dkrc Chapter 63 The Debate on Living Erosion
Chapter 63 The Debate on Living Erosion
Chapter 63 The Debate on Living Erosion
After the fall of Gransol Fortress, a sense of pessimism and despair once hung over the Nora.
Both Solitz and Onze saw a large number of cases of people defecting to the enemy by entering the Black Mist in a short period of time.
The proportion that successfully transformed into active erosion is unknown, but after extinguishing this wave of active erosion, Nora returned to a relatively calm state overall.
It's better to live a miserable life than to die a good death; only a few people have the courage to face the darkness and the unknown.
According to Ellu's statistics, during the nearly one hundred years of peace that followed, especially the first 70 years, those who voluntarily entered the Black Fog were mostly desperate criminals driven to the brink of despair, or fanatical believers of certain extreme sects.
They viewed the black mist and the gods and demons as channels for selection and blessing from a certain "god," seeking power or liberation in this way.
This aligns with Nan'an's understanding.
The country is blessed with abundant corn and potatoes, and also enjoys bumper harvests of soybeans and wheat year after year.
The granaries of the Nora city-states remained full, and grain prices continued to decline year after year.
To ensure population growth, the Senate and the church established welfare institutions to care for orphans and abandoned infants.
Even ordinary people who do not want to raise their children can entrust them to welfare institutions for care.
Suiyue is a beneficiary of this system.
Until she left the Dawn Church's orphanage at the age of 15, she had never experienced true "hunger".
Besides frequently complaining about the lack of variety in food and craving more meat, she also mentioned that someone had taught her basic knowledge during that period.
I still cherish the carefree days of teaching martial arts and self-defense skills.
"I want to go back to school." This clearly shows Suiyue's longing.
With basic food and clothing secured, many large city-states in Solitz have pushed the basic social welfare programs implemented by the Senate to the limit of what their current administrative capacity can achieve.
In such an environment, as long as one is not completely lazy or mentally unstable, living near a large city-state and engaging in some basic labor, even if one chooses to lie down and rely on cheap staple foods such as potatoes and corn to fill one's stomach, one can still survive.
There are no natural disasters that sweep across the entire region, and "man-made disasters" caused by the misconduct of local officials are also relatively rare.
Against this backdrop, however, the number of live erosions has seen a disturbing "counter-trend growth," and is showing a terrifying trend of an increasingly younger age structure.
Over the past 30 years, the average age of the living worms eradicated by Elu has dropped from 30 to 20 years.
This data includes many "centenarians" like Gunn, which lowers the average, but it still presents a terrifying trend of increasingly younger people, which is enough to illustrate many problems.
Suiyue was a little confused: "What's the connection between this data and the video recording?"
Nan'an stared at the dissected troll illustration and asked, "Is the rate of missing infants very high?"
"As expected of an adventurer who dealt with barbaric religions during the Gray Star era," Gunn remarked. "Only large city-states have the resources to compile this data, and in actual surveys, the population of city-states with citizenship is prioritized, which leads to misleading results in official data."
Although her reaction was a little slow, Suiyue understood everything at this moment.
Her voice was strained: "Someone—in secret, starting from childhood—is cultivating living erosion?"
"It's less about nurturing and more about selection. Even those who directly fuse with fresh fragments of gods and demons in the black mist may not be able to awaken, let alone obtain fragments through death and erosion?" Gunn said with self-deprecation. "Perhaps we Erlu are just ignorant and unable to understand what kind of skills they have mastered."
The crow sneered, "Wake up. If they had mastered the skill of using the God and Demon fragments without risk, the number of Living Erosion we have seen would be far more than this. They wouldn't need to try to find new ways to obtain God and Demon fragments. I'm afraid that even now, the attrition rate is still astonishing."
Suiyue swallowed.
"Loss rate"
It sounds like they're discussing objects.
She couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if she hadn't been fortunate enough to be adopted and cared for by the Church of Dawn when she was a child.
She felt she was quite lucky to have been able to live happily in the wild until she met Nan'an.
Nan'an's thinking has already extended along a deeper line.
"The Senate's implementation of this safety net of social welfare and population growth mechanisms was a long-term strategy after careful study of resource carrying capacity limits. A large population base can foster more possibilities and is more likely to give birth to geniuses or miracles capable of changing the status quo."
