The Guardian System: The strongest Summoner's quest to save his family-Chapter 390: A City Like a Corpse (7)

[Entry 600]

I didn't write as much as I wanted to in the past two years. At some point, writing my thoughts became pointless, as I don't really think there is much hope for us now. After five years after its inception, the Guardian System started failing.

We don't know why. More and more people are losing it, and without the vendors, we do not have the right technology to survive. The monsters… They became too strong; some even reached level 600.

As for us, the average fighter is at level 500, but that's not really what is worrying me. Thanks to the Children of Mana, we have seen that after level 450, it's very hard not to go feral without the system filtering mana.

Those who got past that level before the system came undone to them are still ok, but they are scared to level up.

Those who were at lower levels started getting madder and madder as they approached the fated level.

More and more people are starting to turn feral. Their skin is hardening. Their bones are fusing with the weapons they wielded.

We've tried everything. We've reverse-engineered the system as much as we can. We've built mana draining fields, but nothing worked… because the mana levels are increasing.

[Entry 601]

I came back here after one year, six from the advent of the apocalypse. The Guardian System shut down completely 2 months ago for me, for my friends, and for everyone.

The High Council collapsed long ago. Most of the leaders have transformed. The cities are falling apart. People are fleeing, trying to avoid the monsters, but we know well there is nowhere to hide. Sooner or later mana will turn everyone feral, and when that happens, we are just bound to kill each other.

I'm writing this from the Allied Worlds' palace. It's one of the last shielded zones left despite the fuckers having left us to die. We have maybe a month before the power runs out.

After that, we're done. Mana would not be stopped, and those who knew how to keep the circles up are either dead or feral.

The mana is unregulated now, pouring into everything, and people are changing faster than before; their bodies are adapting to survive, but their minds aren't.

I can feel it happening to me already. My hands are hardening, while my skin is turning grey and rough.

The Allied Worlds did this. They knew the system wouldn't last without support. They knew we'd die if they left; they just didn't care.

Damn! For all we know, they might have turned off the switch because if we kept progressing this way, we would have gotten stronger than them.

When the Aegis Phalanx was here, their strongest was at level 508. Our average fighter when they left was at level 430.

This is making me reevaluate things. They don't look for races with high potential; they look for races with modest potential and high controllability.

We were too dangerous, and they let us die.

If anyone finds this, know what happened here. Know that the Allied Worlds don't save everyone. They pick and choose based on who will obey them.

We were strong, but we wouldn't bow. So they left us to die.

My friend, Vor'len, left for the northern sanctum days ago. It's the last place our race will try to mount a resistance or to find a way to survive the mutations, a way to manage mana. A way for us to level up safely.

I didn't go with him. I'm tired. I spent years trying to find a solution, and while I'm sure there might be one, we do not have enough power to pull this off. The others, though, might have found a solution.

These guys think that building magic circles is going to work. There are different ideas on the plate here… Vor'len explained them to me, and I wrote them down in the journal. They are on the last pages.

The idea behind them is simple: create mana crystals. We know they exist; it's just that to fuel something able to deal with massive amounts of increasing mana in order to create them, it's hard.

But Vor'len thinks this is going to work.

They theorized some magic circles that might work, but they need materials we can't get. The monsters are too strong, after all.

Why mana crystals, you might ask? Well, because the crystals would prevent mana from going back to the environment. Mana would be trapped, and while we don't know for how long the mana growth will go on, we might be able to either clear huge chunks of it from the environment or at least slow down the process.

If they do this, we might be able to create places where mana accrues slowly. If this happens, we will be able to "digest it" and prevent ourselves from turning feral.

We know the system has a better way to deal with mana. Most likely the system not only acts as a filter in the classical sense, deleting impurities of the sort, but also as a sort of dispenser.

The ideas are all here in this book. There might be others elsewhere, but… Hey… At this point I don't give a fuck anymore.

Hope this will be useful. Sincerely…

Reidar closed the journal. His hands were shaking.

The Allied Worlds had abandoned the Ignis. They'd given them the Guardian System, watched them for years, then decided they were too risky to integrate. So they took the system from them and left them to mutate.

The Ignis had tried to survive without it. They'd built shielding, but it hadn't been enough. The unregulated mana had twisted them into the monsters Reidar was fighting now.

And the Allied Worlds knew it would happen.

Reidar looked at the magic circle on the floor, recognizing Mara's work immediately. She'd been here and had tried to open a portal using the materials the Ignis had left behind, but it hadn't worked because the materials didn't have enough mana.