Feathered Race

One of the Six Great Races. Also Known as the Harpies. The Illusive Feather and the Sky Goddess (Mother Goddesss)’s bloodline were combined to produce the Harpies so that the Sky Goddess can gather faith.

## History

After the Arcana Kingdom fell, the five races divided the Arcanists’ treasures. The humans obtained the Bloodline Extraction Instrument, the Astrals obtained the Consciousness Converter, the Ravagers obtained the Origin Energy Temple, and the Oceanids obtained the Freedom Wind, each of these treasures extremely valuable to that race. The Harpies obtained the most valuable item from the lot - Sark’s Energy Nuclei, the only city-grade source of energy amongst all of these items.

The Harpies had chosen that item mostly due to their surroundings. Just as humans required the Bloodline Extraction Instrument to grow stronger and the Ravagers needed the Origin Energy Temple to control Origin Energy, the Harpies had their own unique needs.

The Harpies possessed the strongest perception amongst all of the Intelligent Races, not even inferior to the Arcanists. The only thing they lacked was creativity. However, they were quite physically weak and had low fertility rates, so there were not many of them. Their greatest weakness, however, was their arrogance.

Their arrogance made it so that the Harpies refused to advance or adapt.

The humans, Ravagers, and Oceanids all didn’t hesitate to improve themselves for the sake of their race’s survival. The Astrals even went so far as to give up on their physical bodies.

The Harpies, however, were unwilling to change.

They didn’t want to change even a little bit.

They stubbornly believed that a change in culture was just a kind of extinction - if the Harpies lost their purity, what difference was there between that and extinction?

This was the way the Harpies viewed their own culture.

With this kind of thinking, there was no way that the Harpies would ever attempt to improve their physical bodies.

As such, they chose to rely on external aids.

In the 46000th year of the Chaos Era, the Harpies convinced the Arcana Kingdom’s great master, Isador Sark, to start a plan to create a series of floating cities. At the core of the floating cities plan was a need for a source of energy, one that could constantly extract energy from the surroundings.

At the end of the Chaos Era, the Arcana Kingdom fell into ruins.

The Harpies took advantage of the chaos to seize the incomplete source of energy for the floating cities.

The Harpies then invited some Craftsmen and Metalskins to design and construct the floating cities.

In the 946th year of the New Star Era, Sky City’s construction was completed, and the Harpies successfully established the Sky Country. Withered Edge became the emperor, primarily responsible for managing governmental affairs. He also established a separate religious system that worshipped a mother goddess and accepted divine edicts from her. Scarlet Dream was made the leader of the organization.

The Harpies, Craftsmen, and Metalskins took nearly a thousand years and an ocean’s worth of resources in order to complete this floating city, which became the most powerful existence amongst the whole Primordial Continent.

This city was built with incredibly powerful defensive and offensive capabilities. Its defensive Origin Energy formation alone could withstand the attacks of hundreds of Ultimate-Emperor Realm cultivators attacking it at the same time.

The powerful amount of energy contained within the Sark’s Nucleus gave Sky City a seemingly endless supply of energy. As a result, the city was also a location that even the most powerful experts considered impossible to conquer.

The Harpies became overlords very quickly because of this. Anywhere Sky City went, all enemies it encountered were easily defeated!

Yes, overlords. At their height, they were even able to use their city to single-handedly suppress a Primordial Beast.

However, this situation didn’t last for very long.

The Harpies’ arrogance and the might of Sky City quickly made it so that the Harpies offended everyone they could possibly have offended. These included the Craftsmen and Metalskins that had helped them build this floating city.

The Harpies reneged on their original promise once the city was completed, chasing the two subordinate races out of Sky City and taking control of the city. Then, they began to oppress all the other races without discrimination.

Because of this, the four races formed a rare alliance to fight back against the Harpies.

However, Sky City was too powerful. The floating fort had an endless supply of energy and impenetrable defenses. No matter what kind of attacks they launched at it, they were all rendered of no effect.

Even with the four races allying together, they had no way of defeating the Harpies.

For this, they were forced to think of any possible methods.

In the end, the Craftsmen were the ones who proposed a possible solution.

One of the greatest occurrences of sowing discord throughout the continent’s history took place.

A powerful Astral sacrificed his own spiritual body to control a Harpy Arcana Master.

The battle continued, and to raise the status of that Arcana Master, the humans, Oceanids, Ravagers, and Astrals all devoted lots of time and energy to help him produce countless achievements, as well as to help him find resources to increase his personal strength.

By relying on this method, the Arcana Master very quickly became known as a hero throughout the city, as well as a genius general.

At this point, the four races’ plan began to bare its fangs.

This genius general proposed a plan during a military strategy meeting: Operation Deep Sea Anchor.

