1 — Growing Up in Nérou
Since mana's birth, the world had been unraveling. Cities acted as cages—bright and loud, drawing the attention of predators that no longer obeyed the laws of nature.
Dimiour had read the records, the fragments of five generations of hell. Our shining new beacon of hope, JinWin City—once a speck in the old state of Michigan—had become humanity's last great fortress. The first evolved human rose there, and their power remade ruins into walls of stone and steel structures.
Inside those walls, the most powerful men in the world trained day and night to force humanity back to the top of the food chain. Only the evolved were allowed within; even the weak among them—the ones whose power failed to grow—were quietly cast out to the wastes. The unevolved were sent there openly, to live or die as the storms decided. Dimiour was amoungst the names written his mana too faint to register.
His father, Darius Liosmane—once a Myth Rank within those same walls—walked away the same day. He would not leave his son to the mercy of the wilds.
They called JinWin's practice the Cycle of Ascension: pairing the evolved to birth stronger generations, shaping mana's curse into something they could claim as progress. The city called it a miracle. Darius called it survival by any means necessary.
It isn't much—just fences, soil, and stubborn hearts. A village of those the city no longer wanted and a handful of the lowest teir gaurds the city could muster but even with the likes of Darius around it hardly mattered. What truly kept predators away was the sheer density of the mana itself. The air shimmered faintly around the walls, a ghost of JinWin's overflow. The elders called it Jin's shadow.
Dimiour had grown up beneath that shadow. To him, it felt less like protection and more like a reminder—of dependence, of fragility, of how easily the storms could come again.
Time in Nérou always carried that tension. Even with a retired Myth Rank in the fields, attack always felt imminent. Yet somehow, Dimiour and his father always pulled the village through. The people trusted them. They had to.
And today was no different.
the sun dropped behind the marsh hills, the mist always came crawling. Like being next to a raging storm cloud.
That's when Darius would stand outside the village longhouse hammer across his back, watching the fog ripple like it was thinking.
"The mana is restless tonight." His Son forever attached to his hip, would nod and act like he could read the mana like his father.
Dimiour has grown into a sharp-Eyed kid far too intelligent. Always reading. Always asking questions, always pushing the boundaries of how the village thought. The one word that defines him: Focus. Even as a child, Dimiour works tirelessly to prove Jin city's judgment wrong and that's exactly why his father decided today is the perfect day for his first hunt.