December 21, 2039.
Later generations of historians named this day the "Year One of the Card Era" - although on that day, no one realized that history was being rewritten above their heads.
That morning, the sky darkened without warning.
Not an eclipse, not the clouds gathering before a storm. Instead, it was a strange, almost unnatural dimness - as if there was an invisible giant hand that extinguished the entire blue light in the sky.
Meteorological offices and observatories around the world, as well as NASA on the other side of the Atlantic, detected an unprecedented energy fluctuation almost in the same second. The curves on the waveform jumped wildly, far exceeding the measurement upper limit of any known instrument.
No one knows what that energy is. No one knows where it comes from.
Then, the card rain came.
