Chapter 762 - Reactions

Chapter 762: Chapter 762 - Reactions

For several minutes after the announcement, the public communication channels became chaotic.

The slavery revelation struck first.

Many people had believed those practices disappeared years ago.

Learning that entire populations had simply been moved beyond ordinary scrutiny created anger that spread much faster than Lootwell expected.

Then the names of rescued people began appearing.

Families recognized some of them.

That changed everything.

A woman in the Western Continent discovered that her older brother, missing for more than twenty years, was alive on a mining world in the void.

An elderly couple received confirmation that the daughter they had assumed dead had survived and now had children of her own.

Several communities learned that groups who had vanished from remote settlements years earlier had never been killed at all.

They had been transported.

The first reunions happened through communication devices before physical travel could even be arranged.

Some were joyful.

Others were painfully awkward.

Years did not disappear simply because someone came home.

Children had become adults.

Parents had died.

Families had moved on because they believed they had no choice.

Lootwell did not pretend those losses could be undone.

Still, for many people, having someone return after decades of uncertainty felt close enough to a miracle.

•••

Not everyone returned.

A large number of liberated workers had no surviving family on the five continents.

Some had been born in the conquered worlds and considered those places their homes.

Others simply did not want to leave the settlements they had spent their entire lives building.

Lootwell respected that choice.

That mattered publicly almost as much as the rescues themselves.

The liberated people were not being moved from one owner to another.

They were being given decisions.

Some chose the five continents.

Others remained in the void.

Several communities began negotiating ownership rights over mines and agricultural regions that had once belonged to their captors.

A surprising number of faction leaders supported those claims.

Partly from principle.

Partly because nobody wanted to be seen arguing that former slave owners deserved their property back.

Lucien considered political embarrassment a perfectly acceptable motivation when it produced the correct result.

•••

The attempted contact with the Black Mass caused a different reaction.

Fear came first.

People who had spent months worrying about enemies outside suddenly realized that some of the danger might have come from within.

Public channels filled with anger toward the factions involved.

Some demanded that every member be imprisoned.

Others wanted the factions erased completely.

Lootwell refused both demands.

The official evidence had already shown that guilt was not universal.

Several people inside those factions had actively opposed the slave networks.

Others had helped investigators once they understood what was happening.

Punishing them alongside the guilty would have been easier.

It also would have been wrong.

That position initially frustrated part of the public.

Then the stories from the inspections began spreading.

The old faction that had opened three years of reform records voluntarily became one of the most discussed examples.

Vorren had inspected its territory and found nothing alarming.

Lootwell had left it untouched.

That made the distinction much easier for ordinary people to understand.

The purge was not against old enemies.

It was against current betrayal.

•••

Gradually, the anger settled into something else.

Relief.

The frightening part was how close some factions had come to becoming useful to the enemy.

The comforting part was that they had been found first.

People began replaying Lootwell’s earlier warnings about preparation, internal discipline, and refusing to let the void divide the five continents.

Those messages sounded different now.

For many, the conclusion became unavoidable.

Without Lootwell, the hidden slave worlds would probably still exist.

The factions considering betrayal might still be negotiating.

And the five continents could have entered the next major crisis with knives already waiting behind their defenses.

Trust in Lootwell rose again.

Lucien disliked that almost as much as he appreciated it.

Trust was useful.

Blind trust was dangerous.

So Lootwell’s next public message contained no celebration.

It reminded everyone that internal problems could exist anywhere and that responsibility did not disappear simply because Lootwell was watching.

Factions were expected to review their own institutions.

Communities were encouraged to report abuses through established channels.

Administrators were told to keep preparing instead of assuming someone else would notice every problem for them.

Lucien had no intention of turning Lootwell into the only pair of eyes in the world.

That would simply create another weakness.

•••

Vorren watched the public reaction with considerably less interest than Lucien expected.

He had another inspection scheduled.

Months earlier, he would probably have tried to avoid it.

Now he was reviewing the location before leaving.

Lucien noticed the change immediately.

Vorren was studying transport routes, local emergency systems, and the recent reports from the area.

He looked annoyed.

But he was preparing.

Lucien felt the smallest hint of satisfaction.

Vorren eventually noticed him watching.

The suspicion returned to his face.

Lucien looked away before the man could ask anything.

There was no reason to ruin progress by explaining it.

•••

The next inspection took them to an old border territory shared by two factions that had fought each other repeatedly in earlier eras.

Their relationship had improved greatly during the recent cooperation period.

Publicly, there was no problem.

Vorren still felt uneasy.

Lootwell investigated.

This time, they found no conspiracy.

What they found was far more ordinary.

Both factions had built emergency evacuation plans assuming access to the same neutral valley.

Neither had told the other.

If both territories were attacked simultaneously, hundreds of thousands of civilians would be directed into the same region from opposite directions.

The valley could not support them.

The resulting congestion would cripple both evacuations.

The two factions were embarrassed.

Lucien was delighted.

This was exactly the kind of problem he wanted to find now, while it was still only embarrassing.

The evacuation plans were rewritten.

Additional routes were established.

Vorren’s unease around the region diminished.

He looked pleased.

That was when Lucien became absolutely certain.

Vorren was no longer merely enduring these inspections because Lootwell required it.

He wanted the danger to disappear.

The realization almost made Lucien smile.

•••

Weeks passed.

The search uncovered no second network of traitors.

That was good.

Instead, it found smaller weaknesses that would have become larger only under pressure.

A regional command center relied too heavily on one communication tower.

Two allied forces used incompatible emergency signals.

Several food reserves were positioned close enough that one disaster could threaten all of them at once.

A medical organization had enough healers but not enough transport capacity to move casualties during a continent-wide emergency.

None of those discoveries deserved dramatic announcements.

Lucien preferred it that way.

The best danger was the kind removed before anyone learned how close it had come to becoming serious.

Vorren’s unease continued decreasing in small places.

The wider feeling remained.

Something beyond the ordinary risks still disturbed him.

Neither Lucien nor Vorren had forgotten that.

But the world around that larger danger was becoming harder to break.

Every corrected flaw removed another possible cascade.

Every faction that cooperated became one less uncertainty.

Every hidden weakness discovered early was something the enemy could no longer exploit later.

Lucien could not control what was approaching.

He could control how many opportunities it found when it arrived.

•••

One evening, another inspection report reached him.

There was nothing dramatic inside.

A redundant route had been completed.

A supply network had been decentralized.

Two factions had finally standardized their emergency communication protocols.

Vorren’s assessment of all three had improved.

Lucien closed the report and leaned back.

The Thousand Races would never become perfect.

No civilization could.

There would always be greedy people, frightened people, fools, opportunists, and those who believed they were clever enough to survive by sacrificing everyone else.

Lootwell could not erase human nature, nor the equivalent weaknesses among the other races.

What it could do was make betrayal harder.

It could make accidents less catastrophic.

It could make hidden risks easier to find.

It could ensure that when something failed, the next system did not fail with it.

For now, that was enough.

Beyond the five continents, the Black Mass continued moving through the void.

Monster Emperors still appeared.

The Primordial Incarnations remained unseen.

Vorren still felt something waiting beyond the ordinary horizon.

Yet the world they might eventually strike was no longer the same one that had existed months earlier.

The cracks were being found before anyone could widen them.

And this time, Lucien had no intention of waiting for the enemy to show him where the next one was.