There are moments when time itself seems to slip its leash, and in those instants, a feeling ignites within souls—a frantic, desperate spark.
The will to live.
The instinct to survive.
For such emotions to blossom into a roaring inferno within your spirit takes only a moment. This conflagration serves a purpose: it creates the possibility for your dimensional self to truly manifest, to forge the tools you need to find yourself.
According to the world's new calendar, it was the year 110 A.F. (After the Fall). In a ramshackle house, located in the frigid northern reaches of a slum on a unified continent, a youth of about fifteen or sixteen tried to endure. He was scrawny, weak, frail, battling sickness, and struggling against a cold that didn't kill or freeze, but tortured him even in his sleep.
The boy would think. He was always thinking, dreaming of freedom, of the simple beauty of joy born from free will.
"I'd almost started to forget why this fucking air smells so rotten and feels so damn cold. Damn it."
Nobody knew if the boy even had a name. If asked, he'd say 'Touya,' but he doubted anyone would remember. It was normal. Most kids his age were like that, and the rampant mortality rate among them certainly didn't help.
The most common reason for this was that the world was no longer divided into many continents. Only two major landmasses remained under human power and dominion. After the Great Fall, only these two continents were left—places people once called Europe and Asia, but were now known as the Unified States and the Commonwealth of Humane Entities.
On these two widespread continents, the human population had plummeted to 1.8 billion. Unfortunately, a staggering 87 percent of this population was comprised of the young. Such a massive percentage of people under thirty accelerated the forgetting of the world's past—the people, the events, the wars, the peaces, the nations, the races, and all the rest. Now, there was no racial distinction among humans.
They were simply considered the human race. No one looked at each other as American, Japanese, Korean, or any other racial marker. The reason was clear; there were now only two fundamental distinctions that mattered:
Those who had achieved Dimensional Integrity and were Ascendant, and the poor versus the rich.
Dimensional Integrity was a path that led most who attempted it to death and despair. But for the strong-willed and those who could withstand its authority, it granted power and the right to cross over to Miara.
Touya was utterly ignorant about Miara, about gaining dimensional existence, or even most of the common knowledge everyone else seemed to possess.
His only source of learning had been his mother and her friends. His mother, much like himself, was young, and her friends were similarly young women. They would occasionally visit when Touya was very small, bringing food and conversation.
Touya sometimes thought about those young women too. But there was no need for many words; he wished he could talk to people who knew his mother better, to hear about her from them. But most likely, like his mother, they had all vanished from this cruel world at a young age…
The information Touya got from his mother was simple: Miara was a merciless place, but one with constantly renewing resources and strange magic—the complete opposite of Earth. Furthermore, when you thought about Earth, it had been on a path of global collapse due to resource scarcity ever since the wars of the past.
That was, until all the remaining nations united in a single force to explore space, hoping to discover new frontiers and lead humanity to eternity and ultimate power.
Of course, they failed. With every attempt, Earth's resources dwindled further, reaching a point where even a simple tree was a rarity. The oxygen was toxic, life was hard, and everyone was just trying to do something.
But Miara was different. However merciless, Miara was rewarding. People who went there increased their dimensional awareness faster than on normal Earth and grew stronger. When you considered Miara's endless, inexhaustible resources, its magics, and its past—a repository of knowledge and history magnitudes greater than Earth's—Miara was absolutely rewarding.
But not for everyone.
Unfortunately, getting to Miara wasn't the relatively difficult part. If Touya struggled for a year or two, he could probably get there. The real problem was that the place was utterly saturated with dangers and unknowns.
Contrary to belief, Miara wasn't just a few times larger than Earth—that was a lie people told themselves. Back in the 10s A.F., it was revealed that Miara was, in its entirety, larger than Earth. But that didn't even capture its scale. Looking at the current era, it was technically thought to be larger than a star or two, perhaps even larger than the combined mass of several stars bigger than our sun.
Despite this immense size, it didn't collapse inward. It posed no such problem; it was a habitable planet, a dimension.
Getting there was one thing, but paying your dues the moment you entered and simply trying to survive were the real adventures. In Miara, aside from humans, there were twelve other sentient, humanoid races. They resembled humans but were different. Some were more beautiful and powerful than humans, some were terrifying, some were giant, and some were just… some. The most commonly heard of, renowned for their superior beauty, were the Elves.
Beings who resembled humans more than humans themselves—tall, incredibly beautiful and handsome, skilled, and attractive. They were extremely intelligent and, compared to other races, had an average rapport with humans.
All these intelligent, willful races had their own regions, their own kingdoms, their own internal problems, wars, and much more. For instance, when you said 'Elf,' there wasn't just one type. From what his mother's friend had told him, the Elves Touya knew of were just the Ice Elves—with sharp eyes, a lethal beauty, and heights comparable to humans. There were also Forest Elves, the Elves of Eldrath's Star… Touya only knew that much. He'd heard of other races too, but remembering them now just made him feel the cold air even more.
Also, when he thought about dimensional matters, his head sometimes got confused. For example, when the Great Fall happened, humans had just begun to unravel the secrets of the 4th Dimension. And Miara seemed to react to this. From that time until now, Earth was being leveled by spontaneously opening gates and portals, forcing people to go to Miara—which was a problem in itself.
Touya finally fell asleep.
---
And tonight, something strange happened.
He felt as if someone was shouting at him. He bolted upright from his bed, feeling like someone he'd stolen from had finally found him.
He stumbled outside, wearing an oversized coat and tattered, unattractive clothes. The moment he passed the doorway, he felt a blow to his head.
Normally, Touya was tough. He didn't lose consciousness easily.
He was a kid from the slums, after all. But after this blow, he would have to keep his eyes closed for a while.