A quiet, turbulent undercurrent swept across the continent of Teyvat. Whispers regarding the Five-Nation Alliance's desperate war against a cosmic undead cataclysm had already spread far and wide.
At the very least, within the borders of the allied nations, the truth was an open secret.
Given the staggering, daily logistical convoys hauling endless mountains of strategic provisions toward the dimensional gateway, masking the operation from observant eyes was impossible. Ningguang and the leaders harbored zero desire to suppress the rumors anyway; wielding their current military supremacy, why should the alliance fear the fractured factions of Teyvat?
While the citizens of the five courts worried deeply over the apocalyptic scale of the siege, pouring their labor into producing the ocean of munitions demanded by the front, the atmosphere inside the block world remained remarkably grounded.
Having received Ryen's private briefing regarding the upcoming Genshin Impact module, Ningguang and the high command burned with unprecedented, zealous anticipation.
They spent their days actively counting down the hours. They were no longer praying for the cataclysm to merely end; they were ravenous for the dawn of the new module.
While they strictly adhered to Ryen's command to keep the Genshin Impact module an absolute secret, they had already begun quietly gathering regional data from across their homeland.
Compiling the required resources was an exceptionally simple endeavor.
They merely needed to haul the sovereign encyclopedias and natural histories from their national libraries and synthesize a comprehensive master archive.
Determining which specific raw materials to stockpile required zero deliberation.
The native mineral deposits, botanical species, and monster drops their kingdoms had relied upon for centuries offered a ready-made checklist.
Naturally, every preparation was conducted behind heavily guarded doors.
Though they did not fully comprehend Ryen's insistence on absolute secrecy, Ningguang and the women stood unconditionally beside their partner.
As the successive Blood Moons waxed and waned, the mastery of their magical arsenals advanced rapidly.
Nearly every commander who had originally secured a casting staff had maxed out their weapon proficiency.
Furthermore, leveraging the daylight hours to dispatch trade envoys to the wizard towers had yielded a massive influx of fresh armaments.
Ryen could not bear to send Ganyu out every morning to exploit her miraculous fortune, meaning their direct procurement of Master Staves remained modest.
However, even without Ganyu's divine luck, their sheer volume of trade secured an immense treasury of assorted spellbooks.
The commanders ruthlessly condensed duplicate or obsolete spellbooks into Tomes of Arcana, ascending their existing staves through brute force.
By the current phase of the siege, while they had not yet achieved universal distribution, more than half of the senior officers wielded a Master Staff.
Even Prince Aether had finally gritted his teeth and secured a Master Staff for his own arsenal, temporarily sparing himself from Lumine's relentless daily mockery.
With Master Staves in hand and a vast repository of high-tier spellbooks at their disposal, the alliance's exploitation of the Wizardry module had breached its upper echelons.
The final hurdles involved waiting for the cataclysm to conclude before dispatching expeditions to the New Continent to secure obelisks and shrines, allowing them to weave the ultimate magical armor sets.
By the time those expeditions concluded, however, the newly integrated modules would likely dominate their attention.
Whether they would actually wear the wizard armor was a separate matter from possessing it.
No sovereign ever complained about an excess of supreme armaments.
Once the siege lifted, the continued cultivation of the Wizardry module would be formally delegated to the regular standing army.
The long-delayed Combat Mage Corps was finally preparing for official induction.
As for Ryen and the high council, their gaze was fixed entirely upon unlocking and mastering the Genshin Impact module.
More specifically...
They were consumed by the desperate, wicked urge to watch Zhongli and the Archons cross blades with their own voxel doppelgängers.
Hunting for amusement was always the supreme priority.
The relentless progression of the Blood Moons, however, had begun placing crushing pressure upon the defenses of Redstone Tech City.
The inaugural Blood Moon had merely granted the zombie hordes armor and crude weaponry.
The second Blood Moon had bestowed a terrifying, anomalous resilience upon the undead flesh; in crude gaming terms, their health pools had skyrocketed.
The third Blood Moon had injected the horde with the equivalent of alchemical draughts governing speed, strength, and leaping capability.
The sudden surge in mobility had caught the defenders completely off guard during the opening hours of the night.
Scores of leaping mutants had nearly vaulted the battlements before the defenders rallied.
After agonizingly dragging themselves across the finish line of that lunar cycle, the engineers frantically raised the outer walls by another ten meters.
The current ramparts towered over thirty meters high, constructed entirely of solid obsidian. From a distance, the fortress resembled a colossal, slumbering black dragon coiled across the plains.
