Wild Era, Ch 1: Mana Collapse

Author's Note: The following chapter is the beginning of Wild Era, the new series. It is in the same universe as Aster Fall, roughly 5,000 years after the end of Book 9 of Guardian of Aster Fall.

Reading it is not a spoiler.

This first chapter will be visible to all followers, so you can test it out. The following ones will be like normal for subscribers.

***

Here is the blurb for the book:

Wild Era: A LitRPG Adventure. 

For 5,000 years, the Wild Era of humanity has reigned supreme, where strength and magic are the source of everything.

Kelin Wildfire, once called the Archmage of Wild Mana and the greatest warrior of his era, died in battle on the frontier of the Chaos War a thousand years before.

He was betrayed by his allies, but his soul lived on in the cycle of reincarnation, his memories frozen in time. 

Until today.

In his current life, he is barely twenty years old, the orphan son of a stone mason and a weaver, living on the most lawless planet of the human domain where he is barely able to scrape by. He takes up a job as a miner, searching for rare ores and crystals in the mana-filled depths of the mountains, but treachery from local thugs triggers a cave-in that nearly kills him.

The collapse of the mountain releases a mana pulse that strikes his soul, awakening memories of his past life where he was something more.

Half dead and without any mana, but with the memories of an Archmage, he decides to rise again.

This is the Wild Era.

Where the Wild Mage will reign supreme. 

***

Chapter 1: Mana Collapse

I was a son of Irian until its dying day.

The words came to Kelin’s mind again as a massive earthquake ripped through the mine where he was working. 

Everything shook, making the walls look like they’d turned to liquid. 

More than that, the mana density in the area increased in a rush, making him feel like he was being crushed under an ocean. It was so thick he couldn’t even draw a breath, like honey filling his lungs. 

He gasped as he tried to stand, but between the rolling floor and the pressure, he couldn’t make it to his feet. He grabbed onto the wall and began to lever himself up, but it was slow going.

“Run!”  

“Mana collapse!”

“Abandon the mine!”

The shouts of the foreman and others in the mine rang down the tunnel where Kelin was working, and they all began to rush toward the exit. They were half a mile deep in the mountain’s bones, but some of them were a much higher level than Kelin. 

A few of them had lived through these before and had a decent chance of escaping.

For him, it wasn’t looking good.

It was the worst of both things, a mana collapse and an earthquake in one, not that the two were really separate. Someone must have triggered it by breaking a high-grade mana crystal, which was what they were here to mine.

Then that set off a chain reaction.

The crystals here were a special type and very volatile. It was why miners didn’t live for long. Without a higher level to handle the mana density, the earthquake was secondary.

Mana poisoning was a bad way to die.

“If they’re not dead already, I’ll kill whoever triggered this myself!” The foreman’s angry shout was soon swept away by the pressure, even as his footsteps receded down the tunnel.

He was running for his life, so his famous temper didn’t matter much to those left behind.

There were a few other people still with Kelin, but no one paid any attention to them.

They were drudges, temporary hires from the slums whose only job was to haul away rubble and speed up the work, as well as whatever else they were told to do. 

Unskilled and underpaid, they got the worst of everything. 

Now that there was a collapse, they were on their own. 

It was the end of the week, so the foreman would probably be glad if they died. Then he wouldn’t have to pay them.

“Sorry, kid. Run for it!” The words were thrown out as the older drudge that Kelin had been working with managed to scramble to his feet.

He crawled away down the tunnel, half standing and half pulling himself along on chunks of rubble. 

If he was lucky, he might make it before the mana intensity increased and drowned everyone here. He was a dozen levels higher and maybe he could tolerate the mana long enough to get out, if he could run through the shaking.

At least he had a chance.

For Kelin, it was unlikely. He could already barely move. 

He was only Level 9 and barely starting his Path. He hadn’t even got a chance to really use his Class yet.

He didn’t blame the other drudge for not helping him, since it would just end with both of them dead, but that didn’t stop him from swearing at the man’s back.

Another worker near Kelin fell to the ground, shaking as he tried to breathe in the mana-heavy air. His name was Garas and he was a decent fellow who had shared his lunch with him earlier that day.

As Kelin pulled himself up the wall, he grabbed at the man's arm and tried to haul him to his feet too.

Maybe it wasn't the wisest choice, but if he did nothing, the man would die.

He didn't have much of an education, but he knew you didn't leave people behind, and if they didn’t get out now, they probably never would.

Garas's flailing hand was as hard as stone as it slammed into Kelin's head and sent him reeling backward. His balance was off and he found himself lying on his back again with the world spinning in a blur of light.

