Calamity Upon This World

AN: Ah shit I messed up please just skip this chapter if you have read the last two chapters and pease forgive this foolish authors blunder

In Astressa, monsters are just animals who, over the years, have accumulated mana inside their bodies, adapted, and evolved into higher versions of themselves.

Around four thousand years old, these monsters used to number billions and roam the world.

But after an event called the Great Purging, the monsters were killed around the world for their valuable bodies, which can be used for a variety of different purposes.

And after a few years, the monsters, which used to number billions, were reduced to a mere fraction of the population, with most of them living on the neutral continent.

The place is home to dragons, pheonixes, and many other mythical beasts.

While all races wanted the valuable bodies of monsters, no one wanted to risk angering the mighty mythical beasts.

The dragons, a race famous for their neutrality, finally took a stance after seeing the influx of beasts invading their territory, with many daring individuals coming after them in order to hunt them.

At first, dragons were enraged and massacred thousands of lives, both monsters and other sentient races like humans, elves, and dwarves alike.

But other races did not take kindly to the breach of neutrality they were promised from dragons after their inactivity and refusal to lend out a helping hand during the war against demons.

Tension between dragons and the other races was always at an all-time high and only needed a single trigger to erupt into an all-out war.

Which is exactly what happened after dragons broke their 'neutral' stance, and it started what is now known as the great dragonic war of 1470 AZ.

Despite Zephyr's best efforts to avoid wars, he couldn't fully rid the world of war.

Thankfully, this war didn't devolve into a full-blown racial extinction or planet-domination-level conflict.

And after five whole years of war and the deaths of a few thousand dragons, the war came to an end.

Sadly, just to kill a few thousand dragons, millions of human, vampire, elves, dwarves, and beastfolk lives had to be sacrificed.

Dragons, despite numbering not even a fraction of the combined might of the other combined races, were the dominant force for the majority of the war.

This was due to even the weakest dragon possessing enough strength to level cities and kill thousands.

With their scales being impenetrable by the weapons and spells of most people,.

Even back then, only a few hundred powerhouses were capable of actually damaging and killing dragons.

So the war from a surface level may have looked completely one-sided in favour of the United Race Federation, also known as the URF.

In truth, it was actually the opposite of the actual war between thousands of dragons and a few hundred powerhouses, most of whom were barely able to kill a single dragon.

It was during this time period that a very rare and powerful bloodline of dragon slayers revealed itself, which gave its users enhanced stats and abilities exclusively when fighting against dragons.

This bloodline was later named Dragneel, and they had been promoted from commoners to the status of dukes all because of their war achievements.

These dragon slayers, while few in number, were the bane of all dragons, and every single one of them killed more than hundreds of dragons.

While, in terms of sheer numbers, URF had suffered far more casualties, it was the dragons who had truly suffered from this war.

For the URF, the millions of lives lost were spread out between billions of lives and could easily be replaced.

But the dragons had lost almost half of their entire already limited population, and their lost lives could not be replaced due to female dragons being extremely picky about their mates and them only being able to give birth once.

Due to their innate pride and arrogance, dragons got cocky, ended up grossly underestimating their opponents, declared a war they couldn't win, and almost got wiped out of the face of Astressa.

To avoid going extinct, the dragons proposed a peace treaty.

And the URF, despite knowing about their inevitable victory, would choose to continue the war, but the loss would far outweigh the profit.

After this incident, the neutral continent was declared 'No man's land, a place unclaimable by all races and instead belonging to mythical beasts and monsters.

Multiple laws have been put into place regarding the entrance to the neutral continent.

But the most important one is that once you step foot inside the neutral continent, all your past affiliations with the outside world are cut off.

So basically, even if the king of the human continent stepped on a neutral continent and got killed by a dragon, humans would not have the right to seek revenge on dragons.

But the same applies in the opposite case, and if the king kills a dragon, the dragons won't be able to seek revenge against the human race.

In nature, naturally formed artifacts called dungeon cores can be found that attract nearby monsters, and once enough monsters satisfy their total capacity, they create a subdimension.

And these sub-dimensions are called dungeons.

This type of dungeon is called a natural dungeon; there are also artificial dungeons, but before that,.

"Does all of that make sense?" William asked as he looked at the half-sleeping figures of Jasmine, Raya, and Max.

They were currently in this situation because Jasmine made the mistake of asking William about dungeons.

Giving him the opportunity to yap to them about information that they didn't know or were interested in for a whole hour.

None of them could have guessed that the usually calm, stoic, and cool Edge Lord was secretly passionate about history and was just waiting for a chance for someone to ask him.

All three of them were tired from the journey and wanted to rest to be ready for tomorrow's dungeon excursion, but thanks to Jasmine ignorantly asking a question, they were forced to listen to John's ramblings for a whole hour.

'Let's never talk about history in front of Edge Lord ever again.'

