Chapter 3863 Eternal Game
As the Cerebral King continued to narrate history as it remembered the sequence of events, Ves began to piece it all together into a logical narrative.
Over the course of Purgatory's history, the initial batch of fish-whales created by the phase whale known as the Flesh Conqueror grew up into nine strong fish-whales.
Whether they were treated as test subjects, slaves, minions, assistants, handymen or children, Ves wasn't sure of that. The Flesh Conqueror had obviously brainwashed its biological products to regard it as a god creature, so the Cerebral King's storytelling was colored by his fanatical bias and worship of its creator.
This was an annoying factor that caused Ves to question the reliability and accuracy of the king fish's recollection of events.
If not for the fact that the Cerebral King was a gigantic fish-whale that was more than 20 times the size of a mech and possessed enough power to match a juggernaut, Ves would have ordered Venerable Joshua to beat up this unreliable narrator!
Still, it wasn't as if this was the first time that Ves encountered the nonsense of religious idiocy. Due to his wife, he had plenty of practice filtering out the superstitious elements of what he heard.
According to what he managed to piece together, Purgatory was like a slow-moving game of survival.
After the disappearance of the Flesh Conqueror, the 9 'kings' among the fish-whales slowly realized that they had an opportunity to take over the abandoned pocket space!
Multiple kingdoms once existed that each ruled over several different landmasses. Over time, the weaker ones had fallen while the stronger ones persisted.
The Hot Kingdom and the Phase Kingdom managed to withstand the test of time due to two distinct advantages.
First, they both occupied the continents that contained two key resources, namely energy and phasewater.
Through the arrangements of the original creator of the phase whale enclave, both the Blue Light Continent and the Lake Continent happened to be the ones that generated the most of these respective two resources!
The forces that could take over these two continents could quickly build up their strength! With an abundance of energy or phasewater, the occupiers held a clear advantage over their rivals!
However, this story did not quite add up yet to Ves. Hearing how powerful the Hot Kingdom and the Phase Kingdom had become, how come their powerful leaders failed to expand their territories time and time again?
NOT ENOUGH SOLDIERS. NOT ENOUGH FOOD. HIVE KING HOLDS MOST FOOD.
"Ah. That makes sense."
Every kingdom in Purgatory held on to a key advantage that served as their strongest pillar of support.
The Swarm Kingdom that had roughly conquered half of Purgatory did not possess a lot of energy or phasewater, but it had become the most successful of the surviving fish-whale kingdoms by leaning on one overwhelming advantage.
The Swarmers captured the greatest sources of nutrients produced in Purgatory!
MOST SPAWNING POOLS. MOST FOOD SOURCES. MANY SOLDIERS. TOO MANY SOLDIERS TO KILL. MANY KIN DEVOURED. TOO STRONG. CANNOT BE DEFEATED.
The expeditionary forces had become quite familiar with the Swarm Kingdom's disgusting reliance on quantity over quality. Even if their fish-whales were not that exceptional due to the limited amount of energy and phasewater as available resources, it didn't matter as long as a tide of grunt fish-whales could exhaust and overwhelm a lot of defenders!
This had led to the Swarm Kingdom rising up as the largest of them all by holding on to 9 resource-rich continents. Each of them produced resources that allowed the Swarmers to produce even more of their own kind, thereby causing them to develop an overwhelming numerical advantage!
"How strong is the Swarm Kingdom compared to the other surviving kingdoms?" Ves curiously asked.
TOO STRONG. STRONGER THAN THE REST. CAN CRUSH ANY OF US. TOO MANY SOLDIERS TO KILL.
The immensely long survival game had already reached the later stages by the time humans first arrived in the phase whale enclave. The balance between the kingdoms had long shifted to a situation where the Swarm Kingdom alone had made so many conquests that it was able to mop up its rivals at any time it wanted!
The Cerebral King did not care to hide how formidable the Swarm Kingdom and its Hive King truly were. Though the Swarmers were little more than drones to their sovereign, they obeyed and fought to the death without scruples.
Even if hundreds of thousands of Swarmer fish-whales died in a single battle, as long as the enemies suffered enough casualties, the balance between the kingdoms would definitely shift in the favor of the Swarmers in the long run!
EROSION. SWARM SOLDIERS KILL OTHERS. OTHERS KILL SWARMERS. BODIES LEFT BEHIND BUT STRONG SOLDIERS ALSO KILLED. NOT WORTH IT. LOST TOO MANY STRONG SOLDIERS. WEAK SOLDIERS REMAIN. MUST MAKE THEM STRONGER AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. CANNOT LET HIVE KING ERODE MY KINGDOM.
"So the fish-whale raid that attacked you the other day…"
The Cerebral King stared down at Ves with a desolate expression.
EROSION. UNSTOPPABLE.
The king fish conveyed those words with a strong sense of defeat and futility.
It was as if the Cerebral King was put in the position of Sisyphus who kept trying to roll a boulder up a hill, only for the rock to fall back down each time.
Ves sympathized a bit with the Cerebral King. How would he feel if he was put in the same position as this fish-whale? Being able to foresee your own doom but being unable to do anything to stop this disaster must be maddening!
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