The Age of Gods That Ended Half-Heartedly
The world of the twenty-first century carried on after the Age of Gods had ended in a half-hearted manner. In the distant past, humans held no particular advantages over the other races. Without human sacrifice as offerings, they received neither the gods’ interest, nor their love, nor their protection. All humanity could do was live as slaves to the races favored by the gods and as living offerings to be sacrificed to them.
There was one god who chose humanity to reign as the sole deity. He was not particularly sacred, and his name did not even consist of four characters, yet he alone sought supremacy. To humanity he granted the power that became the prototype of martial arts. It began with drawing the natural energies of the world into the body, refining them into internal energy, and using that power to strengthen the flesh. From there, humans drove back the gods of polytheism and their subordinate races, imitating their abilities to expand and evolve new branches of martial arts. Thus the Age of Humanity opened. Yet the Age of Gods was never fully extinguished. The god who had become the sole deity sealed those ancient powers away on “the other side of the world.”
Time passed, and humanity forgot the Age of Gods entirely. The stories of that era were rewritten into the Greek and Norse myths we know today. There was no schism of Abrahamic faiths—no Christianity, Judaism, or Islam as separate religions. Only monotheism existed, and the wars once fought between Christian and Islamic forces in Europe were simply secular conflicts between monarchs. It is true that the sole god gave humanity the seed of martial arts, but because mortals forgot the Divine Age, the truth was never passed down. The Age of Gods warped into myth, taking root as localized legends across every region. Religion became folklore. The influence of monotheism centered on West Asia, North Africa, and Europe, while Indian, Iranian, and Daoist traditions flourished elsewhere. In truth, heroes had existed who drove out the old gods and races of each land—the Rishis of Hinduism, the Buddhas of Buddhism, and countless others. Once humans possessed martial arts, they no longer needed to rely on any single god.
When humanity forgot the Age of Gods, the sealed ancient deities began to descend into the present world by sending avatars that bore names from myth and legend. These descents tore open Gates—portals to other realms. From antiquity to the modern era, the endless struggle against these Gates and the martial artists who closed them continued without pause. To survive such constant threats, human society maintained a martial-arts-centered order. As a result, even in the twenty-first century, true centralized nations never formed. Instead, a feudal society built around powerful sects endured. The great sects of each region functioned as de facto lords and warlords. In exchange for defending their territories from Gates, they collected taxes and harvested resources that emerged from the rifts. The royal family existed above this alliance of sects as a mediator, forever seeking, like every dynasty before it, to strengthen its own authority.
The races and half-bloods who had once served the old gods became scattered remnants, targets for poaching, or hidden powers ruling the underworld. They lurked behind the surface world or spread through regions where Gates could not be controlled. The monsters that poured from the Gates were degraded incarnations of those ancient deities. Green skins—goblins, orcs, trolls, ogres, and their kin—were all splintered avatars of the “nameless cannibal” from primitive Indo-European myth.
In this world, talent for martial arts, sect affiliation, and bloodline decided one’s place in society. The hierarchy stood clear: royal family, then the prestigious major sects and noble clans, their direct martial artists, commoners, and finally slaves and servants. Anyone could learn martial arts, yet the gap between those who entered the elite path of a renowned sect and those who scraped by with common street-level third-rate techniques was vast. Customary law of each regional power held more weight than any national legal code. The strong were protected; the weak were exploited.
One in every five humans was born a Powerless—unable to accumulate internal energy. These unfortunates were not treated as true people. They fell into the lowest strata as servants, disposable tools, or outright slaves.
The Demonic Cult, also known as the Pantheon, rejected this human-centered order. It was a terrorist organization reviled by the world, composed of the ancient gods and their remaining followers. The defeated deities still lingered on the other side of the world, but their conflicting interests prevented any true alliance. Among them, the earth mother goddesses were the oldest. They embodied earth, the feminine, winged serpents, and the cycle of life and death. Yet later sky gods had stolen their thrones, distorting them in myth into wives, daughters, sisters, concubines, slaves, or monsters to be slain. The sky gods now sought to reclaim dominion from the sole deity, while the earth mothers wished to cast out both the sole god and the sky gods alike.
Any technology that might undermine the supremacy of martial artists was ruthlessly suppressed. As a result, technological progress remained slow, uneven, and strangely twisted. The world resembled a museum of refined antiques fused with high-tech medievalism. Technology existed only to support martial arts and governance. Information and communication systems served for swift messaging and constant surveillance. Transportation advanced just enough to move cargo and allow the powerful to travel in comfort. The lower classes walked everywhere. Magic stones—sometimes called spirit stones—harvested from monsters served as fuel. Biotechnology had advanced to bizarre degrees for the creation of spiritual medicines and the improvement of human constitutions. Techniques for detecting, stabilizing, and harvesting resources from Gates had leapt forward dramatically, producing new synthetic materials from their byproducts. Firearms, symbols of the warrior class’s potential obsolescence, were branded as “cowardly tools that insult a martial artist’s pride.” Their manufacture was outlawed and their methods deliberately erased from history.
Technology could only ever be an auxiliary means to sharpen a master’s blade. In battle, in war, the center would always belong to the martial artist.