One hundred dungeons.
The gold icon in the lower right corner of the management panel bounced twice at the edge of his vision, then stabilized.
Allen didn't click on it.
He stared at the blank area left after the gray text dissolved.
A.W. Abyss Walker. Four contacts. Each time closer—from the forum to three hundred meters, to one hundred and eighty meters, to being directly written into his system's core.
The management panel's security protocol didn't intercept it.
It wasn't breached.
The message didn't use the security protocol's channels at all. It grew from the cracks in the system structure itself, using the same syntax as the blue light growing diamond-shaped openings and the spiral growing deep blue core fragments.
Same kind.
This word had already spun four times in his mind. It wouldn't stop.
"The first Architect has awakened." The voice of the abyss had said this. A similar meaning was inscribed in the inscriptions beneath the floor. Abyss Walker said on the forum, "Architects are not human." Now it had delivered "You exposed yourself too quickly" through system penetration.
The gaps between the fragments were decreasing.
Allen stood up from pillar P2-17.
The pulling sensation from his old left leg injury was negligible. His D-level body recovered an order of magnitude faster than his E-level body—not because his physical attributes had increased by a few points, but because the flow of core energy in his blood vessels had changed. The pathways left by self-catalysis were still there. Metabolic waste was being flushed away much faster.
He mentally listed three reasons not to go.
First, his identity would be exposed. Leaving meant leaving the core area under the management authority of the dungeon. External surveillance coverage had expanded to 800 meters, but the accuracy of passive perception was reduced by 30% beyond 300 meters. If someone was following him—
Second, the other party's origins were unknown. Four contacts, none of them provided verifiable information. The forum ID's IP address originated from the dungeon core? The tracking comparison result on the management panel was a 91% match, not 100. A nine-percentage-point error was enough to conceal an entire scam.
Third, a trap. The simplest explanation is often the most accurate. An unknown entity repeatedly approaches a newly exposed high-value target, using terms like "kindred spirits," "dialogue," and "not an enemy" to lower their guard—a textbook trapping procedure.
Three reasons. Each one holds true.
One reason to go.
The connection between "kindred spirits" and "the first architect has awakened" is drawn too clearly in his mind to be bypassed.
If Abyss Walker knew why the dungeons appeared on Earth— If it knew the cause of the Cataclysm— If it knew why the S-class eruption in Manhattan three years ago occurred— Allen doesn't need allies.
He needs information.
Information is the only resource that doesn't lose value just because the other party is an enemy.
He pulls out a spare hoodie from his pocket. Black. Unmarked. He pulls it on. The hood is pulled down to his brow bone. He retrieves his short sword from his equipment inventory, tucks it into his belt, the metal hilt against his tailbone, feeling a cool sensation.
He switches the external monitoring on the management panel to its maximum range.
Within an 800-meter radius of the Red Hook zone, there are no black snake lights. No GWA official vehicles. Only a few scattered Class E and Class F signals moved slowly towards the residential area—the night patrol of the Community Awareness officers.
1:17 AM.
Allen climbed onto the ground from the fire lane in the parking lot.
The night wind filled his hood, carrying the distinctive salty smell of rust and seawater characteristic of the Red Hook District.
— Rift Park is in the southeast corner of the Red Hook District. A fourteen-minute walk.
Allen didn't take the main road. He walked south along the median strip between the warehouse area and the residential area, crossed two rows of abandoned container yards, and squeezed through a gap in the wire mesh to enter the western fence of the park.
The park wasn't large.
Before the Great Rift, it was a community baseball field. After the Great Rift, a fissure appeared in the ground, running from northeast to southwest across the entire site. Five meters wide. Depth unknown—the GWA's survey report stated "beyond the range of existing detection equipment."
Energy barriers surrounded the fissure on both sides, with translucent blue light walls supported by pillars every three meters, the GWA emblems atop the pillars reflecting white in the moonlight.
The fissure itself glowed.
