《--Revival-- New Hope》 The Prolog My name is Roy. I am five years old and I live in fear. Humanity has been pushed to the edge of extinction. Humans have been driven into a single cavern deep under dark mountain. Dark mountain is the tallest mountain known, said to continue into the stars. Composed of a hard rock called Mj?lnir. Mj?lnir is so strong that even the strongest monsters would take years to burrow though it. It also seems to have a property that the monsters dislike, a natural repellent of sorts. Thus the monsters are forced to go through the front entrance, rather than tunnel and flank us. My parents tell me that Mj?lnir is only found in dark mountain. That dark mountain came to us from the stars and is a strong hold from the heavens. Humans have always had a hard time against the monster hordes, however it was more balanced in the past. Not like now when we can barely hold a candle to them. On this world there exists mana, an incredible substance, capable of miracles. Humans learned to manipulate mana and became magi. With the magi, we started winning against the monsters. Some of the stronger monsters are just as intelligent as humans, not as smart, but just as intelligent. The monsters are cunning, patient, and are masters of mimicry. Any tactics the humans used against the monsters, they would slowly incorporate into their own strategies and turn it against humanity. Humans would gain an advantage, then the monsters would use the same advantages against humans, and we would end up losing more then we gained. Over the years we lost more and more until all we have is this cavern. Luckily we have the ability produce agriculture in dark mountain. ¡°volver a la tierra, volver al polvo¡± is the spell that lets us eat. Using this spell, we can turn our dead into fertile soil to grow our potatoes. For as long as I can remember I have feared the monsters, feared for my life, for my family. I always have terrible nightmares, of death, of being hunted, of being afraid. Slowly these nightmares became something different. The nightmares became dreams of a different world, of amazing magic, and a man. A man respected by the whole world for his knowledge and scientific achievement. ¡°The man looked so different from me, except his eyes they look just like mine¡± I thought. The visions showed great knowledge and ideas different from any of this world. I would ask my parents about the world and how to get more knowledge to easier understand what I was being shown in my dreams. They showed me to the magister who was in charge of knowing things and of what little books that were left. He would always patiently answer my questions. Without him I wouldn¡¯t have understood my dreams so fast. Over the past year I had amassed a great amount of knowledge, but most of it was of little use to me at this point. Recently the magister john had told me of an old meditation technique that is said to let one gain better control of their soul. This claim is untested and is mostly considered to be hogwash. The technique requires one to be is a silent dark space with candles in the four cardinal directions calibrated off of magnetic north. Then when facing magnetic north sitting in the lotus positon allow a cat raised with your own hand to lead you to your soul realm. In ancient folk lore the cat is of the spiritual word and the dog is of the physical world. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. In the past year I got a kitten at three weeks and raised Asi. We were never a part for long, and became the best of friends. Asi has finally grown enough not to be consider a kitten, and is entering the realm of being a cat. It is finally time to try meditation. I browed some candles and a compass from my parents, and sought a dark tunnel that branched off from the main cavern. Our main light source was glowing plants and fungi, they grow everywhere in the cavern. Once I arranged the candles how I wanted them I pulled up all the glowing fungi and sat down and begin to seek peace within myself, so I may follow Asi into my soul realm. Because of all the steps and seeming random element in this technique, many scholars had written off this technique, but I had a very good feeling about it. After an hour nothing had happened except I had managed to relax. Normally if there were no adults were around I would be quite fearful of monsters, but in this mediation I had forgotten all about the outside world. I continued for another hour but there were no further changes. I liked forgetting about my fear so I decided to continue with the mediation, and came back the next day. This routine continued for several weeks, when I came out of my mediation I could have sworn that I saw Asi¡¯s eyes glowing but I could never be sure. When I sat down to meditate like I always did, Asi did something very strange, she sat down in front of me and stared at me. I thought it was strange but nothing else. When I meditating I found that I was not alone, Asi was with me. Asi stated walking, and I had the impression she wanted me to follow her. As we walked our surrounding