A/N: Warning! Info dump ahead! xD I hope you don’t skip it! I tried to present it decently so hopefully y’all won’t get bored. They’re important, okay!?
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She looked at him oddly. "But you know about spaces?" she asked, her expression a bit more animated than before.
Finn found her slight changes in expression adorable, and he’d be honored to receive her sarcasm.
He grinned, and Syl’s eyes stayed on his face for a bit longer than usual.
"I inherited one, too, but it’s very small." He even took a few pieces of meat he had left in there to prove it.
She nodded and shifted her beautiful crimson eyes back to the map, and he followed right after her.
It was a map of the continent with several gulfs, minor outer islands, and so on. It showed several mountain ranges, deserts, vast forests, and the like.
To summarize, they had several races coexisting in this world of Aestraea, which was also the name of the main continent, because nearly everything lived in these lands. As for the races here, it was even more interesting. Apparently, other than humans and elves, there were also dwarves, goblins, and Beastkins, and they now coexisted all over the continent.
It seemed like much of the South was a mix of desert and forests. A good portion of it was tagged as beastkin territory.
In the East were dense forests, large mountain ranges, a vast amount of rivers, lakes, and gulfs. A large portion of this area was tagged as predominantly Elven territory.
Finally, the rest of the area, whether it was the entire Northern area, the entire Western area, or even part of the South and the East, was predominantly human.
As for the ’minor’ races like dwarves and goblins, they were sprinkled all over and everywhere.
The greyed-out area was concentrated somewhere in the middle of this large landmass. By estimate, it took up only a tenth of the total area of the continent, excluding the land masses and islands outside the largest landform.
There was a minimal amount of text and no settlements in this place. The only places with text in this region were three areas: Kaelmorr Dungeon, somewhere on the east-center area of this greyed out zone, the Morveil Dungeon northwest of that, and a Zarethil Dungeon at the direct north of the grey area.
Seeing the familiar term "dungeon", Finn couldn’t help but feel a bit of foreboding. However, he did not interrupt her and listened patiently to whatever she would tell him.
"Have the dungeons always existed?" he asked.
"No. They are just about a thousand years old," Syl said.
The root cause of the so-called dungeons actually stemmed from the ancestors.
Apparently, the races hadn’t always been at peace. The most powerful races: Humans, Elves, and Beastkins had fought and killed each other for as long as the world remembered.
These three races had been at war for tens of thousands of years, with the other races taking alliances, sometimes shifting every few generations, though the three top powers had not changed for those tens of thousands of years.
It had always been a deadlock between them. Perhaps there would be two of the three races that would occasionally be a step above the rest, but there was never one overlord race. They each had their own advantages, and they kept each other in check.
Elves were known for their magic, beastkin for their physiques, and humans for their ingenuity and their numbers. The former two were intrinsically strong—able to handle several humans of the same level —but they were famously difficult to conceive, creating a balance of sorts.
On the contrary, humans were not nearly as talented in magic or physique as the other two, but they made up for it in their numbers and their occasional innovation.
In any case, the wars escalated every generation until blood flooded all parts of the globe. There were even attacks and techniques that killed towns and cities.
The continent had no place without turmoil, and the continent didn’t have a single moment of peace.
At some point, about a thousand years ago, the continuous explosion of magic and destruction accumulated to the point that it disrupted space, and...portals opened.
Portals were pathways to another dimension that only had mana, and their creatures evolved to be brainless creatures only wanting to consume and destroy.
It was like two bolts of cloth that had existed above each other and had no intersection were suddenly pierced through.
However, the appearances of these portals weren’t straightforward. They weren’t literal holes or cracks in space.
It was more like there were large areas that overlapped with existing terrain—which, in this case, was the more prominent parts of the danger zone—and the ’solid’ landmass became ’liquid’ in a sense, and mobs of monsters would pass through the ’otherworldly lake’ every so often.
It seemed to be only one-way, though, like the one-way trap he had made before. This meant that people from this plane probably wouldn’t have to worry about disappearing to another dimension.
They were only called dungeons because of people’s imaginations—the thought and wander: what if people were actually pulled to the other side?
They would never return and would suffer there, much like a dungeon, and thus the name.
Anyway, these ’liquid’ intersections were not so big at first. On the scale of the continent, it was not even a puddle.
However, the people were so preoccupied with each other and their wars that they were not able to notice that these monsters had been multiplying, growing stronger, and killing people under everyone’s noses.
Even the first victims—mostly villages—were ignored. The forces were too stretched out by the continuous wars, after all.
By the time they realized the actual magnitude of the threat, it was too late.
These monsters already formed massive mobs, and they emerged into the world like a tidal wave, destroying everything in their path, killing almost every living creature that came their way.
There were too many, and they were too strong for most, and it gave rise to the most recent Dark Ages that lasted decades.
There were more casualties among the races than ever before, and, for the first time, they found a common enemy.
It was only when all the intelligent races worked together that the monsters were pushed back. The physically strong pushed them back with their fists and weapons, while the magic users created barriers with their own life force to control the portals.
After the loss of the most powerful beings on the continent, the monsters stopped coming altogether, as if the portals had been completely controlled.
However, everyone feared that the magic could not last long, so the races formalized the temporary truce into a permanent one, in preparation for an uncertain future.
Now, these races coexisted in relative peace, and teamwork and crossbreeding were encouraged. There were still many cases of discrimination, but nothing that could cause wars, at least not yet.
For hundreds of years, there was no sight of monsters, and the world started to recover.
And, with the absence of war due to the truce, another period of peace and relative abundance began.
Of course, seeing the monsters that surrounded his inn, Finn knew that it did not last forever.