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. Magic suddenly came into existence, spreading into everyone and everything. 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 learned to harness magic themselves. 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.
This was just the beginning. Soon it was discovered that the planet was growing. About a month in, miners noticed that stone and ore that they mined through the month 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”. 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.
The implications of this discovery were enormous, but dwarfed by the questions it raised, especially as time passed. Two 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.
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.
After the passage of almost 3 years, the earth burst into pieces. Not in the sense that it exploded into a horrendous ball of fire, but that the land itself shattered and spread out. 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.
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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. 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, and strength.
Beyond that, the system granted creatures the ability to level up, and even gain skills and perks. 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 a certain amount of perk points per level, as well as one perk point for each time one leveled 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.
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.
Deep in the recesses of a cave, a young lad studied the nature of magic. He searched for why the world changed all those years ago. He was a bookish sort, with the slightest bit of madness. He often preferred the quiet of a book to the boisterous and often vulgar jovialities of others his age. He had few friends, besides the magic in the world he lived in.
Dressed in a pristine lab coat while writing onto a small tablet, he continuously made small chalk marks on the floor. He knew he was unlikely to learn where magic actually came from, yet as time went on he received epiphany after epiphany, as if magic itself was trying to help him. By the end of it all, the cave was covered in swirling lines of chalk.
He picked this cave because it was on the edge of one of the floating islands that remained from when the planet burst. This cave had an interesting quality of spatial displacement, being bigger on the inside than on the outside, as well as bridging the gap between islands even though the island zeno entered had no solid connection to any adjacent islands.
Of course there were several caves like this one strewn about the world, however this one was in surprisingly close proximity to Aris university where Zeno was carrying out his studies. Both his parents worked there, so he was practically raised within the institutions walls, from soon after he was born to when he became an alumni, as well as the fact that it was the only cave the town guard would let him go to with the Ardian threat across the border. It was there where he learned about what the world was like before magic, as well as discover his curiosity on what caused the change. A curiosity that brought him out to a small cave on the outskirts of his island, covered with chalk.
“Now, lets see if my hypothesis was correct…”
Standing at the center of the chalk marks and willing a spark of mana into them caused the whole cave to light up almost instantaneously. Lines of runes began to fill out the empty space, floating off the walls to make an extraordinarily complex multidimensional diagram, as the lines seemed to flow in impossible ways making it look like an M.C. Esher drawing. The lines got thicker and thicker, denser and denser, until they collapsed into a single point of singularity, taking Zeno with them.