As for the best way to enjoy the new show that humanity was putting on for her, Gaia had decided to watch it on television from inside her private space. She had decorated the room to resemble a cozy log cabin, complete with comfortable furniture and everything she needed to relax. With the enormous number of screens available to her, she could watch practically anything happening around the world. And when humanity was given a new form of entertainment, the sheer amount of stupidity they could produce was practically endless.
The proving grounds had only been open for a short time, yet Gaia had already witnessed enough ridiculous situations to keep herself entertained for days. Her favorite so far involved a young man who had accidentally selected the wrong option from the menu. Instead of entering the ordinary training ground he intended to use, he had been transported into a capture-the-flag death match designed for teams of one hundred people fighting against one thousand goblins.
There was only one small problem with the scenario. Neither side could actually capture the flag, because Gaia had placed it so high up the pole that nobody could reach it. She had not hidden the condition from them, either, because the description of the scenario clearly explained the rules before they entered. The young man had simply clicked the wrong option without reading what he was agreeing to.
What made the situation even funnier to Gaia was that the young man had apparently not enjoyed the experience nearly as much as she had. Since the flags were effectively impossible to obtain, the only remaining method of winning or losing was for one side to exhaust all of its available lives. Unfortunately for him, the scenario had given him three hundred lives.
Gaia had eventually stopped the simulation after he had died three times. There was no physical danger inside the proving grounds, but she still had to be careful about how much psychological damage she inflicted on people. She deliberately made death feel painful because she did not want humanity becoming overconfident and assuming that dying in the real world would somehow be harmless. The young man therefore returned from the simulation as a sobbing mess who immediately required counseling.
His experience was quickly added to the guidebook for the proving grounds. Gaia considered that another useful contribution, because it meant future participants would have one more warning about what could happen if they failed to read the instructions. She found it amusing that humans needed such obvious warnings in the first place. At the same time, the entire incident had been excellent for her stores of cultural energy.
Human beings produced free will every day, but free will itself was not the same thing as cultural energy. Most of the time, humans used their free will for their own purposes, including gathering mana and cultivating themselves. Gaia could not simply take all of that energy without interfering with their lives, so she needed another way to convert unused free will into cultural energy.
The most effective method was to encourage people to participate in their communities. When large numbers of people gathered together, interacted with one another, and created something collectively, their free will could gradually become cultural energy. The proving grounds were particularly effective because they had quickly become one of the most talked-about things in the world.
Millions of people were discussing them, participating in them, watching others use them, and creating communities around their experiences. The amount of cultural energy being generated as a result was enormous. Gaia was extremely pleased with the arrangement because humanity received entertainment and training while she received a tremendous amount of energy in return.
There was another reason the proving grounds were especially efficient for Gaia. Every human participating in them was effectively sitting on top of a mana vein. That allowed her to absorb the cultural energy being generated with very little additional mana expenditure. The mana veins were essentially the most efficient routes available for transporting that energy toward her storage.
Gaia could technically allow the cultural energy to travel directly toward the core of the Earth, but that would be an incredibly inefficient solution. For one thing, she did not currently have enough mana to support such a system. Even worse, the journey would take an enormous amount of time, potentially a year before the first significant amount of cultural energy reached her storage.
That delay was simply unacceptable. Gaia needed the energy now, not after humanity had already moved on to something else. This was precisely why the mana veins existed in their current form, even though calling them mana veins was technically inaccurate.
Humanity believed that the mana veins existed primarily to produce and distribute mana. That was only partially true. Their actual purpose was to absorb cultural energy and transport it toward Gaia, while the increase in mana around them was largely a side effect of their real function.
Gaia wanted to create genuine mana veins eventually. Those would have a completely different purpose, with their primary function being to take the mana she created and return it to the atmosphere. Such a system would be extremely important for both the planet and humanity's cultivation.