"The Senate is screening for geniuses, and now, there are also people parasitizing this grand plan and carrying out their own screening."
He looked at Gunn thoughtfully: "This is probably closely related to the recent uproar about the Living Erosion, isn't it?"
'
"I'm often curious about what kind of education you received before you became an adventurer who lives on the edge of a knife."
Pure adventurers are often driven by their killing instincts and the desire for instant gratification, their thinking squeezed into a corner by the pressure of survival. But you—your way of thinking and insight cannot be honed in the wilderness.
Gunn raised his glass, inviting everyone to clink glasses.
"What are we celebrating?" Suiyue asked, puzzled.
"It's not a celebration, it's just praise," the Raven laughed. "It's really not easy for you to summon an external brain."
Suiyue remained noncommittal; in any case, she had experienced the intellectual gap with Nan'an more than once in her interactions with him.
As long as I don't hold Nan'an back, it doesn't matter if I'm slow or not.
Gunn is no longer beating around the bush; the topic of erosion that is currently being hotly debated in Solitz is far more complex than most people imagine.
After the fall of Gransor Fortress, along with the Living Erosion Tide, came the surrender faction.
Despondency and despair, choosing to numb oneself and live for the moment—this was the core ideology of the initial surrender faction.
Fortunately, both Soliz and Onze managed to stabilize the situation in time.
The will to resist, insisting on surviving as intelligent beings rather than as tainted by the black fog, firmly held sway over the leadership of both countries.
On Soliz's side, the dragon Dunakalon is stationed, serving as a spiritual totem and ensuring the unwavering stance of Soliz's high-ranking combatants.
In the more than one hundred years since dissent was set aside, the idea of surrender has not disappeared.
Unlike the earlier Living Erosion Tides that directly plunged into the Black Mist in search of awakening.
They had no intention of taking the risk themselves to gamble on that slim and crazy possibility.
Instead, they became fixated on finding another path.
A theoretically safer and more "controllable" path that can achieve individual awakening and adaptation through research, analysis, and even application of fragments of gods and demons.
This group no longer truly believed that the Nora could defeat the Black Mist and achieve final victory.
They viewed the black mist and the arrival of gods and demons as an irreversible, periodic "reshuffling" of the world.
It is either a divine selection or a test of civilization and life by the world itself.
They see the Black Fog as the new rules and the new era, and Nora's continued resistance now seems laughable and pathetic, insignificant in the face of the overwhelming tide.
At any given moment, when the black mist undergoes another transformation, everything will come to an end.
Since the "Black Fog Era" is destined to arrive and cannot be stopped, the most important thing is no longer futile resistance, but how to adapt in advance.
Huoya bluntly stated that they were hiding behind many organizations.
They secretly supported, funded, and even personally conducted various forbidden studies on the fragments of gods and demons and the nature of the black mist.
The Senate promoted related research, and countless upright scholars, with enthusiasm, followed one after another, voluntarily becoming kindling to burn themselves, using their own bodies to obtain data, all for the sake of understanding and ultimately defeating the Black Mist.
The group that claims to be waiting for the black fog to descend actually has the opposite core purpose in their research.
Everything was done to make themselves and their organizations the first beneficiaries of the new era.
It is the existence of this group that allows the living erosion to continue.
A large number of unnoticed marginalized people, children, and those who went missing became their experimental subjects.
Even if a very small number of individuals are lucky enough to awaken through gods and demons and become relatively stable living erosions, they are often easily abandoned by these behind-the-scenes manipulators because their strength does not meet expectations.
The difference in the upper and lower limits of the superpowers brought by gods and demons is enormous, and the side effects and distortions caused by the fusion of gods and demons are even more disparate.
Those that can perfectly integrate, have no obvious side effects, and stably utilize divine and demonic power are extremely rare.
Being discarded under such a powerful filtering mechanism is actually a relatively merciful outcome.
More often than not, they would deliberately lead these ignorant, captive-raised Eclipses to designated locations to create trouble and attract the attention of the Evil Deer or local law enforcement knights.
Using the heads and blood of these abandoned children who have no research value and are not worthy of further training to whitewash the truth.
"The threat has been eliminated, and Elkeson has once again defended the peace of Soliz!"
They would blend into the crowd, singing praises to Ellu alongside the general public, thus protecting the more core organizations and experiments, allowing them to continue operating silently in the shadows.
