The World of the Ratfolk

As the saying went, your height determined your view, while your standing determined the scenery within that view.

This saying was equally fitting in the Wizarding World.

At First University, for instance, the scenery one saw differed enormously depending on one's height. From the height of an Archwizard, one saw the brilliant, boundless Starry Sky overhead; from the height of a stage magician, one could only see whether fierce beasts were lurking at the edge of Silent Forest a hundred meters away. Likewise, aboveground, one could look up and see the sun and moon, look down at soft lawns, see the silent forest in the distance and bustling markets nearby; belowground, one could only encounter a dim and shadowy world.

This shadowy world had been built amid crisscrossing sewers and hidden stone caverns eroded by earth dragons. Its masters belonged to a group of Clothed Rats.

Of course, these rats had not been the natural masters of this shadowy world. Before them, it had belonged to certain slimy reptiles, eight-legged insects, mutated goblins, and some filthy undead. But ever since the first Clothed Rat arrived in this world sixty years ago, all those races that had once ruled the roost gradually fell silent. In their place came more and more Clothed Rats filling the sewers and caverns.

Unlike the scrawny, patchy-furred rats that had once scraped out a living in the sewers, these clothed rats possessed what seemed to be a self-sustaining civilization and social order. In this shadowy world, they established schools, organized markets, developed handicrafts, created a financial system, and repaired damaged pipes and severely weathered caverns. If one overlooked the rats' appearances and the darkness of this world, there was no significant difference between this place and human society aboveground, or even other civilizations in extraterrestrial worlds.