What could have happened

The current arc had quite a few chapters remaining, in which I would have dug deeper into Nacre, and used it for some world building. I would have also gone a little into the politics of the city, as I started with Lorenzo, and through them explain the conflicts outside of the Kingdom. Through this you would have learned that the North, birthplace of humanity, is split among various war lords, although two have recently been on the rise, competing for the position of High King.

But they aren't the only powerful ones, as a particularly vicious one, Halfàn Blood-Hair, allied himself with the Cult of Izrath, and has been raiding the northern region of Margarita. Blue Light was sent by him to cause the commotion in the Mountain Pass. The truth is that he was plotting to make Margarita believe Brightsky were the ones preparing the attack, because of the location, and have them start a war between themselves, to later swoop in and take over.

Brightsky had their own plans though, which started with the destruction of the Teleportation Array in Nacre. This was to stop them from sending in any army to defend from the impending invasion. They have been preparing this for years, with the Elves from Ilin.

The two powers eyeing Margarita inevitably messed with each other's plans, but in the end Margarita will be attacked on two sides, with two large armies. Brightsky, with the support of the Elves, will attack from the East, in Fìrma, while Halfàn will attack from the North, with the support of Izrath's Cult.

By then, Felix and Lucy will have barely finished the Teleportation Array, but it is enough to use it within the Kingdom. The major part of the army, led by Lorenzo, are aided by troops from Luxtamare, as it is later revealed that Lorenzo is part of a noble family from over there, as well as Yasue's Guild, the Exploding Fist, who show they are actually powerful enough to be part of the Super Hundred. As for the East, the Queen herself heads there with a few elite fighters, as well as Felix, who will rejoin with Drakon/Enzo, and fight.

The Queen, who would have by this point been kept a mysterious figure, will be shown to be more or less broken, as she is actually Lucy. Or rather, Lucy is her second personality, it is her innocent self from before she went through everything she had to do to get back to her kingdom and claim it back from her brother.

But as seen with what she did with Felix's Space Runes, she is strong, and despite having smaller troops in Fìrma, they will manage to resist for a while.

However, when things look like they might work out, the Ancestors of Ilin launch a surprise attack on the Queen (her name's Camilla by the way, not even sure I mentioned it), and injure her. It is revealed that the reason they attacked Margarita was because of an ancient prophecy, which would have already been mentioned through an Enzo POV in the form of a poem about the rise of a Hero.

Heroes are not just titles in this world, but actual positions. Two of them have already been mentioned, Allfather Sven, who saved the world in the First Era and started the second, as well as Emperor Magnus, who put an end to the World Council of the Second Era and started the Third. But I'll explain more about these heroes later in this note.

To go back to the Elves, some of them are affiliated to a certain power, who have been the recurring enemy of Heroes through the Eras, and are trying to prevent the rise of the 9th Hero, who was said to appear in Margarita by a seer. And because of how powerful Queen Camilla was, and how very heroic her journey was, they took her as the Hero.

And indeed, she is so powerful that even alone, she manages to force the Ancestors to use their own lives in exchange to using a special array that will put a curse on Queen Camilla, which I haven't really put time to detail but basically it would take away precisely 100% of her HP while stopping any and all forms of healing.

And that's where Felix comes in. I already introduced the concept of precedence, and how it is decided through two factors: the parties involved, and the environment. For the first, as Felix's Runic Magic uses the World's Mana, he has reached the highest possible precedence possible. As for the second one, spells that directly affect vitality are the highest level of precedence for the second. And by Chapter 54 Felix is already researching into a Spell that could heal him through affecting Vitality, because it is simply more efficient.

Through his research with Lucy/Camilla, Felix will find a solution, which will be to use both Conversion and Space Runes to form a Spell that will take raw vitality/HP from a target, and transfer it to a second. It takes some inspiration from vampiric Spells, but is still quite different because not only do they not target vitality directly, but Felix also has to extract the HP from a set source because of the few Runes he can use in a First/Second Circle Spell.

But in the end, the result is that Felix's Healing Spell has actually reached the highest level of precedence a spell can achieve, and that's exactly what he will use to save Camilla.