This single thought ran through the minds of all Cleansers members aside from William, who was just excited to finally pass on a bit of knowledge he had accumulated thanks to spending multiple hours every day inside his family library.

After this, the cleaners had to listen to Williams ramblings for another 3 hours before they could finally go to sleep.

"Is everyone ready?" William asked as he looked at his team of cleansers and the 10 miners and porters they were supposed to accompany inside the dungeon.

They were currently standing outside a cave with a blue portal-like entrance.

According to what they had been told, their task was simple.

All they had to do was protect the miners from the monsters inside while the miners mined all the ores.

It would probably take one whole day, and once the miners were done mining, they were supposed to clear the dungeon and come back with the loot.

They had the right to any artifacts found inside, while all the ores and monster cores would go to Lark for commercial use.

William and his team had already met the miners they were supposed to accompany, and they looked like good people, so he wanted to make sure they stayed safe.

Hearing his question, a collective "yes" resounded throughout the area, after which they all entered inside.

~Vroom~

Space warped as the daring adventurers and miners entered.

Once they entered, the world around them shifted from an empty field with bright daylight to a narrow, dark cave.

But most of them didn't have the time to notice it, as everyone aside from William and a few experienced miners vomited.

"Blurgh"

"Blurgh" Brought to you by m-vl_e

"Blurgh"

This happened due to them experiencing teleportation for the first time in their lives, which made them nauseous and resulted in their vomiting.

William had gone through multiple teleportation gates with his parents before, so he was more or less used to it by now.

Ignoring the condition of his party and the people he was supposed to protect, he took a look around him and saw the dark cave they were currently in.

But that posed no problem for him thanks to his [Shadow Sense], which allowed him perfect vision and sense even in the dark.

As he looked around, he saw the dull rock sticking out at irregular intervals in the cave.

But before placing too much attention on them, he looked around for any potential threats and breathed a sigh of relief at the absence of any monsters nearby.

"Alright guys, enough, take out the lamps," William ordered.

Hearing the voice of the guy who was in charge, a few miners who had already experienced going inside a dungeon before took out the light-generating lamp artefact they had been given.

Strangely, as the lamp turned on, instead of lighting up a small area like it was supposed to, the entire passageway of the dungeon lit up.

The weird, dull rocks that William had seen earlier now glew a beautiful blue glow and lit up the whole passageway.

Seeing the sudden bright news, the people who were previously on the ground looked up and saw the eye-dazzling sight.

"Wow," Jasmine muttered in amazement at the sight she was presented with.

"I can't believe I'm still inside a dungeon," Max said as he looked at the prettiest thing he had seen his whole life inside a place infamous for blood and gore.

"But what is that?" asked a miner, looking clueless at the identity of the pretty blue rocks.

"Luminous blue stone," replied a miner as he looked at an ore encyclopaedia that had been given by Lark to help the workers recognise what type of mineral they were supposed to mine in case they encountered it.

"What's that?" asked another miner, clueless about what the name meant.

"It's an extremely rare type of mineral used in the creation of water and ice-type artefacts."

"It looks dull in the darkness, but when exposed to light, it glows in a beautiful blue light, like the one we are seeing now."

"And even a single piece of this stone is worth a minimum of 100 gold coins," he exclaimed in shock as he dropped the encyclopaedia and looked around to see the goldmine they had accidentally stumbled into.

Which wouldn't be a wrong comparison considering every single piece of this stone is worth 100 gold coins, and just in their plain sight, there were hundreds of these rocks.

Without even going any deeper, if they just mined the rocks near the entrance and left, they'd have 10 platinum coins, an amount of wealth that the whole nine generations of all of their families could live off in luxury.

Everyone was in a state of shock at the jackpot they had just hit.

"Raya, can you pinch me?" Max asked in shock, still unconvinced that this was actually happening.

Not wasting even a single second, Raya pinched him on the cheek.

"Oww!" Max cried out in pain at the surprising strength of Raya.

"Finally, I can pay off my family debt," a miner cried out as he fell to the ground, thanking his goddess Elona for listening to his prayers.

"I can't believe this is real," another miner said, still in disbelief.

Everyone was excited about this potential opportunity to turn their lives around.

While everyone was just excited about potentially getting rid of their debts, curing their dying mother, or maybe even making their parents proud,.

Someone else had their greed flare up with a desire to take everything for himself and kill everyone else.

"Alright guys, enough fooling around. Let's harvest everything and leave quickly; we're still in a dungeon after all," William shouted, snapping everyone out of their excitement and reminding them about the potential dangers lurking around.

'I have a bad feeling about this' William thought, a bit unsettled by the idea of letting something so fortunate happen to him without some kind of catch.

And sadly, his uneasiness would soon prove to not be baseless.

**

An:

Brand new character art has been uploaded to the app; go check it out.