"When are you planning on entering the Realm?" Clive changed the topic from discussion about frivolous space games to the more interesting topic that consumed the minds of all individuals their age. Will impulsively took a gaze around him out of habit. "My family has an aptitude trial that I need to attend before I can enter the realm." He replied vaguely causing Clive to sigh in admiration at the benefits of having a powerful family.
The Avery family, like a lot of ancient noble families on Earth, possessed a rich heritage of resources which they would use to train their young ones and prepare them for their entry into the Realm. Still, competition to compete for these resources is always intense and to ensure that talent did not dilute over the generations and weaken the household, the Avery family held its own trials for the youth preparing to enter the Realm. Since a young age, the Avery youths were compelled to temper their body and mind under high pressure environments and a strict upbringing. Will wasn't an exception to this rule. He'd been churned out through a personalized and high intensity training program that was both simultaneously primitive and sometimes bordering torture.
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When humanity was once limited in its explorations to just parts of its home planet, civilization debated the structure of the universe. A school of thought imagined the world to be flat, with the sky hanging over as a dome that shined light and guided the fates of humanity. However, the more humans explored, the better they realized that they were simply inhabitants on the surface of an ellipsoid orbiting a larger ellipsoid in a mostly empty universe peppered with similarly radiating ellipsoids known as stars. Humanity's perception of reality changed dramatically at that point, but the discovery of the Realm of Continuity was a still more shocking event, not just for its absurd peculiarities.
The first few years of exploration of the Realm of Continuity were a period of wild documentation and attempts at understanding the reasons why any item whose mechanism relied on electromagnetic forces just didn't seem to work at all. Any item that used circuits or lasers, computation of any kind simply didn't function. As such, humanity soon discovered that it was impossible to set up any kind of power reactors within this bizarre Realm. At the same time, a more startling and radical discovery was made by some architects sent in to plot structures for the human bases. This world was flat - literally flat. The surface of this Realm of Continuity was not part of a planet, instead it was perfectly flat with no explainable mechanism for how such a world existed.
And within this flat world lived a plethora of life both sentient and not, living under laws of nature completely different to the one on Earth. Explorers of the realm quickly discovered that miraculous things could be achieved in this world when it came to improving the human body and that effect stemmed at the genetic level. This improvement in the Realm of Continuity could actually be maintained even when the individuals returned to the original world. This discovery had led to a frenzied rush by people to gain power and the rise of an aristocratic elite of "Evolvers" within human society.
As a result of the nature of the Realm's laws, only primitive weapons were effective in the domain. Even among those, weapons based on gun powder like firearms had their effects severely limited since the creatures living in the Realm were out of the ordinary. Thus cold weapons had become a preferable defensive tool within the Realm. The Star Council had also decreed an increased focus on the research of exotic alloys of increasing durability and strength for the purpose of improving the lethality of cold weapons.
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After bidding his school buddy farewell, Will returned to the Avery household. He passed by the gigantic mansion that was the house of the major line of descendants of the family and made his way to one of the corner courtyards. Will was a fringe member of the extended family, and while he wasn't treated poorly by any means, the competitive spirit the household fostered did create some tensions between the youths. He entered his house and walked over to the small shrine he had made with the photographs of his parents holding him up as an infant. He closed his eyes and remembered them and their memory and what they stood for, before going to the exercise room to train.
Will's parents were explorers in the Realm who had disappeared without a trace. After a search, the family and the Federation both assumed that the couple had met misfortune in the Realm and passed away. This was not uncommon. The Realm was a place where maintaining laws and stability was very difficult. Strength ruled and people often lost lives due to conflict or accidents. However, Will always had a gnawing feeling of emptiness in his heart and a desire to find out what really happened to his parents. It was this gnawing feeling that sustained his momentum through the rigorous training he'd been put through his childhood.
Will's eyes glinted as he combatively continued to punch the 'sandbag' in front of him. It was actually a wall made of a peculiar part gel, part glass like substance integrated with an embedded display of the physical statistics of every activity. Will continued to punch with a hundred percent effort to see the number 1.4 followed by a fluctuating second decimal place reappearing after every punch. With the renewed emphasis on physical self cultivation, humanity's base physical strength had gone up a long way. So the average standard of 1 was actually incomparable to humans of a thousand years ago.
Will proceeded to test his speed and reflexes with the corresponding testing machines in the exercise room and obtained similar scaled results. His comprehensive physical values were around 1.4, which was slightly above average within the current generation of the Avery family. The son of the current family chief, Oliver Avery, had decisively grasped the title of the strongest of the current generation even before the trials. His strength had been rumored to have surpassed 2 months ago, which was shocking considering how the family did not allow any of the youth to practice a gene strengthening art before the trial. Will sighed and clenched his fist, hoping he could do well in the upcoming trial.