The Elven Ancestors' spell is powerful because it has a high precedence, as it directly affects vitality too, and is very close to the peak as the ten Ancestors use their life forces to power the spell, which also has divine origin. But Felix's spell is still on top, and because the Spell was simplified to grant it its precedence, even Felix's meager healing Spell, which only heals a fraction of a percent of Camilla's HP, is enough to save her life.

And it is then, when Camilla lived when she should have died, when Fate was broken, that the 9th Hero, the Breaker of Fate, makes his appearance. That hero is Felix, of course.

After that, the battle quickly concludes as there isn't anyone left to oppose Camilla, as once the Curse expired she was free to once again heal herself, and the rest of the army is no match for her, despite her being injured, as she had been holding back earlier precisely because she knew of the attack of the Ancestors.

The battle up north is also won by Lorenzo, and Yasue's Guild, Exploding Fist, crushes Blue Light, completely taking over their rank.

The second volume starts with a slightly more thorough explanation of the prophecy. The world of Epoch is split in three Continents: Vestan, the Human Continent in the West, Esu the mixed continent in the East, and Barbarus, the recently discovered continent in the South, populated by beast folks. The three continents form a sort of ring, which isn't connected, and the sea in the middle is the Harrstórmannligr.

Each Continent has seen the birth of 3 Heroes, for a total of 9 Heroes through the three Eras.

1- Light of Dawn Elf from Ilin, first born of the Elves

2- Blood of Man Sven from the North, saved Vestan

3- Darkness of Twilight Nine Tailed Fox, gave sentience to Beast-kin

4- Prince of Illusions Vampire Progenitor

5- King of Might Sun Lion, strongest being in the world

6- Emperor of Magic Magnus who formed the Empire

7- Destroyer of Old Dragon

8- Ruin of Luck Dwarf with insane luck

9- Breaker of Fate Felix, from Earth. Breaks the Fates of Heroes, including his own.

These are my notes about the Heroes, in their order of appearance. 1,4 and 8 are from Esu, 3,5 and 7 from Barbarus, and 2,6 and 9 from Vestan. Their story is closely related to the God of Creation, who set forth the cycle for the world, before being split in two: The God of Fate, and the God of Chaos.

But while they oppose each other, they are both pieces of shit. The God of Chaos leads the abyss to destroy the world, while the God of Fate wishes to keep the entire world on a tight leash, and is actually the one the Heroes face.

But since the concept of Heroes was created back when they were one, each of the Heroes are tied to the world, and not so easily controlled. They are each granted great power, and each, in their own way, faced the God of Fate, as well as the God of Chaos, although that one is more of a general problem.

However, although the God of Creation, who was playful and immensely bored, initially wanted to let each of the heroes live by their own rules, be it to save the world or destroy it, as long as it was useful, he was for it. But when he split, the God of Fate tried to control everything, and bound each of them to their Fate.

The consequences for this was that the world itself would grant each of the Heroes a power, which would make them unparalleled and always succeed in their endeavors, but also get rid of them once they finished what they appeared for, banishing them from the world into the void and basically killing them.

But things did not go as planned, as the Ninth Hero, the Breaker of Fate, defied these rules by his very existence, and so the God of Fate, understanding that, tried to stop this, by sending his agents to break his own work, to break fate, by stopping one of the Heroes from doing their duty, and thus never bringing about the birth of the Breaker of Fate, who was supposed to destroy him.

The reason why he did this was because even if in the original plan the God of Fate's own power would empower the Breaker of Fate, the fact that it was his power empowering his enemy would be enough for his divine essence to survive past the banishment of the Ninth Hero. But since he is unable to affect the Ninth Hero with the power of Fate, he seeks to kill the earlier heroes to break fate and the appearance of the 9th Hero.

It is a bit convoluted, but the point is that the God of Fate messed with the world so much that the First Hero, when he learned of his Fate, managed to create a special dimension outside of the world, where the Heroes would all gather, once they were banished, to save them from death.