Operation Deep Sea Anchor was based on some of the flaws that Sky City had.

Even though Sky City was incomparably powerful, and Sark’s Nuclei provided the city with an endless supply of energy, there was still certain drawbacks and bottlenecks experienced by the people living in the city.

The many years of fighting had made one thing clear: when defending against incredibly powerful attacks, Sky City’s consumption of energy far outstripped how much it absorbed.

This was inevitable.

Killing was always easier than giving birth, and spending money was always easier than saving up.

The only reason Sky City was still able to hold on was because the Harpies were going all-out as well - when faced with the pressure from the four races combined, the Harpies were still forced to pay quite a significant price.

It was in this moment that the general proposed Operation Deep Sea Anchor.

The plan was to convert Sark’s Nuclei’s somewhat ethereal connections with the outside world into a more solid, weighty anchor, allowing the nuclei to extract nearly ten times as much energy as before and making Sky City truly invulnerable.

The Harpies were incredibly moved by this plan, but they weren’t very skilled at remodeling.

That was when the general made yet another contribution - he volunteered to go to Craftsman and Metalskin territory to convince the two races to help based on his “majestic presence” to help them create the Origin Energy anchor.

The two races returned to Sky City, letting “bygones be bygones”, and began to work on creating this Origin Energy anchor.

During this period of time, the Harpies watched them closely to ensure that they weren’t trying to sabotage the city,

However, reality demonstrated that the two races didn’t make any attempts at all to sabotage the city.

They diligently completed the work that the Harpies had commissioned them to do, even doing a better job than the Harpies had anticipated - the Origin Energy chain of the Sark’s Nucleus was imbued with spatial powers that penetrated deep into the sea of Origin Energy, making it so that the rate at which it accumulated energy was twenty times what it was before.

The Harpies were incredibly excited by this prospect.

However, not long afterwards, they discovered a shocking situation.

Sky City couldn’t move anymore.

It was firmly locked in the southern regions of the Primordial Continent and could not fly to any other corner of the continent.

They even had no way of cutting the anchor chain because of how intimately connected it was with Sark’s Nucleus. Once the chain was cut, the nucleus would collapse on itself, and Sky City would come tumbling out of the sky.

While Sky City became invincible, it also lost its ability to move as a result.

In the end, the Harpies’ dominance shrunk from more than half of the continent to a small region towards the south.

Just like that, the Harpies’ reign of a hundred years crumbled away into nothingness.

After Sky City was locked in place, the Harpies’ had no way of continuing their dominance.

While inside the city, the Harpies were naturally invincible, but as soon as they left the city, they were easily smacked around.

As such, the Harpies’ offensive capabilities were far inferior to their defensive capabilities, causing them to become incredibly isolated.

This gradually became more and more unfavorable for the Harpies as the environment began to deteriorate.

First of all, the territory in which the Harpies reigned supreme was simply too small.

Even though Sky City was powerful, it was only a city. How much ground could it possibly cover?

Other races had thousands of cities in their territory, while Sky City’s cannons had a reach of only a few thousand kilometers. Outside of this range, no one feared them, and would even beat them up.

No matter how few the Harpies were in numbers, they were still an entire race. With no one left to keep them company, their numbers began to grow while their territory remained stagnant. Their lives became more and more difficult as a result - even though the sky was vast, it couldn’t produce anything!

The Harpies were forced to rack their brains for an idea.

In the 5800th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies mobilized their armies for the sake of obtaining new territory.

This time, they chose to fight the humans - the leader of the Harpies’ religious organization decided to attack the humans and the Craftsmen to inflict divine punishment on them.

However, after five thousand years, these humans were not the same as the humans who had set up the Freedom Alliance all those years ago.

Under the leadership of Gu Changzhi, the emperor of the Illustrious Divine Dynasty, the human race was at their strongest.

Through the course of the intense battle, the Harpies suffered immense casualties, and their ruler, Withered Edge, was gravely wounded. Scarlet Dream committed suicide after returning to Sky City.

In the 6200th year of the New Star Era, Withered Edge’s old wounds broke open again, killing him. Skymist Eagle inherited the throne.

When Skymist Eagle took the throne, most Harpies had resigned themselves to a fate of isolation. However, Skymist Eagle proposed that Sky City alone was not enough to increase the strength of the Harpies on its own. The Harpies needed more territory and more strength.

This was when the Floating Points plan was proposed.

The Floating Points plan required the Harpies to develop their building abilities to create small floating cities with powerful offensive capabilities. This way, they would be able to ensure the safety of both Sky City and the Harpy Race as a whole.

These Floating Points were just miniature replicas, satellite versions of Sky City.

