Solution 9 - Unfounded Speculation!

[Yuella]

I don't want Solution 9 to be Ancient / Azem related. It should be just a direct FFIX reference: an alien civilization embedding itself to North Tural in an attempt to save themselves. Their bodies are not suitable for the planet so they created artificial bodies (genomes) to transfer their souls into.

Although I can see it being Azem's solution in saving the world from the Final Days, creating a city surrounded by a shield of heavy aether-rich buildings

[MikkoAkure]

If it weren't for the use of the proto-Eorzean alphabet I'd have suggested they could be from the future and pulled a Crystarium on us on a bigger scale.

I looked around at what we have available and in what looks to be Shaaloani there's a bar sign that says "BAR" very clearly on it in modern Eorzean. So it is strange that they use the Eorzean alphabet in the New World while the more connected Hingashi uses their own, separate writing system but that also means that Solution Nine is completely and utterly separate from the rest of the New World as if there wasn't any doubt before. That said, the signs also have what appears to me like it could be a different writing script as well, but it's the same thing repeated on both "Employment" and "Soul Supply".

Some things I'm curious about are why there's a dungeon where Solution Nine architecture looks blown up:
https://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...660.1634253356

Maybe a Eulmore situation where they're our enemies before they become our allies and hub at the end of the expansion?

Maybe some army who doesn't like them being there invades them and we chase after?


There's also this previous artwork that looks like a ceruleum tank and by the GPU fans, this is definitely a part of Solution Nine:
https://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...660.1634253356

Maybe this is the "Soul Supply"? Maybe the Niners are mining souls out of the lifestream/ceruleum for some purpose? The city looks to be powered by lightning aether so they could be using ceruleum for other things.


My spitball guess and I've been batting pretty low on guesses lately, is that due to time dilation between shards shenanigans and/or the Ascians being dead/distracted, one of the shards made leaps and bounds in technology without evil ghosts breaking things to prevent that. At some point they realize the whole shards theory and with their technology they ported over a beachhead of sorts, but didn't quite have the Exarch's abilities of living person transference and so they have a system set up to make bodies and then inject souls into them. From what I can tell, the Void uses modern Eorzean script, at least on the maps, but the others could have kept the proto script around if they had no big societal collapses.

[Cleretic]

I think the important thing to remember about Solution Nine is exactly where the zone sits in terms of 'content type': It's the secondary city. It's definitely connected to Heritage Found, and we'll probably first visit them very early; perhaps in that 'pick between two mini-branches' part of the questline, same as we did with Eulmore and Radz-at-Han. I think more Radz than Eulmore, because I believe before ShB's release they were already making it pretty subtextually clear that Eulmore's Up To Some Stuff in a way they're just not with Solution Nine. This also means that, while it's probably going to face a change of some kind to explain why we don't have full access to its services at first, it is going to... y'know, still be there afterwards, and is highly unlikely to overshadow the rest of what we've seen, which is of a very different vibe.

I'm guessing that we'll be seeing an overall conflict of 'traditionalism versus modernity' in Dawntrail--likely not a literal conflict, since it's been made very clear that Tural's all cool with each other, more just everyone having to grapple with that question in their own way. And to aid that whole thing, Solution Nine's situation will be largely 'self-made'; not elevated by some externality like shard travel, but developing entirely by its own propulsion and will.

Basically: I think it's FFXIV Wakanda.

[diamondedge83]

I think the name Heritage Found is probably important too. There are two distinct civilizations in the same place, but what if they aren't? Heritage Found makes it seem like there were a people there that left, and their decendants found their way back and built their new civilization at the same site. Mikko's thought that they could be from the future isn't so far fetched, their alphabet being the proto version could just mean that they kept it alive and didn't deviate like Eorzea. Perhaps they're even from a different timeline's future as well. I wouldn't mind some Chrono Cross stuff going on. Cleritic's idea of it being Wakanda (more like Esthar from FFVIII, same idea) is just as likely. This is my favorite part while waiting for the next expansion; we're probably all wrong, but everyone's ideas are just as good (sometimes better) than what it will actually be.

[Darkpaw]

Baseless Speculation: It's Rowena's hometown.

[MikkoAkure]

The only thing that gives me pause is why they would be so careful to scrub the entire environment of props and avoid letting us see any of the NPCs (with the exception of a few faces from the adverts) if that were the case.

Tuliyollal is also missing NPCs. I think it's more of just a WIP thing than anything else. The Crystarium and Sharlayan previews did the same thing.

