The Mech Touch

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!

However, he didn't believe the Cerebral King had consigned itself to its fate. It was still fighting against the Swarmers and still holding out hope for a change.

Perhaps the fish-whale was clever enough to recognize an opportunity today. The arrival of outsiders broke the stale game of survival that had played out in Purgatory for over a million years.

Ves did not mind playing the outside context factor that could help the Cerebral King break its unwinnable situation. The premise was that the Evolution Kingdom was able to provide enough benefits in return!

The strategy he had adopted so far and the way he approached his conversation with the Cerebral King was therefore tailored to encourage cooperation.

So far, the two hadn't brought up any topics relating to cooperation, but Ves believed it was only a matter of time before they discussed joining forces.

For now, he still wanted to gather more information. Ves needed to obtain a better understanding of all of the surviving fish-whale kingdoms before he could get a good idea on what he could do to fulfill his goals for this campaign.

"You've told me that the Swarm Kingdom is incredibly strong due to controlling much of the food supply of this phase whale enclave. Why hasn't it been able to defeat all of its other kingdoms by now? If The Swarmers launch an all-out attack all at once, they should easily be able to overwhelm any of your kingdoms! By then, the Swarm Kingdom will be able to gain access to new resources which will make its soldiers even stronger!"

If Ves was in the position of the Hive King, he wouldn't have allowed this state of balance to linger for so many years. Back in places like the Yeina Star Cluster, wars tended to last a few years to a decade at most. Fighting any longer than that was unsustainable because most states generally depleted the readily-available resources and manpower needed to supplement their losses.

Although the dynamic of warfare was different in Purgatory due to the unique characteristics of the environment and the dominant race, Ves could hardly understand why the Swarm Kingdom had reached this level of strength for tens of thousands of years but refused the final steps to win the game.

SWARM WILL LOSE TOO MANY SOLDIERS. HIVE KING TOO WEAK WITH LESS SOLDIERS. OTHER KINGS WILL ATTACK. IF THEY CANNOT DEFEAT HIVE KING, THEY WILL TAKE OVER FOOD SOURCES. OTHER KINGS WILL HAVE MORE SOLDIERS WITH MORE FOOD SOURCES. HIVE KING KNOWS THIS. BETTER TO CONSUME OUR STRENGTH SLOWLY. HIVE KING MUST NOT SHOW WEAKNESS.

"I see."

The Swarm Kingdom's greatest strength was its massive amount of cannon fodder, but its overreliance on the grunt fishes also happened to be its handicap.

The Hot Kingdom, Phase Kingdom and Evolution Kingdom might not be comparable in strength, but they were entrenched within their own kingdoms and had become extremely good at wiping out hordes and hordes of Swarmer fish-whales.

If an all-out offensive caused the Swarmers to lose 6 million soldiers, then the remaining cannon fodder was not enough to protect all of the continents that had fallen into their hands!

Even though the Swarm Kingdom would eventually be able to replenish its losses over a period of growth and accumulation, the surviving kingdoms would act before this could happen.

In the end, the Swarm Kingdom not only risked losing the landmass that it had conquered at great cost, but also risked the loss of other vulnerable continents!

The ultimate consequence was that only 3 kingdoms would remain that were both on a more equal level to each other. This was not beneficial to the Swarm Kingdom as it would ultimately weaken while its remaining rivals grew stronger!

Hence the game had developed to the current situation. The Hive King pursued a steady strategy of minimizing mistakes and revealing as few openings as possible.

The downside to this overly cautious strategy was that it took hundreds of thousands of years for the Swarm Kingdom to grind its other opponents down.

This was way too long for humans. Too many leaders and conquerors would have died before they could see their plans come into fruition!

The war between the fish-whale kingdoms plainly showcased that the fish-whales did not think and act like humans. The near-immortal life spans of the fish-whale kings gave them the leisure to pursue extremely long-term strategies that more short-lived species would never be able to enact due to their impatience.

The last thing that Ves wanted to happen was for him and his fellow humans to get sucked into this eons-long war.

He only had a week to complete his objectives for this campaign. After that, the mechers would most definitely swoop in and rudely interrupt this long-standing game so that they could take over Purgatory for themselves.

Ancient or not, the MTA was too powerful for the indigenous forces to resist!

Of course, the fish-whales didn't need to hear about their impending doom. He carefully suppressed these thoughts and more in order to prevent himself from leaking any clues that could ruin his relationship with the talkative king fish.

The two curious leaders continued to exchange information with each other.

After the fish-whale had explained the balance of powers in Purgatory, Ves proceeded to talk about the major alien races that occupied the Red Ocean.

It went without saying that he left out the fact that these alien races would soon become extinct after the Big Two's warfleets swept over their territories.

The Cerebral King became incredibly fascinated by the description of vastly different alien races that it could have never imagined before. From the puelmers to the voribugs, the diversity of life outside the confines of Purgatory intensely stimulated the clever fish-whale's obsession!

Yet before the Cerebral King could gain any more answers, Ves held up his palm again.

"I've spoken enough. It's your turn to give me information. Please answer this question for me. How did you grow so big and powerful? What gives you the capital to survive so long after many of your other fish-whale brothers has fallen?"

This was a dangerous question as Ves directly inquired about the key advantages of the Cerebral King.

Any normal human powerhouse would have become furious and refused to answer such a sensitive question!

However, the Cerebral King was different. It was not only an alien who was unaccustomed to holding these kinds of conversations, Ves and his group also made sure they did not paint themselves as a threat towards the Evolution Kingdom.

After a short pause, the Cerebral King moved its entire body as if to gesture around this entire hall.

THE LEGACY OF GOD IS MY STRENGTH.