Fair warning, this chapter ended up a bit weird and I’m not entirely happy with it. I uhh, do not plan my chapters out like a diligent author would to be honest and often just have an idea bout the beginning and sometimes the end of a chapter. More often than not though, I simply let the chapter flow out and it kinda backfired this time. The idea with this chap was to give a different perspective on what is happening in the world around Argul, but a lot of ideas jumbled into each other and I tried my best to connect them all, but I think it didn’t end up all that good. It’s not super bad, mind you, but I’m not really happy with it. That I stopped taking my antidepression meds midway through the chapter and now ‘suffer’ from feeling emotions (mostly good) again didn’t really help. Anyway, now that I purposefully lowered your expectations of what is to come: Enjoy! ;p

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General Blümlein, now King Erdanien, put away the last sheet of paper with a sigh. There was already a veritable stack of approved or rejected proposals as well as a second, somewhat shorter, pile of reports. He had read through them all and he would do so again tomorrow. No matter what your station or high you rose, there was apparently always paperwork to do.

The King shook his head, pushing away the idle thoughts and looked around his somewhat plain office. He would have to decorate the place sometime, but right now, in the early phase of establishing his kingdom, he and his subordinates really had other things to do. Every second they didn’t look somewhere a fire would pop up that would have to be put out.

The King let out another sigh, though this time it was one of irritation and maybe frustration. Things weren’t going bad, considering the situation he had found himself in, but they were definitely not going according to plan either.

10 months ago, he had been general of his birth country and pretty much at the end of his military career. He hadn’t been satisfied with that, but he was also unwilling to make countless people suffer just because he wanted more, wanted to become the top end of the hierarchy. As such had maybe been a little bit miserly despite his accomplishments. That he had yet to find a partner for life to create a family within all 4 decades of his life didn’t help either.

Then he had been teleported and everything changed. Of course the beginning had been quite confusing. Appearing in an unknown military base with only a smattering of your subordinates surrounded by random soldiers of other countries and hundreds of thousands of confused civilians did that to a person. 

Still, after everything had calmed down and they had time to scout their surroundings with drones, it quickly became clear that they were not in any nation of earth. That they were not even on their home planet anymore.

The first tell for that had been the, despite barely any light pollution, comparatively empty night sky. What confirmed their surprise resettlement was that the few scientists somehow figured out that this new planet was slightly larger than earth.

What had mattered for Blümlein - Gods above was he happy to have gotten rid of that name - however, was that he could now move upwards in the ranks again and thus he had started his campaign to unite the hodgepodge of a military and found a country, with him as the head of course.

The start had been understandably rocky. Not everyone had agreed with him and the majority of military personnel didn’t even know who he was, but those were things that could easily be rectified, though the solution for the former included early retirements and a few ‘accidents’. Some people just didn’t understand when to give up.

Really, the most difficult thing was to do everything covertly and in silence. Despite the military as a whole taking over, the situation had been fragile and they couldn’t let the civilians take notice of their power struggles or everything would descend into anarchy. That that couldn’t be allowed to happen was perhaps the only thing the different factions in the army had agreed on.

In the end, four months after the teleportation, the general and his supporters had come out on top. A shame that before he had been able to capitalize on it their world was once again going to go through a massive change. 

The King thought down his rising anger and began to tap his finger on the table repeatedly. 

Really, what were the odds that some strange new type of energy chose to start spreading right when he was about to declare the establishment of a new country?

The King shook his head in annoyance.

The only saving grace was that they hadn’t been hit by the mana wave completely unprepared thanks to a group of refugees. He shuddered thinking about what would have happened if the Silver Witch, Argul Agren, hadn’t somehow figured out how to combat the changes the mana initiation wrought upon the majority of people. Some estimates put the possible casualties to 80 percent of the whole population. 50 percent lost to the initiation itself and the other 30 percent killed by the creatures born of the mutated first 50 percent. 

The possible loss of life was mind boggling.

To prevent this from happening an operation of unprecedented scale had been required and whatever plans there were previously, they all had had to be shelved for later.

What made this all worse though, was that mana interacted weirdly with other energies and thus disabled a wide variety of technology. Electricity randomly got boosted, frying cables and delicate hardware for example. 

As if having to organize for the safe integration of millions of people wasn’t already bad enough, the area they could use advanced technology in had also been constantly shrinking!

Frustratingly, it wasn’t a consistent phenomenon as fire, for example, remained mostly untouched, as far as the scientists could tell at least. The moment a reaction got explosive however, mana might enhance said explosiveness, which lead to firearms turning into grenades and cars into bombs, they just didn’t know why! 

According to the Silver Witch, mana was quite literally free potential that could be used to do whatever you wanted as long as you had enough of it. Most of the countries foundational knowledge regarding mana actually came from the Silver Witch, something that the majority of the scientists working for the military firmly resented, though the King had a suspicion that the problem was less that she was just some random person and more that she was a random woman. As long as they couldn’t disprove her or come up with a better theory, the scientists would have to accept her teachings however. It was a weird thing to use as motivation, but at this point the King wouldn’t say no to people working more.

Of course all these technical details interested the general populace very little and they were more concerned with rebuilding their lives after the teleportation. Back when the mana wave hit, there had been a fragile stability holding everything together and it wouldn’t have survived this new change.

Mana put a lot humanity knew in question. What had been more important to the King at the time though, was that if the military didn’t have a plausible public explanation for this their credibility and competence were tarnished. Not being able to give an explanation for something weird once was perhaps excusable, nobody is perfect after all and mistakes happen. 

Failing twice though? That was the beginning of a pattern and put their right to rule in jeopardy, something the King couldn’t allow. There hadn’t been and still wasn’t much they could have done though. Nobody had the tiniest clue as to where mana came from and why or why they all got teleported to a different planet in a different universe in the first place. It appeared to be connected somehow, but that was all they could really tell.

The King frowned heavily at the memory.

He had maybe been a bit desperate back then because of this and in all his hurried wisdom did something he now heavily regretted. For, if you didn’t have an explanation, why not create one yourself?!

At least something along that line had to have been his thought when he had gone to the church to rope them into his hairbrained scheme. In exchange for them becoming the state religion of his new country and quite a lot of other confessions such as tax exemption and the right to field their own armed force, the church stepped up and claimed mana to be a gift of god, the precursor of his arrival after having been away from humanity for millenia due to extraordinary reasons.

The King gripped his head in his hands and stared at the map that served as his desk's background. If only he had known that all of that nonsense would come true!

Sure, there had been questions at first, but true to religious ambiguity they had at least been annoyed into giving up. What mattered was that with the church serving as distraction as well as explanation they had managed to successfully integrate most of their domains citizens and then be able to continue with the foundation of Edanien.

Sounded like a plan come true, but no, God Meran actually had to show up and now the King had to deal with an incomprehensible being that held way too much sway in the workings of his own kingdom. With the church he would have been able to deal with, but with a God? Hell no!

And to make things worse?

To the west of the kingdoms borders was a republic that for some reason religiously refused to be bound to any god and to the east was a theocracy that appeared to believe in the same god as Erdanien, but slaughtered every human that had been changed by the mana wave, much to the fury of the church.

King Erdanien studied the map once more and then let out a deep sigh of resignation.

Things weren’t going bad. He had founded his own country and had become sovereign. One could go so far and say that his dream had come true, and it did in a way.

But things were also decidedly not going to plan, because now there was a god above him he had to at least somewhat answer to and there would definitely be a war with the religious nutjobs in the east.