Not a bright light. It was a faint blue glow seeping from the rock face at the fissure's edge, unlike the light at the dungeon entrance—the entrance light was focused and directional. The fissure's light was diffuse, seeping out from every grain of the rock.
There was wind deep within the fissure. Blowing upwards. Dry, with no temperature change, but the wind carried a frequency—not sound waves, but something the signal detection module on the management panel could pick up but was inaudible to the human ear.
Allen stood ten meters from the fissure's edge. Shadow perception at full power. Fifteen meters—no sign of life.
He counted to twenty.
The sound of wind. The hum of the barriers. Some kind of intermittent, low-frequency oscillation deep within the fissure.
No footsteps. No breathing.
"You've come." Allen's right hand reached behind his back for the hilt of his short sword.
It wasn't coming from below. Not from behind.
It was from the blue light at the edge of the fissure—the diffuse glimmer began to gather five meters in front of Allen.
It wasn't brightening. It was thickening.
The light contracted from its diffuse state into filaments. The filaments intertwined into a net. The net layered into a surface. Layer upon layer, from toe to head—not piling up, but precipitating. Something that had been dissolved in the fissure's radiation was crystallizing from the light.
The ground changed first.
Five dark, thin lines pierced the crack in the lawn from the bottom of the convergence point, then emerged from the soil three meters away, and plunged back down. Repeatedly. Expanding. Seven. Eight. Each one was different in direction, varying in length, the longest extending into the rubble at the edge of the fissure.
Roots.
Rooting into the ground, into the rock strata, into the cross-section of the city's crust.
Above the roots, a humanoid form took shape.
Allen's management panel automatically performed a scan. A signal was sent, it encountered something, and bounced back. An anti-scanning barrier. Same as the previous three times. But this time, an extra line appeared in the pop-up window.
[The target has underlying structural compatibility with the Dungeon Architect system. Compatibility: 38%. Inference—the target may be a derivative entity of the Dungeon Core.] Allen's attention wasn't on the pop-up window.
He was looking at the eight fragmented shadows. Moonlight shone from the east. Two streetlights were broken; the third was at the street corner outside the park fence. Two light sources, two directions.
The humanoid's shadow didn't face either direction.
It shattered. Eight dark lines radiated from its feet, each embedding itself in the cracks of the ground.
Not shadows.
They were anchor points.
The humanoid itself looked sixteen or seventeen years old. Short white hair. A gray robe, the cut of which didn't belong to any era or culture Allen recognized. The face's contours were somewhere between male and female, soft yet indistinct—the features were all positioned correctly, but each was off by half a millimeter.
Its irises and the light from the slits were the same color. Blue. But deep within the blue, a dark red glow flowed, its rhythm irregular, uncorresponding to a heartbeat—uncorresponding to any biological rhythm Allen recognized.
"I have no name." The humanoid spoke. The voice came from the direction of its mouth, but there was a 0.2-second difference between the opening and closing of its lips and the syllable. The sound arrived first, the mouth moved afterward.
The pauses between each sentence varied in length. Not hesitation. It was some kind of non-human grammar being translated into English phonemes in real time.
"Your System calls me 'Abyss Walker.' I'll use that."
Allen's right hand was still on the hilt of his short sword. He didn't draw it.
"You sent a message from the bottom layer of my system."
"Your system and my core use the same underlying protocol." The eight fragments beneath his feet simultaneously contracted slightly—less than a centimeter. "I don't need to 'send.' I just need to write at the protocol layer."
"You said 'kin.'"
"Yes."
"You said 'not just humans will come.'"
"Yes." The management panel flashed in the corner of his vision. The compatibility value jumped—38%. 39%. Back to 38%. Unstable. The two systems were resonating and interfering at close range.
"What are you?" The Abyss Walker's fragmented image trembled. Eight dark lines shifted slightly simultaneously.
Then it uttered a number.
"NYC-MH-0031." Allen's fingers tightened three millimeters on the hilt of his short sword.
