[A few years earlier, at the time when Lucifer was still training with Aeshma]
In Arcadia
The continent stretched under a steel-blue sky, an untamed land where civilization was only a distant and foreign concept. In this fragmented world, the law of the strongest did not merely reign; it was the only absolute truth. Since the Third World War, the very structure of humanity had been altered by profound genetic mutations. These changes, although brutal, had allowed certain individuals to strengthen their metabolism, but at the cost of a progressive loss of their humanity. Their bodies, boosted by a primitive internal energy source, evolved to draw closer to the beast, sacrificing their appearance for raw power.
