NOVEL NEXT Introduction
Hello dear reader, you might be wondering what kind of book you just picked up and I will tell you! It may not look like it but this is a diary. I'm not a dairy writer nor a wordsmith so if the format looks off it is because of those reasons. To know why I would write a lengthy and oddly structured diary I would have to tell you something about myself and my circumstances.
My name is Agnis Hourai. Not much of an introduction, but before I delve deeper into this, I will tell you about my circumstances and why I am addressing readers who are obviously not me. As you may or might not know we live in a world of magic and a wide variety of races. The reason I am starting with something simple is that I got involved in an event that more or less destroyed the world and put it back into an age where a lot of knowledge and techniques of my time are lost. I don't know if the time period you live in now went back to the age before magic or technology, so I will have to set a baseline for the world that this story is going to take place in. I'm assuming that the idea of magic is foreign since if you do know what magic is this will feel familiar or might find a difference in understanding.
Magic is the phenomenon where certain effects get put into place by using the energy that's found freely and abundantly in this world which is called mana. This mana gets manipulated by words, motions or drawings, and illustrations to give it the instructions to perform a certain action. An incantation can be made to create a fireball but so can a magic circle, the possibilities are almost limitless but to use magic either magic runes need to be chanted or drawn in magic circles. To create new magic is to have the knowledge and ability to manipulate the magic runes. Sadly, this knowledge and ability are scarce so the majority of the magic was inherited, relearned by others, or variations of other similar forms of magic that sort of mutated into something else. So. In a world where no new magic was created, it was important to keep one's magic skill set as confidential as possible. Now there is a wide variety of magic so it was very uncommon to find 2 people with the same skill set but there was still an emphasis to not show your hand if not needed to.
There are various types of magic but they are mostly categorized by which element they represent; within this element they could be loosely related to its actual element but since users with a high affinity for this element seem to use these predominantly it is assigned to this element. An example is healing for the water element and augmenting others' abilities by an increase of magic power, defense, attack, etc. for light element, these can be found outside their respective elements but those exhibiting these skills mostly fall within water proficiency for healing and light element for buffing. The widely acknowledged elements are Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Lightning, spatiotemporal (or spatial and temporal magic separately), Light, Dark, and element less which is called unaspected magic or household magic.
Some elements that seem extremely rare or extinct are Ice (frost), Chaos, Harmony, Black magic, Abyss magic, Creation magic, and Spirit magic. The magic I want to talk about is unaspected magic which contains curses, seals, and everyday life magic. This very diary is imbued with this very magic. It has magic on it that makes it likely to be found when lost, a tendency to find its way to the owner, indestructibility, auto-translation, memory recall, ability recall, magic recall, special skill recall, and more. The fact you made it this far into this introduction means that the auto-translation works pretty well. The reason for all this magic in a diary is because the event which made me write this diary would have a high likelihood of me having to put a rebirth into motion which might wipe my memories, magic abilities, and basically, everything that makes me, well me. This diary is written so that when it arrives in my vicinity, I can regain myself since it will unlock the things I've lost. How and why this all happened is something that you will find contained within these pages.
Now I've said some outrageous things like the world more or less getting destroyed and me setting myself through a rebirth and you'd be wondering who I might be. Well, I am Agnis Hourai, a nine-tailed spirit fox. Even in my time, this is a rare and mythical race so I wouldn't be surprised if there is confusion here. So, a short introduction about my race. The nine-tailed fox race is responsible for the well-being of the dimension and its inhabitants in a certain sense you could say we’re the immune system of our dimension.
Long before I was born, they were seen as harbingers of disaster since they were often seen when disaster struck, of course, this is because they had to make their appearance if things become so dire that they couldn't do this from the shadows. My race is intelligent, cunning, doesn't like to stand in the spotlight, and has a high affinity for magic, so they were only ever seen when disaster struck and never outside that so my race was driven close to extinction because of this, at least that's how the story goes. Now my race is strong but we aren't big fans of conflict. I would say sometimes we’re a bit too pacifistic so they allowed most of their kin to get slaughtered with much retaliation. Don't ask me why, I don't know either but that's how history went so my race is a bit thin in numbers. So are most of the other tailed races, yes there are more, there are 9 types of what we called tailed races going from a single tail up to 9. I’m not gonna name all of them but there are some important individuals out of this series of mythical beings that have close ties to me because this story is not just about me but about me and my close friends.
My best friend Raishin Torai, who is a six-tailed lightning tiger, his race is responsible for generating energy to keep the dimension and world running, they specialize in well... Lightning magic and energy generation. My other best friend is Gregory Sheru a three-tailed Shadow cat, his race is responsible for storing energy in shadows and/or retrieving these to return to the world, this is an important function since the lightning tigers are quite passionate about their energy generation responsibility so it is hard to stop them so it is of importance to store this energy and retrieve it when they get tired.
Three-tailed shadow cats specialize in dark magic and earth magic. A trait of all tailed beasts is that they can make how many tails appear as they want up to their maximum limit, so I can run around with 4 tails if I want but Gregory cant since his upper limit is 3, our tails also can double as our limbs or brain since they can be moved at will and have a lot of magical processing power so our tails could solve magical or logic problems while we are sleeping or occupied with something else, which makes it that the more tails one has the more one can accomplish. It is a fact that nine tails are stronger than three tails but it is more nuanced than that since the fewer tails the more efficient they are in the end quantity still wins out albeit not by a big margin. Anyways I'm going on a tangent.
The last of my best friends aren't from the tailed mythical races, he is from a quite simple and common race which is Ted Barrington from the Brown War bear race, they were a race commissioned as bodyguards but also since they were on good terms with the tailed races. His specialty is defence and martial arts and they have an insane amount of vitality, you could chop his arm off and it would instantly regrow, that is if you could get through his defences. Our races are relatively immortal since we only die when we are killed, we don't die from old age and even when we get killed, we have some tricks up our sleeves like having multiple lives or reviving or rebirth.
This story follows us from start to end, which might be an interesting read but it's also to give the magic a hand in being complete in restoring what was lost. I have to stress I am not a writer nor a wordsmith and things might sound weird and that could be because of my writing skills but also because the stuff that happened to me is sometimes quite weird.
I will color code my lines with Blue, Raishin’s lines with Yellow, Gregory’s lines with purple, and Ted’s lines with Red. Another note is that I can swap from first person to third person perspective because of a special trait I have. Some perspectives might get added too which is the result of me telling their story after talking to them about it or due to another technique that I won't spoil for now.