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Chapter 311: Epilogue of Steam and brass - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2024-10-25 07:38:49 +0000 UTCThe world moved on. The death of Miria and Anise went almost unnoticed in history. The two of them had never made a huge impact on the world, after all.
Felix was a different matter. Felix’s efforts to bring industrialization to Zanna were well-remembered by the people. After Felix’s death, the new Minister of Industry in Zanna declared a day of mourning for him, with the reluctant agreement of the king. The man who brought trains, factories, and proper safety standards to the archipelago was gone. The minister delivered an impassioned speech about Felix's achievements the day of his death. Of course, most Zannans only had a vague understanding of who Felix was - but at Felix's death was far from unnoticed.
While many members in the government sought to commemorate Felix, others had little interest. After all, Felix had made plenty of friends, but he had also made some enemies. Some, like the king, tried to devalue Felix's accomplishments. Others simply didn't care now that he was dead. In the end, while Felix’s name lived on in history textbooks, his achievements were glossed over by many of them. However, he still secured a place in most history textbooks.
His name resurfaced a century later, when his notes on using affixations as a ‘container’ for affixations reappeared. Many alchemists were intrigued by Felix’s ideas, even though all of Felix’s notes recounted failure. However, while Felix’s old research notes sparked academic interest, due to a lack of results, this interest died down again after a decade. Nobody could quite figure out how to make Felix’s ideas work. Many Alchemists thought they should be feasible... but nobody could ever get them to work in practice. Thus, using an affixation to hold more affixations became a kind of legendary theoretical achievement. However, its impact outside of academic circles was minimal.
Time passed. Zanna took the factories that Felix built, and used it to build a stronger presence in the untamed rainforests. After decades of development, Zanna didn't remove all of the rainforests. However, the smaller islands were converted into hubs of industry and commerce. The endless poisonous animals and plants disappeared, at least on some islands. Zanna became a major industrial power as the world changed.
Of course, Zanna never reached the level of a great power that could change the world on its own. After all, Ennalia still had decades of industrial development that the rest of the world did not. They wasted some of their ‘head start’ trying and failing to suppress their former colonies, but they still had a huge advantage. Several other colonies also had more advantageous geography. Zanna had plenty of natural resources... but most of them were in the rainforest, where they were hard to use. Furthermore, Zanna's natural metal deposits were much lower than in some other parts of the world. However, Zanna still managed to carve out a position in global politics, even if not as a leader.
Of course, industry wasn’t the only thing that advanced after the deaths of the group. As decades passed, the ‘death zone’ on the Zelyrian continent started to fade away. It did not disappear, but it did shrink and became less dangerous. A century after Miria’s death, people started to explore the ruins of the old empires that once dominated the globe.
What they found was a ruined wasteland. After a century and a half of neglect, most of the human architecture in the area had crumbled. However, people started to learn rather interesting facts about the Worldstriders and the old world from the ruins. Specifically, they found some written records left behind by the Worldstrirders.
From this, people discovered a shocking secret: the worldstriders claimed that they were not from this dimension. At first, archeologists thought that this was a metaphorical statement. The consensus at the time was that the Worldstriders were talking about their 'birth' in Zelyrian labs. A few archeologists instead claimed that they had found some sort of religious text. Nobody took their claims at face value, though.
After all, it was common knowledge that the Zelyrians had created the Worldstriders in a lab. Decades later, an alchemist debunked this claim by accident. She managed to make contact with the ocean of souls while trying to study ‘teleportation.’ Rather than creating a 'portal,' she pulled water from the ocean of souls into her lab. Nobody was quite sure what she had done at first. The water she teleported in had a variety of odd properties, such as making anybody who touched the water feel weak and dizzy. At first, the alchemist believed that she had successfully created a portal with an unknown 'exit point'. But after more testing, she realized she had reached outside of the world itself and grabbed a bucket of water.
This allowed people to put more information together. Eventually, they realized that the worldstriders had not been making grandiose claims. They had been describing their origins in a very literal way.
