Mana

Anything with a magical nature gives off mana, so it streams from Hunters, from Magic Beasts, and from the Gates themselves. Its roots, however, lie outside the human world. The energy descends from divine beings like the Absolute Being and from what they made, the Rulers and the Monarchs among them. People had no inkling that mana existed until gates began ripping open worldwide, funneling it in from a separate world entirely.

When mana flowed through the gates and bonded into certain bodies, those people awakened as Hunters and were granted magical power. The same energy hardens an awakened frame well past an ordinary person's, so even the feeblest Hunter shrugs off conventional weapons. Purpose-built instruments translate a Hunter's mana output into a figure that assigns their rank, though S-Rank Hunters put out more than the devices can register. A handful of individuals, the False Rankers, can knowingly suppress their output to read below their actual power.

Lifeless objects unearthed in dungeons can also hold mana; Mana Crystals and essence stones are the prime examples, and both turned out to work as a clean, long-lived power supply that fetched hefty profits on the market. Yet not every body tolerates the energy: weak tolerance bars some people from ever awakening, while severe intolerance can induce Eternal Slumber, a sleeping condition with no cure on record. Sung Jinwoo would later uncover that the Rulers built the gates on purpose to soak Earth in mana, hardening it for their looming war with the Monarchs, and like those two factions he appears able to use Authority and class skills without burning any mana of his own.