In the year 2034, the world as we knew it ended. Why the year 2034? Because some random fuck picked an arbitrary event as year 0 and the world as we knew it ended precisely 2034 years afterwards.
As for how it ended? Well, if you were expecting something like a solar flare, meteor impact, nuclear apocalypse, or even zombies rising up while hellfire rained from above, you would be wrong. Actually, there are only a few very rare recorded cases of people dying from a reason directly related to the end of the world.
That's because rather than a sudden disaster, the end of the world as we knew it came as something that could only be called a miracle. As long as they weren't too far gone, the sick miraculously recovered with even the bedridden suddenly jumping around as if they were in the prime of their lives. Crops grew to maturity in weeks instead of months. Batteries seemed to last 100s of times longer than they had any right to, while each drop of gasoline someone put into their car did for 20. Athletes found themselves capable of increasingly superhuman feats of strength, endurance, speed and skill.
It was the end of the world as we knew it, because the world we found ourselves in was unrecognizable. Soon enough people could manipulate the very world around them with their wills alone. Most could barely will a ball of light with the radiance of a candle into existence. However some learned to teleport themselves to the other side of the world, to bend hurricanes to their will, temporarily control the minds of others, create massive illusions, divine the future and past, and countless other feats. Unmistakably, magic had stepped out of the realms of fantasy and into reality.
This was just the beginning, as it seemed that the advent of magic meant more than simple parlor tricks. Soon it was discovered that the planet was growing, growing hundreds of meters wider every day. About a month in, miners noticed that stone and ore that they mined through the month since magic appeared was beginning to grow back. Besides the usual stone and mundane ore, wholly new materials started to appear as well. The appearance of strange new elements coincided with the wide scale mutation of living things. Some herbs gained incredible properties, some plants uprooted themselves and migrated across the land, and animals grew into beasts and monsters of legend. It was the analysis of these materials and creatures that revealed the existence of “mana particles”. The newly discovered elements were actually the same elements on the periodic table, save the addition of mana changing their intrinsic properties. Mana itself was classified as a boson for magic, similarly to how photons were the bosons for light and the electromagnetic spectrum, affecting the world in strange ways.
The implications of this discovery were enormous, but dwarfed by the questions it raised, especially as time passed. 2 months in, and the first reported sighting of a goddamn unicorn occured along with dragons, mermaids, phoenixes, and countless other mythical creatures. People began changing, some developing an incredible affinity with magic, along with pointed ears, some seemed to compress themselves, becoming short and stout, while others grew to immense sizes with the strength to match. Race suddenly stopped being about skin color and became whether you were elf, giant, dwarf, or just plain human. Faith healing began to actually work, and even common priests of almost all religions could give at least minor blessings. It seemed that mana responded to information, tapping into the lore and collective unconscious of humanity and bringing it to reality. Of course testing this with a computer yielded the first case of an enchanted item.
Causing a computer to output the information related to a certain phenomena, in the case of that experiment a small electrical arc, and then adding a bit of code to actually send a current caused a small arc to magically appear, even when the computers battery was removed and all electricity drained.
It seemed that magic simply drew on the thoughts and imaginations of people and made that into reality, taking that which lies in the platonic realm of ideas and forms, and bringing it into the material world. It was by the study of magical phenomena that the existence of this realm became part of the natural sciences instead of a simple philosophical thought experiment. Mana had an intimate relationship with ideas, acting as the medium between reality and imagination. At its most basic essence, magic took what existed in the realm of thought and brought it into the here and now.
Suddenly humanity was ushered into a strange era. Technology progressed explosively while dragons soared through the skies. During all this time, the earth continued to grow and living things continued to mutate. The properties of the realm of Ideas was studied more and more, finding countless different forms and structures that magic seemed to naturally create, from beasts of myth to, ironically, futuristic starships, as well as strange and alien forms unlike any seen on earth. Through harnessing this magic, mankind not only maintained their position at the top of the food chain in spite of the existence of dragons and zombies, but rose further than ever before.
After the passage of almost 3 years, the earth burst into pieces.
