of the gathered people started clearing out and going their own way. There was no real point in complaining about it, though, because Jordan was already gone and there were considerably more important things happening outside. They had more than enough time to catch up with one another after everyone had dealt with their own immediate affairs. For now, the only thing that truly mattered was making sure the people guarding the secret realm did not exhaust themselves.
That was because, despite all the planning and discussion, a large number of creatures were currently pouring out of the portal. They emerged in waves, immediately attempting to kill anything that stood in their way, only to be hacked apart by the people positioned around the portal. The fighting had become almost routine in its brutality, with creatures appearing and dying so quickly that those further away barely had time to notice what had happened. The portal itself continued to function as though none of the chaos around it mattered.
There was another complication that needed to be considered as well. Quite a few of the people who had been teleported into the area had appeared relatively close to the portal, which meant corrupted creatures would be teleported out if they stayed within its effective range. Because of that, they could not simply keep everyone concentrated around the portal indefinitely. They would have to slowly withdraw and redistribute their forces so that the balance they had established was not disrupted by people suddenly disappearing.
The small village that Gaia had created was outside the range in which the portals would automatically spawn corrupted creatures. That made it a useful place where people could stay without constantly worrying about being burned by the people defending the portal. Nobody really understood why the portals automatically spawned corrupted creatures for every human in their range. They could have asked Gaia about it, of course, but there were considerably more important questions that needed answers.
There was also the possibility that Gaia simply would not answer. She had never been particularly interested in explaining every rule of the universe to humanity, especially when she believed that humans were supposed to discover certain things for themselves. And while everyone respected her power, nobody was particularly interested in deliberately asking a question when they were not sure they wanted to hear the answer. For the moment, understanding the portal's automatic clearing mechanism could wait.
Meanwhile, Gaia was occupied with a much larger problem. She was trying to determine the best way to deal with the corrupted humans who had begun to fester throughout the United States, and the more she investigated, the worse the situation appeared to become. There were considerably more corrupted people in positions of influence than she had initially expected. Their influence had spread into companies, families, government institutions, and other organizations that had enough authority to affect the response to the secret realms.
Then again, Gaia could not have expected much better. The United States had spent the previous century presenting itself as a nation built around certain morals while repeatedly failing to live up to many of them. From Gaia's perspective, the corruption was particularly obvious because she could see things that ordinary humans could not. She could see the connections between people, the hidden influence of corrupted individuals, and the ways in which power could be abused while remaining technically protected by the structures of society.
As far as Gaia was concerned, quite a few of the most powerful companies and families in the country were completely corrupted. They had accumulated enough influence that removing them would not simply mean eliminating a few individuals. Their disappearance would create holes throughout the systems they controlled, and those holes would need to be filled by people who were not equally compromised. Unfortunately, the same problem existed within the highest levels of government.
Congress was among the worst problems Gaia had discovered. In her eyes, it was filled with opportunists, many of whom had become deeply entangled with the corrupted humans controlling parts of the country. If Gaia removed the corrupted people as she believed she needed to, Congress would suffer enormous losses. The problem was not simply whether those people deserved to die; the greater problem was what would happen to the country once so many powerful individuals suddenly disappeared.
If Gaia killed all of them at once, the United States would fall into an enormous panic. Far too many hidden connections would suddenly be exposed, and the resulting power vacuum could be even worse than the one created in Russia. At least Russia's hidden rulers were still alive and continued to control the country from behind the scenes. In the United States, half of those hidden rulers could simply disappear, while the other half would need to be dealt with because they were almost as rotten as the people Gaia intended to remove.
Even the president, who appeared to Gaia to be one of the cleanest among the people currently holding that level of authority, was still surrounded by enough scandals that she believed he would eventually be executed as part of the purge. The situation was therefore not something that could be solved by simply removing a handful of obvious enemies. Gaia needed to think about what would come afterward. She needed someone who could take control of the country without being part of the corruption she was trying to eliminate.
As Gaia went through the list of possible replacements, she eventually found the candidate she considered ideal. Summer Woods would make a fine leader for the nation that Gaia believed needed to continue existing. Gaia did not particularly like the culture that had developed over the years, especially the influence of corporate greed, but she had no desire to see the United States simply collapse into chaos. Humanity needed functioning countries, and the United States was still an important part of the human civilization Gaia was trying to protect.
As for how Gaia would make sure that Summer became president after the entire debacle was over, the solution was surprisingly simple. She would increase the luck surrounding Summer. Gaia would not need to openly interfere with every decision or manipulate every person involved. She was the planet itself, and if she decided that someone was favored, the world around that person would naturally begin responding to that increased fortune.
Anyone who attempted to interfere with that luck would effectively be revealing themselves as a corrupted human. After all, ordinary people would not possess the ability to meaningfully counter Gaia's influence over the luck surrounding someone she had chosen to support. Those who could interfere would therefore be the exact people Gaia needed to identify. It was an elegant solution, at least from her perspective, because she could use the reaction to her influence as another method of exposing the corrupted humans hidden throughout the country.
As for those corrupted humans themselves, Gaia decided that their fate could be dealt with later. She had far more important matters to consider at the moment, especially because she had discovered what they were planning. She could see the corrupted humans laughing and feasting while believing that their plans were finally beginning to work. They believed that soon ten secret realms would completely burst open and descend upon the various cities where they were located.
Their goal was not simply to release monsters. They intended to use the secret realms and the resulting sacrifices to perform a ritual that would summon a portal completely under their control. Once they possessed such a portal, they believed they could use the world as a jumping-off point to conquer it and eventually devour the rest of the universe. Gaia would rather not allow that to happen, particularly because such an outcome would ultimately result in her own death.
The beings of the Void feasted on cultural energy, and they could use that energy for a variety of purposes. The most important purpose, however, was simple: they used it to grow stronger. That alone made the corrupted humans' plan dangerous enough, but the possibility of creating a stable connection for such beings to enter the universe made it considerably worse. Gaia had no intention of allowing creatures capable of devouring cultural energy to establish themselves directly on Earth.
There was also a reason the secret realms appeared whenever humans were nearby. The universe had created these secret realms as filters for creatures connected to the Void, and creatures capable of generating cultural energy were responsible for cleaning those filters. Humans were therefore not simply unfortunate victims who happened to wander too close to mysterious portals. Their existence was part of the reason the system surrounding the secret realms could continue functioning at all.
When a filter became ready to be replaced, the secret realm could be opened by beings such as humans if they happened to be in the vicinity. The exact process was not something Gaia had designed herself, but she understood the basic purpose behind it. If the universe did not maintain those filters, they could eventually stop working or even explode, and neither outcome was something the universe wanted. The presence of humans therefore provided a way for the filters to be cleaned before they became too dangerous.
Humanity's growth also affected the amount of Void energy being pulled through those filters. As humanity became stronger, the amount of Void energy that could pass through them increased as well. The universe understood that its cleaners were becoming stronger and assumed that stronger cleaners would still be capable of handling increasingly filthy filters. That relationship was one of the reasons Gaia understood just how dangerous humanity's continued development could become if the corrupted humans succeeded in turning the secret realms into tools under their direct control.