Of course, you wouldn't learn all of this at the beginning of the second volume, I would reveal it throughout the entire novel. At the start of the second volume, you would only know there existed 9, and that Felix was on a quest to find out more about them.

That's why he will spend the second volume going to the North, where Allfather Sven, the second Hero, once lived. Felix can't go there with the Teleportation Array because the one in Nacre isn't ready to teleport that far yet, and although they are working on it, Felix would get there faster by foot.

And so he leaves, along with Drakon, for the North. It will take them a month to get up there, through which Drakon will get his promotion to Tier 1, although Felix will remain stuck to Level 50. After all, while the Hero Plot is important, so is his Curse. His title as Breaker of Fate will not do anything to his curse, and he still has to find a way to break past Level 50.

For his Curse, I hesitated for a while as to what make it out to be, but in the end I decided not to make it a curse coming from a multidimensional God (God of Fate/Chaos/Creation) of Epoch, because that would go with the usual route of the game turning reality. Instead, for this story, Epoch is actually a game, everything within the product of an AI.

That doesn't mean Felix's Curse is as simple as his condition translated, though. While the story focuses mainly on the world of Epoch, I also put some hints about the state of the real world by the time of the story, and I would expand on that in the rest of the story.

The reason humanity managed to resolve most of the world's problems is thanks to the discovery of Dark Energy, and how to use it. It is through Dark Energy that humanity managed to operate a game like Epoch, and power the AI who made it.

But there is more to Dark Energy. Dark Energy is a mysterious energy that permeates the entire universe, and which is actually Mana. Humans aren't capable of naturally harnessing it, but playing Epoch through chips, who glow purple because they have a crystal of condensed Dark Energy/Mana powering them, allows the human body to better adapt to the Mana, and in time, because capable of harnessing it.

The game is also there to teach them about how to use Mana, so that when the time come, they don't become like lost lambs.

As for Felix's Curse, it is a simulation of what Mana could force his condition to evolve in. In the end, Felix was never cursed by an unknown God or anything crazy, he was just a guy with a condition who tried to have fun in a game.

By the end of the story, when Epoch's main quest is finished as Felix brings back all 8 heroes into the world and face the God of Fate and the God of Chaos, and force them to merge, as they are immortal and can't be killed, humanity has also more or less assimilated to Mana in the real world.

For those who didn't play the game, they can't use Mana, but nothing stops them from playing the game, as it didn't just disappear. But even if they don't, if they have children with someone who can use Mana, the genes of the person with Mana will be stronger.

The story will open into the evolution of human society, into outer space.

But that's only for the very, very end, and basically the ending I envisioned. I although thought of making a second story, in the same universe, which would happen thousands of years later, when humanity has expended throughout the universe and butted head with other civilizations, and Felix has become a God like figure for mankind, kind of like a God-Emperor from 40k, but with a different protagonist. Might still do it.

Anyway, that's a little too far in the story, and only the big lines. In reality, through the story, although Felix would be the 9th Hero, before anything he would be playing the game with companions he would acquire through time, while discovering the world.

The second companion he will make will be a player called Mulan. She is a Chinese Player already introduced, the Jade Princess from the Chinese Divine Ten Guild, the Jade Palace. She is basically the ultimate fighter, but because of her nature, she is constricted within the Guild.

She not only is a woman, but also a lesbian, which would make her a controversial figure were she to inherit the guild from her family, and that's why she ran away. Felix and Drakon will meet her, and through their adventures in the North, where they would help one of the two North Leaders become the High King, become friends and form a party.

After that they would head to Esu, where they will be caught into an adventure involving vampires, and where they will meet Gusman, a Summoner.

After that… well, to be honest I have a rough idea, but this would all be several months, if not years, into the future, had I decided to continue writing this, so I didn't plan that as much, but basically Felix would continue exploring the rest of the world.

Anyway, that's about it. I wrote more than I thought I would, but if you reached the end, then I would like to thank you once more for reading this, you are part of a very restraint elite.

Also, I called this what COULD have happened, instead of Would, because knowing myself quite a few details could have changed as I wrote them.