NOVEL NEXT Chapter 29: World Invasion
People kneeled in front of the statue of a woman.
It was made very realistic, to the point that one needs to look closely to notice the difference.
She had black skin and a comparatively longer face but was overall beautiful by the standards of the people of the former Tray Country.
A few weeks ago, individuals with extraordinary powers came and arrested the king of the Tray Country.
They then announced that a new king had taken over and now rules over them.
There were protests initially, but all were violently suppressed.
Nobody could resist these individuals, so the people could only accept it.
After the takeover, many new laws were enacted.
One such law required everyone older than 7 and younger than 100 to bow every morning to the statue at the center of every city.
There were exceptions, such as sickness or pregnancy, but these were very limited, and if someone misused them, they could be executed in public.
Everyone intensely hated this new king but could not do anything about it.
Some people who spoke poorly of the new king were arrested and judged by individuals sent by the new king named Doris, and without fail, all were found guilty and executed.
Many people cried and wailed, feeling sad and angry, but with the strange power of the invaders, the people of Tray Country were helpless.
Some people tried to run to the neighboring countries but noticed that the takeover was not limited to only Tray County; it was everywhere!
They had no way to escape.
Some accepted the fact and started taking the initiative to come every morning and bow, praising the new king loudly, acting as if she were the savior.
The invaders took many of those people and put them in positions of power.
Most hated those 'traitors,' but as always, without power, everything is just empty words.
Law and justice are an illusion if one can't enforce them, and the people of the former Tray Country are experiencing it firsthand.
From far above, someone was looking.
She was a Rank 9 mage from the 'Judgment' Academy, Daisie Espinoza.
The 'Judgment' Academy had three Rank 9 mages and controlled a continent with great magical resources, albeit fewer than the Dyer Continent.
When the Seven Light Academy contacted them, she was skeptical at first. Still, after hearing them and conducting an investigation, she became convinced that the mage named 'Doris' really had a way of fixing the situation with 'rivers' of time.
She convinced the other two rank 9 mages in the Academy, and they started helping to colonize the mortal continents.
The mage world is vast, but only a tiny part has pure energy.
No matter how much one tries to change the barren continents, all pure energy escapes after a while.
There have been many cases where mage academies tried to build massive formations to prevent pure energy from escaping. Yet, the consumption was so immense that even some Rank 9 academies went bankrupt.
The pure energy of the whole world is concentrated in a few hundred continents.
Daisie turned around and started moving to her destination.
Rank 9 mages began acting personally to increase the speed of colonization. With their help, colonizing entire continents took only a few days.
After rank 9 mages, lower-ranked mages start acting, putting up statues, selecting suitable people for governance, setting up governments, and then leaving.
There are so many continents that mages cannot stay.
At most, a few Rank 1 mages stay in important locations to suppress any revolt.
Right now, 20 continents are being colonized every single day. However, to reach the target of 1 million continents colonized, it will take more than 100 years!
In reality, there are far more than just 1 million continents.
The true size of the mage world remains undiscovered, even today.
Mages have been exploring to reach the end of the world, but no matter how far they go, it seems endless.
When first discovered, these continents were completely uninhabited by humans, but thanks to the 'Humanoids' Academy, they soon became inhabited.
The goal of the 'Humanoids' Academy was to populate the world with humanoids. It was founded more than 40 million years ago.
They set up cities on every uninhabited continent they found, and since there were no mages or monsters on those continents, almost all of them survived and expanded.
This is the main reason why so many continents are inhabited by humanoids today.
Conversely, the Humanoids Academy is the only Academy with Rank 9 mages not helping colonize the continents today. The rest of the academies helped when they saw the evidence for themselves.
This is one of the few times when humans and non-humans agreed on something.
Since ancient times, humans and non-humans, primarily elves, have been engaged in numerous wars.
The origins of humans are unknown, but elves were created by the God of Beauty nearly 150 million years ago.
However, human mages considered elves to be agents of heaven. Still, at that time, humans didn't have any Rank 9 mages, so they couldn't stop the expansion of the elves.
