Foreword

The genesis of this tale traces back to the Sacred Era, year 1600.

A decade had passed since the devastating Demon Lord War, which had ravaged the continent.

The land was slowly mending from its profound wounds.

Yet, victory did not usher in jubilation; instead, it ignited a fierce clash of ideologies and emerging trends.

Rewinding a decade further into that era, Pope Marinanco I, having initiated a brutal purge against the ‘Otherworld Travelers,’ was summarily slain by Rajes, famously known as the King of Heroes, with a single stroke within the Holy Court atop Paradise Mountain.

From that pivotal moment, the millennia-old system of the Papacy, which had represented humanity, began its inevitable descent into collapse.

The subsequent onset of the Demon Lord’s invasion of the continent only deepened the despair of those who had already lost faith in the gods.

The transmigrators, once oppressed by the Papacy, formed a new council, beginning to assume dominion over the continent’s affairs.

Concurrently, people abandoned their belief in the ancient deities, freely seeking paths and methods they believed could save themselves.

By the year 1603, the social order, once maintained by the Papacy and uniting humanity against common foes, completely disintegrated amidst the power struggles among regional bishops vying for the papal throne.

The Papacy consequently lost the greater part of its influence over the continent.

It was also in this very year, in a remote military stronghold situated on a high-mountain plateau along the human-orc border in the far north of the continent, that a young boy, seemingly of humble origins, who earned his living by herding for others, doing odd jobs in taverns, and acting as a shill in casinos, celebrated his thirteenth birthday.

He, of course, could not have known what role he was destined to play, what identity he would forge upon the face of this world.

—From ‘A Brief History of the Great Era,’ Special Edition 1700, Bureau of Papal Evangelism.