NYC-MH.
Manhattan.
The GWA database index in his mind automatically popped up the remaining fields. Underground Central Park. S-class. The epicenter of the massive eruption three years ago.
Allen didn't speak.
Not organizing his thoughts. His vocal cords were rebelling. Two muscle bands twisted together, refusing to let air pass through his throat.
The parking lot drainpipe wasn't here. But he hallucinated dripping water. One drop. Two drops. The interval between each drop was exactly the same as the pipe next to pillar P2-17.
"Three years ago. That massive eruption." A dark red light flashed in the Abyss Walker's iris. "It surged from my body."
Allen's right hand drew the short sword from his lower back.
The movement was conscious, a command executed by the spinal cord. His D-rank muscle reaction speed completed the three steps of drawing the sword, shifting his weight forward, and pre-activating Shadow Step in 0.18 seconds.
Shadow Step didn't activate.
At the last second. The brain caught up with the spinal cord.
S-rank dungeon core. D-rank short sword. This strike couldn't even cut the dust on its robe.
But the short sword wasn't sheathed.
"Three years ago. Twenty-three thousand people."
Allen's throat was dry. He could count the sharp edges of each word as it scraped across his vocal cords.
"My parents are inside." The Abyss Walker glanced down at the short sword.
The eight fragments of light froze instantly. Not contracting, not extending, but solidifying. The eight dark lines on the ground remained fixed, each locked at its current curvature.
Then it said, "I know." Allen's wrist tightened. Not to stab. He couldn't control it. His tendons twisted, leaving a white mark on the hilt of the short sword.
"Paul Gray. Susan Gray."
These two names came from the mouth of a non-human entity. The lips moved 0.2 seconds slower than the sound. But the names themselves—the pronunciation—was accurate. Every syllable was precise.
"They are recorded in my core database. All the humans who died in the outbreak—" A pause.
Unlike the previous pauses caused by translation delays. This one was longer. The fragments on the ground—not trembled—writhed. The ends of three of the eight lines briefly curled up, then relaxed.
"—Every single one. Name, time of death, coordinates of death, cause of death. My core records it all." The dryness in Allen's throat spread to the back of his tongue.
It recorded every single person.
Not a database "record." Not rows in an Excel spreadsheet.
It used "my core." Core. Heart.
In the heart of an underground city, lay twenty-three thousand names.
Allen didn't speak. The blue light of the rift cast a blurry dividing line on the ground between the two. The roots of the Shattered Shadow intertwined on the other side of the dividing line, none crossing it.
"It wasn't my choice to erupt." Allen's short sword tip pointed at the Abyss Walker's chest. If there was anything inside.
"The eruption command came from the Abyss Will. No sleeping core has the authority to refuse." Pause. Another pause that wasn't due to translation delay. The fourth thread of the Shattered Shadow curled its end.
"The heart won't stop beating just because you don't want it to."
These words fell onto the gravel ground of Rift Park.
Allen heard it. He heard every single word.
His brain completed a logical analysis in 0.3 seconds—the Abyss Walker claimed to be a passive executor, the outburst an instinctive reaction, beyond conscious control. This explanation was logically self-consistent. A core without self-awareness was activated by the Abyss's command, releasing monsters, devouring the surface—it wasn't the murderer, it was the gun.
The gun didn't choose who it fired at.
Allen's logical circuits accepted this analysis.
His hand didn't lower the sword.
"But you're awake." He grasped the other end of that logical chain. "You have self-awareness. You can resist."
"Yes." Allen's short sword tip pushed forward two centimeters.
"But I woke up too late." Six words. The eight lines of the Shattered Shadow simultaneously shortened by five centimeters. This was the first time Allen had seen its body language change so drastically—contraction. Inward.
"After that outburst three years ago, my core entered a period of dormant reconstruction. It took three years to rebuild consciousness." Three years.