Suiyue clenched her fists, her anger barely contained.
"Everyone says that the Elu are the most outstanding. You have extensive experience fighting gods and demons and the Living Eclipse, so how could you not find any trace of these people? You haven't been able to find a single clue in all these years?"
“The Eresh can’t watch over every corner, and they’re not vicious thugs looking to make a name for themselves. They’re a secret society that will hide even deeper once they’re discovered,” Gunn sighed. “We’ve tracked down and destroyed many strongholds, but with little success. Even now, with its territory swallowed by the Black Mist, Nora is still too big.”
Suiyue was furious.
She was a hot-blooded, righteous fool, and her willingness to risk her life to fight against the living dead speaks volumes.
"I don't understand, what does all this have to do with the discussions about the Living Erosion?"
Nan'an rubbed her horns to soothe Niu Niu's emotions: "Because all along, Solitz's strategy for dealing with the Living Eclipse has been to exterminate them. Once you become a Living Eclipse, it is assumed that you are no longer human, and anyone can punish and kill you—the Elu are probably the first group to be tested."
The crow gave a bitter laugh.
As someone who experienced the Battle of Gransor, his attitude towards gods, demons, and the Living Eclipse can basically be summarized in one word.
kill!
If you kill too many, there will be no more living erosion.
If live erosions keep appearing, it means the killing wasn't done quickly enough.
The accusations of being cold-blooded and ruthless likely stem from his period of brutal executions, during which he was always cold and rude in his interactions with nobles and related figures.
But as time went on, and after killing living erosion for decades, he became increasingly clear about what he was fighting against, and began to waver.
His blade was sharp enough, and his execution of the living was swift enough.
In the fight against gods and demons, he always took the lead and achieved victories.
But why did the number of living erosions increase instead of decrease during Nora's century of peace?
He saw increasingly younger living erosions.
They saw a child who had surrendered voluntarily, begged for atonement, and actively cooperated in disclosing information about other living beings, even though the child was not yet an adult.
Raven, unusually, did not kill anyone. He gathered all the children in the stronghold under guard and awaited the Senate's decision.
Then he received the execution order.
Executing the living has always been the absolutely correct method of execution, but for the first time, the Raven protested to the Senate.
He felt it shouldn't be like this.
Assuming these children are telling the truth, they were unaware of their ordeal from childhood, becoming experimental subjects for certain individuals from a very young age. All their understanding of the world stems from false education and indoctrination.
They should be innocent.
The crow admitted that it might be getting old, and had become sentimental, even starting to defend the despicable living eclipse.
These children may grow up to be thugs who harm the local community, and their incomplete divine and demonic power may erupt at some point, turning into a disaster that sweeps across the entire city.
But if things continue like this, won't the people lurking in the shadows be secretly pleased?
All they need to do is tell the selected superior erosions what fate the Senate has dealt with those who voluntarily submit to the erosion, and then everyone will see Solitz and Onzer as enemies.
Even if they one day clearly learn that the very people around them who forced them to endure inhuman torture from childhood to adulthood were the hypocritical experimenters, they would never be able to stand on Nora's side.
The crow's dilemma failed to save the children, but within the Senate, at least the chief senators, an unprecedented argument ensued.
Since the fall of Gransall, there has been no such heated debate, with the two sides' views clashing fiercely and almost escalating into a physical fight.
Whether or not to accept live erosion has become an unavoidable issue.
Solitz had to admit that they were facing not only the gods and demons surging in the black mist and the endless stream of living erosions, but also those with ulterior motives who had already set their sights on their kind from the Black Mist Era—of course, they didn't know if calling them kind was accurate, but at least for now, they couldn't sense any humanity in these people.
Nan'an never expected that there was such a complex background behind this debate on the living eclipse.
This is a unique struggle over the path of Soliz, which will directly determine the future situation in the fight against gods and demons and the Living Eclipse, as well as the basic code of conduct for everyone.
To exterminate them all?
Or should we select from the living, give these persecuted poor people a way out, and give them the opportunity to offer their loyalty to Solitz and prove themselves?
He glanced at the silent Gunn, then at the gruff-faced Crow, pondered for a moment, and asked.
"What is your stance, you two?"
"The Ravens support giving them a chance to prove themselves, I support extermination," Gunn laughed. "Our stance is exactly the opposite of what outsiders imagine."