What could be more distressing to know about – the fact that people didn't consider you to be alive despite standing in front of them, or hearing about the death of those who were with you?
Jinju's eyes raced around in polar coordinate spirals, trying to estimate the location of his current situation – if his brain could lift up a spoon full of useful information from the pool of confusion that his mental landscape was currently being infested with.
"What? Dead?!" Jinju couldn't believe he had to face a day as grim as this. "Please, sir… wait, stop. I need answers."
"Then find them yourself, boy," Eolum Hon's reply came out like a venomous snake out of his mouth, biting into the crippled bit of faith Jinju still had in humanity. "If we don't get out of the Himalayas before sundown, there'd be no one left in our camp to even offer up funeral rites for us."
Jinju stood there, watching Takira Hon and her father escape at a walking pace into a smoky mist surrounding the near horizon of the synthetically-constructed icestone caverns.
The girl looked back at the young demon hunter one last time with a worrisome face before she vanished behind a wall of thick smoky particles underneath an archway leading out of the barren cold interior.
Rude! Never expected someone from the famed Hon family to reject a civilian in need. Well, not that I am a civilian after all. But even if I was, I expected a much better attitude towards fellow humans.
The encounter and interaction with the human mages shot down some catalysts for Jinju's mind to use as crawling crutches.
Parts of his living memory fluttered back to him.
*Sigh*
The magnetically-enhanced discs remained intact around his wrists. With no choice left, he began following along the same path as the Hon ice mages out of the room, revising through all the vital information about the world and how it had grown to be as it was now.
Mankind had always been involved in fighting for resources and dominating over other species and races for a majority of time that they had been here on Earth.
But times had changed as mysterious beings from possibly other worlds, universes and dimensions were spotted lurking in the shadows. First, they were always in hiding from sight by the rest of the humans. Over time, they seemed to be collecting information about how the various countries and continents worked – learning about their economies, logistics, societies, languages, inventions and anthropology. When they felt comfortable enough, those otherworldly foreigners revealed themselves under various banners of their own.
Almost humanoid in appearance, the creatures introduced themselves as elves – offering great gifts, power and knowledge to those who were capable enough.
They had been looking after the whole human race since its dawn of existence, and by far, they were impressed by the rate of improvement and development that all of the people of Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Oceania, Africa, and Antarctica had managed to bring.
"We bring forth glad tidings of you Earthians to possess a bright future," the spokesperson of the elves had stated. "As a great warrior race you have potential indeed. You have the invitation to join the rest of the worlds beyond the Cradle Veil to continue ascending through the space-time bubbles of matter… or you can remain a peaceful conglomerate of species while we protect you from external harming forces in this stellar void you call home."
The deal seemed had too profitable.
Already most of mankind's technologies had reached a plateau of self-sufficiency deficiency, formed by the tug of war between capitalists grown too greedy for actually researching projects at greater scales that would kill off their own business purposes versus natural limitations cause by the lack of resources and fuel.
But as with any contract that appears to offer too much on the packaging, the humans fell for their own mistake regardless of how much their own people regularly scammed themselves via similar tactics.
The elves taught people insanely valuable amounts of knowledge in just a few months that would have taken a whole army of Einsteins and Eulers atleast eight thousand years to discover or develop. Not just the incomplete pieces of science that every frontline of knowledge at every university was struggling to figure out, but also secrets to the universe that almost seemed like betrayal to their own religions. A few ethnicities began seemingly worshipping the elves, which they courteously denied and forbade them to do so.
Magic. Previously only existing in the intricate minds of fiction writers, now every layman could have access to it. Working wonders in reality beyond the boundaries of printed paper and tangled thoughts.
It turned out that the elves were simply a superior civilization landing a score up high on the Kardashev scale, although they still had not figured out how to build whole Dyson spheres around stars (which they thought was a really bad idea).
But those euphoric moments only made up for the first half of the agreement at most. As for the second half, once the humans were accustomed to their new way of life internationally – from the biggest and greediest trillionaire's mansions to the poorest and least educated homeless orphans – the elves released the so-called Cradle Veil surrounding the Virgo Supercluster, which was home to countless families of galaxies with their own little solar systems and planets including the Earth.
From the perspective of the people on Earth, instantly the skies in both the day and night sections were overpopulated with way too many celestial objects that had never been spotted by any astronomer before. Science geeky bits aside, once the Cradle Veil was gone, intergalactic space travel and interdimensional portal pathways had become active throughout the vicinity of the human world.
"We have given you all that you need to survive," the elves were about to take their leave at a time when all the people of Earth needed them the most. "Don't worry. We shall send our best champions to assist you on occasions of any disasters deemed far too catastrophic for you to handle. You know the way already, just rediscover them."
Skipping over some more years, the state of the world that Jinju Wan had been born into was not an easy one.
Portals to other worlds could spawn in at any random coordinate. Thanks to the sheer small size of the Earth, most of these 'gates' appeared on other planets, inside the core of stars, floating somewhere in the vacuum, or even inside a black hole. But the tiny chance of portals spawning here on Earth kept every scientist and technologist of the time busy making estimations using quantum computers and polynomial-time algorithms to track them down. In the last century before young Wan arrived to this world via the combined collaboration of his parents, atleast a dozen such 'portals' had been spotted.
Instead of friendly faces like the elves, hostile monsters and demons squeezed through the entrances to land onto the territories controlled by mankind.
Heeding the elves' advice carefully, the people were prepared. They had weapons that combined the fascinations of magic alongside the raw physical pain-inflicting devices that militaries in every country had habitually been using since the Roman ages.
Sometimes I wonder if those Elves really wanted to help us. Or was it all a plan? To make us feel the perspective of being prey to superior entities that hold so much unimaginable power over us?
Jinju Wan reached the exit to the cave.
His head was dizzy with the heavy task of sorting and labelling some sense into what this location was all about. Why were those ice mages rescuing people? How many more prisoners were there? Who are these Gargonians? What sort of mad scientist had developed those holding cells?
A mist of many strange particles hung heavy in the air beyond the point of the archway leading out of there.
I think that man was right. We need to get out. I need to get out. Is it just me or are these freaking discs growing heavier by the moment?
The mist was making it difficult for him to see what lay ahead. His other senses of smell and hearing didn't offer much assistance either, due to the well-designed acoustics of the Gargonian cave dwelling.
Ah, Gargonians! Finally I think I remember now.
ns216.73.216.39da2
and then Add to home screen.