They say the world was split in half long before the first empire ever rose.
On one side lies the First Supercontinent, where men built their kingdoms from stone and steel, gathering qi as rivers of destiny. On the other side, beyond the storm seas and shattered ridges of the abyss, lies the Second Continent—untamed lands where beasts are born with qi already flowing in their veins.
Two halves of a coin, forever clashing, forever locked in balance.
But balance is a fragile thing.
I was not yet born when the legends were carved into earth and sky. The elders in my village would whisper of battles where emperors and beasts struck so fiercely that oceans boiled, glaciers split, and the heavens themselves wept lightning.
Eight eternal figures still remain, half man and half beast, neither side willing to bow, neither able to fall. They are the immovable rulers of our age: the Eternal Sun Emperor and his rival, the Solar Titan Ape; the Lotus Empress Eternal and her nemesis, the Abyss Serpent; the Frost Emperor and the mammoth that even glaciers fear; the Storm Emperor and the roc that darkens the skies. Four emperors, four beasts. And across from them, four houses, four slayers, four monsters locked in eternal stalemate.
It is their battles that scarred Aetherion. The storm seas where no ship dares sail? Born from a clash between lightning and talon. The black wastelands where nothing grows? Poison spilled from serpent and scorpion alike. Even the glacial ridges where the sun never rises—those are the mammoth's footprints.
The world remembers through ruin.
And yet, despite the stalemate, despite the silence of these eternal titans, the balance trembles still. The Lumens have already begun to seep through their rift—perfect, arrogant beings of light who see us as children and beasts as nothing more than cattle. They move like blades carved from heaven itself, and when they descend, they descend with purpose: conquest.
We humans squabble, blinded by empire borders. Beasts bare their fangs in endless cycles of evolution. The empires cling to power, unwilling to risk open war, while the Lumens prepare to anchor their rift and claim all of Aetherion as a colony.
It is a fragile age. An age where the smallest shift can topple everything.
I should not matter in this story. I am no emperor. No beast born with power. No heir to a great house. I am a fisherman from a forgotten coast, nameless, faceless, a man the world has already dismissed.
But the sea has its own truths.
Beneath its waves lie things older than empires, deeper than bloodlines, more enduring than the scars of war. Relics of an age when dragons still soared, when horizons themselves bent to their will. One of those relics found me—or perhaps, I found it. A ring of black and gold, pulsing faintly like the heart of something that refused to die.
The moment I touched it, I felt the tides shift.
The world does not yet know my name. The empires do not yet mark me on their maps. The beasts do not yet scent me as kin or prey. But they will.
Because I am no longer only fisherman. No longer only man.
And when the horizon burns with golden light, when sea and sky shatter under my step, they will understand:
The balance has already ended.