Chapter 167: Chapter 167

On Hemera, no two natural forests are the same, not in trees, not in the smallest mosses, not in the birds, insects, or predators that live within them.

Each is its own sealed ecosystem, completely isolated from every other forest on the planet. Step across its border and you step into an entirely new biome, one that has never naturally mixed with its neighbors.

The separation isn’t just biological. Every forest grows over a geological signature unique to that one location. Beneath the roots lies a mineral deposit that cannot be found in the same abundance anywhere else on Hemera. In rare cases, small scattered pockets of that mineral exist elsewhere, but they are quickly claimed and exhausted.

If humanity finds a species or resource valuable enough to use, they can sometimes reproduce it in controlled facilities, but only after burning the original forest down to bare earth to get it.

Total Biological Isolation

No species of plant or animal naturally occurs in more than one forest. Similar shapes and roles exist, a “canopy hunter” in one forest may resemble one from another, but they are genetically unrelated.

Many species depend on one another in ways that make separation fatal: a tree may rely on a single insect to pollinate it, while that insect can only breed inside the seedpod of one specific bush.

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Each forest has one defining mineral deposit. The mineral’s abundance and quality are unmatched anywhere else. Examples:

Lumos Crystals (Nespói): Stable, perpetual energy output, enough to power anti-gravity rings for mega-city skycraft indefinitely.

Shardstone: An impact-proof silica alloy ideal for shielding and armor plating.

Eclipsite: Absorbs light and heat, perfect for stealth coatings.

The Nine, the Legion, and corporate forces have never held a forest long-term, doing so would require defending a hostile, unfamiliar ecosystem against both its wildlife and enemy forces.

Instead, the standard tactic is:

Burn it down. Controlled fire, explosives, and defoliants clear the canopy and kill anything that moves.

Strip and sample. Extract mineral cores, high-value biological samples, and any rare compounds from surviving specimens.

Abandon it. Once samples are secured, the land is left barren. No effort is made to restore the ecosystem.

The destroyed biome is considered an acceptable cost. Once the resource can be replicated in controlled environments, the original is no longer valuable, except as a memory of what was lost.

Resource Wars: A single forest’s mineral can tilt entire military campaigns. Whoever controls the initial extraction controls the monopoly.

Denial Strategy: Even if reproduction takes years, burning the forest denies rivals the chance to exploit it. Thɪs chapter is updated by novel-fire.net

Rare Pockets: Small deposits of a forest’s mineral in other regions become flashpoints, often changing hands in brutal skirmishes.