Two long years have passed since the beginning of Mr. Gregory and Roger's lessons, and in that time Arne has turned nine years old. Only ten more days remain until Arne's class graduates from their school, and learns their respective styles. Over these two years, along with status growth, Arne has learned to manipulate magic to a basic degree, enough to finally absorb the status card that his mother has kept hidden since his birth.
Due to the hard work and dedication of Phillip, Eli's father, and the village banker, the village has grown immensely in a short time. The former mayor has stepped down, and unsurprisingly, his secretary has taken his place and has done well keeping the new and old residents alike happy with their situations.
On the first day of school for Arne, Phillip had met with a merchant from the affluent Coins Kingdom, which was why he was in such a hurry to get back to the bank. He successfully solidified Lumin Village, now Lumin Town, as one of the Sword Kingdom's cornerstones of trade with a single handshake. Now, every month or two, a caravan loaded with goods from across Baccar arrives in town to sell to locals and to stock the market with commonplace and exotic items. The head of the caravan was an odd, but otherwise trustworthy jackal beastman by the name of Sabuin. He was a low ranking official in one of the Golden Desert's top merchant families. The desert gets its name from the large amounts of capital that flows through it, almost as if a river of gold poured over the great dunes and nourished them.
Beastmen and the Coins Kingdom, as Arne learned from Mr. Gregory, are complex topics. First came the beastmen, whose ancestors are the same as humans, but somewhere hundreds even thousands of years ago the path diverged in what is commonly referred to as the 'first fusion', where a human exiled to the Golden Desert killed a beast and fused the beast with him or herself. This power came at a great cost, as the future beastmen would be unable to utilize mana due to the impure mana signatures in their bodies. Modern beastmen are all descendants of those who have undergone fusion with a beast or have themselves, so there are many different races and sub races and hierarchies amongst the beastmen. With hundreds of years to diverge and evolve beastman culture has gotten more and more complex, and the merchant families that have developed as a result heavily integrate that culture into politics.
The Coins Kingdom's hierarchy seems simple on the surface, but the nuance and dominance of certain sub races of beastmen within the mercantile families is to a scale that average or unmotivated humans are incapable of comprehending. At the top of all families are the mythic beastmen, which are those who have either directly fused a mythical beast or are born from a pair of mythical beastmen (so a mythic level wolf fused with a man to create a 'first fusion' beastman would not have mythic level children, but a dragon beastman would). On the bottom would be simple beast beastmen, such as non-magical wolves, boars, bears, etc.
In Lumin Town military presence and the local guard increased in number rapidly, due perhaps to the availability of the jobs or the proximity to the border. Lumin Town sat only a few kilometers away from the natural border between the Sword Kingdom and the eastern reaches of the Cups Kingdom. Further north was the Wand Kingdom, separated from the Sword Kingdom only by the Bloody River running east from the southernmost peak of the Caelian Mountains and the small unenforced territory of the Cups Kingdom. The Bloody River's namesake is recent, in reference to the gruesome first battle of the Sword Kingdom's invasion into the Wand Kingdom, and also the place where Roger and Lily's father fell.
As the Town closest to the border, it has developed in nearly every aspect with the help of the Sword Kingdom's best architects and magic users. The roads have been paved with stone, a sewer system has been created, and the market district/town square has become even more lively as the Kingdom's brand-new boom town.
Though all is not as perfect as it seems on the surface.
As long as the war-hungry king sits on his throne, the war against magic never really dies. Since the direct conflict with the Wand Kingdom paused five years ago, tensions have never really died down, and some think that the war has never stopped, so the appearance of a fresh village near the northern border caught the looming gaze of the Sword Kingdom's King.
The advanced study of magic of any kind has been banned, and the magic academies of the Sword Kingdom have been demolished. Even the curriculum for the youngest generation is limited to the most basic lessons on controlling mana, and only for those who have passed their first year (which Arne, Eli, and Thea excelled on). The younger generation do not realize the implications of the magical ban, but those of older generations, such as the parents of Arne, Mr. Gregory, and Granny, know how absurd those rulings truly are.
The military overexerts their power on the public as they try to transform Lumin into a military fort. The new mayor has little say, or power at all, in his own Town since the military began running the show. Despite the obvious seizure of power, they have still given him a personal advisor much to his ire.
Numerous times people of different races have been apprehended by the military attempting to enter the Town, never to be seen again. Those people all have one thing in common: social status. They are all poorer people or craftsmen who are looking for a new start in what should be one of the best places to migrate to in the Kingdom. With the construction of the jail, the military has the authority to imprison whoever they like, and since the jail is new, nobody in the town knows the layout, or where and how prisoners are held. It is entirely possible that those taken there by the military are never judged by the mayor and are held there indefinitely.
A group of buildings rest softly on the edge of town. A mill, and a barn are freshly built below the view of the house. The sunrise brings light onto the hill; the dew gathers upon the grass and the small garden laid out in front of the house. Outside the mill, a muscular man can be seen, carrying logs of wood from the forest. He methodically saws the logs into quarters and sets them in a wagon to be brought into town. Scars are clear on his callous hands as he lifts the logs one by one. Stubble is clear on his tanned face, and a tattered scarf is tied around his neck loosely.
As he boards the wagon to take the wood into the market, he passes by the barn. He waves towards it as a young woman walks out followed by several chickens, a cow, and a sheep. She waves back as he urges the horses to speed into a trot. A soft wind urges the animals to follow the girl. She has long wild blond hair that flows into natural waves, and it remains untangled by the wind. She wears a lime green shirt under blue overalls, and tall leather boots made for outdoors work. Her slender hand caresses the head of the soft sheep. She glances towards the home and smiles before sadly looking towards the sky.
The wagon jaunts past the cottage, where outside, a woman tends to the garden. The man waves to the older woman. She smiles back, and returns to tending the garden.
The front door of the cottage opens and young boy steps out.
'What a beautiful da-' he thought, almost out of habit, before his eyes narrowed as he stared at the cloudy sky and rising sun. A dark miasma drifted through the air. Glowing white paths appeared to be twisting underground stretching outwards from the town.
'Hmm..' he thought, 'that wasn't there yesterday.' he pulls out his status card and focuses on two spots:
[Race:] Half Elf
[Unique Skills:] Prismatic Eyes: As the owner of elven blood, the user is granted the rare ability to see the flow of magic, as well as the type of mana in the air.
He takes a deep breath, and glances back to the pathways underground. 'So all of those colors have been mana the whole time...' he stares into the miasma, 'I wonder what kind of magic did this'. His eyes follow the strings of white mana towards Lumin Town.
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Beneath Lumin Town, in the newly built sewer system, beady black eyes dart from right to left.