Hello, dear Readers; welcome to the next journey with me. Ad Astra has been an original project that I have been working on for the better part of two years. From the beginning of this original project, I wanted to try something different from what I have seen so far. Growing up, I watched, read, and played what we now consider retro-futuristic/techno-military settings. For me, that has always been an exciting setting, balancing out a more advanced future setting while maintaining the groundness of what we see.

In addition to the retro-military setting, I wanted to see what I could do with the addition of mana-punk, a technology that has been influenced by magic. With retro-futurism, I wanted the freedom to create and explore my own ideas without having to be locked into every little futuristic idea that is on the Internet. There are so many ideas, and there are times that can get in the way of the core elements of a story, at least for me, but at the same time, I want the freedom of what I said above.

Typically, you see the protagonist faction being technology superior against a far inferior antagonist, usually being the fantasy side of the isekai genre. Regarding the fantasy element of the genre, I always felt there could be more done with it than just swords that glow. I wanted to develop and show a completely independent technological civilization influenced by Thaumaturgy (a fancy word for magic). Earth evolved on the concept of science, and Alagore evolved with Thaumaturgy. Show what are the pros and cons of each, what advantages and disadvantages those differences could bring and so on, how one side could be more advanced in one area but behind in another. It opens the door for some creative ideas and settings. I hope you all agree and enjoy the universe that I have created.

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I want to personally thank everyone who helped me throughout the development stage of this project. I am shocked by how much this project has grown since I started working on it. Thanks to all of you, it has matured greatly.

With the layout of this project, I intend to focus on volumes, each having its own arc. While these are not official numbers, I predict each volume to be about ten to fifteen chapters, depending on the story needing to be told. When a volume is complete, the chapter # will reset back to Chapter 1 (example, V2, Chapter 1)

To help maintain organization, after three or four volumes (depending on the story arc), I intend to stop there and start a new book (same story) and continue with the subsequent volumes. The idea is that one web book has less than ten or fifteen volumes within it, being this giant list of content. The goal is to make Ad Astra more easily accessible to new readers.

Table of Context:

Prolog

Volume 1 Alagore

Volume 2 Assiaya

Volume 3 Borrian