Eve’s efficiency was first-rate.
With the All-Seeing Eye working alongside Laplace’s Demon, she had, in effect, a dimensionally superior advantage over every faction from the original story.
Roy, still soaking in the bath, nodded.
“Report now.”
“Yes, Lord Joshua.”
“The Slane Theocracy covers 300,000 square kilometers, with a population over 40 million, roughly 41.5 million to be precise.
It’s the strongest of the human nations in the continent’s northwest corner…”
Wait.
“Over 40 million people?”
Roy remembered that in the original story, the Slane Theocracy’s total population sat above 15 million, the largest among humanity.
Slane Theocracy: population 15 million.
Re-Estize Kingdom: population 9 million.
Baharuth Empire: population 8 million.
Northern Roble Sacred Kingdom: population 3.5 million (excluding the south), roughly 7 million overall.
These were the population figures the novel had stated outright.
After his rebirth, Roy had made a point of writing down whatever numbers he still remembered from the source material, early on.
And now the Slane Theocracy’s population had simply doubled?
Roy asked at once:
“Is that population figure accurate?”
“Almighty, Laplace’s Demon uses a biological headcount method.
The margin of error won’t exceed a hundred, and that hundred accounts for new births happening every single minute.”
Roy considered this for a moment:
“What’s their level of agricultural technology?”
Eve continued her report:
“The Theocracy has built extensive storage facilities.
Their food reserves are more than adequate, enough grain stockpiled to last a full decade, and their livestock industry is well developed too.”
“Their grain yield runs roughly 12 metric tons per hectare, across nearly 6 million hectares of farmland, roughly 20% of their total territory.
They could feed 80 million people without any trouble at all.”
“The Theocracy still runs an active pro-birth policy, one that’s been in place for centuries now.”
“Every human child born earns a reward: 250 kilograms of flour, three hens and three roosters, and a hundred eggs.”
“They also run roughly six years of universal education for ordinary citizens, focused mainly on theology, while screening for talent along the way.”
“Across this world’s population, roughly one in every two hundred people is born with an innate special ability, and the Theocracy runs broad screening programs to uncover them.”
“Setting magic aside entirely, the Slane Theocracy’s raw technology in some areas has reached roughly an 18th-century level, agriculture especially so.
They can produce fertilizer through both industrial and magical means.”
“On top of that, the Theocracy has implemented sanitation practices that address problems like puerperal fever, which has driven population growth enormously.”
No wonder.
It clicked for Roy now.
Everything he’d left behind for Surshana hadn’t gone to waste after all.
Six hundred years of accumulated change, and humanity’s strength here clearly outstripped anything in the original story by a wide margin.
For the Theocracy to push grain yields up to roughly 12 metric tons per hectare.
Whether it was the special seed strains he’d left behind, advances in fertilizer production, or improvements in farming methods, every piece had played its part.
“And what about the Six Great Gods?”
Eve continued:
“After the Six Great Gods appeared six hundred years ago, they fought against a Dragon Lord.
The outcome is unknown, but afterward, they relocated a large enslaved population to the continent’s northwest corner and spent the following centuries protecting humanity’s growth.”
“Five hundred years ago, this world gave rise to a set of powerful figures known as the Eight Greed Kings.”
“During that time, the Six Great Gods negotiated with the Eight Greed Kings, formally submitted, and offered tribute.
The Eight Greed Kings were satisfied with that and never gave the Theocracy any real trouble.”
“The Eight Greed Kings went on to rampage across the continent afterward, hunting down countless powerful aberrant beings, before suddenly falling after only a brief reign.”
“There are rumors they built a harem, indulged in every excess imaginable, and destroyed themselves through infighting.”
“Based on what data we have, that story doesn’t hold up especially well.”
“The Theocracy, oddly enough, made enormous strides precisely because of the disaster the Eight Greed Kings caused.”
“Some unsolved mysteries followed, though.
The Six Great Gods vanished one by one, and some say infighting was to blame.”
“The Theocracy officially claims they simply died of old age, and comes down hard on anyone who suggests infighting instead.”
“The last of the Six Great Gods, the God of Death, personally traveled to the heart of the continent two hundred years ago to investigate the mystery of Inveria’s fall, and vanished without a trace.”
So he hadn’t managed to survive after all.
Roy fell quiet for a moment.
Among the resources he’d given away, one had been genuinely critical: the Elixir of Immortality, an item nobody in the game had ever wanted.
The Elixir of Immortality was the item that unlocked the Immortal Sage class-change.
Take it, and you were essentially granted eternal life, or at the very least, six hundred years wasn’t going to be a problem.
That was exactly why every one of the Six Great Gods had survived their confrontation with the Eight Greed Kings.
With all six of them still standing, the Eight Greed Kings had clearly preferred not to make enemies of them, focusing instead on conquering the continent.
