In the Star Calendar Era, in Year 500, known as the era of falling stars, comets, and meteors.
The world did not collapse because of the ambition of a king or an emperor who was busy teaching the meaning of absolute domination. Its destruction happened because humanity had never been, and would never be, ready to accept power that surpassed reason and recorded history.
Fifteen supernatural abilities were born from the surge of spiritual energy that destroyed the civil order within only a matter of months, changing everything from within.
Far beyond the reach of human sight, nine gods, including an absolute goddess — watched their creations from outside the boundaries of the world, without interfering with the beings they had created.
They were the ones who created the human world, the spirit realm, the hidden beautiful realm, the true monster realm, the djinn realm, and the demon realm, as well as many other realms across the immeasurable vastness of the universe, each separated, sealed, and bound by different laws.
But those boundaries were not accepted forever.
Their creations slowly began to change. Boredom turned into rejection, and rejection turned into an unspoken rebellion. They did not face their creators directly, but instead forced their own existence out of their respective realms. Spiritual energy was pushed outward by force, too vast, too wild, exceeding limits that were never meant to be broken.
That pressure seeped into other realms, eroding the boundaries that had been established since the beginning. The human world, which had never been designed to contain such energy, became the most fragile victim.
From that pressure, supernatural abilities were born. They blended with the air itself, not as a blessing, but as a wound that would slowly kill humanity.
...
Around five hundred years ago, long before Zavi's life in the eras of peace. War erupted. Not merely disputes between races, but caused by a small event that changed the dark history of the world, a war that turned cities that had once been centers of trade and civilization into smoking ruins.
The streets were filled with the corpses of humans from various races and animals, houses collapsed before their inhabitants could escape, and sacred buildings that had stood for centuries vanished in explosions of power that could not be explained.
There was no front line. There was no difference between soldiers, people of high rank, and civilians. Everyone became victims. Everything happened without warning.
Some survivors were enslaved by those who "Held Power" and "Survived". Others chose to disappear, hiding in forests or remote regions with one purpose: to survive the threats of the outside world.
They ate whatever they could find, saved every drop of clean water, and continued searching for ways to survive until the war ended. That waiting did not last for days or months, but years.
On the eastern and southeastern continents, children were killed and buried beneath the ruins of their own homes. The elderly were burned alive by fire that did not come from torches or oil, but from other humans, humans who no longer understood the concept of mercy, "Demons from Hell".
Villages disappeared overnight, erased from the map of the world without leaving behind a name or history.
Supernatural abilities that should have been blessings turned into disasters. Ancient relics, raw magic, artifacts, and powers from other realms were used without limits. Every release of power destroyed the structure of the world and the life around it. Rivers were polluted by foreign energy, farmland turned into dead soil, and forests became nests for monsters that had never existed before.
Civilization collapsed faster than kingdoms.
Governments lost their function. Laws lost their meaning. Cities that survived were filled with refugees, starving, wounded, losing their sanity and some even killing each other.
Some humans sold other humans to survive. Others became slaves to those who could control supernatural powers through contracts.
Since that day, the world's calendar was no longer counted as the beginning of civilization, but as the beginning of destruction. Year 1000 was not remembered as the dawn of history, but as the day when humans realized that they were no longer the rulers of the world they inhabited.
The pressure of spiritual energy did not only trigger evolution in land and water animals. On a far more terrifying scale, it opened invisible gates to other worlds. These doors connected the human world with the realms of evil and good spirits, the hidden beautiful realm, the true monster realm, and the cursed demon realm filled with horror.
Creatures that should have been bound to their own realms found ways to cross over. Distances that should have separated them for trillions of light-years became meaningless. By simply passing through these doors, they could directly enter the human world.
...
Still on the same night. Sunday, October 28, 1543.
The night in the Luand district felt different from Moran. The air was calmer with a fragrant scent hanging in every corner of the street. Here, people grew up with stories of their ancestors that were never fully considered mere fairy tales. Belief in the supernatural had survived for centuries, woven into habits, language, and even the way people understood fear itself.
In one of his books, a famous writer named Lucitte Kehlen discussed this concept. He was known as a productive writer, having published dozens of books across the continent and even beyond. However, one of his works, The World's Decline, became the most controversial.
The book did not discuss physical destruction, but the decline in the way humans perceive reality. Lucitte wrote about the fear of things that were not meant to be seen, or more precisely, things that were never seen the same way by everyone.
He gave a simple example; a piece of white cloth hanging from an old tree. He told a story about two people standing in the same place, far from that white cloth, looking in the same direction, yet seeing different things.
One person saw a black-and-white winged creature with a flat and expressionless face. The other saw a woman in a worn white dress, with small, neat, and sharp teeth. The object was the same, yet its form changed according to what grew within the observer's perception.
Many laughed at the idea. Some called it impossible. Others considered it an insult to ancestral traditions. According to common belief, what humans saw was merely the result of their own fear, shaped by mysticism that had long been rooted, especially in old cities like Moran.
And because of that, The World's Decline slowly disappeared.
The book was no longer printed. No longer sold openly. The name Lucitte Kehlen began to be spoken with insults, even avoided. Some claimed his writings tarnished ancestral heritage, causing the younger generation to question what had long been considered sacred.
Was the book truly wrong? Or was he simply saying something the world did not want to hear?
Meanwhile, while walking along Street No. 10 Kirei and asking about herbal potions from one passerby to another, the effort proved useless. When he reached a quiet road near a wooden suspension bridge with a stretch of wide land beside it, Zavi once again found himself forced to fight against five silent-type Chalog, monsters with intelligence above average.
This time the Chalog had physical forms resembling black tigers, occasionally disappearing whenever they were not exposed to the streetlights, making them difficult to track.
Even the third-level spirit, the young girl, struggled greatly against the silent Chalog without the presence of light, forcing Zavi and Moreira to separate and become trapped by the monsters.
"Damn… Do those bullets really not injure them at all?" Zavi muttered, his eyes unblinking as he observed his surroundings while waiting for the Chalog to attack.
"Huh, is entering their territory really what makes them angry?" he murmured, letting out a deep sigh. "What if those monsters attack ordinary humans?"
After thinking for a moment, he suddenly realized a fact that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand.
'That is very possible. Those deaths… could they be related to the monsters standing in front of me?' he thought, though he was not entirely sure it was true.
Meanwhile, the five Chalog continued roaming the streets of the district, ignoring other pedestrians, yet continuously targeting Zavi, Moreira, and the young girl who was with him.
'This is bad.'
Earlier, Zavi had been thrown against a building wall, separated from the two of them, and his body was covered in claw wounds from three Chalog that attacked him. However, he managed to regenerate those wounds using a wound-transfer technique.
And until this moment, he could only sit in silence, leaning against a streetlamp pole. Its light spread roughly five meters, saving him from further attacks.
"Are they really afraid of light?" Zavi stared at the three Chalog. The other two had left, and they watched him with their dark purple eyes shining as they observed Zavi, who was now powerless.
"Come on, come on. Why don't you attack me? I'm tired, damn it," he said weakly.
He tried to stand, but failed. In the end, he decided that waiting for sunrise was the best option.