The Enemy Has Arrived

Safety went hand in hand with the culture of the Shining Plains.

After the Age of Dark Boiling, humanity's resurgence began here. It would not be an exaggeration to call the Shining Plains the birthplace of modern human civilization.

Back then, Queen Elizabeth had started from here. She broke through the Giant Plain, swept across the entire southern continent except for the King of Calimshan! To the east, the Queen's knights conquered what was now Tumis, then continued their conquests along the Sea of Fallen Stars, turning the entire sea into their own inland lake!

All lands along the Sea of Fallen Stars belonged to the great Queen Isabella! At the time, the Empire's reach had even extended toward the mysterious eastern continent. It was once said that the Queen had hoped to make the Empire's borders meet those of the mysterious and mighty Far East Empire, allowing her Empire to contact the Far East Empire without relying on sea transport.

However, that ambition vanished like smoke after the Queen's death.

It was precisely because of this greatest queen of the past several thousand years that the Empire's heart, the Shining Plains, became the center of the entire world. Many of humanity's existing systems of etiquette had been compiled here before spreading across the continent.

Here, every city—even the smallest one—was a work of art! Queen Isabella was an ardent lover of art. She had once declared that in her realm, even a rural village had to be beautiful and filled with artistic charm.

Although that ambition was even less realistic than sharing a border with the Far East Empire, as the Empire's center at the time, the Shining Plains had indeed been built according to the Queen's requirements, and that tradition had continued to this day. Thus, even a