Chapter 359: Destruction of Civilization

On Planet Dige, international relations were far from peaceful. The world had a limited amount of landmass, yet it was fractured into more than two hundred countries of varying sizes.

Religious conflicts, territorial disputes, and historical grudges created an endless, bitter cycle of tension.

Among these nations were superpower "world police" states, rogue nations, and neutral powers, making their political landscape even more complex than Earth’s.

In recent decades, rapid industrialization had severely worsened the planet’s greenhouse effect. Rising temperatures caused sea levels to surge, completely submerging vast tracts of coastal land.

The shrinking landmass and flooded cities pushed global tensions to the breaking point. Border skirmishes erupted constantly.

Once the method for communicating with the "Gods" went public, the entire world plunged into absolute chaos within months. This upheaval didn’t just affect the common citizens; it shattered the foundations of major governments.

A small, impoverished nation named Lys suddenly made a terrifying move: they successfully built a nuclear bomb!

How could a tiny nation build a nuclear weapon in just a few months? It seemed impossible. Lys had no domestic uranium mines, and international sanctions prevented any uranium imports. Yet, they still managed to construct an atomic weapon.

The answer was terrifyingly simple: by relying on "divine intervention," the rogue state of Lys forced the Sea God to replicate massive quantities of weapons-grade uranium! With an unlimited supply of highly enriched uranium, building a nuclear bomb was suddenly incredibly easy.

But human greed didn’t stop there. What if they could just replicate the entire nuclear bomb?

At first, they failed. The marine algae could not penetrate completely sealed environments, meaning they couldn’t replicate the bomb’s internal mechanisms. At most, the entity could only copy the empty external casing.

However, the devil is always one step ahead of the saint. The cunning engineers of Lys drilled holes into the bomb casings, allowing seawater to flood the interior.

Through this loophole, the entity successfully replicated massive quantities of semi-finished nuclear weapons. By manually drying and modifying these semi-finished replicas, the rogue state quickly amassed a terrifying nuclear arsenal.

Through relentless experimentation, the fanatical natives discovered the entity’s limits. It could not replicate fully sealed spaces, exceptionally thick alloys, certain complex toxins, and highly radioactive elements.

Furthermore, the replication speed depended on the object’s complexity. A single nuclear bomb could take several days to fully clone.

"Even the Gods fear poison! Even divine power has its limits..."

Still, this "limited" capacity vastly outpaced any traditional industrial manufacturing. Armed with a new nuclear arsenal, the Republic of Lys began aggressively flaunting its military might. Its citizens were overwhelmed with pride and arrogance.

Faced with a rogue state’s provocations, the global superpower, acting as the world police was enraged. They desperately wanted to launch a preemptive strike to wipe Lys off the map. But the superpower was paralyzed by its own internal collapse.

Its economy was in ruins. Counterfeit money and cloned gold had flooded the market, triggering hyperinflation. Businesses were shuttered. Nobody wanted to work in factories or farms anymore; everyone had flocked to the beaches to play with the "Gods."

The government desperately blockaded its coastlines and tried to force a transition to an all-digital currency to combat the counterfeit cash. Simultaneously, top military leaders debated whether a foreign war could unite the country and distract from their domestic crises.

In the past, that strategy might have worked. But now, it was suicidal. The enemy possessed nuclear weapons. If they weren’t entirely annihilated in a first strike, they would retaliate with a devastating nuclear barrage.

And this terrifying standoff wasn’t just limited to these two nations. Almost every country on the planet was trapped in a nightmare of internal economic collapse and external military standoffs. They were rotting from the inside while glaring at their neighbors on the outside.

Historically oppressed nations suddenly rose up. With easily acquired nuclear arsenals, they grew impulsive and arrogant, itching for an excuse to launch missiles at their old enemies. The world had never seen such a terrifying spectacle.

Trapped in a state of spiritual collapse and ideological madness, the natives of Planet Dige had accidentally unlocked the massive industrial productivity of an interstellar civilization.

And they were using it entirely to destroy each other. It was like handing a loaded machine gun to a toddler. Power without wisdom only leads to self-destruction.

Personal ambitions grew wildly out of control. The Holy Church, completely furious, launched a brutal, violent inquisition against the "blasphemers." Various Church factions splintered.

