Chapter 3-68: A New World to Adapt To (Infodump!) (1/2)

Fey hiding in the shadows had come into the light, and were ever more populous in this new world with magic about. Ancient beasts from deep places were returning to the light, and the existence of the Felldeep, opening back up with buried kingdoms and realms somehow existing down in the depths of the world, raised hackles on anyone wise.

Unperturbed by the rise of the undead, the sea nations were now making themselves known. The ancient Deep Folk, fish-headed servants of Dagon and the Mythos, ruled the deeps of the North Atlantic and South Pacific, and plagued those who crossed it now, even if their technology was behind the times.

The Sahaug commanded the middle and southern Atlantic, warring with the Deep Folk and raiding the coasts for meat, slaves, and just for the fun of the slaughter.

The merfolk lived in isolated seas between those great powers, especially the Persian Gulf and Caribbean, but their kingdom of Lemuria in the North Pacific was also a great power. The Indian Ocean was supposedly dominated by kingdoms of Kraken and eel-folk and stranger races, who fought any invaders savagely and remorselessly. It was noted that large passenger ships attracted all kinds of attention, supposedly for the pollution they left behind themselves, and after several massacres of such vessels, they’d been either beached or completely redesigned...

The noble Tritons had claimed the Mediterranean, and held it against all comers. What force ruled Antarctica wasn’t truly known, but word from some of the supernaturals indicated that shoggoth roved it on land and sea, and no other force dared claim anything there.

Humanity went from being the only known sapient species on the world to one of many. They were still grappling with the fact eight decades later...

Worse for many of them had come the activation of buried genetics with the coming of magic, and entire swathes of humanity had altered over days and weeks into other races.

I was familiar with human midgets evolving into the hyn, but that fate also befell a lot of shorter people here.

Cementing their relationship to humanity, Ancients, dwarves, and elves had all mutated into existence among descendants of Europeans. Goblins had erupted from the ranks of Africans and Mid-Eastern tribes, including Mongolians.

The Han Chinese and most of India, to their utter dismay, found a good chunk of their people evolving into yellow-blooded orcs.

Serpentine bloodlines had erupted among the other peoples of the Far East and some island nations... and sparked massive massacres of them when they did. Nobody wanted Yuan-Ti among them...

Gnomes had come out of hiding, being a race with Fey connections living in realms warded by illusion and secrecy... places now far too easy for the Powered to find. Their cautious and secret nature had given rise to a lot of fear about their shadowy hands manipulating everyone... but since there were so many other forces doing so, it wasn’t taken as seriously as it might have been without all the distractions around.

Given they were generally a Lawful Good race, the rumors probably had unhealthy sources, too.

Elves had been concentrated in the Scandinavian countries, with Norway having the highest percentage of converts, followed by Sweden, then Finland. There had been some appearing in rural France, Spain, and places in Ireland, but by and large they were the rarest of the new races... although their presence on the world stage rapidly exceeded that of every race but humans.

Dwarves had been common among the Scots, the surviving Germans, and the Slavic peoples. A whole lot of Polish people had started to grow beards...

The Ancients were basically concentrated among the Russians, and also among people who formerly had mental defects like Down’s Syndrome. As a result, they were pretty damn rare even compared to elves, but stood out even more, towering over all the other races.

America, perhaps unsurprisingly, had more half-bloods of all the races than probably the rest of the planet combined. Half-orcs were non-existent among the pureblooded Chinese, for example, but the urukhar children of Orcs and other human subspecies weren’t that uncommon at all.

Thus half-orcs, the urukhar; half-dwarves, the dhatun; and half-elves, the halvyr, had a significant presence in America right from the start, and were considered races of their own because of it. While others had certainly come up in numbers, half-bloods never arose from their parent races who shared a heritage, i.e. there were no Chinese urukhar; they were always humans or orcs.

The more mixed your ancestry, the greater the chance you’d be a half-blood. America thus had a bunch of them everywhere. Since most half-bloods were born Powered, it definitely was considered a good thing to be, although orcs and goblins were no more likely than humans to be Powered...

Noteworthy was that there were no half-goblins, but considering there were three breeds of Goblins who had evolved out of humans, it was not that unexpected...

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So, in addition to the Powered arriving and simply ripping apart rigid old human societies with their power and drive, this whole situation had introduced massive race politics into the whole situation.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. It reminded me of the Fall, only this was worse. The only race politics Terra-Luna had to touch were Hyn and Ancient, and they were such small numbers initially that it was irrelevant... although the numbers of Hyn had increased sharply later...