2389 Rotting Land (Part 1)

"And you dare say I'm the perverted lizard." Lith chuckled, noticing that alongside the regular uniform, there was another with a mini skirt instead of pants and whose buttonless blouse had a deep neckline. "Where did you even get those?"

"Zinya gave me a couple of her spare student outfits. Do I need to say more?" She pouted at the prolonged pause in their effusions.

"Gods no." Lith shook his head while shuddering to shrug off any thought about what Vastor might do in his bedroom. "Where were we?"

"You had just refused to forgive me for my defiance and-"

"I remember now." Lith grabbed her by the waist and picked up from he left off a few seconds ago.

***

Jiera continent, at the same time.

Thanks to the Gala broadcasted throughout the Kingdom to celebrate the victory of the Royals, the fires of the War of the Griffons were now dying out in Garlen. All the Royals had left to do was deal with the embers of Thrud's rebellion.

The Blood Desert and the Gorgon Empire could finally sigh in relief, their borders safe from the Mad Queen and her cursed academy.

As for Jiera, it was rotting away.

Both figuratively and literally.

After the plague spread from the Torin Kingdom had brought the human race on that side of the ocean to the brink of extinction, things seemed to have found a new balance for a while.

Plants and beasts had moved together, forming the first new megalopolises of Jiera. Once they were connected to each other thanks to a Warping Array network, the single cities had joined their resources and formed a central governing body, establishing the Wild Empire.

Aside from the Liches, the members of the undead race had lost their only reliable source of nourishment and had migrated to the other continents. Some had found asylum. Others a new home.

Most of them had found eternal death by the hand of the living or their fellow undead who didn't want to share the resources and safety they had worked hard for centuries to secure.

The humans of the entire continent, instead, had joined their forces and scoured the land as quickly as they could in search of survivors. Capable healers, Awakened, and people who were lucky enough to be naturally immune to the disease were still alive.

Some of them had even managed to save their own families and their friends as well.

Yet even an Awakened wouldn't survive for long alone. It wasn't a matter of not knowing how to grow food or butcher animals now that money had become irrelevant. Nor how to get clothes and shoes.

Or rather, those were huge problems, but they rarely were also deadly.

The same couldn't be said about the Abominations and Eldritches who now had no need to hide and nothing to fear. They could now attack the houses of powerful mages who had died to the plague in order to steal their secrets and best equipment before moving on to Awakened.

In a similar fashion, now that beasts and plant folks had formed their cities, there was no one keeping the monster population in check. The corpses of hundreds of millions of humans were an endless source of food for such creatures.

Some races of monsters knew how to preserve the precious meat while others had no problem feeding off rotting flesh. Both kinds of monsters had found a nigh-infinite supply of food that had allowed them to grow their numbers exponentially.

If on Garlen a monster horde was considered a threat, on Jiera several monster hordes had banded together under an Abomination or a particularly cunning monster, forming monster tides.

They moved from one corner of the continent to another, devouring anything in their wake and their own members when the natural resources weren't enough. Cannibalism thinned their numbers but it more than made up for it by letting only the strongest, the smartest, and the most ruthless of them thrive.

After every culling, quality compensated for the lack of quantity until the surviving apex monsters found new prey and their numbers swelled again.

Even the Awakened fortresses of humans and the underground cities of the newborn Wild Empire had almost fallen more than once to the monster tides. They had survived only thanks to their mastery over magic and careful planning.

Victory however didn't mean much when every fallen warrior among their ranks meant the loss of dozens if not hundreds of years of experience. The monsters, instead, had no such problem.

The corpses of their fallen were a great source of nourishment and their younglings needed but days to reach maturity. No matter how many monsters the Awakened killed, they would always come back like nothing had happened.

Last, but not least, there was the problem of the lost cities.

Throughout Mogar's history, all of its continents had given birth to their fair share of powerful mages obsessed with conquest, immortality, or reckless ambition. Each one of them had used Forbidden Magic to create sentient monstrosities that plagued Mogar and Jiera was no exception.

The lost cities were eternal scars in the land that couldn't be healed nor cauterized, only kept from spreading to the healthy tissues.

After the fall of mankind, beasts and plant folk had asked for the help of the Awakened Council to collect all the information necessary for the maintenance of the arrays that kept the living legacies trapped.

The Council had spared no effort to help them, sharing with them everything they knew about the lost cities, how to weaken them, and what to do to keep them sealed indefinitely.

Awakened had a very long lifespan and no desire to babysit a whole continent so they had done everything they could to pin that hassle on someone else.

At first, everything had gone well. The Awakened humans only had to worry about how to repopulate Jiera. The beasts, instead, focused on expanding the borders of the Wild Empire, bringing order and help to the small settlements of survivors they encountered, no matter their race.

Then, the monster hordes started appearing with increasing frequency until even the Awakened Council had become involved with the matter, afraid that it would blow up in their face.

Alas, they were more than right, they were also too late.

There was a small number of lost cities spread throughout Jiera, but that number had been irrelevant only because there were plenty of people keeping an eye on them and ready to intervene.

Before the plagues, reaching any of the lost cities was a matter of minutes, and dealing with the problem took a single Ranger hours.

Now, however, Jiera's population had been reduced to the point that vast portions of the continent were completely uninhabited. The birth of the Wild Empire had brought magical and Emperor Beast together in their underground cities, leaving most of the wilds to regular animals.

Plant folk had soon followed them, looking for that company and inspiration that only creatures with a wide emotional spectrum could give them.

The final result had been that more and more monster tribes had escaped the beasts' detection despite their regular patrols and had found plenty of resources to grow their numbers over time until they had become uncontrollable.