Fog Sea Era

Just then, he faintly heard voices. They were quiet, probably still quite far away.

Could it be the Library attendants?

Without any further hesitation, he headed straight toward the voices.

As he drew closer, he saw two figures standing ahead.

That familiar short, brilliant golden hair, that unmistakably broad back... wait... wasn't that his dad? Who was the person in front of him again?

Eros glanced over, then again, then once more. She looked a little familiar...

Since the woman was facing Eros's direction, she spotted him as soon as he emerged from behind the shelves.

She froze for a moment, then nudged the man in front of her.

That man was none other than Eros's father, Duke Renka Orich North.

She nudged the duke and whispered, "Someone's coming! Someone's coming!"

At her words, our duke looked utterly unconcerned and said casually:

"Relax! I sent all the servants away this morning and forbade them from coming anywhere near the Library today. Who could possibly be here now?"

Despite saying that, he still turned to glance behind him.

And there stood his genius son, the pride of the family, the Duchy's rising star, looking rather puzzled.

Duke Renka froze, then immediately gave him an awkward but polite smile and nodded at Eros.

Then he took the woman's hand and slunk away.

No wonder I haven't seen a single person all this time in the Library. Dad chased them all away.

Dad really ought to know better. Is a library any place to fool around? Now I have to find the books myself.

Fortunately, the books in this nearby section were exactly what he had come to the Library for.

The rows of shelves held historical records. That discovery gave him a peculiar look. Were those two planning to desecrate history right here? They certainly know how to have fun!

He shook his head, cleared those stray thoughts from his mind, and looked up at the shelves, hoping to find books recording the events of previous eras.

As he searched, he noticed a pattern: the closer a shelf was to the outside of the section, the more recent the period covered by its books.

Without further hesitation, he headed straight to the innermost part of the section.

Once there, he spotted the book he wanted at a glance: the Misty Sea Annals.

The title alone suggested it was a book about the Sea of Mist.

Without another moment's hesitation, he quickly climbed the shelf and took down the thick volume of the Misty Sea Annals.

As for the shelves and other books he had dirtied with his shoes-hah! Never mind getting them dirty; even if he climbed up there and took a dump while doing a handstand, no one would say a word. Would anyone actually dare scold him?

The book must have been wiped down regularly, since there wasn't a speck of dust on its aged cover. He couldn't help marveling inwardly.

The Library held so many books-probably several million volumes.

Every single one had been wiped spotless. Just how much labor and resources did that take?

All he could say was that feudal society truly was terrifying. Luckily, he was one of the oppressors now.

He opened the aged, dark gray cover to find dense paragraphs covering the dull yellow pages.

Perhaps because the book was so old, the ink on the pages had already faded.

The moment he saw its contents, he knew he had found the right book.

It described precisely the incident involving the Elf Race that he had read about earlier, only in greater detail.

After the entire Elf Race departed the Croya Continent, the long-standing animosity between the continent's two most powerful empires could no longer be contained, and war broke out at once.

The war dragged the entire continent into its grip. Smoke hung everywhere, and people died everywhere.

With no one to burn the bodies of the fallen, they were simply thrown into a great river, in the hope that its waters would wash them out to sea to feed the fish.

But there were far too many dead to count, and the blood flowing from their bodies stained the entire river red.

The red waters flowed downstream into the sea, stirring up wave after wave of crimson.

As the war continued, those crimson waves kept spreading farther into the deep sea.

After the war had raged for three hundred years, banks of fog began rising over the sea for some unknown reason.

At first, they attracted little attention, but the fog spread rapidly.

In less than a year, the entire sea was shrouded in fog. Every human who entered it vanished without a trace, with neither survivors nor bodies ever found.

More terrifying still, the fog continued spreading toward land. Every coastal town lost contact overnight.

Panic gripped everyone. No one knew how the fog had appeared, and no one knew whether it would ever stop spreading.

Prophecies of the world's end sprang up everywhere, and the war was put on hold.

Everyone lived in fear and unease, terrified that they would wake the next morning to find the fog right before their eyes.

Yet just as everyone was spending their days in constant dread, the fog suddenly receded.

It retreated as inexplicably as it had appeared.

It finally stopped five hundred kilometers offshore. From then on, humanity's exploration of the world was forced to end at that five-hundred-kilometer boundary.

As for the land once shrouded by the fog, it lay utterly silent after the mist withdrew. Every living creature had vanished.

The fog had come suddenly and retreated just as suddenly, and once people witnessed the eerie state of those coastal towns after it withdrew,

the continent's remaining nations lost all desire to continue fighting. They each recalled their troops and began recovering.

But the terror brought by that fog was etched deep into every survivor's mind, which was why that era came to be known as the Fog Sea Era.

The first day the fog reached land marked the end of the Second Era and the beginning of the Third Era-the Fog Sea Era.