In the past, before any dungeons, there had been about two hundred countries. However, after the advent of dungeons, the number of nations had been drastically reduced, and the world had long since comprised around one hundred nations.

To be honest, Ji-Cheok did not know this. It was Cheok-Liang who told him.

Of course, there was a very good reason why the number of countries was cut in half.

When a dungeon appeared, whether the monsters could not be contained or the entire area was razed to the ground, the result was inevitable: the region around it would become Manaformed. Otherworldly plants and beasts would fill the area while increasing their numbers every day. As a result, that area would eventually become an otherworldly environment, completely uninhabitable for humans.

As region after region was Manaformed, humanity’s territory was bound to shrink, so it was no wonder that nations disappeared and the population was halved.

Even among the countries that survived, most only barely scraped by. It was pretty hard to defend a country against monsters from dungeons to begin with, and the monsters from Manaformed regions...