Book 5, Chapter 47: Floating Point Plan
Chapter 47: Floating Point Plan
After Sky City was locked in place, the Harpies’ had no way of continuing their dominance.
While inside the city, the Harpies were naturally invincible, but as soon as they left the city, they were easily smacked around.
As such, the Harpies’ offensive capabilities were far inferior to their defensive capabilities, causing them to become incredibly isolated.
This gradually became more and more unfavorable for the Harpies as the environment began to deteriorate.
First of all, the territory in which the Harpies reigned supreme was simply too small.
Even though Sky City was powerful, it was only a city. How much ground could it possibly cover?
Other races had thousands of cities in their territory, while Sky City’s cannons had a reach of only a few thousand kilometers. Outside of this range, no one feared them, and would even beat them up.
No matter how few the Harpies were in numbers, they were still an entire race. With no one left to keep them company, their numbers began to grow while their territory remained stagnant. Their lives became more and more difficult as a result - even though the sky was vast, it couldn’t produce anything!
The Harpies were forced to rack their brains for an idea.
In the 5800th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies mobilized their armies for the sake of obtaining new territory.
This time, they chose to fight the humans - the leader of the Harpies’ religious organization decided to attack the humans and the Craftsmen to inflict divine punishment on them.
However, after five thousand years, these humans were not the same as the humans who had set up the Freedom Alliance all those years ago.
Under the leadership of Gu Changzhi, the emperor of the Illustrious Divine Dynasty, the human race was at their strongest.
Through the course of the intense battle, the Harpies suffered immense casualties, and their ruler, Withered Edge, was gravely wounded. Scarlet Dream committed suicide after returning to Sky City.
In the 6200th year of the New Star Era, Withered Edge’s old wounds broke open again, killing him. Skymist Eagle inherited the throne.
When Skymist Eagle took the throne, most Harpies had resigned themselves to a fate of isolation. However, Skymist Eagle proposed that Sky City alone was not enough to increase the strength of the Harpies on its own. The Harpies needed more territory and more strength.
This was when the Floating Points plan was proposed.
The Floating Points plan required the Harpies to develop their building abilities to create small floating cities with powerful offensive capabilities. This way, they would be able to ensure the safety of both Sky City and the Harpy Race as a whole.
These Floating Points were just miniature replicas, satellite versions of Sky City.
The Harpies commissioned lots of manpower to try and find items that could store kinetic energy, as well as putting aside their arrogance to try and reach a compromise with the Metalskins and Craftsmen. Those two races were not very happy with the other Intelligent Races either. After making a vow to the Harpy’s mother goddess, some of the Craftsmen and Metalskins shifted alliance and once again came under the Harpies’ wing.
The Harpies did their utmost to meet the needs of these two races, and even in the present day, these two races possessed immense sway amongst the Harpies.
In the 7400th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies managed to kill the emperor of the second Arcana Kingdom, obtaining a piece of equipment that could secondarily store energy. This was a byproduct formed when creating Sark’s Nuclei. With it as the motor, the Craftsmen and Metalsking were able to create a small-scale floating city, the “Origin Light Castle.”
In the 8700th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies relied on the power of their religious organization and the mother goddess’s Origin Energy Pool to create a second floating city, the “Harpy Star.”
In the 9600th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies obtained a large quantity of Flying Spirit Stones, which they used to create the third floating city, the “Flying Spirit City.”
In the 11200th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies and Ravagers fought once again. By relying on the three floating cities, the Harpies emerged victorious.
In the 13000th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies used the bone of an Origin Beast they had taken from the Ravagers to create a fourth floating city, the “Origin Energy Demonic City.”
In the 14800th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies found a confused Prehistoric Beast. They first lured it to Sky City before attacking and suppressing it. By sacrificing hordes of heroic spirits and religious disciples, they were able to successfully tame it. They erected a fifth floating city on its back, known as the “Chaos Tower.”
The creation of the fifth floating city multiplied the Harpies’ strength, and their influence began to grow.
By that point, the Harpies had already burned through all of their resources on hand. It was basically impossible for them to think of another unique way of creating a floating city.
As a result, they decided to duplicate the fourth floating city by focusing their attention on the skeletal remains of the Origin Beast.
Origin Beasts possessed incredible might. Often times, their remains would still possess unique attributes and powers. The Origin Bone Scepter was a prime example of this.
The “Origin Energy Demonic City” was constructed from the bones of a bird-type Origin Beast. It had left behind a backbone filled to the brim with energy. This backbone could fly through the air autonomously, so it was basically carrying the entire city. Of course, the Harpies had used other techniques as well to further strengthen this floating city, but the fact that this Origin Bone was the core of the floating city was indisputable.
All of the Harpies hoped to find yet another Origin Beast’s remains to create a new floating city.
In the 17200th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies found yet another corpse of an Origin Beast that had passed away in its sleep.
However, this corpse was located in human territory.
In order to obtain the Origin Beast bones within human territory, the Harpies purposefully sowed discord and enraged the Prosperous Emperor. As a result, the Prosperous Emperor annulled the Western Mountain Treaty that had existed for ten thousand years.