got more strange, first we were surrounded by darkness, then slowly lights, or stars became apparent in our surroundings. Swirling around us the stars became galaxies, and other universes, it was a very surreal experience. After an indeterminable amount of time I saw the end of our journey. The end of the path lead to that man. The one of my visions. As I got closer to him I finally got to examine him in detail. He was a fairly tall man with brown hair, a straight noise, and thin lips. He was wearing a white lab coat. When I reached him, I placed my had on his chest and something incredible happened. He was slowly resonated with me, and we slowly, but instantly became one person. I saw all his memories, I also realized he had no will, his will had moved on with his death and became me. After the re-connection, I was still me, but I was also him, a hybrid of both people. It felt as if neither people were true and that I had become more whole, more real. After that I opened my eyes, I knew what I had to do to protect my people, and break my shackles of fear. New beginnings New beginnings As I came out of the mediation I began to review the memories of my past life to better understand why his life was bleeding into mine. In my past life I had been a great scientist studying the soul and what happens after death. I had been part of the golden generation of scientists and magicians that lead a great renaissance of scientific and magical achievement. In my past world magic and science had been successfully merged and lead to the creation of a great utopia. Allowing the perfect environment to quietly make scientific breakthroughs. The breakthrough that allowed me to gain worldwide recognition, and differentiate me from the other members of the golden generation was that I proved the existence of the soul. That all creatures are born with a soul. For a long time, the existence of a soul had been a matter of great contention among people. In my most ambitious experiment designed to test whether a soul is destroyed or sent somewhere, to be reincarnated, find their judgment, or something of that nature. During the experiment something went horribly wrong and my soul got mixed up in the resulting explosion that caused my death. Because of my experiment soul was able to keep the memories of my past life and remember them in this life. This has some interesting implication but I don¡¯t have the time or resources to explore them. With my new knowledge I was able to recognize some of the bigger problems faced by humanity surviving in this cavern. The biggest in my opinion is that we have no alert system. We are completely blind to anything beyond our walls. We need an alert system, something that will allow us properly prepare for the monsters when they decide to attack. The monsters always mix up their attacks with faints and fake attacks that cause large amount of stress and fatigue to build up in our troops. ¡°I have a few ideas but I need to a few days to make sure that I don¡¯t jump the gun on such an important decision.¡± I thought while I rushed off to explore a few of the options. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. In my time of researching, the only viable option seems to be one of the most extreme. The first step would be to create the catalyst needed for the what I will be calling operation foresight. The ideal catalyst would be liquid mana synthesized from high grade monster blood. However, that would be next to impossible for me to obtain. So I need to do this the hard way. There is only one type of mana beast that I can make use of to fulfill my needs the ruby-eyed rat. The ruby-eyed rat is one of the few monsters that lived naturally in the cavern. They have more use that they do harm so humanity never eradicated them from the cavern. Their eyes can be harvested, and treated in a special method to preserve them into a jewel. The meat can be sold at rock-bottom prices; even if you can¡¯t afford anything else you can often afford rat meat. Ruby-eyed rats need surprisingly little amount of food, so they don¡¯t have too much of an impact farms. If my math is right and I don¡¯t make many mistakes in the distillation 100 rats should be able to produce 10 drops of semi-pure liquid mana, and 5 drops of pure liquid mana. I need an ounce of pure liquid mana which is about 500 drops. So I will need the blood of 10,000 ruby-eyed rats. In order to get the blood, I need I asked about working at a rat processing plant. Hunters will bring the rats to the processing plant for cash. The plant will do the dirty work turning the rat in to meat, jewels, and any other usable products they can make with the rat. I found out that the plant processes about 111 rats a day. At that rate it will take about three months to gather the needed blood and with the wages I¡¯ll be able to afford some of the other material need for operation foresight. As for the distillation of the blood, I¡¯ll test into an apprentice alchemist position at the alchemist institute, then I¡¯ll have access to all the glass wear and facilities I need to prepare.