Free Web NovelPrologue: The Death of the Old World
Three hundred years ago, the world ended.
Not with a bang. Not with a war. Not with any of the apocalyptic scenarios that humanity had spent centuries imagining and preparing for.
It came like a whisper.
No one knew where it originated. No scientist, no government, no institution on the face of the planet could explain it. One moment, the world was normal — people went to work, children went to school, couples argued over dinner, and the stars shone the same as they always had.
Then mana arrived.
It pressed against the planet like a drowning weight, seeping into the soil, the oceans, the air, into every living thing that drew breath. Within the first hour, birds fell from the sky by the millions — their tiny bodies raining down on city streets like twisted confetti. Within the first day, fish floated belly-up on every coastline. Within the first week — the mutations began.
Every animal on Earth changed.
The oceans turned hostile. Creatures that should have remained in the deepest trenches surfaced — leviathans, krakens, things with no names in any human language. They crushed naval fleets like toys and swallowed cruise ships whole.
And then came the Dungeons.
Gateways to hostile worlds tore open across the planet. From within them poured monsters — creatures of every shape and size, some resembling animals twisted beyond recognition, others being things that had never existed in nature. Horned beasts. Flying terrors. Things made of shadow and stone and fire.
Some possessed sentience. They could think. They could plan. They could speak in languages no human had ever heard.
The first year alone wiped out nearly four billion people.
Entire countries disappeared. The United Kingdom was one of the first major nations to fall — a coordinated assault from sea creatures emerging from the Atlantic, combined with dungeon breaks across the island, overwhelmed the military within weeks. Russia fractured into scattered holdouts. The Amazon rainforest exploded in size, swallowing cities whole. The Sahara Desert became a breeding ground for reptilian and insectoid monstrosities.
Of Europe’s once-proud nations, only Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, England, Spain, France, and a handful of others survived — and even they bore scars that would never fully heal. Paris was half-destroyed and rebuilt three times. Berlin’s walls were reinforced with abilities and technology that made it more fortress than city.
By the end of the first decade, the human population had plummeted from eight billion to less than two billion.
It was the darkest period in human history.
But humanity survived.
Not because they were strong. Not because they were smart. But because of something that happened during the second year of the Cataclysm.
People began to change.
Children born after the mana flood began developing abilities around the age of sixteen. At first, it was rare — a girl who could make small flames dance on her fingertips, a boy who could hear conversations from a mile away. These individuals became the vanguard of humanity’s survival. They fought the monsters. They cleared the dungeons. They protected the weak.
Over the decades, the awakening rate stabilized. Ninety percent of humanity never awakened. Of the remaining ten percent, most received useless or marginally useful abilities. Only six percent gained genuinely combat-viable powers. And above them all — the Dual Awakeners, the S-Ranks, the SSS-Ranks, and the Bloodlines.
The top five human clans — Vanguard, Ryu, Schwarz, Amara, and Silva — became pillars of civilization, their inherited bloodlines granting them power that ordinary awakened could only dream of.` fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
But they were not the only bloodlines.
In the shadows, something older stirred.
Vampires.
Before the Cataclysm, they were myths. Afterward, they were very real. They established hidden domains across the world. They kept to themselves, mostly. They had arrangements with certain human powers. Unspoken agreements. Quotas. Boundaries.
But every so often, a vampire would slip through those invisible lines.
And when they did, humans died.
Not in battle. Not in glorious combat.
As prey.
The World Government knew. The Awakened Association knew. The Hunter Guilds knew. But publicly, vampires were classified as "S-class dungeon threats." The truth was buried under layers of classification, because if the general public knew that literal vampires existed and that the government was doing essentially nothing about it...
Well. Society would collapse faster than the monsters could destroy it.
So the vampires remained in the shadows.
And humanity pretended they didn’t exist.
This is the world Lucian Grimaud was born into — a world of ruin and monsters, of power and cruelty, where the strong devoured the weak and called it order.
A world that had taken everything from him before he was old enough to understand what everything meant.
His story begins not with glory, but with a fall.