Some declared the ocean entity was a demonic "False God." Others claimed it was a divine servant of the true God. Conflicting dogmas tore the religion apart.

The most fanatical believers began throwing themselves off buildings in despair. Those who didn’t commit suicide either went completely insane or blindly clung to the Church’s rapidly shifting doctrines.

But national governments couldn’t afford to care about theology. To ensure their own survival, they sparked the greatest arms race in planetary history.

Coastal nations forcibly evicted citizens from the beaches and transformed their coastlines into massive military assembly lines. Weapon components were copied directly in the surf and assembled on the sand. The fact that the parts were soaking wet hardly mattered to the war machine.

A massive, unstoppable chain reaction had begun. Although pacifists desperately pleaded for restraint, their voices were drowned out by the global march toward war.

The nations with ocean access became instant superpowers, their military strength multiplying by the day. Meanwhile, landlocked nations cut off from the Sea God’s miracles, were rapidly reduced to impoverished, defenseless targets.

Without divine intervention, these landlocked countries had to rely on traditional, grueling industry just to survive the arms race. Ironically, because they couldn’t clone money, their internal economies remained relatively stable and free of counterfeit chaos.

But to survive the shifting balance of power, a landlocked nation only had two choices: quickly invade and conquer a coastal neighbor, or be conquered themselves.

For a brief period, global nuclear war was delayed simply because every leader maintained a tiny shred of fearful restraint. However, brutal conventional skirmishes had already erupted across the globe. For nations already locked in generations of hatred, peace was never an option.

The rampant proliferation of nuclear weapons had turned the entire planet into a massive powder keg. A single spark would trigger planetary annihilation.

The leaders of the major powers were like tightrope walkers in a hurricane. One wrong step meant the abyss. The smaller, newly armed rogue states, having nothing left to lose, constantly tested the limits of the superpowers’ patience. The powder keg only needed a single trigger.

Underneath the chaos, the planet’s brightest minds saw the inevitable doom approaching. They frantically began constructing massive underground fallout shelters. But nobody knew exactly when the clock would run out.

Luther was absolutely devastated.

He never intended for this to happen. The reality of his actions was a horrifying distortion of his original dream. This global march toward death was a tidal wave that no ordinary man, not even a president—could stop.

Luther had simply wanted to free humanity from ignorance. He never imagined that his scientific breakthrough would hand them the tools for their own extinction.

Consumed by unbearable guilt, Luther took his own life.

Before his suicide, he leaked the remainder of his research data to the public, desperately hoping it would help. But it was far too late to stop the world’s descent into hell.

Meanwhile, completely unnoticed by the warring natives, the Sea God Umorlu was experiencing a profound transformation.

For tens of thousands of years, the entity had remained largely dormant. Now, it was receiving tens of millions of communication waves every single day. Fed by this endless stream of stimuli, an incredible phenomenon occurred: true self-awareness began to rapidly spark into existence.

Evolving from zero to one from a mindless organism to a thinking being is a journey of unimaginable difficulty. But once that threshold is crossed, evolving from one to one hundred is incredibly fast.

Like a newborn child opening its eyes for the first time, the Sea God began to actively and consciously observe the frantic, intelligent beings swarming its shores. It evolved past subconscious mimicry into deliberate, conscious imitation. It even began to mutate new sensory structures, allowing it to literally "see" and "hear" the world above the waves, freeing it from its reliance on electromagnetic waves.

It was a terrifying, qualitative evolution. The spark of self-awareness had transformed it from a biological machine into a confused, highly intelligent entity.

But a newborn creature does not understand good or evil. It only has primal instincts. Like a human infant, it learns entirely by observing its environment.

And what did it observe? From the moment it opened its eyes, the foolish natives of Planet Dige force-fed it lessons in greed, malice, war, and the systematic slaughter of its own kind. It watched massive armadas assemble and witnessed brutal military massacres right on the shoreline.

What else could the outcome be?

To this day, nobody knows who launched the very first nuclear missile. Was it an impatient, paranoid nation? Or was it the Sea God Umorlu itself, simply mimicking the violence it had been taught? Nobody knows.

But once the powder keg was ignited, it could not be stopped. And that is exactly how the radioactive wasteland of Planet Dige was born.