Chapter 124 – The symbol of glory

As the sun started to peek over the horizon line, brightening up the world, Noah came to the forest edge and threw his gaze at the scene outside the forest.

As the sun started to light the scene his view opened to the city in the distance. Noah stood mesmerized gazing at it, marveling at its beauty and also lack of protection. It was his first time traveling to the so-called 'safe regions' of the human habitat. So seeing a city without a discernible border in the form of a wall was quite a novel experience.

Fields and pastries with animals slowly blended into habitable areas where more and more houses crammed together the closer they were to a city. On the outskirts of heavily populated areas of the city, they started to form whole settlements that in their turn merged into the city as if tendrils, making it impossible to discern the border of a city.

It stood at the hill covering it entirely and spilling from it onto the fields at the feet of it covering a large area around that hill.

A river flowed through that city bisecting the streets in its path, while small arch bridges crossed over it in many places

On top of the hill, which could be considered the city's center, among the rooftops, a huge stone wall could be seen as an old reminder of the times when this city was on the vanguard of the war with monsters and served as an outpost of humanity in the dangerous area populated by man-eating beings. Now this wall was more of a historical mark than a necessity and served more as a divide between a rich noble area, and an area populated by the commoners.

Safe regions are free of monsters. These are the areas that are now furthest from the monster habitats, and all the miasm and dark energy that helped produce the monsters has been fully cleansed in them.

Unlike the 'outskirt region' of the human kingdoms such as the West region where Noah was from, regions that were far away from the monster habitat had been guarded against the sudden dungeon occurrences and dungeon breaks with the Labyrinths that prevented the development of the evil seeds buried deep in the ground of these areas for hundreds of years. Thanks to that, humanity was able to wipe out the monsters and cleans the environment, finally able to live in that area safely without any concern of monster attacks.

As all nature was cleansed of miasm and evil energy that the evil core kept emitting was contained inside the Labyrinths, new monsters could only be produced inside the labyrinth. With regular monster hunts inside these Labyrinths, humanity prevented that energy from exiting to the outside world. That in turn made Labyrinths into a sort of mines capable of producing monster cores and magic crystals that people learned to use as ingredients in alchemy and as energy sources. Only instead of miners these resources were gathered by hunting parties of adventurers.

Humans are very adaptable creatures. Once a deadly creation made out of necessity for survival, now was integrated into their society and served as a mere source of resources that did not need strong warriors to be mined.

In the past these Labyrinths needed to be cleared to the highest levels, where concentrated evil energy produced strong monsters, no weaker than the ones that warriors and adventurers capturing dungeons at the outskirts of human Kingdoms would be facing against. However, in the present, these Labyrinths turned into something akin to a playground and a training facility for young warriors and nobles.

As the resources of the Labyrinth were constantly exported out of it, after some time it would exhaust all its dark energy and the Labyrinth core finally would be cleansed. Without dark energy, it immediately turned into a high-purity magic crystal that represented the evil seed's death. In this case, people quickly promoted pseudo cores that were nourished by the Guardian families for decades into new Labyrinths cores. This prevented the occurrence of dungeons as the Labyrinth core would absorb magic energy from the ground preventing the development of all evil seeds in the ground in its area of influence.

There was, however, a catch. As people could find evil seeds only by luck and could not move them from the spot as the ground around them was so thickly imbued with the magic that it was practically indestructible, they had to make new Labyrinths in the spot of a newfound seed. This brought a situation where a new Labyrinth influence did not cover the same area as the previous ones.

To prevent any dungeon breaks, people nourished multiple pseudo cores in the area around the Labyrinth and then turned them into new Labyrinths together. This way, instead of one deep formidable Labyrinth in the previous area, they gained several Labyrinths in close proximity to each other. Because of that these Labyrinths would divide the magic energy absorbed from nature between themselves. This brought an occurrence of weak Labyrinths that had barely a dozen levels in depth and could produce only weak monsters that novice adventurers were more than enough to clear. With every next core exhaustion, the level of these Labyrinths lowered even more as even more labyrinths were created in the area.

Of course, the quality of resources 'mined' from these Labyrinths dropped as well.

Until people found a way to nourish the Core with the help of Keepers that helped prolong its life, there were a lot of areas where the level of Labyrinths dropped so much that they bore no interest to humans even as a mine, producing only the lowest quality crystals and weakest monsters.

There was, however, another use for them.

