The servant from House Winchester arrived in the late afternoon, guiding a horse with two heavy bags slung over its back. He bowed respectfully as Gregor met him at the gate, handed over the satchels, and departed without unnecessary chatter. Gregor carried the books into his underground study—a clean stone room lit by a single lantern—and laid them neatly on the table.
He selected the thickest volume first, its cover cracked with age. As soon as he opened it, his eyebrows furrowed. This world, according to the text, had not always known magic. It was shockingly recent—barely a thousand years old.
The author described a turbulent era known as the First Crusade, when kingdoms warred and empires crumbled. During those conflicts, the skies were torn open by the descent of several massive meteors. They were said to glow with purple and orange brilliance, streaking across the heavens before crashing with earth-shaking violence. After impact, their strange radiance spread across the land like invisible storms.
The writer spoke of it poetically, but Gregor recognized the signs immediately.
"Cosmic radiation… mutagenic energy exposure," he murmured. "That explains the sudden awakening of abilities."
Humanity noticed the changes decades later. People began manifesting unusual talents—telekinesis, fire manipulation, enhanced strength, elemental affinity. Before societies could even begin to understand these abilities, something far worse followed.
Rifts appeared.
Tears in reality, swirling with unnatural light, opening randomly across the world. From them poured horrors that defied biological structure—nightmares of fang and sinew, creatures that lived only to kill. They ravaged everything in sight. Cities fell, villages were wiped out, and humanity was pushed to its brink.
And then the demons came.
The descriptions made Gregor pause. Tall, intelligent, vicious creatures with bodies stronger than steel and magic more potent than any human could muster. They dominated the battlefield, enslaving thousands and experimenting freely upon their captives. Some rode dragons—real dragons, not myths—monsters bred for war.
Gregor flipped through page after page, seeing humanity's despair written in grim detail. For the first time in recorded history, the author admitted, humans genuinely believed extinction was inevitable.
But salvation came from an unexpected source: a woman feared across kingdoms, dismissed as a mad telepath. Her psychic abilities were so overwhelming that she heard voices from other worlds. She saw visions of countless realities overlapping the present one. Condemned as insane, she nonetheless persisted in her research until she discovered something unprecedented—summoning magic.
Using a fusion of archaic ritual sorcery and her own psychic power, she created a method to reach across dimensions. Her ritual required blood, focus, and patterns carved into the earth. With it she pulled people— strangers, outsiders—from other worlds into this one.
The first summoned individuals were called Heroes.
Some were powerful. Some brilliant. Some cruel. A handful arrived powerless and died on the spot. Others brought knowledge, skills, or technologies that altered civilizations entirely. But all of them—willingly or not—became weapons against the demons.
Summonings continued for centuries. Human populations slowly recovered. Magic evolved rapidly thanks to the combined experiences of both natives and outsiders. With time, humanity struck back. Dozens of kingdoms across the world united in a rare moment of solidarity. Armies marched. Mages unleashed their fury. Heroes led assaults into enemy strongholds.
The demons, after centuries of tyranny, were exterminated.
Gregor leaned back in his chair, digesting it all with a mixture of awe and concern. "So I'm not unique," he muttered. "This world has seen outsiders—hundreds of them—for generations."
The book concluded with descriptions of demon remnants: vampires, werewolves, wendigos, mutated beasts. Deadly legacies of demonic experiments that continued to haunt the world even after their creators vanished.
He closed the first book and reached for the next.
This one was smaller, bound with dark hide inscribed with strange angular markings. A manual on runes.
Gregor began reading, fascinated almost instantly. Runes were not spells but equations—symbols that manipulated mana flows. By carving or etching them into materials, one could create effects that persisted independently of a mage's will.
It was brilliant, elegant, and terrifyingly similar to microengineering.
The book divided runes loosely into categories—though the author wasn't nearly rigorous enough for Gregor's scientific standards. Some runes enhanced objects, making blades sharper, armor tougher, or granting minor boosts to strength or reflexes. Others performed specific functions: locking doors, lighting rooms, forming barriers, detecting magic. The most complex were arrays, where multiple runes interlocked to perform advanced tasks like mana storage, auto-repair, or elemental manipulation.
Gregor's mind raced faster with each paragraph.
"Mana circuits," he whispered. "This is literal magical circuitry…"
He immediately pulled a notebook closer and began sketching diagrams. Runes could act like processors, conductors, capacitors. Materials mattered immensely—metals conducted mana differently from stone or wood. Some runes required symmetrical patterns; others demanded spirals shaped to mimic magical vortices. One diagram detailed a reinforcement rune that redistributed magical stress across an object, effectively making it more durable without increasing weight.
He imagined what would happen if he applied runes to machinery.
Steam engines reinforced with mana, running hotter and more efficiently.
Pipes enchanted to resist pressure and prevent leaks.
Tools that sharpened themselves.
Sensors made with detection runes to measure pressure, heat, or mana fluctuations.
Even power storage—mana batteries—became possible.
Gregor's heart pounded with excitement. "With this… I can industrialize an entire nation in a decade."
He devoured every page, absorbing the theory, analyzing flaws, mentally rewriting explanations with scientific precision. To a native scholar, the book was groundbreaking. To Gregor, it was a doorway—an invitation to combine two worlds into something far greater.
When he finally closed the last book, night had fallen. Lanternlight flickered across the underground chamber, glowing off the metal tools, sketches, and unfinished engine parts scattered across his workbench.
Gregor exhaled slowly, mind burning with possibility.
The Count saw the steam engine as a novelty.
The nobles would see it as a threat.
But Gregor saw what none of them could—
A world that had plateaued after surviving apocalypse, waiting for someone with the knowledge to push it into a new era.
And he intended to be the one to do it.