I had been so caught up with how similar this world is to earth that I hadn't even considered that while there would of course be places like earth, there are going to be places vastly different. Things which shouldn't even be possible as far as I understood them.
Questions floated through my mind. How is such a thing possible? The answer was of course with magic. Did that mean it was created by someone or was this somehow magic done naturally?
---
After the arrival of demons to earth around two decades ago, mana was introduced into the world. It spread through all matter on earth almost instantly, converting around a fifth of the mass into mana but yet at the same time nothing actually changed. The weight of objects, their properties even on the atomic scale seemed the exact same.
In short nothing had really changed despite the fact the whole world was now partially made of mana, well there was one big difference actually. You could control mana with your will, if you wished for mana to move it simply would but shockingly the matter the mana was attached to would also be affected but our souls were weak, moving even a grain of sand was incredibly strenuous.
None the less suddenly the world was now malleable. We ignored the introduction of the demons for a while. They were absolutely shocking, yes but the demons that came through the rift were weak and dumb, absolutely no threat in the face of the power of our modern weapons.
On the other hand the ability to mould the world with your very soul was enrapturing the world, the definitive proof of a soul was shocking enough in and of itself.
Eventually techniques to use mana with more power appeared, most were vastly different from one another but all of them that actually worked had several things in common with each other.
They used the ever so slight pull your soul had over mana to gather mana slowly over time, then they released this mana and let the built up pressure create a much larger force than your will alone could.
This idea was quickly optimised into creating the mana core and mana weave. One to easily store pressured mana and one to guide this mana with the direction and force to utilise it.
A technique which worked like the weave but instead it was focused on gathering mana instead, it worked by using the mana you already had and circulating it around to act like a net, absorbing the mana it touched. This was until it was found this could simply be integrated into the weave itself, allowing the weave to serve both functions.
At around the same time others discovered that many types of mana had properties, specific kinds of elements and states of matter the kind of mana liked to attach to and would interact more strongly with.
This developed into finding out you could in your own core begin to refine mana to interact with specifically the user's will and very weakly with anything else but could quickly be turned into any element you wished for so long as you had the finesse to do it. It allowed for much more dense cores, and much stronger forces.
Once it reached a certain strength people were finally able to start making spells. It required immense control over mana and incredible finesse in controlling the exact properties the mana interacted with but allowed for incredible things.
These first few years showed potential to propel humanity into a revolution on a scare incomparable to even the industrial revolution.
During this time the demons coming out through the rift were beginning to become stronger and stronger. We just didn't care, humans were now individually so much stronger than we were before that the demons were still insignificant. Even without the technological weapons we had, we could easily deal with the demons with hardly any effort.
New uses for mana and new techniques were constantly advancing, it felt like everyone on the planet was all working together on making magic. Electricity was practically free by that point, you could order the parts to make a generator which works off of mana cheaply, it would have a small storage for mana which refilled daily and it would produce electricity in amounts almost no one has any use for.
Clean, completely renewable energy was available for everyone. We would never run out of it either, it had been experimentally proven that a substance that had less than a fifth of its weight in mana quickly turned a portion of its mass into mana. This was energy storage on the scale of mass conversion which meant we had the entire mass of the earth to work with, which is a truly horrifying amount of energy, we were confident that it was physically impossible to use that much mana. Our main problem was with making mana more efficient, the spells we made caused most of the mana 'used' to just simply release back into the air.
More and more ideas spread throughout the globe. The news channels were always broadcasting new inventions, new accidents, new laws and regulations.
"Miss Keara Hill has recently announced magic which can create magnetic fields."
"The US Government has announced a bill forbidding certain kinds of magic."
"The Canadian Government regrets to announce the demons have broken the containment barriers."
Suddenly all eyes turned to the demons. We had all ignored the fact the ones coming through the rift were getting stronger and stronger. We couldn't figure out much about the home of the demons due to the fact it simply didn't let us enter through the rift but it was clear this rift was more than a slight problem.
We had concerns that humanity with this power would wage war on each other, little did we know we would never get the chance to.
We had managed to stop the demons who escaped. We already knew they didn't even try to communicate and tried to kill every single human they found regardless if they died or not, so we decided to just kill them first and ask questions later.
There were many that deemed something like that incredibly cruel and they should try to understand the creatures of another world instead of culling them. Just a few days later though, no one ever said something so idiotic again.
The demon lord had arrived, it had been nine years since magic had been introduced to the world but less than a month after the demon lord had arrived the world had already fallen. They brought with them weapons more powerful than nuclear bombs, each soldier had mana so powerful it made humanities strongest look like common trash.
Humanity grew at an even faster rate in response, while we were pushed into hiding away from the apocalypse every human alive was not committed to revenge on the demons and had a thirst for power.
In the end it didn't really matter, it wasn't even all that eventful. Over the next decade nearly every single human was exterminated the last outpost of humanity were the best of the best, we were nearly a thousand strong with power which could take over a country in the old world but not even those countries combined along with the nukes they held did anything to the demon king. Not because they were more powerful than a nuke or anything but because their magic simply prevented a nuke from being able to launch, making them useless scrap metal.
Our force of a thousand became a few hundred once they found our hideout, then it became barely a hundred once they found us again. They didn't even rush to kill us, they just threw countless soldiers at us to whittle us down and eventually we fell under the crushing pressure. The last of us was only eighteen of us. We had found a massive amount out about magic and how to use it, we had found ruins of a subterranean race of beings in the ancient past of earth more advanced than we could imagine, which wielded magic far before the earliest human had.
---
I woke up to the sound of hail slamming into the top of the hammock I was resting within. A hammock was easily one of the most effective beds no matter where you are. They are easy to set up, needing only two ends to attach to and assuming you had one that could withstand the elements, would be a perfect fit for anywhere you needed it.
I had currently set mine up high up in the trees to keep it safe from any potential predators on the ground. I didn't actually know if the trees were any safer with my lack of knowledge about the local fauna but it made me feel safer so I decided to set it up out here.
I opened up and looked through the flap which worked as both an air hole and window and tried to look around.
Despite the fact I had set up the hammock at dusk and gone to sleep once it had gone dark, all that surrounded me was still darkness. Well not quite, in the distance I could see many bioluminescent plants glowing along with the giant crystals below the unimaginably large floating island ripple with light. The day and night cycle here was significantly longer, from what I could tell it was almost three times as long so despite the fact I had just had a nice long rest, there was still plenty more of the night left.
In the darkness of my hammock my mind drifted back to yesterday when I first saw the floating islands. I tried to figure out how they floated in many ways, but they all boiled down to trying to see how the mana around them was flowing. Sadly I had hardly learned anything at all. The mana treated the rocks up above the same as any other solid object, as if rocks floating in the sky were no different to the ground itself.
I wondered just how much knowledge I could gleam from this new world.