[Denishia]

Spitball Theory: Calamity of Lightning. Solution Nine is the last surviving remnant of the civilization that rose after the first calamity and that the First Astral Era did reach a little beyond "to forge stone tools and established settlements and towns, which grew into kingdoms that soon went to war, each seeking to expand their domain." Just a tad. And to add to the Shinra vibes, "To forge their tools and weapons, mountains were gutted and skies blackened." So, this society was older than Allag but younger than immediate Pre-Sundering. Enough so that the proto-script survived unaltered. In Tural the memory of this civilization survived as folktales said as Allag did back east, with the same recentish rediscovery by North Tural's version of Saint Coinach, hence Heritage Found. Nothing wackier than that.

[Vyrerus]

I actually like Mikko's idea.

As for my own... well this post will contain spoils for a 24 year old game.

*shapes tinfoil hat into a cowboy hat*

In Final Fantasy IX, Zidane is a manufactured person. He's a Genome that was given a soul and a mission. He forgot the mission. His mission was to destroy all of the inhabitants of Gaia, so that the inhabitants of Terra could populate the fused planet after Terra consumed Gaia's crystal heart. Terra was a wandering planet of highly advanced beings whose planet was dying, due to their incidental killing of its crystal core.

Mothercrystals in prior Final Fantasies have always been important. Either bestowing power directly to heroes or maintaining the forces of nature. Sometimes both. In IX, they started the tradition of The Crystal calling souls back to itself when beings died, like a fusion of the old crystals and FFVII's planetary rebirth cycle. They flesh this out and explicitly show it in FFXI.

Anyway, in IX, The Terrans having essentially killed their world... They needed a way to live. And they found out that they could move their planet to other planets and have it merge its empty core with a new crystal core, and this would stave off their extinction. Of course, this meant that they had to replace a cycle of life. A young crystal would not work, and the natural flow and evolution of crystals and worlds was too slow for them. So they traveled from world to world, sometimes shepherding primitive peoples till their world was ripe, more or less, and then they replaced them with themselves.

It's been an awful long time since I've played through IX, so I don't remember if that had happened once or twice or multiple times before. I just remember that in IX it was currently what was happening to Gaia, and it was the reason for things like The Mist and Kuja and Zidane.

With that backdrop in place, it wouldn't surprise me one way or the other, whether Solution-9 was alien or it was ancient. The Ascian's civilization has actually been responsible for prior FFIX references and is utterly alien to our real world, so it could easily be that. It could also be an amalgam. You know, "Why not both?"

Just as Venat as Hydaelyn took in the alien race of Dragons as both refugees and allies, so too, perhaps, did her controlled opposition.

We've already been shown in the Hildibrand questlines of EW that there are multiple alien races already caught up in present day affairs. The symbiote race responsible(but possibly not responsible) for the Hildibrand clan's prodigious power. The blue alien race for Pupu. These came to Etheirys of their own will, in need.

But what if, what if perhaps Etheirys took in another world, not a shard, to save itself? What if under the auspices of the Ascians, another world, or at least its denizens, were taken in?

What would such a fusion mean for Rejoinings? What would it mean towards the larger threat that was always out there til just recently? And what would it mean with regards to the WoL and who the WoL is?

Perhaps there are still puzzle pieces in our own origin that have yet to be laid bare. As it stands, a lot of folks like to believe that the world of FFXIV is a solved equation. We've certainly been shown that to be the case. Yet, with XIV dev's love for subverting expectations, what if there's a few more motes of light that have yet to twinkle?

What if the WoL is a strange Zidane analogue crafted by both Ascians and Aliens? An Angel of Death sent to reap Nihilism.


------

Yeah, never gonna happen, but YEEHAW!

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Here is my entirely baseless theory. The Final Days hit and you have a world full of super wizards attempting to figure out what to do about it. Some want to sacrifice half the population to make a god, others want to eradicate the species. Perhaps, Solution 9 is the literal 9th idea on the list of ideas (with the absolute worst ideas at the top for some reason). What if one group of Ancients decided to either digitize themselves and take the servers out of phase with the universe. And we know taking things out of phase with the universe is within their power because the shards are out of phase with our universe. Or they figured out a way to send their city to the future beyond the issue. Or they flew to another more aetherically dense world and have returned now that the threat is over. My theory is that Solution 9 is gonna be Ancients in one form or another so they can rollback the unintended suggestion that some peoples are so culturally and/or genetically inferior that there is no choice but to wipe them out.

[Holy_Miasma]

I also wanna point out, some of the glyph symbols in the artwork very much resemble the glypy symbols found in certain Allagan themed dungeons, like the twinning and fractial. Maybe someone continued where the Allagans stopped, Or maybe not all of them disappeared after all.