The Martial Unity

Chapter 2507  Collapsing Civilization

Eventually, a month passed since the inception of Beast Incursion.

In the span of one month, the state of human civilization had been altered fundamentally and drastically. It was unrecognizable.

In the span of one month, all human nations and polities that didn't possess the ability to last for too long under the endless waves of beasts and monsters simply perished. One month into the Beast Incursion filtered out all the weak, vulnerable, and unprepared human establishments and polities.

This amounted to a fifth of human civilization. This represented hundreds of billions of human beings across the entirety of the Human Domain.

This fifth was closest to the Beast Domain where the pressure and peril were the highest. They were simply unable to deal with the endless frenzy of the beast tide that never ceased for even a second. That factor combined with massive supply chain disruptions meant that the already struggling Martial Artists were not able to get all their potion needs, which meant they were less productive. It also meant that siege weapons could not last too long  and had to enter cooldown for longer periods of time.

And thus, they simply perished.

Hundreds of billions of people died in the span of thirty days.

Every day, news of a new catastrophe spread across the entirety of human civilization. Yet another prosperous and powerful nation fell to the frenzied beasts and monsters. So many horrifying tragedies and horrors emerged that the Martial World and the political sphere had begun to grow numb to them. Meanwhile, an information lockdown on the average citizen had come into place. If the average person found out that twenty-percent of human civilization was destroyed, they would erupt in panics, upheavals, and outbreaks, destabilizing human civilization. Communication technology was limited to the top-one percent of human civilization, and thus the average person couldn't just simply use a comms device to contact the rest of the world and figure out what was going on. And despite that, consumer sentiment plummeted to all-time lows as supply chain disruption destroyed and annihilated the supplier market. Shops, stores, and markets had closed down due inability to supply products that required goods, services, and resources from abroad to produce. The markets were rapidly emptied as the ability to sell things plummeted and a wave of hyperinflation washed over the entirety of the tatters of the ravaged global economy.

The inability to supply caused countless companies to fall just one month after the Beast Incursion began. Mass lay-offs and mass unemployment characterized an overwhelming majority of the surviving polities.

Morale hit dark and abyssal lows as the lack of jobs to give them money, the lack of money to purchase, and the lack of goods to be purchased drove a dark wave of misery, despair, and suffering across all people all around the world.

Most nations fell into martial law and national emergencies. While the seafaring capital of all coastal nations were rapidly repurposed for the sole purpose of supplying the most essential goods and service across the entirety of the world, food and other essential goods and services were seized by governments and carefully rationed to last as long as possible.

The dreadful lows in morale and high public dissatisfaction led to a wave of petty unorganized crime.

People were no longer safe in a civilized and ordered society; they were pushed to the edge and were surrounded by other people pushed to edge of desperation and other negative emotions due to the drastic plummet in their quality of life and the daily fear of being exterminated by the beast tides that blasted their borders.

Theft, murder, assault, and rape spiked in the span of just one month, reaching unprecedented levels in all of recorded human history.

Governments around the world deployed Martial Artists on permanent patrol to try and restore a semblance of order.

Males of all ages spanning from sixteen to sixty were forcefully drafted into the defensive military effort while women, children, and the elderly were evacuated to the very cores of human territory. Martial Artists continued being the single largest force that stood between the people and absolute destruction.

Civil liberties, fundamental rights, and constitutional axioms were thrown out the window as the one and only thing that came to matter was survival. Everything else was no more than a luxury.

A luxury that they could no longer afford.

Martial Artists became nothing short of gods to the average person. They had already possessed exalted statuses in society before as most of the private and legal establishment of humans had treated Martial Artists as a special and privileged class of society.

Now, however, they had come to earn the genuine and heartfelt gratitude of all people who would undoubtedly be dead without them. If before, people had been awed and admiring, even if envious and resentful, now they grew devoted in their gratitude.

Governments added extraordinarily powerful incentive structures to keep Martial Artists around. The worst outcome for most nations was if these Martial Artists decided to migrate to a more prosperous and powerful nation like the Kandrian Empire and abandon their weaker nations, resulting in their destruction.

Martial Artists came to possess absolute legal immunity, maximal priority of resources, and other goods and services and any and everything else that human civilization could offer.

The most stable nations were the Sage-level powerhouses that continued to dominantly crush the incoming beast tides. However, not even they could avoid much of these same societal and economic patterns.

The one and only nation that came out of national emergency with a functioning, even if significantly damaged, economy with well-functioning institutions and a prevailing public order was the Kandrian Empire and the nations on the island continents that surrounded the supercontinent of Panama.

The beast tide was unable to pass the Great Nam Ocean very well, thus these smaller island continents were largely safe from the destruction of the Beast Incursion in the short-run.

Regardless, the first month of the Beast Incursion did incalculable and destructive harm to all of human civilization, the likes of which nobody could even begin to fathom.

The arrival of the Human Summit was the first ray of hope in an era of darkness.

-