From there, research into the Worldstriders and Zelyrians developed at breakneck paces. Many nations felt that extradimensional exploration might be the future. New dimensions could give nations endless space to expand and colonize. Interest in Worldstrider and Zelyrian technology, history, and culture rose like never before. People even started to understand the nature of 'essence.' This led to a new realization, that in the wider multiverse more types of essence existed. Finally, people discovered how the worldstriders had lived, and how they had died.
Long ago, the Zelyrians had betrayed the worldstriders. They used the bodies of the worldstriders as a sort of ‘battery,’ shackling them to the pocket dimension that the worldstriders had been trapped within. Through this energy source, the Zelyrians created two extra layers of reality. First, they created the worldstrider's ‘prison.’ It served as a prison, which also digested the worldstrider's bodies and broke them down into energy. This was why this layer of reality had acidic properties. The other thing the Zelyrians had created after betraying the Worldstriders was the pocket dimension. The Zelyrians had intended for this to be a sort of second world. It was meant to be abundant in resources, safe, and filled with manifestation essence.
Somehow, the Worldstriders had made the final step of this process backfire spectacularly. The process was never written down, but the results were evident. The Zelyrian empire had collapsed at the pinnacle of its power. However, the Worldstriders hadn't escaped their prison. After that, the Worldstriders started using leftover artifacts to improve their situation. They started to change their biology. They turned their acidic prison into an advantage. Hundreds of years later, for unknown reasons, they escaped.
After the worldstriders had escaped the pocket dimension, they had waged a one-sided war against the rest of the continent. Most historians didn't know exactly what they planned. There were too many cultural and biological differences to fully understand them. However, most historians believed that the Worldstriders wanted to rebuild the Zelyrian empire. But this time, instead of being the right hand of the Zelyrians, the Worldstriders wanted to take over for themselves.
During the war, the human militaries created Project Nightsong together, as a means to fight back. However, Project Nightsong had interacted… poorly with the Worldstrider’s subset of reality. At first, Project Nightsong was a desperate attempt to attack ‘unkillable monsters’ from the human military. The way it did so was by tearing at the layer of reality the worldstriders were imprisoned in via the use of sound. This proved incredibly effective. Thus, the worldstriders developed countermeasures. They cobbled together a bomb from old Zelyrian artifacts. It was meant to kill any Project Nightsong within a massive range, ensuring that the Project wouldn't escape destruction.
What happened next was... complicated. It remained a topic of dispute for years, before humans got a better understanding of souls. However, through research, Alchemists started to claim that life needed a soul to work properly. Whether it was a plant, insect, or animal, it needed a soul to live. Since Project Nightsong did not have a soul of its own, but still mimicked several functions of a ‘living’ creature, it was likely unstable. The fact that project Nightsong had been able to work at all was a sort of miraculous fluke. The military had essentially created a 'fake' life form that had a bunch of pre-coded responses built into it. However, without any understanding of souls or replacement for a soul, Project Nightsong was like a ship held together with duct tape. It worked fine short term, but it was already on the verge of falling apart when the Worldstriders made their bombs. When the special anti-Nightsong bombs were detonated... everything imploded at once.
Each Project Nightsong tore itself to pieces, taking several chunks of the secondary layer of reality with them. With such huge holes in the extra layers of reality, the whole thing started unraveling. Within weeks, the whole thing fell apart, killing most life on the Zelyrian continent.
This dampened enthusiasm for extradimensional exploration for a time. Most nations were wary of a repeat of the Worldstrider incident. However, eventually, people still stepped into the wider multiverse. There were too many reasons to explore, even if it was 'risky.' But that was a story for the distant future.
While Miria and Anise were forgotten by history, Felix’s accomplishments were remembered. In Zanna, he was always mentioned as one of the 'founding fathers' of industry in the archipelago. He wasn't quite as popular as many other historical figures, but most children of Zanna recognized his name. It was still far from the heights Miria and her friends had hoped for... but it was certainly a step in the right direction.
Author’s Note:
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Comments
Bryan D
I always enjoy the afterwards chapters. They tie a nice bow on the arc.
