Deep within a narrow mineshaft, where the air was thick with dust and the echoes of iron striking stone, a grizzled old miner worked alone—far from the reach of civilization. His clothes hung in tatters, soaked with sweat and streaked with the grime of endless labor. Each swing of his pickaxe sent sharp jolts through his tired limbs, the sound of metal on rock reverberating through the hollow earth.
He had lost track of time. Hours… maybe days had passed since he last saw the sun. But still, he swung—over and over, driven by habit, by hunger, by the faint hope of something valuable buried in the dark.
Then, with a bone-jarring strike, the stone gave way once more.
But this time, instead of seeing more black or brown rock, the old man began to see a soft blue glow. It slowly seeped into the shaft. It was subtle at first, like moonlight trapped underground—but as he cleared more rubble, it intensified, casting ghostly reflections across the cavern walls. The miner froze. A chill ran down his spine.
He stared at the strange ore embedded in the rock—cold, blue, and quietly pulsing like it was alive. For a long moment, he just watched, breathless.
Then, trembling with fatigue but lit by newfound excitement, the old man turned away from the glow and began the long climb back to the surface—his thoughts already drifting to what such a unique discovery might earn him
—
In a bustling city nestled among lush green forests, a man dashed through the towering gates of a fortified research facility. He was striking—middle-aged, well-groomed, and dressed in a crisp suit now slightly rumpled from the urgency of his pace. A briefcase bounced in his grip. Beneath his composed expression, barely concealed excitement burned in his eyes.
Without pausing, he strode through the facility's pristine white halls and approached a rarely used elevator tucked into a shadowed corner. He glanced over his shoulder. No one was watching.
With practiced fingers, he tapped a hidden code into a panel just beneath the standard controls. A soft click echoed from the wall, and the elevator doors slid shut.
Instead of rising, the car began to descend—deep below the surface. Minutes passed. The descent felt endless, though it was only his nerves twisting time into something heavier.
At last, the elevator jolted to a stop.
When the doors opened, the man stepped into a strange chamber. The walls were sleek, sterile gray, humming faintly with hidden energy. But the floor broke all expectation—a chaotic mosaic of bright shapes and colors, like the flooring of a retro arcade, playful and dissonant beneath the clinical overhead light.
He barely noticed. His eyes were fixed on the door directly ahead.
He marched forward, twisting the handle before even slowing his steps. The door flew open—
Inside, a researcher looked up from his computer, quickly closing it and cutting off a female voice mid-sentence.
The man—sharp-eyed and stern—sighed at the intrusion.
"Must you always make such dramatic entrances, Mark?" he asked, folding his arms. "As I've told you before, that kind of behavior is only acceptable when the world is ending."
Mark strode in, unbothered and grinning, his pace slowing as he approached the table.
"Oh, give it a rest, Kai. We own equal shares of this place, remember? You don't get to act like you're my superior." His eyes flicked to the darkened monitor. "And what's Robbin doing talking to you? I thought she was on a field assignment."
He didn't wait for an answer. With a thud, he dropped the briefcase onto the table and clicked it open—slowly, deliberately.
As the lid lifted, a soft blue glow spilled out, washing their faces in pale light. The air seemed to cool around them. Mark stepped back, letting the glow speak for itself.
Kai leaned in, his expression shifting from confusion to awe.
Resting in the case was a stone—smooth, dark, and pulsing with a quiet, ethereal blue light.
Still grinning, Mark crossed his arms. "Told you we'd find something worthwhile on the east-west coast of Serak-Tal."
He tapped the edge of the case. "Ran a few tests. It's not just rare—it's a new element. Pure. Stable. And it does things I don't even fully understand yet."
Kai jumped from his chair, the legs screeching against the floor as he rushed forward. He hovered over the stone, eyes locked on its shifting glow. A shiver ran down his spine—as if the element were alive and staring back.
"Mark… do you know what this means?" His voice trembled, climbing with restrained excitement. "All the time we poured into this company—all the money, the sacrifices, the stress on our families…"
He turned to Mark, eyes wide, breath quick.
"It's finally going to pay off. We can give them the lives they deserve."
—
In the heart of a new metropolis, swiftly built in the north of serak-Tal, a new skyline had emerged—one forged not from steel and glass, but from Etherium. Towering spires pulsed with blue light, veins of the mysterious element woven into their structure like circuitry in a living machine.
