Cave Refuge

But by the time Zachary arrived here, many ships were lingering around the Great Whirlpool.

Upon observing, Zachary noticed that the majority of these ships were not Companion Spiritual Treasures but various warships built before the natural disaster. Even among those that were Companion Spiritual Treasures, they were equipped with all sorts of mechanical devices stripped from unknown places.

Unlike Zachary, who relied solely on devouring the Dark Green Trick Nucleus to obtain mechanical devices, he could store the Companion Spiritual Treasures into the Sea of Consciousness at any time.

After they were loaded with those foreign devices, unless they never stored the Companion Spiritual Treasures into the Sea of Consciousness, they would inevitably have to remove those devices from the Companion Spiritual Treasures should they wish to store them again.

Through observation, Zachary also discovered something quite interesting—that the ships lingering in the waters around the Great Whirlpool were not only from Rabbit's Home.

Ships from the South Korean Family and the Basin Chicken, which were relatively close by, also hovered in the surrounding waters.

In fact, Zachary didn't pay much attention to the ships from these two families; given their proximity, their presence here was normal. But aside from these two families, Zachary also spotted some Kundale Slaves on some ships.

He had no idea from which Zoo these Kundale Slaves hailed, though both White Elephant and Rabbit belonged to the zoos in the Asian region. Given even the White Elephant Family's difficulties with sailing, often leading to mysteriously sinking ships, Zachary had no clue how they managed to get here.

However, considering that Blue Star had now turned into a waterlogged nation, theoretically, one could reach anywhere in the world with just a plank and enough luck.

Besides the black Kundale Slaves, there were also Caucasians on some ships, but compared to the Kundale Slaves, Zachary had already speculated about the origins of these Caucasians.

After all, before the disaster, Eagle Sauce had military bases globally, especially in South Korea and Basin Chicken Family territory, not only did they have specialized military bases, but to suppress Rabbit's development, they also deployed highly advanced aircraft carrier fleets to patrol the nearby waters.

These fleets would typically resupply at nearby bases, and after the disaster struck, compared to inland cities, aircraft carriers, which habitually stocked up on reserves for every voyage, were minimally affected.

Initially, when the Otherworldly invaders arrived, the connection points that appeared were mostly on land; there were no such links in the sea.

And natural disasters like earthquakes, storms, floods, and droughts, though impacting the massive entities on the water, didn't cause significant damage because aircraft carriers were designed and built anticipating severe weather, equipping the fleet with strong capabilities to resist natural disasters.

Moreover, given the deferential attitudes of South Korean and Basin Chicken, treating Eagle Sauce like a respectful son to a father—preferring to starve themselves to cater to the father's needs—the original aircraft carriers belonging to the Eagle Sauce Family didn't leave this location after the disaster.

As the ancient saying goes, "A general in the field is not subject to orders from home." Clearly, with the opportunity to wield power and enjoy superior treatment here, as opposed to returning and being subservient to others, anyone with sense would know how to choose.

Hence, the origins of those Caucasians didn't need much explanation, and even the origins of those warships were clear to Zachary.

Just as Zachary was puzzled about why those people were lingering in these waters, what was attracting them here, his tablet suddenly made a sound.

Zachary wondered why the tablet, which he had used as a navigation tool on the table, would suddenly make a noise and picked it up to see if it was broken.

Unexpectedly, after picking it up, he saw a feature appearing on the screen similar to a green bubble drift bottle, but unlike the completely random throwing of bottles in green bubble nationwide, the bottles displayed on the tablet were thrown by ships in the nearby waters, with each bottle specifying their ship name and contact information.

At that moment, Zachary noticed that previously every base had an independent communication page, but unbeknownst to him, it had become a standalone App, appearing on a brand-new page.

Unlike other pages named after the base, this page did not contain the various miscellaneous Apps, but only four: News, Announcements, Tasks, and Communication.

Zachary directly opened the Announcements and found there was only one message inside, which was an introduction to this page.

Formerly, each region had its own base page and App, and these pages and Apps could only be accessed and used within their respective regions; stepping outside the designated areas rendered them inaccessible.

It was because of this situation that the Imperial Court had created an interface and App that could be accessed and used at any location worldwide.

The News section functioned just like the old encyclopedia intelligence, where everyone could upload items, events, and some undocumented entities they encountered.

The Imperial Court would verify these uploads in chronological order, and once verified, annotations would be added for others to consult suitable response strategies when encountering unknown events again.

Unlike the pre-catastrophe official web pages, which published dozens of announcements daily, now the Imperial Court only published very important announcements in this section, making every new announcement in this Announcements section extremely crucial and a must-read for everyone.

The Task section was similar, where the tasks published were of significant national importance. Based on the game-like ranking of tasks, any task published here was never rated below S-level, irrelevant for ordinary people, who only needed to be aware of them.

Everyone actually knew that if monopolizing other aspects was considered disadvantageous, the opposite was true for communications; for ordinary people, the more monopolized it was, the more convenient it became.

After all, if communication was not monopolized and methods were not interoperable, contacting different people would require navigating various separate communication methods, which was very troublesome for ordinary people.

It was like in ancient times when languages were not unified, everyone spoke different dialects, and to chat with people from different regions, one had to learn a variety of dialects, which was too burdensome for ordinary people.

A unified communication method was akin to unifying Mandarin globally; as long as Mandarin was unified, there would be minimal communication barriers anywhere.

This communication App did just that, removing all independent communication Apps from other bases and replacing them with this singular global communication App.

Each individual received a unique code similar to an ID card so that even if many base communication Apps were combined, it wouldn't affect anything else.

Unlike pre-catastrophe Apps that were cluttered with various features, this communication App did not have many functions, only messaging, creating conference rooms (up to fifty people), and adding friends and message bottles.

Adding friends was simple; by entering each person's communication code, one could precisely add the desired contact.

Unlike the pre-disaster message bottle that randomly added national friends, the current message bottle functioned more like the old local friend add feature, sending messages to strangers in the same region after use.

This was similar to the old chat software's feature of mass messaging strangers, which was the situation Zachary was currently facing.

Since everyone else had already taken the initiative, Zachary naturally did not refuse their goodwill and immediately added the others' communication numbers, curious to see why these people had proactively added him.