In a world ruled by Magic and swords. He laughs. In a world where the weak obeys the strong. He smiles. In a world where greed is the symbol of each nation’s ruler. He jokes.

In a world where both light and shadows exist. He lives.

“What a joke” he thought. Around him was a pile of corpses and blood was spilt on the walls. He was the only living being in this room. At the sight of this macabre scene, he could only let out an uncontrollable laugh. After laughing for a good minute, he finally calmed down and left without a word.

This would be later known as the “Silent massacre”.

***

A substance called “Magic” for convenience is widely considered to be the origin of the world and all life. For several millennia, many of the races populating the world known as “Sigmas” have tried to understand how Magic works in order to be able to grasp the meaning of life. Although such answers have yet to be found, many advancements have already been made.

The most significant one to mention is the ability to manipulate Magic that races have developed. Although raw Magic can be manipulated roughly by any living being, some of the most intelligent communities have understood how to make use of their knowledge in order to use Magic more efficiently.

After decades of experimenting, the first control of Magic was made possible by an Elf called Arcadeus who later became known as the First Sage. He taught the world that the Magic present in all living beings was called “Mana” but there was also Magic floating around, and present in the environment. He called it “Cindril”.

According to him, such a distinction between the two kinds of Magic was necessary in order to be able to manipulate Magic. He explained that Mana could be considered raw Magic while Cindril was Magic that had already been infused with elementary Magic.

As raw Magic is unusable and mostly useless, it needs to be molded and infused with elementary Magic in order to be usable, however the process of infusing elementary Magic into raw Mana takes a lot of concentration and that’s why it is easier to use Cindril that can be directly manipulated by infusing a tiny amount of Mana into it.

For example, if a fire was lit by normal means, the flame would be considered “Fire Cindril” and therefore would already contain fire Magic. The only process left to turn it into a fireball would be molding it by using Mana to make a ball shape with the Fire Cindril.

On the other hand, using Mana to make a fireball on your own would require the user to first create the fire element and then use more Mana to mold it into a fireball. Since half of the process was already done by using Cindril, most people abandoned the idea of using only their own Mana to manipulate Magic.

To further add to this disadvantage, one could think that manipulating Magic using only Mana would cost 50% more but in reality, the process of creating elementary Magic was much harder than the process of molding it.

As a matter of fact, if one were to digitize it, creating a 『Fireball』using only your own Mana would use about 50 Magic Points and creating one using Fire Cindril would cost about 10 Magic Points. Considering that 1 Magic Point is the same as 1 Mana Point, one could say that the process of creating an element takes up about 80% of the whole Mana required for a spell.

Talking about races, the world of Sigmas is currently divided into several ones. The intelligent ones and the others, known as “monsters”. The intelligent ones consist mainly of the Human race, the Dwarf race, the Elf race, the Orc race and the Half race.

Humans have lived for a long time as one empire, the “Porcephone Empire”. The Porcephone Empire controls roughly 70% of the Sill continent. The other 30% is owned by the Half race. The Dwarves decided to make use of the numerous natural resources present on the Klug continent and the Orcs followed them.

Ever since Arcadeus taught the world how to use Magic, the Elves secluded themselves on Dorua, a continent separated from the other two by a large sea and mostly dominated by vegetation in order to deepen their knowledge about Magic and follow the teachings of the First Sage.

Surprisingly enough, there hasn’t been any war between the races, as the only records of large scale wars concern civil wars in the Human and Orc races.

The past few years however have been relatively peaceful inside of the Porcephone Empire. Or at least, that is what it looks like…