This article details the particularities of Underworld. For the background and behind-the-scenes details, please refer to Project Alicization 1/4.

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Summary

Underworld is the world created in Project Alicization 1/4 that is described in Alicization Arc.

History (Continued)

The Development of the World

The population continued expanding. People got married when turning twenty on average, with an average of children to a couple; by the 5th generation, the AI population counted 600 people, with four hundred still alive from the older generations. The people initially tainted by egotism had lusted for power and had become the world's elite to give rise to the noble families that already ruled the world by that time. They kept snatching more and more of the fertile lands, robbing the peaceful farmers of it. Those farmers had to become tenant farmers if they wanted to remain in the capital city of Centoria, while the others left to seek new lands and founded their own remote towns, including Zakkaria and Rulid.

The noble families of Centoria were competing for power, so the cross-family marriages were not happening for a time, until they invented marriage of convenience and the most egotistic and ambitious girl ever was born.

The Rise of the Axiom Church

Quinella

The Axiom Church was founded on in 30 HEC, a hundred years after the world's creation, by Quinella whose Sacred Task was "Sacred Arts Research", the first of the kind in the world. She enjoyed success and discovered a compendium of rituals for everyone to use.

At thirteen, Quinella decided being nobility did not cut it — she wanted absolute power. Cunningly, she became a fake prophet, traveling around and performing "miracles" such as weather prediction and healing in the name of "gods". People wanted more miracles, so the told them they would need to build a temple to worship gods so they would bestow even greater miracles. Soon, a marble tower was built in the center of Centoria, and the Axiom Church worshiping started.

When Quinella was reaching the end of her lifespan, she was frantically searching for the Sacred Arts that would let her live longer, and just combining commands to try and discover something new. On the deathbed, Quinella discovered Inspect Entire Command List. The command at the bottom of the list was the one Quinella had wanted. It was the command that transferred the administratorial rights from the Cardinal System to her. Every command from the admin console was at her fingertips from then on, including the one that let her set her maximum Life to anything she liked.

The Barriers

But Quinella was not satisfied, because Cardinal had the same rights as she did. She tried to remove Cardinal, but accidentally fused together with it. Cardinal ended up changing her purpose — Quinella's goal was now to keep the Human Empire as it was.

To that end, she created the Everlasting Walls in Centoria, dividing the empire into four sectors to ensure that the only information broker will be the Axiom Church, preventing anyone from conspiring against her reign and making the people reliant on the Church. She also surrounded the living area with insurmountable obstacles to stop the expansion of humanity, and its progress as well. She also created the Taboo Index to keep everyone well-behaved, and the Seal of the Right Eye made sure everyone complied. The Church kept growing.

Cardinal

70 after seizing admin rights, Quinella noticed that her memory was close to its limit (set by the physical capacity of a lightcube). Trying to find a solution, Quinella tried copying her Fluctlight to a body of a little girl. However, in accordance with Project Alicization's early testing, neither one was able to live with the notion that there were now two of her and would inevitably fall apart. But instead, the girl's Fluctlight was just a moment faster to break, and Cardinal used the chance to split off from Quinella's mind and into the girl's body. The breakdown stopped, and Cardinal attacked Quinella immediately. Quinella was stronger, however, and Cardinal escaped into the magical Great Library Room, earlier made by Quinella as a bunker and an attempt to try and offload her system command knowledge to an external storage, as well as keeping her own version of the world's history books. Cardinal locked herself in there. Meanwhile, Quinella paid all of her attention to keeping herself alive by recycling the old memories and sleeping a lot to avoid new ones.

Continued on page 3.

References

• Underworld - Fan Wiki
• Sword Art Online Alicization Arc - Yen Press