Some human mages later changed their view of non-humans, but many high-ranking human mages still dislike elves and non-humans in general.
It's said that the God of Beauty saw what one of the creators looked like and created the elves to look like him/her.
There are many artworks, most of which paint him as a male elf, and some describe her as a female elf.
As for the other one, it's a mystery.
Some sources claim the other creator was a 'she' and looked like a human, but mages, gods, and demons collectively rejected those as unreliable, a rumor without a source.
As Daisie was thinking of these, she arrived at the next continent. Moving long distances is easy for Rank 9 mages.
She started and cast the 'Mass Avatar' spell. It was a Rank 9 spell that created billions of temporary avatars with the power of mage apprentices.
These were the first waves that removed every local king and ruler. She then cast the 'Long Distance Teleportation Point.'
After a while, many low-ranking mages emerged from it. They all bowed and waited.
After thousands of low-ranking mages gathered, Daisie cast the 'Mass Teleportation Points to Civilization.'
Hundreds of teleportation points appeared, each leading to a different part of the continent with a human population.
With Rank 9 mages, everything seems so easy!
The low-ranking mages bowed respectfully and jumped into the teleportation points, one in each.
After at least one mage jumped in all the teleportation points, she cast 'mass teleportation' again, leading to new places in the continent.
In this way, the entire continent was colonized in 1 week. With a few mages remaining in critical locations to prevent an uprising, the rest jumped into the next long-distance teleportation point, which was cast by Daisie, who was already on another continent.
...
Doris was jubilant!
The number of justice points she was receiving every day was unprecedented! She already had enough points to buy a lot of Rank 7 resources!
Honestly, the 1 million continents she mentioned was just a way of testing them. She had no idea that so many even existed! But to her surprise, the Rank 9 mages accepted it as if they expected it.
In truth, even a population 50,000 times that of the Dyer Continent should be enough for a Rank 10 spell crystal.
But Doris was happy to see that they would try to reach the 1 million mark.
She is not suicidal.
What happens if she fixes the River of Time? Doris is not naïve; she knows that every single mage is dying to know how she can acquire a Rank 10 item.
The most likely thing that will happen when she fixes the River of Time is that she will get captured and experimented on for them to see how she obtained the item.
So she is trying to accumulate a lot of points and reach Rank 10 in one go!
Everything is in the system store; the only problem is insufficient justice points.
She has been eyeing a particular item for a long time.
It is called 'Jump Rank,' and it can permanently improve the user's rank. It is expensive to the point that even a Rank 6 Jump Rank is slightly more expensive than the resources required for one to reach Rank 7!
The Rank 10 Jump Rank is so expensive that she never thought it was actually possible to obtain it.
But with the help of Rank 9 mages, it's actually happening.
The mortal continents are far, far away.
Local continents are all ruled by mage academies, so when the Robels Kingdom set up some small colonies in other continents, it was not those mortal continents.
She wasn't even aware that they existed!
Although she was Rank 7, she didn't have access to sensitive information like this before.
If she knew, she would have tried everything to colonize them.
She looked at the system interface with a smile, then took out a new novel and began reading it.
Writers are heavily rewarded in the Dyer Continent if what they write pleases Doris, so it was a thriving business.
...
Dyer rechecked his luck.
It was increasing higher and higher!
"Why is my luck increasing so much? It's unreasonable!"
One fundamental question that very few mages can answer is, 'What is luck'?
As the mage with the most knowledge about luck, Dyer can answer this question.
Luck results from two complete laws of time and space being intertwined. It is deeply connected to the roots of the world.
The predictive ability of luck comes from this. Also, when one has incredible luck, it means that their future will significantly impact the world.
However, as the future can change, one person's luck can change too. Today, Dyer's luck is increasing much more than it should have been.
In his life of more than 100 million years, his luck has never increased so much for no reason. It was so high that it almost materialized!