But then the Eight Greed Kings were wiped out entirely, and the Six Great Gods started disappearing one by one instead.
Which meant this had nothing to do with lifespan.
And a group that had fought together for a shared cause across a full century wasn’t especially likely to suddenly turn on each other right after surviving the chaos of the Eight Greed Kings.
Roy couldn’t help but ask:
“Eve, what’s your read on the Six Great Gods’ downfall?”
“Based on what we know so far, the Six Great Gods made consistently cautious, careful decisions.
Whatever enemy was working behind the scenes likely never found a real opening, or never managed to gather full intelligence on the players.”
“Then the Eight Greed Kings’ fall changed everything.
Whoever was behind it all gained enormously from that event, and picked up a great deal of intelligence on players in the process.”
“Looking at it that way, the Six Great Gods’ deaths were very likely targeted eliminations.”
Roy felt Eve’s reasoning tracked closely with his own, but pressed the question anyway:
“What makes you say that?”
Eve answered, unhurried:
“Inveria lost eight million people in a single night.”
“It belonged to human-controlled territory, the main settlement of the Rainbow Eyes, and one of the Theocracy’s friendly nations, with a fair amount of trade between the two.”
“In this single catastrophe, which shook all of humanity, four human kingdoms fell, and more than thirty million people died.”
“Given how deeply the Six Great Gods had committed to protecting humanity, there was no way they wouldn’t investigate, and that was exactly their greatest vulnerability.”
According to the original story, the Elder Coffin Dragon Lord had used a soul-draining ability to wipe out Inveria’s five million people.
Clearly, Inveria’s trade with the Slane Theocracy had raised its agricultural output and grown its population considerably.
Even now, with the Slane Theocracy sitting at 40 million people, that still wasn’t enough to stop the Elder Coffin Dragon Lord from taking a couple more bites.
It made complete sense, then, that the last God of Death had acted on this.
And then the God of Death had run into the Elder Coffin Dragon Lord, caught by a single blast of its soul-annihilating breath.
Without a World-tier item shielding him, he would have died on the spot, no question.
The fact that the Elder Coffin Dragon Lord got wrecked by Ainz in the side material came down entirely to an intelligence gap.
Any level-100 player without a World-tier item who ran into it would be in serious trouble.
These True Dragon Lords were probably far more dangerous than anything in the original story.
Still, looking at the bigger picture, the information crystals Roy had left behind had proven their worth enormously.
Humanity was still hanging on, tenaciously.
Except where the Elder Coffin Dragon Lord had claimed 20 million lives in the original story, that number had now become 30 million.
A genuine tragedy.
Six hundred years of time, with changes stacking up at every major historical turning point, added up to a genuinely massive butterfly effect.
The Six Great Gods had lasted longer, the Theocracy had grown considerably stronger than in the original story, and humanity’s numbers had grown right along with it.
Of course, for the aberrant races, that also meant a lot more food on the table.
Which had pushed both sides into a new kind of dynamic equilibrium.
Roy pressed on:
“What about the other nations’ population and development levels?”
“The Re-Estize Kingdom covers 300,000 square kilometers, population 18 million.”
“The Baharuth Empire covers 220,000 square kilometers, population 20 million.”
“The Roble Sacred Kingdom covers 150,000 square kilometers, population 10 million.”
“The Dragon Kingdom covers 50,000 square kilometers, population 4 million.”
Taken all together, humanity’s overall strength here looked to be roughly double what it had been in the original story, and their territory had even grown along with it.
It seemed they’d beaten back plenty of aberrant races out in the northwest corner and successfully expanded their territory as a result.
But the Sacred Kingdom and the Dragon Kingdom, hemmed in by military pressure, had seen their populations grow far more slowly.
Which also explained the Theocracy’s frustration with the Re-Estize Kingdom.
It held territory just as large as the Theocracy’s own, with equally fertile land, and yet its population growth had never lived up to expectations.
Because population was national strength, plain and simple, and in a world where humanity could face extinction at any moment, one in every two hundred people was born with an innate special ability.
Calling that kind of innate power a blessing from the gods wouldn’t be an exaggeration.
It was humanity’s real hope.
Which meant a nation had to govern well, to grow its population, educate its people, and identify talent wherever it appeared.
Roy had gotten a basic handle on the situation now, and had a reasonably solid grasp of the butterfly effects his own actions had caused.
Eve added:
“Almighty, should we make secret contact with the Theocracy?”
“They likely still hold some real strength of their own, though nowhere close to World City’s.”
Eve understood exactly what Roy’s relationship with the Great Cat Kingdom meant to him.
Even at its absolute peak, the Great Cat Kingdom wouldn’t amount to a hair on World City’s head, whereas the Great Tomb, holding a fair number of World-tier items, could pose at least some real threat.
Roy considered this for a moment:
“That depends on how far the butterfly effects have actually spread.”
“Any activity yet out at the Katze Plains?”