Beyond the walls, the synchronized bombardment of TNT duplicators, coupled with Zhongli's deliberate terrestrial manipulation, had carved out a massive, canyon-like trench.
Calling it a moat was an understatement; it was an artificial chasm.
The defensive parameters had scaled to magnificent heights.
Following the third Blood Moon, Redstone Tech City had thoroughly evolved into an impenetrable fortress of war.
It was a testament to the old adage: apocalyptic pressure often breeds architectural perfection.
In truth, the evolutionary leaps triggered by the first three Blood Moons had caused the high command little genuine despair.
The mutants had merely grown faster and sturdier.
So long as the hordes could not breach the physical fortifications, their enhanced parameters were meaningless.
The defenders simply held the walls, raining down fire and magic while comfortably harvesting weapon experience.
Across those three lunar cycles, the alliance not only forged dozens of new Master Staves, but maxed out the proficiency of every Advanced Staff in their armory.
Furthermore, the kill zones yielded thousands of fresh SlashBlades.
The forging bureaus had accumulated thousands of fully leveled staves, awaiting only the conclusion of the siege to convert the wizard towers into permanent, automated experience farms.
On the whole, the first three Blood Moons passed without a true existential crisis.
Yet the moment the fourth Blood Moon stained the sky, the rules of reality warped into something grotesque.
When the crimson light fell, the unthinkable reality became undeniable.
The zombies had learned to place blocks.
The vast, canyon-like moat guarding the walls was obliterated in minutes as hundreds of thousands of zombies mindlessly threw dirt and cobblestone into the void, paving a solid highway across the abyss.
The hordes built bridges even as they sprinted toward the obsidian gates with suicidal ferocity.
Even the relentless, raining hellfire of the TNT duplicators failed to halt their advance.
Their numbers were simply too vast.
The moment an explosion shattered a makeshift bridge, the tide of undead pressing from behind instantly patched the breach with fresh blocks.
Worse still, towering columns of dirt began rising into the sky as mutants attempted to build staircases into the clouds, plotting to leap directly over the ramparts into the heart of the city.
The dormant, automated defense grid of Redstone Tech City roared to life. Relentless barrages from redstone cannons blanketed the lower altitudes.
The heavy machine gunners and rocket infantry abandoned all pretense of conserving ammunition, unleashing a deafening, uninterrupted storm of modern munitions downward.
Overhead, the wings of redstone bombers and the floating sky-islands mobilized, raining explosive payloads and fragmentation grenades onto the rising dirt pillars.
Only through that catastrophic expenditure of firepower did the alliance manage to suppress the opening wave of the fourth Blood Moon.
Once the initial breach was contained, Zhongli refused to gamble on their luck. He immediately ordered the logistical squads to haul their entire reserve of subterranean lava to the ramparts, pouring it down the obsidian face.
A dense, uninterrupted curtain of molten rock swallowed the outer perimeter of the city.
The colossal black dragon was instantly crowned in roaring, apocalyptic flame, transforming into a fortress of magma.
With the ground approach drowned in liquid fire, the defenders ignored the terrestrial bridges, focusing their artillery entirely upon the mutants attempting to build towers into the sky.
The magma flood was a tactical triumph, though it came at a staggering cost.
Over half a year of hoarded lava reserves were completely incinerated in a single night.
Fortunately, the molten rock could be reclaimed once the siege ended, meaning the permanent loss was negligible.
The true nightmare arrived with the fifth Blood Moon, when the mutant hordes unlocked the ability to break blocks.
That evening, the commanders watched from the battlements as a thick, black tide surged across the distant horizon. As the horde swept through the surrounding forests, every tree, leaf, and blade of grass was utterly annihilated, leaving a barren, scoured wasteland in their wake.
The destructive velocity was incomprehensible.
It was an authentic natural disaster.
Fortunately, the magma curtain strategy proved its worth, successfully incinerating the mutants before they could press their rotting hands against the walls to mine through.
Otherwise, even obsidian walls would have fallen.
Given the sheer density of the horde, a five-meter-thick slab of solid obsidian would have been chewed to dust in seconds.
A single zombie might strike with limited force, but how long could a single block withstand the simultaneous, frantic clawing of a hundred mutants?
The fifth Blood Moon pushed the alliance to the absolute brink, yet they maintained their fragile grip on the perimeter.
After agonizing deliberation, Ryen chose not to seal the automated trap corridors stretching across the cardinal directions.
They needed the final window to grind the remaining SlashBlade drops.
However, as a safety protocol, Ryen ordered the foundational layers beneath the trap corridors reinforced entirely with indestructible Bedrock, ensuring the zombies could not mine downward to escape the kill zones.