Inside the central Etherium Research & Development Tower owned by the quickly rising super power corporation 'Halbridge Biogenetics', engineers moved with the urgency of prophets. Etherium-powered trams floated silently between floors, data spiraling through transparent screens suspended in the air. The city had become a living organism, fed by the soft, rhythmic hum of its new lifeblood.
At the center of it all stood Director Halen Vosk, overlooking the fusion core—a massive chamber surrounded by rotating rings, each laced with glowing threads of Etherium. It pulsed steadily, casting long shadows over the team of scientists below.
"We've stabilized the perimeter," one technician called out, fingers dancing across a console. "Etherium output is up by fifteen percent—no degradation so far."
Vosk nodded slowly, his expression unreadable.
Behind him, a large screen displayed a satellite view of the small continent. Blue-lit cities flickered across the north like stars.
"Imagine," he murmured, "a world powered without limits. No more fossil fuels. No more war over energy. Just light. Just progress."
He turned to face the chamber, where robotic limbs delicately welded Etherium filaments into the next generation of power cores. Etherium was quickly becoming known around the world "the super element" people called it, everyone was excited about this new and strang element that has swiftly became part of their lives, and for some reason no one questioned it.
And no one noticed the first data irregularities. Not yet.
The element they worshiped was waking up.
—
Somewhere deep beneath a Halridge Biogenics facility, red lights flashed in slow, steady pulses across the walls of a long-abandoned medical chamber. Dust hung in the air like ash, and the rusted cryo-doors whispered faint echoes of screams long since gone.
It hadn't always been this way.
Years earlier, the lab had thrummed with purpose. Scientists in white coats moved between rooms, flanked by security personnel. At the center of it all stood a sterile glass observation room, where a pregnant woman lay still on a reclined bed. Her eyes, once filled with defiance, now stared blankly at the ceiling.
"Dose administered," came the cold voice of the lead researcher.
A blue fluid pulsed through one the IV lines, glowing softly. The fetus on the monitor twitched.
"We're getting response. Elevated synaptic activity. It's absorbing the Etherium."
Soon after they had received a positive response, a small portion of blood was being drawn out of the other tube plunged into the woman chest, being sent to the next room over.
In the other room, technicians scribbled notes while watching similar monitors, each showing unborn children bathed in pale light.
"Three generations," one muttered. "That's all it took to make the trait inheritable."
Behind him, a child stood motionless in a sealed chamber. No older than five, she stared through the glass as if she knew something the adults didn't. A flicker of light danced across her fingertips. The lights above her dimmed for a moment.
She smiled.
These children would be the first. Born with Etherium in their blood. Able to channel it, shape it.
There was no going back.
And while the world marveled at its golden age, the price of progress gestated in silence, preparing to be born.
Eventually, the children who had Etherium running through their veins had to be revealed by Halridge Biogenetics. They showcased the children and their unique powers in a video broadcasted through both major continents. Halridge Biogenetics compared the powers the children had to magic, That one word—magic—captivated everyone who saw the broadcast
However instead of admitting that their human experiments were successful, they played it off as some sort of miracle. Acting like the element, for some reason and some way found a way to enter the fetus' of unborn children and grant them powers.
In the open, it seemed like everyone believed them, but deep down everyone knew what despicable things that Halridge biogenetics had done, but everyone seemed to bury their human decency in hopes that their they might obtain powers similar to the children that Halridge had experimented on.
And their hopes came to fruition, first it was released to the rich, then it was released to the middle class, a shot that injected a etherium-based compound into your blood, it bonded with the blood and took root within it. But no one cared how it happened, all they cared about was that they had gotten their hands on magic.
No one cared about the long term affect, no one feared what was to come.
—
The sun hung low in the sky, casting a warm, golden hue across the stark white research facility located in norther Serak-Tal, however instead of a research facility, it was now a place to educate and teach the new generation how to use their unique etherium, it was a place for the new generations to grow, a glimpse of humanities greedy desire to become ever stronger.
A group of children, no older than ten or eleven, gathered in a small courtyard. Their hands glowed with the faint blue sheen of Etherium, the strange energy that had reshaped the world. The air was thick with the hum of raw magic as they practiced, learning to control their newfound abilities under the watchful eye of their instructor
Lila, a small girl with wide eyes, stretched her hands out in front of her, trying to form the floating orb she had been working on for days. Her fingers twitched, and a glowing sphere sputtered into existence, wobbling in the air. She smiled, her confidence growing with each successful attempt.
