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.