Ruy's concerns were not unjustified, because no one knew exactly how the Earth would expand again or what would happen to the things humanity built when it did. Except perhaps the system, there was no one who could even make an educated guess about what the next expansion would look like. The previous expansion had wiped out almost every sign of human life outside the cities and mana veins, leaving humanity with a painful reminder that anything built in the wrong place could simply disappear. Because of that uncertainty, the question of how humanity should handle the next expansion of Earth was troubling people all over the world, not just the European military.
For cities, the situation was relatively simple. As long as enough people were living in a city, the city itself was protected, which gave governments at least one reliable foundation on which to build their plans. Everything outside those protected areas was considerably more troublesome. Ordinary citizens did not think that far ahead, and Herman could hardly blame them for it because most people were far more interested in buying their own farm, opening a business, or simply improving their lives.
Governments could not simply stop all private investment because they were afraid that everything might be wiped out in another twenty years. That would be ridiculous, and humanity still had to live in the world that existed now. People needed roads, businesses needed infrastructure, and farms needed access to markets. Telling everyone to stop investing because the planet might change again would effectively mean telling civilization to stop developing altogether.
That was why governments continued building roads despite the uncertainty. The enormous investment in railroads was also going ahead, even though everyone understood that another Earth Expansion could potentially change the value of those investments. Humanity simply could not afford to remain silent while waiting for something that might happen decades from now. If one country stopped developing while another continued, the country that kept investing would gain an advantage, and no government was particularly fond of voluntarily giving its rivals an advantage.
The same logic applied to many of the major infrastructure projects being constructed across Europe and the rest of the world. They were being built because humanity could not afford not to build them. Even if there was a possibility that some of them would eventually be destroyed or rendered useless, the immediate benefits were still important enough to justify the risk. Civilization had to keep moving forward, even when nobody could guarantee that the road ahead would remain intact.
Castles, however, were different. Building a castle was not necessary for Europe's immediate progress in the same way that roads, railways, ports, and other infrastructure were. There was not much left for humanity to learn about basic castle construction under normal circumstances. Humans had been building castles for thousands of years, and practically every major iteration had been documented somewhere.
If there was one type of military structure whose development had been thoroughly recorded throughout history, it was probably castles. Humanity had documented why walls became thicker, why towers changed shape, why certain layouts were abandoned, and why other designs became standard. Historians could trace the progression of castle architecture across entire civilizations. There were arguments to be made about the finer details, but nobody could honestly claim that humanity had no idea how to build a castle.
In fact, the last fifty years had taken castle design far beyond what historical builders could ever have imagined. After the widespread adoption of sustained nuclear fusion reactors made energy effectively worthless, many of the limitations that had once restricted video games disappeared. Combined with the enormous computational power of quantum computers, it became possible to create massive simulated worlds where countless kingdoms could fight wars against one another. These were not simple games with a few scripted armies fighting predetermined battles.
The amount of freedom available to players had become absurd. Some of the largest strategy games allowed players to design their own kingdoms, armies, fortifications, and castles. There were presets available for people who did not want to spend hours designing everything themselves, but many players were far more interested in maximizing efficiency. They would examine every wall, tower, corridor, gate, and defensive position to determine whether they could squeeze another tiny advantage out of their design.
And when gamers became competitive about details like that, things could become scary very quickly. Players would spend thousands of hours testing different layouts, comparing defensive angles, analyzing attack routes, and searching for weaknesses that other players had overlooked. The most dedicated players could effectively devote their lives to understanding how a virtual castle would perform under every imaginable circumstance. Humanity had therefore spent decades doing exactly the kind of experimentation that the military was now considering doing in the real world.
With that much computer power available, simulations could be run on an enormous scale. Designers could test castles against different armies, terrain conditions, siege tactics, and approaches to warfare without having to spend years physically constructing each version. There were even games where every individual soldier on both sides was controlled by an actual player. That allowed the chaos of human decision-making to become part of the simulation instead of relying entirely on predictable computer-controlled units.