Nearby, Kieran and Vance, two boys known for their competitive streak, were locked in a friendly battle. Kieran raised his hands, and a bolt of pure energy shot toward the ground, splitting the earth beneath his feet. Vance countered, calling forth a swirling vortex of wind that ripped through the air, sending dust and debris flying. Their laughter echoed across the courtyard, the joy of creation filling the space. However, that emotion of pure glee was short-lived.
A slight scent of death could be spelled, coming from a short distance away. In the distance, an eerie rumble vibrated through the earth, unnoticed by the children caught in their play. They were far too absorbed in their training to hear the faint groan of the earth, the strange the sky grew strange and dark, the wind turned violent. A terrifying, gargantuan black line appeared in the sky, directly above the children.
The towering streak of darkness began to creak open. It was a truly grotesque thing. As the line of nothingness grew wider, it seemed to tear the sky apart like flesh. The wider the rift grew, the more unbearable the repulsing smell of death became, After the wound in the air reached a colossal size, it stopped growing, instead A shadow fell across the children, casting an unnatural gloom over the courtyard.
Lila's orb flickered and dimmed. She looked up, confusion crossing her face. Kieran stopped laughing mid-strike, his gaze shifting toward the horizon. Vance's windstorm faltered, dissipating into nothing as the distant shape grew larger, its form emerging from the depths beyond the gate.
It was massive—an enormous leviathan, its body covered in deep blue scales that shimmered with an otherworldly glow. Its enormous eyes were filled with an incandescent flame that radiated cold indifference, and the ground trembled as it was ejected from inside the tear in reality.
A deafening crash sounded as the creature's towering form crashed down from the gate. The children barely had time to scream before the enormous being's tail, or perhaps its body swept across the courtyard, knocking them aside like fragile toys. The leviathan turned its body and began to make its way toward the children with a slithering motion of its body. Lila's orb flickered one last time, fading into nothingness as the leviathan's enormous form crushed the area beneath it.
WIth nothing standing in the towering leviathans way, it made its' way to the children and without a second thought devoured them all, only satiating its hulking hunger for mere moments.
Without hesitation, the monster turned, its colossal body lumbering toward the nearby body of water. the faint glow of Etherium in the air dimming in the aftermath of the destruction.
The leviathan's tail splashed into the water with a force that sent ripples spreading outward, the chaos of its arrival leaving nothing but silence in its wake. The last whispers of magic faded from the courtyard, lost to the void that had opened with the monster's presence.
—
After the first incident in the northern reaches of Sarak-Tal—where the leviathan tore through the gate and crushed the Etherium-born children—everything changed.
At first, scholars and government officials called it an anomaly. A freak occurrence. A breach in reality that would never happen again. But they were wrong.
Within days, more gates began to open.
They weren't isolated to ruins or deep laboratories anymore. These rifts—jagged tears in the fabric of the world—began appearing wherever people with Etherium in their blood lived. Villages, research facilities, fortified cities. The sky itself would shimmer, twist, and split open like skin tearing under pressure.
And from each one, something emerged.
Sometimes it was a beast: hulking, alien, and barely comprehensible. Sometimes it was a flood of smaller creatures—skittering things that moved in packs and whispered in a language no one dared to understand. Other times, it was simply a sickness in the air, a psychic scream that drove entire towns to madness before anything even passed through.
It soon became undeniable: the Etherium wasn't just a gift. It was a beacon.
A call to something on the other side.
Each host—each human bonded to Etherium—was an anchor point. A signal. The more Etherium saturated a population, the greater the chance that a gate would tear open nearby. It wasn't random. It was systematic. Calculated.
The world had unknowingly wired itself into a network of dimensional doors, and the monsters were only just beginning to answer.
Governments collapsed under the weight of the realization. Blood tests turned into death sentences. People began hiding their abilities, or tearing Etherium from their bodies in desperation. Entire communities turned on themselves. The gifted were hunted—not out of hatred, but out of fear.
Because every child born with glowing veins was no longer a miracle.
They were a time bomb.
And the countdown had already begun.
End of Prologue.