pertwk Chapter 444 - 71: Hunting the Black Prison Civilization, the Beginning of the Great War
Chapter 444 - 71: Hunting the Black Prison Civilization, the Beginning of the Great War
[Time Cage: 1. Blue Star]
Note 1: As the sole promised land for recruiting Players for the True Game, the entirety of Blue Star, including the surrounding five billion kilometers of the Star Sea, has been sealed within a Time Cage.
Note 2: The Time Cage is designed to automatically adjust the time-flow ratio between Blue Star and the outside world with each version update of the True Game. The current maximum time-flow ratio is 1:1000, and the minimum is 1:10. Unit of measurement: days (24 hours).
[Player Promised Lands Unlocked: Your current highest Authority allows you to open a total of five locations.]
[Game version update complete. The administrator is advised to explore the various Authorities on their own.]
...
The fusion of the True Game and the Cosmic Game was unexpectedly smooth.
Now, the True Game could no longer be called the True Game.
If one had to give it a name, it could be called the True Cosmic Game.
Ultimately, it wasn’t important.
What was important was that Lince discovered that after the two merged, many of the game’s functions had major discrepancies with what he had previously imagined.
For example, as one of the Authority Holders, the scope of the Authority he could obtain was completely hidden from the others.
In other words, the other Three Gods could not possibly know any of the information Lince learned through his Authority.
Likewise, Lince couldn’t know what the other Three Gods knew.
From this perspective, it seemed as though the game had been completely quartered.
But that wasn’t entirely the case.
Because outside the individual Authorities of the Four Gods, the game also had an information-sharing area.
In this information-sharing area, the Four Gods could publish known information and details about explored civilizations. Once published, all four of them would know everything about it.
Of course, this shared area also came with a major shared Authority.
This shared Authority, without a doubt, was access to the basic information on all civilizations and planets discovered by the True Cosmic Game.
Of course, the basic information for these civilizations showed them as ’unclaimed’.
Unclaimed meant that none of the Four Gods had yet accepted a war mission to attack that particular civilization.
If one of the Four Gods became interested in a particular civilization, they could choose to accept the war mission for it.
Once they did, only that respective Deity’s forces could participate on that battlefield.
It wasn’t that the other Three Gods couldn’t participate. However, without the consent of the Deity who had accepted the war mission, their subordinate forces would be unable to receive any rewards from the game even if they joined in.
Furthermore, as a penalty for breaking the rules, if one Deity sabotaged another’s war against a civilization, it would be considered an act of war in the struggle for Authority between them.
Thus, in this shared area, once an Authority-holding Deity accepted a mission for a war of civilization, the other Authority Holders were barred from participating.
In addition, the other Deities had no right to know anything about that civilization, including the progress of the war.
Only when the war concluded would the system announce whether the war of civilization had ended in victory or defeat.
However, in both the former Cosmic Game and the True Game, no Deity had ever lost a war of civilization.
For one thing, even if a single Authority-holding Deity encountered a tough opponent and was unwilling to allow others to intervene, the game’s underlying logic didn’t care about such sentiments.
It would immediately notify the other Authority Holders to provide support.
After all, regardless of whether it was the True Game or the Cosmic Game, and even if the Authority-holding Deities were not subordinate to one another, the fundamental purpose of the game was to expand its own territory.
How could it possibly allow its own forces to be annihilated by an external power?
The game’s rules might permit internal wars, but in an external war, the game’s fundamental rules would not easily allow an Authority-holding Deity to lose.
It was precisely because of this underlying logic of the Cosmos that the relationship between the Three Gods of the Cosmos had previously been more friendly than hostile.
The True Game had only differed because Lince was its sole Authority Holder; otherwise, its underlying logic was actually the same as the Cosmic Game’s.
The largest portion of the shared information Authority in the True Cosmic Game’s shared area pertained to discovered civilizations.
The entire shared area currently contained a total of forty-eight explored planets and civilizations that had not yet been attacked.
Magicless Worlds were the most numerous, totaling thirty-seven. The other eleven consisted of seven Low Demon Worlds, three Middle Demon Worlds, and one High Demon World.
The fact that they were on display meant that none of the Four Gods had yet accepted a war of civilization mission for any of these worlds.
As for why they hadn’t been claimed, Lince now understood.
To put it one way, the shared area held fifty percent of the Authority for the game’s "Explore Civilizations" function.
The other fifty percent of the "Explore Civilizations" function’s Authority was currently divided among Lince and the original Three Gods of the Cosmos.
So, while the shared area contained the most ’unclaimed’ civilizations, for which any of the Four Gods could accept a war mission, each of the Four Gods also had their own unoccupied civilizations that they had discovered through their personal Authority.
Therefore, of the forty-eight civilizations currently in the shared area, a portion had actually been shared by the Three Gods themselves.
As for why they would share them, there were many reasons, but the most important was that the return was not proportional to the investment.
For example, on one of the Magicless Worlds, intelligent life had begun to appear, but it was still in its nascent stages.
’And you expect the Three Gods to conquer a world like that?’
’Go fight a bunch of monkeys?’
’Opening a Star Gate takes time and Magic Power, you know?’
’What’s the point of conquering a world like that?’
’Even if the entire world were sacrificed—a Magicless World with life in the early stages of intelligence—the returns would be so paltry that the Three Gods wouldn’t even give it a second glance.’