“The commoners did not fear hunger or sickness, and the kings and nobles looked after them as though they were their own kin. The knights’ swords delivered justice, and the mages’ songs were full of wisdom and truth.”

The king’s voice, powerful as though reciting a heroic epic, quickly turned melancholy.

“Those were glorious days, but they did not last. It all started with the foreigners.”

His heavy voice resonated in the empty secret room.

“It was the foreigners who led us to the most magnificent of times, but it was also the foreigners who then pushed that Golden Age into the darkest depths of despair.”

The king explained. The new world described by the foreigners was so tempting that many of the native people began to share the same dream.

Seon-Hyeok thought he had a vague idea of what that dream was, but he did not interject and listened to King Theodore’s story.

“A huge war erupted. Countless famed generals died, and this world almost lost the entirety of its proud knights and wise mages. The crops in the fields rotted away because nobody was left to harvest them. The fields were filled with unburned bodies, leading to rampant pestilence, and after this extended conflict, the kings and nobles were unable to trust one another.”

It was similar to the unspoken history of the continent as told by Einst Jeneger, the royal examiner, when he first...