The fifth Blood Moon was terrifying, but tactically stable.
The descent of the sixth Blood Moon shattered that stability completely.
The zombies learned to tunnel.
They burrowed deep beneath the earth, tunneling beneath the magma moats and obsidian foundations, before mining straight upward to breach the inner sanctum of the city.
The subterranean assault caught the entire alliance completely blind.
Though Ryen had warned of the theoretical possibility, and the engineers had flooded the immediate sub-basements with lava and water, the sheer sprawling acreage of Redstone Tech City made total subterranean flooding impossible.
There simply was not enough liquid to fill the cavernous depths beneath the metropolis.
Inevitably, the perimeter failed.
On the opening night of the sixth Blood Moon, several thousand mutant zombies erupted through the cobblestone streets directly into the heart of the city.
For the very first time across the forty-nine-day cataclysm, the conflict devolved into a massive, desperate theater of brutal urban melee.
Having undergone six phases of mutation, the zombies were terrifyingly formidable.
Caught in a sudden ambush behind their own walls, the alliance fought a grueling, blood-soaked battle through the streets that lasted until dawn.
Even wielding enchanted diamond armor, modern firearms, and high-tier SlashBlades, it required the coordinated effort of three or four veteran soldiers to securely put down a single mutant.
After all, the zombies were clad in enchanted armor of their own.
That night marked the alliance's first authentic battlefield casualties.
By the time the sun rose on the first day of the sixth Blood Moon, Liyue had suffered three hundred fallen warriors; Mondstadt mourned one hundred and eighty...
Tallying the ledgers across the Five-Nation Alliance and Khaenri'ah, the total losses exceeded a thousand men.
Mercifully, the high command had issued Totems of Undying to the vanguard prior to the breach.
The moment a soldier's totem shattered in a burst of golden light, Dragon Knights immediately dove into the alleys, snatching the disoriented warriors from the fray before they could be struck again.
Furthermore, the city streets were heavily patrolled by towering Iron Golems and packs of wolves reinforced by alchemical combat draughts.
While the casualty reports appeared catastrophic on paper, the true cost was merely a staggering consumption of Totems of Undying.
Only four or five soldiers perished completely due to chaotic positioning, and Zhongli and the Archons swiftly restored their souls using Totems of Rebirth.
Yet to claim the night carried no heavy price...
Not a single commander would agree.
The expenditure of Totems of Undying alone was enough to make strong men weep. According to Lumine, the usually stoic Prince Aether had nearly collapsed from sheer financial agony upon reviewing Khaenri'ah's ledger.
It was the most devastating material blow the alliance had suffered since crossing the threshold into the block world.
Reviewing their entire operational history, aside from the chaotic friendly fire during recreational Bed Wars tournaments, they had never sustained such concentrated losses.
Furthermore, the desperate urban melee had inflicted severe structural damage upon the residential and commercial districts of Redstone Tech City.
The devastation broke Guizhong's heart. This was only the first dawn of the sixth Blood Moon...
If the subterranean breaches continued at this pace, the entire metropolis would require complete reconstruction once the cataclysm ended.
Redstone Tech City was her architectural masterpiece.
Sensing Guizhong's profound distress, Ryen sequestered himself for an entire day, digging through his memories until he recalled the precise engineering mechanics for an infinite lava duplicator.
Throughout the remainder of the sixth Blood Moon, Ryen flooded the entire subterranean foundation of the city with replicated magma, essentially installing a lethal, continent-sized heated floor beneath the paving stones.
The subterranean ambush routes were instantly choked off, guaranteeing that the horrific losses of that first bloody night were never repeated.
The solution brought overwhelming joy to Guizhong's heart, earning Ryen three consecutive nights of exceptionally passionate rewards behind closed doors.
The first three Blood Moons had carried pressure, but allowed the alliance to maintain a leisurely, farming rhythm.
The final three, however, placed a crushing, mountainous weight upon their shoulders.
Every regiment across the wall exhibited visible, bone-deep exhaustion.
While the insomnia mechanics were managed through staggered sleep rotations, the sheer psychological terror of the siege was impossible to alleviate through mere rest.
Fortunately, General Gorou moved tirelessly among the ranks, his steadfast presence and encouraging counsel holding the psychological breaking point at bay.
After seven agonizing days of enduring the mutant tunneling hordes, the crimson light faded.
And the seventh Blood Moon, exactly as prophesied, finally stained the sky...
The ultimate, apocalyptic climax had arrived at the gates of Redstone Tech City.