For Asher, the two days it took the caravan to travel between Poltar and Abingdon were spent a few hundred miles away in Whikoga’s library. He even went so far as to enlist Wilna’s aid and use his own librarian class to try and collect as much information on greater demons and demons as a whole as he possibly could.

  The results… were a tad lackluster.

  Unsurprisingly, there was far less information on other realms than there was on just about any other subject. Studying elements and skills or practically anything else here on the material realm was a far simpler task than traversing the other realms or summoning denizens from them to question and experiment on. Most realm wanderers seemed far more interested in bringing back magical reagents or powerful artifacts than they were in recording details on the opponents they fought. Though while most of the information regarding the other realms was filled with conjecture or scholarly theories, he was at least able to better his understanding of the realms as a whole.

  This world, this realm that everyone lived on, was known as the material realm. That much he already knew. But what was new to him, was the fact that the material realm was considered unstable compared to most of the other realms. It was this reason that certain powerful entities, such as the ruler of demons themselves, simply weren't able to set foot onto it at all. The realm itself wouldn’t be in danger of breaking if they tried, but it physically couldn’t support their immense power.

  One scholar likened it to a mogrant attempting to balance on a fine spool of steel thread enhanced by a skill. The thread wouldn’t snap under the mogrant’s weight, but the mogrant was simply too large, and would tumble off in the event that it ever tried to undertake such an impressive balancing act. Even greater demons and demon lords were too much, requiring the power of a mighty summoner to help stabilize them, or an entire group of dedicated summoners in the case of the demon lords. Without such assistance, they weren’t able to enter the material realm despite the fact that one of their few known abilities was the power to travel between realms on a whim.

  This strange, uncommon instability was also apparently the reason why elements manifested on the material realm in such large quantities in the first place, but he wasn’t able to find much more on that front other than a confirmation that most other realms didn’t have elements appearing out of thin air.

  After the material realm, the most well known of the remaining realms were the nine hells. They went by many different names, such as the underworld, the pits, or even the burning realms, but most cultures seemed to simply call them the nine hells. This realm was actually fractured into nine distinct, almost miniature realms of their own, but seeing as all of them shared pretty much identical characteristics, scholars all seemed to agree to simply lump them together as one realm.

  These nine hells were where the very demons Asher was trying to research originated from. It was a place of constant fire and death, where demons and imps battled against their own kind in seemingly endless bloodshed. Not much was known about them specifically, other than the fact that for whatever reason, when a demon or imp was slain, it would simply manifest once more within the nine hells and continue their pointless, global battle. The only being strong enough to permanently end one of their lives for good was the ruler of demons, of which very little was known about.

  Apparently, there had been four recorded excursions into the nine hells by various kingdoms over the years with the sole intention of eradicating the ruler of demons and wiping out the demons all together.

  Not a single member of any of the excursions had ever returned.

  There were plenty of theories about the ruler of demons, such as that they were the physical manifestation of every demon’s hate come to life, or that they didn’t actually exist and it was simply the demon lords banding together to pretend as though they had an even more powerful backer, but nothing was confirmed.

  After the nine hells and material realm, the most well-known realm ironically enough was actually the astral realm. It was little more than an echo of the material realm itself, but seeing as all teleportation-based skills technically had a person traveling through the astral realm for a fraction of a second, plenty of scholars had devoted time to studying it. This was news to Asher, but he supposed it made sense, in a way.

  At the very least, it explained how people could teleport through solid objects without issue.

  After those three realms, information on the others got a bit more scarce. For starters, it seemed one particularly hot topic between scholars was on just how many realms there even were in the first place. Some argued that there were only six true realms, and that the others were little more than scraps of reality not solid enough to be considered actual realms, while others argued that there were a total of twelve, or even more. It somewhat reminded Asher of Earth’s own debates surrounding planets, and how Pluto had had its title revoked years ago.

  Other than the material, the astral, and the nine hells, the most widely accepted were the wild realm, the wastes, and the abyss.

  The wild realm was the only realm listed as even less stable than the material realm. From what realm wanderers spoke of it, it was a land of chaos where just about anything could happen at any moment. Famous realm wanderers had spoken of changing landscapes, creatures appearing out of thin air, and even random elements spawning in seemingly irrelevant locations. This realm was the fan favorite for most realm wanderers to risk heading into, as despite the constant danger, the payouts could be quite massive if luck was on their side.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The wastes were exactly what they sounded like; a barren wasteland where nothing grew and no living being called home. This was probably the most studied realm by scholars after the material, just because of how safe it was. There were no monsters, no enemies, nothing threatening in the slightest. People had spent months and even years exploring the realm, and yet if anybody had ever managed to find anything other than miles upon miles of barren earth that was devoid of nutrients, they’d never deigned to share it with anyone else.

