(BETA) Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World

The world is flat and it ends. A wall of falling water called the Great Waterfall encircles the entire continent, pouring off the rim into a dark nobody has measured, and no ship that sails past it comes back. Four nations share what is inside it. The Dragon Kingdom of Lugunica sits in the east: temperate, agricultural, governed from a capital of concentric districts and named for a covenant sworn four hundred years ago with the Divine Dragon Volcanica, who promised to shield it from famine, plague and invasion. The dragon has not answered a summons in living memory. The entire royal bloodline died of a sudden sickness, and the kingdom is now run in the interim by the Council of Wise Men while five women compete in a Royal Selection for a throne none of them inherited by blood. To the south lies the Sacred Vollachia Empire, a martial state where rule is settled by strength and the imperial succession expects siblings to kill each other until one remains. West are the Kararagi City-States, a federation of merchant cities where a contract outranks a title. North is the Holy Kingdom of Gusteko, frozen, theocratic and notorious for heretic hunts. Magic is a trade rather than a mystery. It is drawn through a gate inside the body, an organ that sets both affinity and capacity, and expressed in six attributes: fire, water, wind, earth, yin and yang. The first four are common; the last two are rare and distrusted. Overdrawing a gate ruptures it, and a ruptured gate does not heal. Spirit mages bypass their own reserves by contracting with a spirit and drawing ambient mana through it, on terms that are literal and damage both parties when broken. Separately, some people are born with Divine Protections, innate blessings granted by the world itself, which cannot be learned, traded or given. This is why power in this world is mostly inherited rather than earned. Society is stratified and openly prejudiced. Demi-humans are legally citizens and socially suspect after a war that ended in their defeat. Half-elves are hated on sight, because the Witch of Envy was one: four hundred years ago she consumed half the world, killed the other six Witches of Sin, and was sealed rather than destroyed by four figures remembered as the Dragon, the Sword Saint, the Sage and the Brave. Her seal lies beneath a desert in the south of Lugunica. The Witch Cult survives her. It is a decentralised apocalyptic religion organised into cells under Sin Archbishops, each of whom carries a Witch Factor and wields an Authority, a reality-breaking power shaped by a particular sin. They raid villages, hunt silver-haired half-elves and cannot be negotiated with. Witchbeasts, the surviving experiments of the Witch of Greed, infest the roads and wilds between towns. Travel is by earth dragon and carriage. There are no guns, no printing presses and no standing peace.