The Harpies commissioned lots of manpower to try and find items that could store kinetic energy, as well as putting aside their arrogance to try and reach a compromise with the Metalskins and Craftsmen. Those two races were not very happy with the other Intelligent Races either. After making a vow to the Harpy’s mother goddess, some of the Craftsmen and Metalskins shifted alliance and once again came under the Harpies’ wing.

The Harpies did their utmost to meet the needs of these two races, and even in the present day, these two races possessed immense sway amongst the Harpies.

In the 7400th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies managed to kill the emperor of the second Arcana Kingdom, obtaining a piece of equipment that could secondarily store energy. This was a byproduct formed when creating Sark’s Nuclei. With it as the motor, the Craftsmen and Metalsking were able to create a small-scale floating city, the “Origin Light Castle.”

In the 8700th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies relied on the power of their religious organization and the mother goddess’s Origin Energy Pool to create a second floating city, the “Harpy Star.”

In the 9600th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies obtained a large quantity of Flying Spirit Stones, which they used to create the third floating city, the “Flying Spirit City.”

In the 11200th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies and Ravagers fought once again. By relying on the three floating cities, the Harpies emerged victorious.

In the 13000th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies used the bone of an Origin Beast they had taken from the Ravagers to create a fourth floating city, the “Origin Energy Demonic City.”

In the 14800th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies found a confused Prehistoric Beast. They first lured it to Sky City before attacking and suppressing it. By sacrificing hordes of heroic spirits and religious disciples, they were able to successfully tame it. They erected a fifth floating city on its back, known as the “Chaos Tower.”

The creation of the fifth floating city multiplied the Harpies’ strength, and their influence began to grow.

By that point, the Harpies had already burned through all of their resources on hand. It was basically impossible for them to think of another unique way of creating a floating city.

As a result, they decided to duplicate the fourth floating city by focusing their attention on the skeletal remains of the Origin Beast.

Origin Beasts possessed incredible might. Often times, their remains would still possess unique attributes and powers. The Origin Bone Scepter was a prime example of this.

The “Origin Energy Demonic City” was constructed from the bones of a bird-type Origin Beast. It had left behind a backbone filled to the brim with energy. This backbone could fly through the air autonomously, so it was basically carrying the entire city. Of course, the Harpies had used other techniques as well to further strengthen this floating city, but the fact that this Origin Bone was the core of the floating city was indisputable.

All of the Harpies hoped to find yet another Origin Beast’s remains to create a new floating city.

In the 17200th year of the New Star Era, the Harpies found yet another corpse of an Origin Beast that had passed away in its sleep.

However, this corpse was located in human territory.

In order to obtain the Origin Beast bones within human territory, the Harpies purposefully sowed discord and enraged the Prosperous Emperor. As a result, the Prosperous Emperor annulled the Western Mountain Treaty that had existed for ten thousand years.

The Harpies went to war with the humans.

The Harpies, who possessed five floating cities, felt that victory was within reach, but they were quickly sent reeling back into reality.

Even though the Illustrious Divine Dynasty had begun to decline in power, the Harpies still could mount no resistance. The Commander-In-Chief, Lin Zhonghui, led his troops to a commanding victory against the Harpies, sinking the “Flying Spirit City” and inflicting serious damage on the “Harpy’s Star”, in addition to slaughtering over five hundred thousand Harpy soldiers.

The Harpies’ ruler at the time fled back to Sky City, then killed himself, following in Scarlet Dream’s footsteps.

Harpy leadership exchanged hands a few more times as they began to adopt their former policy of isolation. Their satisfaction with what they had made it so that they closely guarded the four floating cities. This equilibrium remained until Eternal Night assumed the throne.

Eternal Night was an incredibly young ruler. Unlike his predecessors, however, Eternal Night had slaughtered his way onto the throne.

This young, ambitious Harpy emperor believed that, if the Harpies were to grow stronger, they would need to cast aside this complacent mentality and seize what they were after.

He decided to follow in the footsteps of Skymist Eagle.

Following a period of internal slaughter, by which Eternal Night cemented his authority, he began to follow Skymist Eagle’s path closely. Unfortunately, the Origin Beast remains from back then had been destroyed in the large-scale conflict many years prior, so Eternal Night could only wait until he was able to find the remains of another Origin Beast.

## Profession

Cavalry mages, Archers, and Winged Knights were the three main soldiers types that the Harpies had developed over the years. The others, such as Sanskrit Chanters and Wingless Harpies, were all very specialized professions, akin to the Ravagers’ Soulless or Bone Diviners.

These Wingless Harpies were a specialized kind of warrior that walked the path of physical strength. Because the Harpies possessed innately weak bodies, they lacked soldiers that could serve as meat shields and tanks. Thus, they had done their best to think of many different ways to train up such soldiers.