He dragged in another liquid breath as he pulled himself to his feet, but his vision was blurring and he could barely see the stones.

Garas was lying on the ground now and barely moving.

From the look of it, he was already past saving, so Kelin forced himself to look away.

He turned and staggered toward the entrance, trying to keep his balance as the mine rolled beneath him.

Mana collapses didn’t end quickly. It took time for the world’s natural mana flow to balance out the excess. Until that happened, this area would be unlivable for most people.

Only someone significantly higher in levels, maybe over Level 200, would be able to tolerate it.

The chance of someone like that coming to his rescue was exactly zero. He was pretty sure there wasn’t someone at that level in the entire region, much less in the small city where he’d grown up.

He figured if he could get up the tunnel far enough, the mana might thin and then it would be easier to make it the rest of the way.

But if he were being honest, Kelin didn’t know much about that.

Most of his education was drawn from random talk from the miners and others in the town where he’d lived for the last two decades. He’d grown up there as an orphan, and they really hadn’t focused on an education, just on not making a mess or disobeying orders.

He could read, make out a few basic runes, and count well enough to check his pay at the end of the week, but that was all. 

Even most of that he’d scrambled to put together on his own, reading torn books stolen from trash heaps or borrowed from merchants in the market who had a soft spot for kids, and later trying to bum the occasional lesson in arithmetic or magic from anyone he could.

He’d always dreamed about doing more one day, but as the floor rolled under him again, chunks of rock began to rain from the ceiling.

He staggered as the world turned around him, and he slammed into the ground. He tried to stand up again, but his hand slipped from the wall. His vision was spinning as the air in his lungs was oversaturated with mana.

It looked like it wasn’t going to work out.

“No!” he growled out the word.

He wasn’t going to let it end here.

He had Yao and Naomi to take care of, two friends who’d just been kicked out of the orphanage. They were the reason he’d taken this risky job. He couldn’t let them down. 

If he did, they would starve or something worse would happen.

The ground was rolling too much to stand, so he began to crawl up the tunnel, slamming his numb hands into the ridges left by the mining carts for purchase.

His breath burned in his lungs as he clawed his way along. His vision was flashes of red and black.

Over the next few minutes, he made it about a good hundred feet, but by then he could barely feel the ground. His hands were so numb he couldn’t tell the difference between the flat surface and the wheel ruts. His vision was a swirl of colors and encroaching blackness.

Then a deeper and more threatening rumble came from the depths of the mine, as a piercing flash of light and mana erupted from below. It was followed by a series of other eruptions in a long chorus.

Another mana crystal had just exploded, setting off even more.

The mana pressure intensified like a hammer slamming into him and then the full wave hit, sweeping Kelin off the ground like debris and hurling him down the tunnel.

He flew for a good fifty feet until he slammed into a wall with bone-breaking force.

If he’d been aware enough to see what happened, he might have felt grateful that it got him closer to the exit, but a moment later even that hope would have been crushed.

Under the pressure of the mana wave, the tunnel floor crumbled away, revealing a hidden cavern just below the surface. It wasn’t large, only a dozen feet or so across, but it was heavily studded with raw mana crystals along the walls, which glowed with a soft blue light.

The foreman’s eyes would have lit up with greed to see it, but he was long gone.

Kelin fell through the roof of the cavern and slammed into the floor of the chamber, followed by a collapse of rubble from the tunnel that sealed the opening in the roof. Then it landed on top of him.

Rocks hammered down, leaving him buried and broken.

With the weight, it wouldn’t be long until he stopped breathing, but it didn’t feel much different than the mana that was crushing him.

The only saving grace was that he was too numb to feel anything.

His mind drifted away, filled with a chaotic blur of the money he’d been trying to earn and what Yao and Naomi would do without him.

As he lay there, the old phrase returned to his mind again, as it always did.

I was a son of Irian until its dying day.

The phrase had always been in his mind. He heard it every day, waking and dreaming. There was something sad about it, like it was a promise.

He’d never known why the words were there, and no one had ever recognized the name, but the phrase was burned into his mind in his own voice. 

It was a fitting accompaniment to the mine collapse, since it looked like he would be dying here along with the last memory of Irian.

As the rocks pressed down and his lungs seized up, the world began to fade away into a blur of silver and black. 

At that moment, a strange thought floated through his mind. 

For some reason, the area around him seemed to be getting brighter, lit by a wildfire glow in yellows and reds that reflected off the mana crystals in the walls.

Then he stopped breathing.