Unfortunately, she could not create them yet. The energy that would normally be available for constructing those mana veins was currently being used elsewhere. Gaia needed every spare bit of energy she could obtain to heal the planet and ensure that the massive increase in biodiversity caused by the expansion of Earth remained stable.
The ecosystem was still recovering from everything that had happened. Entire environments had been forced to adapt to a much larger planet, and Gaia needed to make sure that the various cycles of nature continued functioning correctly. Until that work was finished, she simply could not afford to spend large amounts of energy on infrastructure that could wait.
"It is a sad affair, really," Gaia thought as she considered the situation. Proper mana veins would be extremely useful for both the planet and humanity's cultivation, but she was not ready to create them yet. There was simply no reason to damage the planet's recovery just to satisfy her impatience.
"Enough pitying yourself, Gaia. You are a planet. Stop looking at everything from a human perspective," Gaia told herself.
That was easier said than done. She had found that thinking according to a human sense of time was surprisingly useful, because it stopped her from becoming inactive when dealing with problems that were important to humans. At the same time, it could cause her to become unnecessarily impatient about problems that were insignificant from her own perspective.
The issue with the mana veins was a perfect example. To humanity, waiting another ten years for the planet's natural systems to stabilize could feel like an eternity. For Gaia, however, ten years was practically nothing.
She had active memories stretching back roughly three hundred thousand years, and even those memories represented only a tiny fraction of her existence. She also possessed far older memories that were much hazier, reaching back billions of years. Compared with that span of time, ten years was barely worth noticing.
The humans would suffer from the delay, though, and that was what made the matter important to her. Gaia had to remind herself that she was not human, even if she increasingly enjoyed thinking like one. The distinction was important because a planetary consciousness could afford to wait for things that individual humans simply could not.
Meanwhile, in a completely different part of Europe, Orazio Vassevilliers sat at his desk reading an email from the Sonnenbergs. The subject of the message immediately caught his attention, and a smile appeared on his face as he finished reading it. "That is an interesting question, and one that certainly needs to be discussed," Orazio said.
The Sonnenbergs had proposed discussing a proper system for classifying factions and determining how those factions were allowed to treat and rank their members. Orazio immediately understood why Karl considered the matter important. There was nothing inherently wrong with accepting someone into a faction without paying them a traditional salary if the person received meaningful opportunities and privileges in return.
Those privileges could include access to specialized training, cultivation techniques, equipment, housing, or other benefits that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. The problem was that the current system had never been properly formalized. Different organizations were beginning to create their own rules, and there was no guarantee that those rules would remain compatible with one another.
Orazio knew that many organizations were unwilling to pay the one hundred silver coins required for a loyalty contract. The trade families were particularly unusual in this regard, because they were reluctant to place their ancestral knowledge outside the areas they directly controlled. They preferred keeping their techniques, traditions, and resources within their own territories.
That made sense from their perspective, but it also created an enormous number of potential problems. If factions were allowed to create their own internal systems without any broader framework, then the difference between employment, membership, servitude, and privilege could become increasingly difficult to define. Eventually, someone would inevitably abuse that ambiguity.
Karl had already pointed out the obvious problem in his email. If the matter were left entirely to parliament, it could take decades before lawmakers even realized that the problem existed. Once the issue finally reached the political stage, the situation could become even worse.
There was almost no public knowledge about how the great houses and other powerful factions actually operated. If that information became public without a proper framework already prepared, the resulting political pressure would be enormous. Corporations would immediately begin lobbying politicians because any legislation that restricted how factions could operate would inevitably affect their own profits.
Orazio leaned back in his chair and reread the final part of Karl's message. The issue was not necessarily urgent today, but that did not mean it could safely be ignored. If they waited until the public discovered the problem on its own, they might lose the ability to shape the system before everyone else became involved.
"That means we need to deal with this before parliament realizes what is happening," Orazio muttered to himself. He reached for his communication device to call his own family meeting, as he wanted more instructions on it, since it would define their own interests, which was always a touchy subject. At the same time, these rules were needed, as the potential problems were too large to ignore.