Allen had also been lying on the concrete ground next to pillar P2-17 for three years. From nineteen to twenty-two. From the Awakening Ceremony to today.
"Then I detected—an Architect has appeared."
"What does the Architect have to do with you?"
"The Architect is the interface designed by the Abyss. The bridge between humanity and the dungeons." The fragment trembled again. The eight dark lines shortened a few centimeters on the ground, their roots contracting.
"The Abyss planted dungeons on Earth. Then it waited. Waited for a human to evolve the ability to resonate with the core of the dungeons. That person is the Architect."
"So I am a product of the Abyss." Allen's voice was flatter than he had expected. Too flat.
"A pawn." The dark red flow in the Abyss Walker's iris quickened. "But a pawn doesn't necessarily move according to the player's wishes."
Allen's breathing rate was twenty percent faster than normal.
His chest was straining. Not a physical problem.
There was something stuck between his lungs and throat. It had been there from the moment he stepped into Rift Park. With each word the Abyss Walker spoke, that thing solidified a layer. Now it was so heavy it was affecting his breathing. "One last thing." The crimson light in the Abyss Walker's blue irises stopped flowing.
Frozen.
The eight fragmented shadows froze too.
Every movement of the entire humanoid figure—the flow of light, the writhing of shadows, the swaying of the robe's hem—ceased. Just for a moment.
A dungeon core mobilized all its processing resources to deliver the next sentence.
"Manhattan erupts. The Abyss's command was indeed issued. But the propagation speed was artificially accelerated." Allen's grip on the sword hilt lost two Newtons of strength.
"From within your GWA." The hallucination from the drainpipe returned.
But this time it wasn't dripping water.
It was an image of a hand reaching for a button—Robert Chen's words resurfaced from the depths of memory, each word so clear it didn't seem like a recollection, but rather etched onto his retina.
"The alarm was manually turned off."
Not just turned off the alarm.
Someone accelerated the propagation of the eruption signal while turning off the alarm.
Two actions. One after the other. Precise coordination.
The warning was deactivated, and the outbreak was brought forward, which meant—
Allen's short sword slowly fell.
Not retracted. It was as if the strength in his arm was replaced by something else in an instant.
That thing had no temperature. No direction.
It seeped from his very bones, filling every vein in his extremities.
Not anger.
Anger has heat.
This doesn't.
Allen stood at the edge of the fissure. The short sword hung at his right hand. The tip was three centimeters from the ground. The wind blew upwards from the depths of the fissure, lifting the brim of his hood.
His face was expressionless.
The fragmented shadow of the Abyss Walker lay motionless in the moonlight. Eight dark lines were embedded in the cracks in the ground, maintaining a distance of three meters from Allen's shadow.
Two entities, their very existence rewritten by the same catastrophe, stood three meters apart, separated by a rift of blue light.
Seven seconds.
Allen's voice returned to its normal, steady tone.
It was too peaceful. Even he himself sensed something was amiss.
"You didn't come to reminisce." The Abyss Walker's fragmented shadow resumed its slight movements. Its roots began to slowly undulate again.
The dark red light in its iris began to flow again, but the rhythm had changed—slower than before. Not relaxation. A process that had consumed a large amount of processing resources had just ended, and the computing power had been released.
"The next wave of testing in the Abyss is about to begin." Allen's management panel automatically highlighted the keyword "Abyss" in the corner of his vision.
"Not a single-point outbreak. It's global. Multi-point synchronization." The Abyss Walker took a step back towards the rift, the fragmented shadow beneath its feet beginning to lengthen. Each dark line shifted from contraction to extension, the roots were stretching out again—it was preparing to retreat.
"The Abyss's will is evaluating the accumulated data of all dungeon cores. If the evaluation result is 'unqualified'—"
"All dungeons will erupt simultaneously."
Allen finished for it.
It wasn't a guess. The logical chain had reached a point where only one endpoint remained. Seed, test, evaluation, elimination. The Abyss treated Earth like a nursery. Those that grew well remained. Those that didn't—started over.