***

Kelin Wildfire was dreaming that he was back on Irian.

In that dream, the world was in its golden age, two hundred years before it had been destroyed in the Chaos War. He missed it with every strand of his heart. 

He had been away fighting on the front lines when his homeland fell. If he’d been there, he liked to imagine he could’ve prevented it and crushed their enemies.

As dreams went, it was a pretty good one.

Only one Chaos Gate had opened near the world and he hadn’t heard of any Sixth Evolution beings coming through, just Fifth and under. It was like many other gates that he’d destroyed in his long life.

The wards should have protected it, but with all the strongest fighters away, they’d been overwhelmed in the end.

He was reluctant to wake up, but there was something insistent hammering at his mind and painful spikes in his lungs that wouldn’t stop bothering him. 

It felt like half the bones in his body were broken. That wasn’t impossible, but at his level, it was highly unlikely.

Fine, he muttered to himself.

Perhaps he should be grateful to have spent so long in his dreams. It was rare that he got the chance.

Never did get to sleep much after the war broke out. What’s it been, a whole day? Why didn’t they wake me?

He sent a pulse of perception around the area, trying to figure out what was going on and where his assistants were, those kids they kept sending him so he could teach them how to use his signature brand of magic.

What came back to his mind sent him reeling in shock.

What is this?

His senses were feeble, barely able to extend past his own body, but what he saw was a disaster.

He was basically dead, with barely a trace of air in his lungs, and half of his bones were indeed broken. They stabbed at his awareness with spikes of pain.

An effort of well practiced will told them to shut up and let him think. He knew they were there. It wasn’t a spell so much as an old mage’s force of will, but it worked just the same.

Blessed silence filled his mind and he quickly took his stock of the rest of his condition.

What he noticed instantly, which came as less of a surprise than perhaps it should have, was that this was not his body.

Or perhaps it was now, but it wasn’t his old body.

His old body would never have been troubled by such a small thing as a few thousand pounds of rock and some broken bones.

He could’ve lifted that with one hand, not that it would have been necessary. The rocks would have crumbled to dust under the force of his aura.

Obviously, something had changed.

He pushed the question of whose body this was out of his mind. 

He could figure it out later, as well as how he’d gotten here.

Unless he did something immediately, he was about to die.

The mana reserves of this body were completely undeveloped, but for some reason, there was a massive amount of fire elemental energy all around him. It was a strange variety that he hadn’t seen before and extremely volatile, but he could work with that.

Volatility was another word for ‘easy to use’ if you knew how.

He forced the weak senses of his body to start gathering the fire essence, and he carefully wove it through his body. 

Three seconds later, the spark of a fire elemental spell flared to life, a very subtle one, and began purifying the air in his lungs.

Almost instantly, he felt the pain in his lungs calm down as he began to draw in shallow breaths. 

He couldn’t move much, but just that trace of air and the spell were enough to let him breathe, and that gave him time to think.

A wind-based spell might’ve worked better, but this would do. Fire was capable of purifying air. 

It was all basic elemental magic, even if it did require a certain understanding of human physiology. 

To him, it was all the same. He’d rebuilt his old body so many times that it was child’s play.

Even breathing had been optional for him. He’d been sustained by his mana regeneration.

A purification spell wouldn’t be enough to get him out of whatever situation he’d found himself in, but with the immediate problem taken care of, he could get to work on the rest.

He began to meditate as he reached out to the fire essence. It was so dense that it had completely infiltrated his body and it was clogging up his mana circulation.

If he left it in that state, it would start to destroy his body, like a slow poison.

A thought of “mana poisoning” passed through his mind, almost like a foreign thought, but he brushed it away.

Oversaturation of elemental essence was not the same as mana poisoning, even if both of them would kill you. 

Fortunately, humans were well suited to handle both energies if they knew how. They were an adaptable race.

He just had to put that ability to good use.

The first thing was to clean this mess up and get the fire essence out of his meridians, the innate channels through which mana flowed.

That would let him meditate more easily and increase his mana regeneration, which would improve his capability to do the rest of what was needed.

If this body had an affinity for fire, he could’ve used the essence like mana, but from what he could tell, whosever's it had been, it had an almost complete absence of any sort of magical or physical training.

That was just embarrassing.

Who had taught this kid?

No one, obviously, or his body wouldn’t have looked like this.

What was more, with the Chaos War happening, who would waste resources and people so badly?

That was what angered Kelin more than anything. Someone had failed this young man, failed to make him strong enough to stand on his own and contribute to society.