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Not in the sense that it exploded into a horrendous ball of fire, but that the land itself shattered and spread out, like a massive iceberg breaking apart into smaller chunks upon the sea. Suddenly instead of a sphere of rock hurtling through space, it was a massive archipelago of floating islands, the space light years around the planet suddenly warping. New islands appeared, these not being born from when the planet shattered, but seemingly teleporting in from the space between the islands. These islands were populated by strange creatures, some angelic, with feathered wings and halos, some demonic with cloven hooves and barbed tails, some completely alien, as if they were extraterrestrial aliens that were dragged into this situation with us, some mechanical, as if robots that were built rather than born. At that moment humanity learned they were not alone in this universe, or even those dimensions adjacent to theirs.
These foreign aliens seemed to have gone through the same process as humanity. They too reported that strange phenomena had occurred all over their own worlds, bringing their myths and legends to life. It was not known at the time, but it was the combined creative imagination and consciousness of all of those species that allowed magic to spill into the world in the first place. It was this collective consciousness that finally gave the world of Ideals the oomph it needed to pierce the veil of reality.
That was when everyone first heard what humanity would then know as “the system”
[initializing…]
[quantifying…]
[greetings sentient, your status has been recorded and can be displayed at your leisure]
It appeared that magic itself developed something of a boltzmann brain after reaching some sort of critical mass by bringing all the races together. Suddenly everyone found their attributes quantified into specific numbers. These numbers, representing their physical, mental and miscellaneous attributes, were then subdivided further. For example, mental attributes included memory, magical attunement, and will, while physical attributes included vitality, perception and strength.
Beyond that, the system granted creatures the ability to level up, and even gain skills, perks and classes. Leveling up was achieved by collecting experience points, supposedly bits of magic you gained over time by doing certain actions. Leveling granted bonus stat points to certain stats, depending on the skills and perks of the one who leveled up. Perks were akin to passive abilities one gained by meeting certain criteria such as a certain level in a skill. Skills represented certain abilities one learned, such as ones mastery with a sword, their ability with a certain type of magic, all abilities that grew in proficiency and leveled up as you went. Classes acted as the sum total of a creature's abilities, allowing them to grow their abilities in their chosen fields even further.
So, as time passed, the various races and cultures that were swept into this new world collided, with the addition of the system, technology and magic kept growing, and the world became truly and utterly unrecognizable. It was in this world, where wizards stood tall over mechanized cities, warriors could sunder mountains with their bare hands, angels and demons collided, and myths and legends were brought to life, where a young lad named Zeno met his “end”.
Zeno was working at a “lab” in the university, composed of several computers as well as a wide area to create a runic matrix. Zeno was garbed in basic lab attire, a long white lab coat covering most of his skin while safety goggles enchanted with magic detection framed his face. His hair was short, black and spiky, while his skin was tanned. While not exactly built heavily, he wasn’t a stick either, maintaining a medium build despite spending most of his time either in front of a computer or with his face in a book.
At the current moment, Zeno was busy trying to design the runes necessary for the current experiment. He was currently researching a new technique to break the first law of thermodynamics, creating something from nothing. Magic, interestingly enough, was both great and terrible for this purpose. Great, because breaking the fundamental laws of reality was the modus operandi of magic, and terrible because by its very nature, magic needed something to base itself off. It was hard to create a good rune to represent the act of creation, since something appearing out of nothing was really hard to actually conceptualize, and thus most techniques and spells fell short in either versatility or practicality.
What Zeno was doing, on the other hand, was try to design a rune that represented not simple creation, but the very beginning of reality. He hoped that a runic array capable of symbolizing the Big Bang would allow him to tap into that power to act as a form of source for whatever he wanted to create.
Zeno was able to achieve so much progress in this area due to his origin research perk, a perk gained from reaching 5 levels of proficiency in the research skill tree as well as 1 level of proficiency in at least 4 other fields of knowledge. This perk gave allowed him several epiphanies in his work, as if an unseen force was guiding him to success. Soon enough, he completed the runic array he was to test.
“Now let’s see if this works…”
Programming the runic array into the computer, Zeno watched as lasers engraved it onto the floor with inhuman proficiency. The array itself was multi layered, expanding from a single point on the first layer before bursting out into various symbols of heat, energy, and matter on the second layer, with control and regulation runes on the third layer to keep the array from exploding.
Once the engraving was done, all that was left was to actually supply some mana to start it up. Standing at the center of the array, Zeno began channeling his mana into it. Light seemed to flow through the runes under Zeno’s eyes, the runes seeming to rise into the air around him.
For a split second, Zeno felt a sense of immense vertigo as the runes spread around him, space itself shifting about. Then, before he could jump out of the array, everything went dark.