  The abyss was probably the scariest of all the realms, at least in Asher’s opinion. It was essentially the universe’s trash heap, where monsters and objects that slipped through the cracks in reality ended up. It was a realm filled with darkness and entities that didn’t follow conventional rules who would give even the strongest of demons pause. The few realm wanderers who had dared to venture into the abyss and actually managed to come back had all but refused to talk about what they’d seen, though some of the materials they’d brought back had apparently been used to craft legendary weapons that were well known to this day.

  Those were the six major realms everyone agreed upon. Though according to his research, there were others that some kingdoms decreed counted as major realms as well, despite the fact that they weren’t as large or as well defined as those six.

  For example, there was the realm of ages, where time flowed in mysterious and seemingly unpredictable ways. Realm wanderers who dared step foot into that realm had returned moments later having aged entire decades, or had been thought dead, only to reappear nearly a century later looking like they hadn’t aged a day. This realm apparently echoed the material realm as well, similar to the astral realm, though it was far more chaotic with the fluctuating streams of time and thought impossible to safely navigate. After that, there was the deafened realm, where one's senses simply didn’t exist and nobody truly knew what lay within. There was even the realm of air, which, as the name implied, didn’t seem to have any actual ground. Realm wanderers reported falling for days or weeks on end, their seemingly indefinite falls broken up only by the flying monsters that dotted the airscape.

  The realms got even weirder and more scattered after that, which explained why different scholars argued as to which of them deserved to be labeled as ‘major’ realms. Though there was one other critical piece of knowledge he picked up from his studies, and while it wasn’t a realm itself, it was something that every scholar agreed upon as a no-go zone.

  The void.

  With so many different realms and fragments of reality, there had to be some sort of way they were connected to one another. That connection was dubbed 'the void'. It was sheer nothingness. The absence of all elements and energies. A true void where nothing ever had or would exist. It was to the realms what outer space was to planets. Technically capable of being passed through and studied if one took extreme precautions and knew what they were doing, but still beyond dangerous.

  What was truly shocking was the fact that traveling from the material realm to any of the other realms, other than the ones that echoed it, required moving through the void. These movements, however, were nearly instantaneous, to the point where a person spent less than a fraction of a second within the void unless they were actively trying to reach that nothingness.

  Very little was known about this space between realms. In fact, the first time Asher found mention of it at all, the author who wrote about it included a warning that any and all attempts to research the void in further detail would result in a global response of annihilation unless the proper permissions were gathered first. He’d thought the author was being a bit extreme, until he spotted the identical warning the second time he stumbled upon mention of the void by an entirely different author, and then again by a third. It wasn’t until he swapped research targets out of curiosity and went digging on the void itself that he quickly learned why this was the case.

  Close to three thousand years ago, the Kingdom of Gostoria had been regarded as the most affluent and famous kingdom in the entire world. They had pushed the bounds of elemental research, and a large part of what people knew and used today regarding artifact creation came from their studies. It was known that they had decided to become the first to ever truly study the void, and had even sent note to their allied kingdoms that they had finally managed to manifest an element of Void from their research, asking for more scholars to be lent to them in order to crack its secrets.

  Then, they were gone.

  According to the records, the Kingdom of Gostoria simply ceased to exist one day. A nation nearly the size of Australia based on the included maps, with a population of over fifty million people, vanished without a trace. The entire continent was gone, the landmass literally erased from the planet as though it had never existed. It was the one and only record of an element of Void existing in the entire history of the world, and it was enough for every single country to immediately add the element to their list of forbidden elements. Apparently, even the handful of more free-rein countries that didn’t have lists of forbidden elements made an exception, decreeing quite loudly that it was now forbidden.

  The few smaller countries that continued to refuse to do the same were utterly and efficiently wiped out by the rest of the world in response. Nobody truly knew what had happened within the Kingdom of Gostoria, but one thing was very clear.

  The element of Void was far too dangerous to ever exist again.

  Even after three thousand years, the global ban remained in existence to this day. It seemed the complete erasure of the strongest and most advanced kingdom in the entire world wasn’t something kings and queens forgot about in only a few scant millennia. While research into the void itself wasn’t necessarily banned across the world, gaining permission to study it was something that took years to do, and scholars who actually managed to do so were heavily scrutinized, their every move watched over and monitored quite extensively.

  Many of the different realms Asher had read up about intrigued him to the point of wanting to visit them himself one day. Falling indefinitely through the realm of air and fighting against flying monsters sounded like a unique experience, as did the wild realm and its ever-changing nature. Though if he ever did gain the ability to travel to other realms besides the astral one day, one thing was for sure.

  Other than that brief moment of required travel through it, he would be staying far, far away from the void.

  lot of important stuff in here Asher just learned about!

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