First Light of a New Age

Chapter 175: The Vampire Lord & The Fool

A/n: This chapter has over 20,000 words. If you feel tired of paying attention to details or commenting on anything, don't read it yet until you have the time and energy to read the whole thing for hours. You can also rest for a while for every scene you finish reading.

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Before the world around him fell into complete darkness, the ground where Riley was standing turned black. 

Darkness has surrounded everything including the light itself. The darkness envelops Riley into it, which now his sight is darkened, although he is not blind yet, but his sight was so clouded that shapes blurred into nothing

“Depiction of Nature and Society,” Riley muttered, which was little more than a growl in the void. “So the Reich and their lapdog ally really have this.”

He remembered the intelligence reports, half-redacted and stamped with layers of classification, that the artifact was described as an ancient magical device capable of trapping enemies inside an isolated space. Apparently, it can even swallow the whole space of the opponent. It was an artifact that could seal a target into a closed-off space. To be more precise, it swapped a painted landscape with the real world, and then it would convert the real world into a painted landscape.

On the other hand, this painted world was almost the same as the real world, with nothing strange or outstanding within it. However, it was fundamentally an illusion. Worse, the wielder could select from a catalog of a hundred such “worlds”. The most fearsome aspect of this artifact was not drawing people into another-world, but being able to manifest various effects on the targeted area. 

The wielder could also choose these effects. If they chose a volcanic wasteland, lava could flood the battlefield, yet the user could exempt allies from the flames. If they conjured an arctic tundra, blizzards could freeze an army in minutes while sparing their own troops. It was less a prison than a weaponized canvas.

And Riley had been pulled into one of the crueler versions, a Dark Forest, where the air was thick and visibility was practically zero.

That much, at least, matched the intelligence gathered by Austronesian spies stationed near the Mysthiac Theocracy’s borders. The mission had nearly cost them their lives, but the knowledge they smuggled back was invaluable. 

Now, as Riley breathed slowly and let his senses adjust, he felt the density of the pocket dimension pressing on him. 

Every atom in the air, every rough edge of leaf, every grain of dirt underfoot was saturated with manipulated mana. To the untrained eye, it all looked genuine. To Riley, who had lived and studied this world for years, it looked like a painting with seams showing.

Being in this world for a few years, Riley already had thorough knowledge of the magic of this world. 

And one of the basic aspects is knowing how to differentiate between 'mana' and 'magic'.

People used the terms carelessly, but he knew the distinction. 

Mana is the fundamental aspect that makes up the world. Everything contains mana within it, from the trees on land, to the deep ocean  from the untouchable sky to even the people it encloses. 

There are those who call it "life force", monks refer to it as "chi" and magicians address it as 'mana'. It embodies many names, but its main form is that it exists within all things, but whatever the word, it is universal. 

And from mana, magic is born. Without mana, there could be no magic. And the more mana one possessed, the more terrifying the magic they could unleash.

Mana used to simply be a means of giving things life, but elves, beastmen, dwarves and many other races took it and used it to give birth to chaos and death. The use of magic, magic artifacts, and waging wars.