The Raven's POV-Chapter 28: This - consister of 99% dialogue

"Everything we know comes from obelisk, whether it is our culture, technology, science, social structure, everything came from the obelisk"

"The obelisk was a reservoir of knowledge, it is the reason humanity progressed as fast as we did amidst all the war and conflict."

"The gifts can only take you so far, they are completely random. Independent of our needs, gifts have limits, and humans cannot manipulate raw essence like other races, we are so much weaker than other races yet here we are."

"Sitting at the very top of the food chain, overpowering dragons, werewolves, vampires, beastkins and dragons.

That on top of fighting monsters and clearing gates that pop up."

"and let me tell you, when I say obelisk was the reason of our Initial triumphs over other races when they emerged, I truly mean it and all historians in this academic realm would agree"

"It is also why the following years after the destruction of obelisk were called the dark ages, marked by the first massive loss against other races, followed by enslavement of humanity"

"We lost, we were enslaved, humanity was enslaved for the next thousand years. But it was also a lesson in the grand scheme of things, a hard earned lesson that we were over-reliant on obelisk for knowledge, that in favour of easily available knowledge, methods, we forgo innovation."

"and we paid for it, for a thousand years."

He then took a sip of yellow liquid from his weird shaped glass bottle. Was it a whiskey?, probably yes.

"Obelisk provided us with everything we needed, and more, but it did not tell anything about one thing, and one thing only"

"magic, the term itself came from the obelisk and it was unanimously after some heated discussions across the globe decided that we would use the word ’magic’ to categorize anything related to essence, whether it be gates or gifts"

"We never bothered delving deeper into gifts, how did they work?, was there a better way to use them? Maybe but who cared when you could have used a gun"

"we did research into essence, but never too deep, only enough to adapt our devices to it, to work our way a problem that is caused by essence, we ignored magic and we paid the price later for that"

"The absence of obelisk, exposed those gaps in our knowledge, our own shortsightedness."

"No civilisation can survive in this brutal world by ignoring one aspect in support of another, our enemies are also constantly evolving in order to best us"

"during the thousand years of slavery, where humans were treated worse than cattles, we learned, we were not allowed to use any kind of technology, it made us realise that they feared our weapons more than they ever feared us, they created devices to block our gifts but that’s all they did."

"we could not control raw essence, so we learned to, in the dark age of humanity we tried to adapt to magic, we learned, we could not use essence as is, it did not listen to us as it did for other species, we were incapable of using it."

"So we split it, we tried every method and we found one, we split it"

He motioned his hands, searching for the right analogy to use, and snapped his fingers as it came

Snap.

"like crude oil, like how we did fractional distillation to crude oil, to obtain oil, diesel, and lubricating oil"

He went one to use more analogies

"like how an atom consists of three things, electron, proton and neutron"

"and we did it, we split the essence into three things we could control,

Namely. mana, aura and spirit then we refined them. Until we could wield them as weapons, until we had enough comprehension of how they worked"

"and that sparked the beginning. After the dark ages, came the era known as golden age of magic, use of cold weapons and staffs prevailed the use of firearms"

"We didn’t stop there, we kept moving forward but we did not abandon technology either, we tried finding ways to merge them and we still to this day are"

"We invented 9 aura cores, 9 spirit stars and 9 magic circles, they are known as the absolute limit but we didn’t stop there."

"we tried to break past it, we tried to mix them, that’s how we found the path of unity or simply known as path of synchronization, well you will learn more about it in magic class"

He looked at every student present and said his next words in an authoritative tone

"and this is how my classes will be, no unnecessary flattery to some long dead figure, you are here to learn, not to glorify some long dead emperor, they are dead for a reason."

"We are here, to learn, to analyse why they fell in the first place. To the best of our ability, so we don’t repeat their mistakes"

"That’s all for this class, see you next week"

The f*ck does he mean by ’next week’ was the collective thought of every student but no one got the chance to ask as Marcus had already left.

And 12 minutes early at that.