As the labyrinth core exhausted its dark energy it would saturate with pure mana and turn into the highest quality magic crystal that could finally be taken out of the labyrinth. Because of that, these areas now were used solely to constantly search for new evil seeds and production of new Labyrinths that would soon exhaust all evil energy and turn to crystal. These crystals possess an amount of energy incomparably larger than any crystal that could be mined in any Labyrinth and was very sought after. However, these exhausted Labyrinths were mainly situated in the oldest area populated by humans. Which was around the capital of the country and was strictly under Royal family control.

This made the Royal family the possessor of a 'mine' that could produce the most expensive magic crystals with an annual production rate, while all other regions could produce them once a decade at most. It helped the Royal family to control the source of the most expensive resource, giving it influence and wealth to control other regions that needed these high-purity crystals for many uses.

With time, areas with weak Labyrinths became fully cleansed of any dark energy and were unable to produce any monsters, thus allowing humans to proliferate in this area once again as they did in the old times before the dungeons occurred. Bringing with it the creation of cities that no longer needed the walls to guard against the monster hordes.

A city without walls symbolized the unbound prosperity and success in fighting off the Great Evil that destroyed the previous civilization and brought humanity to the brink of extinction. These cities represented that humanity pushed monsters and evil gods back.

This was the glory of the new civilizations. The one that overcame the disaster that ruined the previous civilization.

The North region of the Moonstar Kingdom where Noah was now, was a safe region as well. To the north of Moonstar Kingdom was another human kingdom, Starfall Kingdom. The two kingdoms were divided by a wide mountain range that was uninhabitable and hard to travel through, so it was not possible to create a labyrinth in that mountain range. Instead, humanity created multiple labyrinths at the feet of mountains on the very edge of the mountain range from both sides of the two kingdoms.

Thanks to that there was only a small area of that mountain range at the very center of it, between the two kingdoms that were not under any labyrinth's core influence and had dungeons that could produce monsters. However, that area was quite small and the dungeons there were very weak, so people did not bother traveling into these mountains to clear those dungeons.

The weak monster produced in these mountains could hardly get through the mountain range and mostly died from the forces of nature, with only a bare minimum of them managing to get to the border region, where border patrol's regular monster hunt at the feet of the mountains was enough to protect the region, allowing the people on the north of the Moonstar Kingdom and the South Region of the neighboring Starfall Kingdom, at the other side of the mountain range, live safely without the worry of monsters.

The Moonstar Kingdom had one full region that was entirely a monster-free safe region, which was the East region that was closer to the Central Cathedral Country situated in between the Moonstar Kingdom and three other kingdoms.

The other three regions of Moonstar Kingdom: North, South, and West, were only partially safe. Among them, West Region, where Noah was from, had barely any area that could be called a safe or monster-free area, as it was the region that faced the monster-infested areas and was the region that had the task of opening up the new habitats for humanity by fighting off the monsters and conquering the dungeons.

The Capital of Moonstar Kingdom was founded at the place that once was the intersection of four regions. However, with the West region's constant progress into the monster areas to the west of the human habitats, the region became wider and wider, growing incomparably larger than the other three regions that were limited in their growth.

The North region was limited by the North Border with the Starfall Kingdom which passed through the mountain range. East region was limited by the border with the Central Cathedral Country and the South region was in turn limited by the border with the kingdom to the south of Moonstar Kingdom.

The West region was the only one that gave the people of Moonstar Kingdom unlimited space for development as long as they could wipe out the monster on their path, which they have been quite successful at, constantly moving the border of the kingdom to the west.

To balance the powers inside the kingdom, the Royal family would occasionally redraw the kingdom's inner borders, widening the three other regions with the lands that previously belonged to the constantly fighting at the vanguard Western region.

Because of that, the Capital that was once at the center of the four regions was now fully within the Easter region of the kingdom. This was a problem for all four kingdoms that constantly battled the monsters in four different directions spreading their lands further and further from the Central Cathedral Country, which was the cradle of this civilization.

However, this showed humanity's progress in conquering the monster areas and slowly but surely tilting the scales of war for dominance on the planet in favor of humanity. This gave the hope that someday, just like in the distant past, humanity would once again freely walk this planet without the worry of monsters.

Countless thoughts and feelings swirled in Noah's head as he gazed upon the city that represented freedom and the indomitable will of humanity. Or what it should have represented. With newly found freedom and prosperity of humanity, also prospered and grew the dark side of civilization. Corruption, crime, greed, and insanity. The dark society was its epitome. And it looked like cities like this were well infested with this disease-like organization that instead of helping in the war against monsters only pulled humanity back and preyed on the weak and innocent.

Noah clenched his fist while gazing at the city.

Dark society. To win the war with monsters, humanity needed to be cleansed from this organization as well.