While waiting for his student to prepare the carriage, Jenkins rolled out of bed. Disregarding his status, he crawled under the bed and pulled out a locked wooden box.
He opened it. Lying inside was a metal chessboard of black and white.
This was the mysterious Ancient Relic, the Chessboard. Jenkins considered it the pride of his life, certain that it was connected to the future and Destiny of all humankind.
The board was made of a special metal he had never found despite searching through countless texts. It looked incredibly heavy, yet it was exceptionally light to the touch, as if weightless. However, when he ran his hand over it or tapped it, it felt solid and substantial.
The black and white squares were still distinct, uneroded by the millennia. But they were no longer uniform. Instead, they possessed a strange, twisted quality, as if the board had been submerged in water, the colors warping into bizarre shapes with the ripples.
Something was clearly wrong with it...
