Chronicle of the Origin World

Ten thousand years ago, the origin of species. The continents were separated from one another by treacherous seas, the races had no dealings with one another, and each lived alone on its own ground.

Then, 5,000 years before the Kaiyuan Era, a calamity came out of the sky—meteorites fell in great numbers, scattered across every continent. Within a kilometre of each impact the grass and flowers withered away; the black stones came wrapped in heavy smoke, radiation coming off them, not to be touched and not to be approached. Another thousand years passed, the meteorites weathered and dimmed, and people came to call them the Arcane Stone.

In the year 3900 before the Kaiyuan Era, the Elves used magic to refine arcane energy out of the Arcane Stone, and developed all manner of uses for it—power, medicine, the holding back of age. Humans packed that energy into machinery, and their civilisation drove hard into an industrial age; the Source Stone energy that would hold up the whole world in later years has its root right here.

In the year 3500 before the Kaiyuan Era, the three races began to trade with one another. Later still, humans, the Orcs and the Elves crossed the sea in turn and set foot on the Frozen Continent at the far south of the world, each staking out ground of their own.

In the year 1200 before the Kaiyuan Era, disputes over ground on the Frozen Continent set the three races against one another and lit the war. In the year 1100 before the Kaiyuan Era, the Elves refined the first bio-weapon out of the Arcane Stone—a forbidden art that called the dead back up again. The creations went out of control, mutating without stop and breeding on their own, and so the Undying were born.

In the year 1030 before the Kaiyuan Era, the Umbral Queen appeared and brought the Undying, until then each going their own way, under a single will. In the year 1000 before the Kaiyuan Era she led the Undying host against the three races in the Great War, and it held in deadlock for a full 500 years. Only when arcane energy ran dry and the Queen's grip weakened were the Undying broken apart one by one. In the year 500 before the Kaiyuan Era, the three races wiped the Undying from the Frozen Continent—but the Umbral Queen was nowhere to be found.

In Kaiyuan Year 1, humans, the Orcs and the Elves signed a Peace Treaty, pulled out of the Frozen Continent, and rebuilt their homes together. The world took that moment as its starting point and began counting "Kaiyuan."

The particulars of that great war scattered almost entirely away with the years, becoming a stretch of forgotten history—forgotten so thoroughly that it makes a person wonder whether someone wiped it out on purpose.

It is now Kaiyuan Year 1010. Source-Stone stockpiles have hit bottom and the whole country has fallen into an unprecedented shortage; and on the frozen ground at the far south that was once the battlefield of the Great War, the global monitoring system Spectra has just flagged the first net-wide alert for something it calls a "Rift." Deep in an ice field long gone quiet, something seems to be waking again.