The kid clearly had a halfway decent affinity, even if Kelin didn’t have too much time to study it. 

He would’ve been useful as a soldier.

The old soul who had once been called the Archmage of Wild Mana and the Lord of Wildfire muttered to himself as he went about fixing things, including more than one curse better suited to soldiers’ taverns than mages’ libraries. 

It was good that this body had a strong elemental affinity, or he really would have been out of luck. His mana was so feeble that all he could do was the smallest of adjustments directly. The rest came from cajoling the fire energy to go where he wanted it to.

Luckily, fire was one of the core elements that made up Wildfire, the unique blend of elements that had given him his name, and it was everywhere here.

First, he started a draw cycle that began to pull mana through his meridians, attuning it to his breathing. With each breath, a little bit of the fire energy was drawn away and pulled toward his mana core, where he gathered into a pool.

In time, that could become a sea of flame and a core elemental affinity, but for now he was just getting it out of the way.

It took him two hours to clear his meridians out, all while meditating to keep the mana moving, but it was finally able to flow freely. 

Now and then, he siphoned off a bit of the fire energy and used it to reinforce the purification spell on his lungs. He could have used it to reinforce his meridians too, which would have made this entire process faster, but this body was a blank slate. 

He wasn’t going to mess it up by doing the first easy thing that came to mind, not unless he had to. He’d set it on the right path once he got a handle on things. 

Skill rank notifications rang in his mind as he worked, but he ignored them. It had been a long time since he’d heard those for basic skills, but there would be more before he was done.

As he worked, he took some time to assess what was going on. 

He wasn’t sure why he was here, but he had to accept reality.

Either he was a displaced soul inhabiting this body, or he’d been reincarnated somehow and this near death experience had woken up his old memories.

There was a strange part of his soul that felt like it had been crystallized, like a chunk of rainbow-hued stone, which he’d have to study later. If he was making an educated guess, this whole thing probably had something to do with that.

Maybe that was where his memories had been.

He was leaning toward the reincarnation theory, since it didn’t seem like this body rejected him at all. It felt like his own and there was no conflict with the soul that was supposed to inhabit it.

Nor was there any sign of another soul except his own, which was perfectly stable, indicating that it had always been in this body. A quick scan told him that except for the crystallized part, his soul was young as his body.

So apparently he’d died and this was the result.

The last thing he remembered was resting before a battle the next day. He wasn’t sure how long ago that had been, but he would investigate. 

Until now reincarnation had only been a theory that he’d heard of, an idea bandied about in mages’ circle whenever the topic of the soul came up. 

A few Classes had strong abilities to affect the soul, so it was a well-studied subject, and it was critical to have defenses in case one of the things that came through the Chaos Gates wanted to attack yours.

He’d seen possession, soul manipulation, various control arts, and oaths made on a soul, but true reincarnation wasn’t something he’d ever encountered. He hadn’t believed it was possible.

Clearly, he’d been wrong. The evidence was undeniable.

He was a grand Level 9 now. 

That was 690 levels short of where he’d been before.

Based on the memories he had access to, as paltry as they were, his birthday had been about three weeks ago, when he’d just turned 20.

The rest of his memories of those years detailed a sad life of deprivation, near starvation, and mistreatment, so he carefully partitioned them away. He had the basic idea. There was no need to look into them too much.

As soon as he had the ability, there would be hell to pay for how this kid had been treated. It wasn’t even that personal. In his old life, if he’d seen people treating a kid as badly as this one had been, there wouldn’t have been anything left but scorched earth.

There was a reason they called him Kelin Wildfire.

His temper was as legendary as his battle prowess.

And that brought him back to his decision about not absorbing the fire energy into his meridians.

It would be easy to use this fire essence to remodel his meridians and establish a Fire Elemental Affinity. It was as easy as breathing with this much around him.

But if he’d really been reincarnated, he wasn’t going to let himself start off with something as basic as that.

He would rebuild the affinity for which he was famous, and which had taken him the greater part of his life to master.

It would take a long time, but he’d make sure to apply all the strongest training methods he’d learned in a very, very long life on an endless battlefield. 

He wasn’t sure what the result would be, but perhaps even the Seventh Evolution wouldn’t be out of his reach this time.

In his last life, he’d fallen just a sliver short.

And then...perhaps he would be able to rebuild Irian as the golden world that he remembered.

It was a silver lining amidst the damage that was plaguing his body, and the trace of a smile flitted across his lips. 

Then he continued to work on removing the fire essence from his body. 

It was going to take another few hours. 

Once that was done, he’d see what he could do about putting the rest of his body back together.