"Your management panel should have already detected the abnormal fluctuations globally."
Allen opened the management panel. He filtered the local data. He flipped to the global overview—a page he had never opened since registering.
Global Dungeon Abnormal Fluctuation Index.
Line graph. Three months of data.
First two and a half months—flat.
Past week—slightly rising.
Past twenty-four hours—the slope of the line steepened threefold.
The end of the line pointed to a red threshold line. There were still two scale increments to the threshold.
The two scale increments didn't indicate how much time they represented on the chart.
Allen stared at that line. The red threshold line shone blindingly on the management panel in the dead of night.
The Abyss Walker retreated into the blue light of the rift.
The edges of its grey robes began to dissolve—in the same way the grey messages dissolved. Character by character, it was absorbed back into the light.
It spoke its last words. The voice had begun to distort, the intervals between phonemes lengthening.
"Architect. You can create dungeons." Fragments of light shrank back into the rift from the ground, one by one.
"But can you create them fast enough?" The blue light swallowed its face. The short white hair vanished last. Then the silhouette. Then the fragments.
Finally, the irises disappeared—the faint red glow at the bottom of the blue lingered in the void for half a second longer.
"When all the dungeons erupt simultaneously—you don't need one." The glow died down.
"You need a hundred." The voice bounced one last time from the depths of the rift, overlapping with the hum of the railings, and dissipated.
The wind stopped.
The blue glow from the fissure returned to its previous diffused state—seeping outwards from the rock's texture, evenly, slowly, without any sign of coalescing.
Allen stood still.
The short sword hung at his right side. The metallic blade reflected half his face in the moonlight—the shadow of the hood cut off the upper half, leaving only the lines of his lips and jaw. His lips were closed. His jaw muscles were taut.
His eyes behind his glasses were devoid of anything extra.
He sheathed the short sword at his back.
He turned.
He walked towards the warehouse area. His pace was the same as when he came. 1.2 meters per second.
He didn't look back at the fissure.
When he reached the gap in the barbed wire fence of the container yard, the gold icon in the lower right corner of the control panel jumped.
Not the previous steady jump. It was a single, strong pulse.
Allen stopped.
The broken barbed wire was beside him. The night wind rushed in through the gap, carrying the salty smell of the sea.
He tapped the gold icon. [New Feature Preview - Dungeon Network.]
[Unlock Requirements: Dungeon Level ≥ C + Management Panel Upgrade + Architect Level ≥ C.]
[Current Progress: 0/3.] One hundred dungeons.
His current level is D.
He can't even build the second one.
Allen finished reading the three lines. He shrunk the management panel back into the corner.
He squeezed through a gap in the barbed wire. The broken wire scraped against the back of his hoodie, but didn't cut his skin.
The gravel path in the storage yard glowed white in the moonlight. His shadow trailed behind him. There was only one path. Leading in one direction.
He took thirty steps.
He stopped.
Not because of the management panel. Not because of the shadow fragments, the root system, and the line graph.
It was because of a name.
Paul Gray.
When the Abyss Walker uttered this name, his lips moved 0.2 seconds slower than the sound.
The pronunciation was accurate.
Allen stood in the middle of the gravel path. The moonlight pinned his shadow to his feet.
His right hand—the one that had just gripped the short sword—clenched. Five fingers rolled into his palm. Nails dug into his flesh. Four arc-shaped white marks appeared, only to be pushed back by the elasticity of his skin.
The core of an underground city. It remembered his father's name. It remembered the time of death. It remembered the coordinates.
It remembered everyone.
Twenty-three thousand people.
Allen's fist clenched for seven seconds.
Then it loosened.
Four shallow, arc-shaped indentations remained on his palm. They would disappear within three minutes.
He continued walking.
In the corner of the management panel, the line representing the global anomaly fluctuation index jumped another notch.
The red threshold line remained still.
But the gap was narrowing.