Chapter 54 - Growth (2)

It was now clear to me that all hope was lost with regards to a natural transition from human to archuman. My body was too far gone and it wouldn't be able to recover the "normal" way. I had to find an alternative one to get back on my feet. The fact that I had been disregarding plenty of natural laws for a prolonged period of time gave me confidence that there existed such a possibility.

Instead of trying to concentrate on the characteristics that made archumans what they were, I started to think in terms of the history of this world. If things hadn't deviated too much from my original design, the history of the new world could be divided into four major epochs: the Age of Sorrow, the Age of Plunder, the Age of Trade and the Age of Wander.

The Age of Sorrow was when the new world came into being, the time in which the old world was swept away by waves of mana and all had been lost.

The Age of Plunder, also known as the Tarred Age of Bloodstained Gold, was the era in which the newly born archuman-geogenai civilization had reached its apex, hundreds of Perimeters had been erected worldwide and the Obsidian Paths had been laid down. In those days, the archumans had flooded into the greater world, streaming over hundreds if not thousands of civilizations, causing their demise. The Miller Household found its roots in this age, where their great ancestor, the Legion of the Blue, was born.

The Age of Plunder came to an end with the betrayal of the geogenais and their king, who was called the "Great Traitor" by the population, the "Treacherous Bastard" by the nobility of the great empire and the "BBEG" or "the adversary" by me. After a prolonged war which caused innumerable losses on both sides and the destruction of all but less than ten Perimeters, the genais were finally cast out, made to withdraw by the involvement of one of the Legions in the conflict. As a matter of fact, Legions tended most of the time to remain aloof, disinterested in the fate of others.

Skirmishes outside of the main archuman territory were still going on even to this day and age, the Age of Trade, whose name came from the fact that the old ways to the outside had been barred, making them almost impossible to traverse without someone inviting you in from the other side.

Anyway, this age would soon come to its natural conclusion. I didn't know if it would require years or decades, but soon the adversary would find out about the plan the heads of the major arch Households had been concocting and a new conflict would start anew. It would rapidly degenerate beyond what both sides had initially planned and the world would be destroyed by one final mana storm.

I frowned or at least would have done it had I had control of my motor functions. Going through the rough timeline of my world I realised that at first sight, it might have seemed as if the sequence of events contained quite the big continuity error.

During the Age of Sorrow, mana had swept away each and every single living thing and even artificial creations. Then, the survival of humanity should have been impossible. The story went that thanks to the awakening of aura, a portion of humanity was able to survive, but at least two issues remained to be resolved.

First, I had in the past thought of aura as some sort of physical manifestation of life force. This would entail that aura had to be directly related to vitality. In the past, there had been many species with much higher vitality than humans, yet they had gone extinct almost instantaneously with the great world change.

Second, if only those protected by aura, even if incredibly faint, could survive for prolonged periods of time under the effects of the mana, it should have been impossible for normal humans to be alive in this day and age. Still, even if I hadn't seen one directly, the one year spent in the Gamma Perimeter had given me enough time to confirm normal humans were inhabiting this world's underground.

I started to think hard about these issues. I was certain by doing this I would find the answer to escape the predicament I was currently in. Although I was perfectly conscious I wasn't exactly what people would call a genius, what I didn't lack in this situation was time to squeeze my brains.

After long and difficult reflections, I came to the final conclusion that I had effectively come across an anomaly. Initially, I couldn't believe it, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense. There was an apparent continuity error because the way I had thought about the inner workings of this world was fundamentally mistaken.

Aura was not the original reason why humans had survived the mana onslaught. It was an adaptation which enabled them to survive relatively well in the changed world, but as every single adaptation, it required time to manifest, time that would not have been available at the start of the first new age.

In the last few days, a brief memory of my previous life had re-emerged. Maybe calling it a memory was an exaggeration as it was more of an impression, but I had been able to extract some details. It was a scene of us discussing with other people the story I had built in my head. After some back and forths, we had gone off the rails and degenerated into a pseudo-philosophical discussion about the nature of humanity.