Institute of CelluloseBoard

Untecna wrote:

(So, like, Xatem is tricking Yano to teach him a lesson. He avoids anything super romantic, but still takes kisses and whatnot to keep the narrative up)

Orange Creek wrote:

Things started to change in the 16th century though, following the Church's cultivation of the Polytrichastrum subterraneum or "lightless moss", which was this extremophilic species of moss that could grow with barely any sunlight. The cultivation was extremely pivotal because it allowed for the Church to dig deeper and deeper into the Underground without worry about a lack in oxygen.

It also spurred further cultivation attempts to create even more lightless plants, though with mostly limited success until the creation of the mar core in the 17th Century, which is the same mar core that you see powering the Custodian Matrix today, where clumps of mar is molded together into a sphere and then ignited. See, these cores were not only extremely powerful for their energy output, but also for their extreme likeness to the Sun.

This included the faint, electromagnetic radiation that the mar cores gave off, which were near-duplicates of natural sunlight. Though nowhere near as powerful as the Sun itself, the creation of the mar cores made cultivation so much more easy, and allowed for agriculture to completely explode in the Underground, and animal husbandry followed shortly thereafter.

The boom did get interrupted abruptly during an uncertain period in the Modern era, when the resulting soil erosion from the multiple Underground layers caused by Oranic agriculture caused a catastrophic collapse, but the Orange Creek quickly rebounded from this too and developed further technologies in architecture that ultimately lead to the modern day layers as we see it today.

As for why the Orange Creek has 13.7 billion people, well, it was simply down to the nation's homogeneity. After the Day, the line between Roman, Berber, Arabic, and Egyptian was completely destroyed and replaced only with a single label: Oranic. Religion was a constant too, with virtually all Oranics being Crymenathean until the 20th Century, when "virtually" became "legitimately". This cultural stability, especially when controlled by an institution as powerful as the Church, meant that the Orange Creek could only grow and grow.

Orange Creek wrote:

What if the Byzantines won at the Battle of Manzikert, and what if the Yano-killing-Xatem storyline was kept as canon.