The Harpies went to war with the humans.
The Harpies, who possessed five floating cities, felt that victory was within reach, but they were quickly sent reeling back into reality.
Even though the Illustrious Divine Dynasty had begun to decline in power, the Harpies still could mount no resistance. The Commander-In-Chief, Lin Zhonghui, led his troops to a commanding victory against the Harpies, sinking the “Flying Spirit City” and inflicting serious damage on the “Harpy’s Star”, in addition to slaughtering over five hundred thousand Harpy soldiers.
The Harpies’ ruler at the time fled back to Sky City, then killed himself, following in Scarlet Dream’s footsteps.
Harpy leadership exchanged hands a few more times as they began to adopt their former policy of isolation. Their satisfaction with what they had made it so that they closely guarded the four floating cities. This equilibrium remained until Eternal Night assumed the throne.
Eternal Night was an incredibly young ruler. Unlike his predecessors, however, Eternal Night had slaughtered his way onto the throne.
This young, ambitious Harpy emperor believed that, if the Harpies were to grow stronger, they would need to cast aside this complacent mentality and seize what they were after.
He decided to follow in the footsteps of Skymist Eagle.
Following a period of internal slaughter, by which Eternal Night cemented his authority, he began to follow Skymist Eagle’s path closely. Unfortunately, the Origin Beast remains from back then had been destroyed in the large-scale conflict many years prior, so Eternal Night could only wait until he was able to find the remains of another Origin Beast.
He had waited until very recently.
Su Chen and Patelocke immediately realized what the Harpies were after as soon as they connected the words “Floating Point Six” with the fact that the corpse of an Origin Beast was right beneath their feet.
“I’m such an idiot. I should have thought of that possibility as soon as you told me that there was a dead Origin Beast here,” Su Chen muttered.
“So that’s what your plan was.” Death’s Shadow was also stunned.
Only Patelocke, who had lain dormant for tens of thousands of years, was unaware of this segment of Harpy history.
As such, Su Chen was forced to explain it to him.
“So that’s how it is,” Patelocke sighed. “So Isador was in fact able to fulfill his dream and create a source of endless energy.”
“You know the inventor of Sark’s Nuclei?” Su Chen was a bit surprised.
Patelocke replied, “Yes, he was once a student of my institute, a student of my student. He left an impression on me - he was incredibly talented genius fixated on creating some kind of limitless energy source. I had encouraged him in the past and expressed my faith in him, but unfortunately I died before I witnessed him grow to maturity. So he really succeeded, huh?”
The Arcana Kingdom’s history was incredibly deep. So many important characters had risen and fallen throughout the tens of thousands of years that had passed. For Patelocke to actually have met one of these individuals in person was undoubtedly the whims of fate.
Flowing Flame Oriole couldn’t resist saying, “Isador Sark created this unlimited source of energy under the direction of the Harpies!”
Even as a captive, the Harpies’ unique arrogance made her unwilling to give up on the glory and prestige she felt like she deserved.
“Oh? Is that how you understand history?” Patelocke chuckled. “It does make your accomplishment seem much more glorious, but unfortunately the Isador Sark I knew had this dream from the very beginning. The Harpies were once our servants. Your arrogance is not even worth bringing up before me. Do you really think you are worthy of directing a genius Arcana Master? In my opinion, it seems much more likely that he was the one using you, right? However, the Arcana Kingdom was unable to sustain itself in the end, giving you the opportunity to rise to power. It must be said, though - the Harpies must be quite clever if they were able to turn the immensely powerful Sky City into a turtle shell. Hahahaha.”
As Patelocke spoke, he began to chuckle derisively.
The Harpies’ greatest shame was brought to light just like that. Flowing Flame Oriole flushed with embarrassment and anger.
“Alright, let’s get onto the main topic. Since that was your plan, what’s with this bug hive?”
“That hive will be the carrier of Floating Point Six. Throughout the past tens of thousands of years, we have never given up on our quest of creating a sixth floating city. This hive is a carrier that we found off in a distant, faraway realm. It possesses an incredibly powerful consciousness, and it can also produce an endless supply of these unique bugs, which make for the most natural soldiers. The mobility of these floating cities has always been a big problem, but using the hive as a carrier resolves that issue. Because it is alive, it has the ability to fly on its own. In that faraway realm, we observed a massive brood mother flying through the air, bearing the weight of countless bugs attached to her body. We believe that, if we can cultivate it into our next floating city, this next floating city will far surpass any we have created before. Its strength power even be comparable to the might of Sky City itself.”
“So why put it here?”
“Because it still has weaknesses. Even though its consciousness is powerful, its physical body is very weak. This is actually a big problem for this creature. It is not nearly strong enough yet, so we must think of a way to make it truly powerful.”
“So that’s why you brought it here? To extract the remains of the Gold-Devouring Ape? But this time, you weren’t planning on using it as the main backbone of the floating cities but as fodder!” Patelocke was stunned. “Heavens, what extravagance!”
“So how exactly did you find this place? And how did you come into contact with the Rong Clan in the first place?”
“Everything is as the mother goddess has foretold,” Flowing Flame Oriole replied.