Chapter 10

It took a bit longer than usual to publish a new chapter of this story, but sometimes, good things come to those who wait  

I know I am opening up a lot of knowledge in this chapter about the ancient world, the nature of cultural differences, urban organization, and some respective observations about both Chinese and Roman/Western Civilization. They're both looking at the world through different lenses, but there's also some fallacies that each side holds in regard to themselves and the other. 

Christians, especially the missionaries, during this era were idealists, hoping to create a world where everyone embrace the Roman-Christian ideal. The Nicene Creed had recently been approved 325 AD, where the absolute divinity of Jesus Christ and core tenets of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestantism was formed. After centuries of endemic factionalism and disunity among Christian beliefs, the new centralized ideology created renewed hope as it ended strife within the Roman Empire through the unity of a "single God" and "single empire". However, such renewal was short-lived as Rome would fall in less than a century to "Christianized" barbarians. Effectively, men like Antonius would be on a Quixotic quest with pyrrhic victories, but they held high ideals and dreams for something that sadly did not exist, except in false euphoria. 

Chinese Civilization also had its own issues too as I noted before with the mixing of another Barbarian rule, such as the Di, who renamed their nation as the "former Qin", in order to show they wished to rule under the same rights as the Qin Dynasty from earlier times. Urban decay and issues with the organization were also rampant,  since the fall of the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period, cities had become disorganized with large waves of refugees. Historically, under Xie An and other capable Prime Ministers of the Southern Dynasty, Jiankang became of the few rays of hope in the world. By the middle of the 5th century, the city was able to house more than a million people, which is a testament to urban planning and organization.

As promised, I opened magic in my story. Magic in my story is something understandable and unknown at the same time because it does not operate under the same frame of reference as some other fantasy stories with fixed rules. In order to use it properly, you must understand the basics of science and material interactions between energy and matter. Observation and continual improvement with knowledge of interactions would be how you gain advancement in the use of magic along with the accumulation of energy and matter itself.