Those games had produced some rather impressive results. Human players could behave in ways that no simulation designer had predicted, especially when thousands of people were involved simultaneously. Someone could make a completely irrational decision that unexpectedly created an advantage, while another player could notice a weakness that an army's commanders had overlooked. The sheer unpredictability of human minds was one of the reasons those simulations had become so valuable for studying warfare.
So no, unless mana introduced some completely new methods of construction, humanity was unlikely to learn much from experimenting with the basic design of castles again. The military already had access to those games and their enormous databases of designs and simulations. In fact, practically everyone had a field day studying castle plans during the Trial, when constructing and testing fortifications had become a practical necessity rather than an academic exercise.
That meant the real danger was not that Europe would build a bad castle. The danger was that Europe could build an excellent castle, spend an enormous amount of money constructing it, use it for perhaps ten years, and then watch the next Earth Expansion erase it. If that happened without the castle ever seeing meaningful military use, the entire investment would have been wasted. The possibility of that happening was simply too high for Herman to ignore.
Strategically, the immediate usefulness of castles was also questionable. Their primary purpose would be deterrence, and almost nobody believed that another major country was going to invade European territory within the short period in which those castles would make a significant difference. The most likely threat in the near future was not even another human army. It was corrupted beasts escaping from secret realms.
Nobody wanted unnecessary trouble before then. Even the attack Russia had caused had been more about collecting data and testing the European Union's response than actually attempting to conquer anything. Russia had learned what it wanted to learn, Europe had responded, and Russia had been punished far more severely than it had anticipated. A serious invasion was therefore not something Herman expected to happen simply because Europe lacked castles.
The same principle applied to the situation involving the Church in the United States. If the conflict there threatened to escalate beyond its current level, the rest of the world would intervene. Every major world leader had a reason to prevent a conflict between humans from spiraling completely out of control. They might disagree on almost everything else, but there was one thing that united them more strongly than most political differences.
Every human resource on Earth was valuable to them. The leaders of different countries might not see eye to eye on countless issues, and some of them might even hate one another to the death, but they all wanted one thing: a longer life. To achieve that, humanity needed to keep winning the Trials. And to keep winning the Trials, they needed as many humans alive and developing as possible.
That meant wars between human nations would continue to be suppressed for as long as possible. Until the time between Trials became long enough for humanity to easily recover from the damage caused by a major war, large-scale conflicts would remain a terrible investment. There was simply too much to lose by killing millions of potential cultivators when every human could eventually contribute to humanity's survival.
"Right. I am going to ask someone, but for that, I am going to need to go in person," said Herman as he suddenly sat up in his chair. The change in his posture immediately caught the attention of several people around the table. He had been thinking through the problem from every possible angle, but he had finally realized that there was information they were missing. If they could not determine what the next Earth Expansion would do to large structures, then they needed to find someone who might know.
"I know someone who might know the answer, and if not, they can come into contact with the person who can get in touch," Herman said, his eyes suddenly filled with determination. The problem had become clear to him. There would be no castles without some reasonable understanding of what the world would look like in the future, because castles were not supposed to be temporary structures.
A proper castle was built to last a thousand years if necessary. It was supposed to remain standing through generations of rulers, wars, sieges, and changing political borders. Building something with that kind of lifespan was already expensive under normal circumstances, and trying to construct one within a reasonable timeframe made the cost even worse. If the military wanted to build castles that could survive for centuries, it could not afford to treat them like temporary fortifications.
The Trial had made that problem look deceptively simple. During the Trial, there had effectively been no meaningful limit on money as long as the required structure was built and successfully held. If a castle was completed and performed its intended function, the people responsible for constructing it could demand whatever payment was necessary. That system had made rapid construction possible because money was not the limiting factor.
That was not possible now. There was no way Europe could simply throw unlimited money at the construction of castles, especially when there was no guarantee that those castles would survive the next Earth Expansion. Building them quickly would make the already enormous cost even higher, while building them slowly would create its own problems. Herman therefore understood that, under the current circumstances, the project simply was not worth approving yet.
He needed help before anything could move forward. If there was someone who could provide a better answer about what would happen to the world during the next expansion, Herman needed to speak with them personally. Until he had that information, there was no point in asking the military to spend an enormous amount of money building castles that might disappear before they ever became useful.