Chapter 20: The Mother City

Page 1/3

Hestia suddenly recalled the anthropology she had once read in Dean Alma’s lounge, remembered Mina Delid and the femur fossil she mentioned, and suddenly realized that even back at the monastery, she had already touched upon the gateway leading to the era before the Great Blackout, though she had overlooked that keyword at the time.

“The legacy of the Golden Age—is that referring to books?” Hestia asked.

“Far more than that,” Liz said as she sat down at a nearby table. “Our world today is divided into sixteen major zones. Do you know why there are sixteen?”

Hestia shook her head, so Liz began to explain patiently.

“At the end of the Golden Age, war drove the entire world to the brink of apocalypse. Resources were scarce, populations plummeted, and after the Great Blackout began, within less than a century, all public infrastructure was destroyed—buildings burned, bombed to ruins. You wouldn’t see schools, hospitals, churches anymore...

“No antibiotics, no vaccines—a sudden epidemic could wipe out nearly all the newborns in a community at once. The maternal mortality rate was as high as 15%, and child survival rates below 40%.

“After losing the education system, literacy rates plummeted rapidly with each passing generation. Books in libraries gradually lost meaning to most people; one by one, they were taken and burned for warmth to survive the winter. But come summer, people were helpless against the heat. If temperatures stayed above 40 degrees Celsius for two weeks, it spelled disaster for elders over seventy...

“Everyone believed the world was ending. The surviving elders clung to memories of civilization and tried to call for rebuilding order, but the youth who grew up amid the ruins no longer cared. They lived by their own jungle logic, obsessed with redrawing territories... Human technology fell back to a farming level in less than two hundred years—until the world’s first Mother City appeared.”

“...Mother City?”

“Yes,” Liz said warmly, as if speaking of her homeland. “It was like a dream city, covering 34.12 square kilometers, like a seed sprouting from underground. The vast city was empty of people but perfectly orderly.

“It was a precious relic of the old civilization, powered by both nuclear and solar energy, with about two thousand robots constantly maintaining the city. From the well-preserved buildings of the Mother City, people finally realized that the legends of the Golden Age were not fantasies—they truly existed and had miraculously reappeared among us.

“After that, sixteen Mother Cities appeared around the world within a year. Relying on their libraries, research institutes, and automated factories, although many technologies in the Mother Cities remain black boxes to us—we only know how to operate them, not the principles behind them, let alone replicate them—humanity rekindled the flame of civilization.

“With these sixteen Mother Cities as our foundation, here we are today. Zones One through Fourteen are named and arranged in the order the Mother Cities emerged. Zones Fifteen and Sixteen are special cases—humans have yet to discover a way to enter those two cities without damage, so they have been set aside for now.”

Page 2/3

Liz looked at Hestia. “The Great Blackout Era began with the ‘Star-Seizing Night’ event in the year 3812 and ended in the spring of 4001 with the arrival of the first Mother City. It was a brief yet prolonged darkest moment in human history. Today, every zone is feverishly decoding the technology of their respective Mother Cities, but their focus is always energy and military-industrial applications. Literature is only a trivial embellishment among them…”

Liz’s introduction ended with a long, regretful sigh. She led Hestia to a world map hanging nearby.

The first thing Hestia noticed was Zone Three, especially since it was raised in relief on the map. She reached out to gently touch the protruding mountain ridges, then her gaze gradually shifted to the area beside it.

“What is the large blue area? Why is it so vast?”

Liz laughed. “That’s the sea, Jane.”

She looked at the map. “We’re not far from the coast, just about an hour’s drive—though the application process for travel permits is very complicated. If there’s ever an opportunity to be sent out, I can take you to see it.”

Then, Liz pointed out different regions on the map one by one. Hestia listened silently, as if she was seeing the world for the very first time.

She saw that Zone Three covered a vast area of 11.47 million square kilometers, the second largest on Earth by land area, yet its habitable land was only 640,000 square kilometers—the rest lay fallow as “wastelands” awaiting development.

According to Liz, population distribution in Zone Three was extremely uneven. Tanyi was the fourth largest city there, yet it housed about one-third of the zone’s population.

As for Zone Fourteen—in Hestia’s imagination, it should have been separated from Zone Three by ten other zones, but no—they were directly adjacent.

However, Zone Fourteen was enormous. Even measuring the absolute distance from here to Zone Fourteen showed it was still very far away. It spanned an astonishing 24.73 million square kilometers, nearly covering the entire continental plate from south to north, with 1.86 million square kilometers of habitable land—almost three times that of Zone Three.

She saw the boundless snowfields in the northern part of Zone Fourteen—on that permafrost which never melted through the years, there was almost no sign of towns or roads.

The world map hung quietly on the wall, yet standing before it, Hestia felt as if a mighty current was sweeping through her soul.

Page 3/3

At first, she tried to find Short Chirp Alley or Saint Anne’s Monastery on the map, but Liz told her those places were too small to appear on a world map.

So she turned to search for the Seven Mountains and saw a long mountain range bearing that name. It started from the northern coast of Zone Three, gradually extending into the inland, stretching to a breathtaking length.

Liz laughed again, saying the Seven Mountains was just a name shared with the range. The Seven Mountains outside Tanyi city were still too small to be marked on this map. If she wanted to see the Seven Mountains on a map, she could check the electronic map later.

Hestia was stunned. Earlier, when Liz spoke of the role of literature, she had been somewhat confused; when they talked about cosmic exploration during the Golden Age, she had been indifferent. But now, silently facing the land and sea on the map, she clearly felt a shattering of some awareness she had about the world.

She thought of the place she once called home, remembered the towering ridges outside the monastery and the endless mountain ranges.

Seven Mountains—still small?

Then how vast is this world...

Hestia lifted her head.

Gazing at the map of the world, she felt her own insignificance for the first time.