"With this much luck, I am unprecedentedly strong!' With the fragment law of destiny, it's possible to manipulate the River of Time to some extent, but how much you can control depends on how much luck you have.
He opened his third eye and looked toward Doris, who was at an unknown distance away.
His third eye is a Rank 9 magic treasure, an inheritance from one of the creators. It can see things that are not supposed to be seen.
He saw her luck, which was like an ocean.
He looked deeper with his third eye, piercing through the surface.
On her ocean of luck, there was a ship.
He scrutinized deeper and deeper.
On the ship, he saw something like a pill container.
He examined even deeper, specifically looking at the pill container.
Some red veins appeared in his eye, but he gritted his teeth and looked deeper at the pill container.
No matter how he examined, it was as if there was no more depth to explore.
He closed his sore eye and took a very deep breath.
"That pill container! Is it the source of Doris's luck?"
The strongest ability of the third eye was to look at the source of things.
Doris's luck manifested like an ocean, which means her luck was extremely great.
But the ocean is not the source so the third eye can look further.
On the ocean, there was a ship.
Ship means she is either going somewhere or has come from somewhere far away.
But the ship is still not the source so the third eye can look deeper.
On the ship, there is a pill container!
A pill container has no meaning, as far as Dyer knows. But the third eye cannot go any deeper.
This means the source of her luck is the pill container.
"What relation does Doris have to that thing? Why is it her source of luck?" he was baffled.
The source of luck is the most important thing; without it, a person loses their luck.
"But why? What am I missing?" Dyer thought with his eyes closed.
He started thinking about everything he knew and learned about Doris. He opened his eyes and smiled. "Alistair Robels! He knows something! He acted weird when conspiring with the 'Orange Light Academy.' He must know something!"
Dyer had read everything about Doris before and knew the details.
He snapped his fingers, and Alistair, who was in a white lab coat, appeared in front of him, dumbfounded!
"Freeze!" Dyer cast a spell, making Alistair unable to move.
He put his hand above Alistair's head and cast 'soul search'!
This Rank 9 spell is completely beyond Alistair's ability to resist.
Dyer learned everything about what Owen had said regarding the container to Alistair and that Alistair had placed a Rank 4 pill in Owen's body in case he managed to break to Rank 4.
Dyer cast 'memory manipulation' and snapped his fingers. Alistair returned to his lab, unaware that anything weird had happened.
The reason the soul gets damaged during soul search is resistance. The soul search can be done harmlessly if the rank difference is too high.
Dyer closed his eyes and absorbed all tens of thousands of years of Alistair's memory in a second.
"The pill container was found by Owen from Luther Robels. That day, the container spoke for a day with Alistair and answered his questions. To answer Alistair's question of 'how you were made,' it said naturally."
He examined everything but didn't see any clues.
He closed his eyes and thought.
Then, he opened them and smiled! "It's so human! There are a lot of treasures with intelligence, but they are made like high-rank mages—smart, practical, ruthless! But this thing looks so much like a mortal! From its answers, I can see it answered all the questions, trying to deceive Alistair but failing miserably. It didn't even know how to lie! Along with having a name, Rachel, it really looks like a human."
"And from what I discovered from soul searching Daniel, I can see it grew more mature over time, becoming more ruthless, wiping away Daniel's emotions with pure energy, even though it helped Owen keep his emotions intact."
"So when Luther found it, it was most likely just made, or it arrived in this world and somehow got lost and ended up inside a stone, being found within a piece of stone!"
"Nothing like this has ever been made! It could be one of two things: either an inheritance from the creators or an item from another world."
He closed his eyes again and, after calculating with luck, frowned.
"If it were an inheritance, I would have detected a reaction from the River of Time. The most likely scenario is that it came from another world. But items from another world aren't like this! They are pieces and scraps, randomly entering this world."
He closed his eyes again and calculated.
"It is the source of Doris. Doris is the daughter of Owen, who owned the pill container when she was born."
He opened all three of his eyes wide.
"It's a world invasion!" Dyer thought with horror.