The Void Portal opened like a wound healing in reverse.
He activated it at midnight in the warehouse, three weeks after his A-rank provisional was issued and four days after the full panel report confirmed it with the notation 'anomalous ability type, ongoing monitoring recommended.' The Portal was a circle of inverted light, darkness that glowed, approximately two meters across, suspended at standing height above the warehouse floor. Through it he could see the Underworld.
Not a dungeon. Not the artificial copy-space that Gates generated, the bounded, finite pocket dimensions that mimicked Underworld environments without being them. This was the real thing: the actual first layer of the Mythological Underworld, looking back at him through a two-meter window with the indifferent attention of something that has always existed and will always exist and finds the concept of a ten-minute time limit mildly amusing.
It looked like a battlefield that had been given a thousand years to become a forest.
Dark trees with silver bark rose from cracked stone earth. The sky, if it could be called that, was a low ceiling of moving cloud the color of graphite, lit from somewhere inside by a sourceless amber light. The air that came through the Portal smelled of old war and growing things, an incongruous combination that Liu Yun would come to associate, over time, with the first layer specifically: the layer of the Honored Dead, where the warriors of a hundred mythologies had been deposited after their mortal lives and had, over centuries, built something between a civilization and an ecosystem.
He sent Shadow-01 through first.
The Bone Sentinel stepped through the Portal and stood in the Underworld and turned back to look at him with its violet eyes. It raised one hand, the gesture of a soldier signaling that the landing zone was clear.
Liu Yun went through.
The ground on the other side was harder than it looked and the ambient pressure was different, thicker, like air near sea level compared to altitude, but the substance wasn't oxygen, it was mana. Raw, unprocessed mythological mana, the kind that had been accumulating in this layer for millennia. His Void Core drank it automatically, the absorption rate clicking up in his peripheral system display.
[VOID CORE CHARGING - AMBIENT ABSORPTION RATE: HIGH][NOTE: Extended time in the Underworld accelerates Void Affinity growth. Recommended for training.]
He stood in the dark forest for nine of his ten available minutes, watching the silver-barked trees and the amber-lit clouds and the things moving in the distance. They kept their distance, the creatures of this layer, watching him with eyes that caught the sourceless light and gave none back. He could see them with Void Sight: red auras, most of them D-rank and below equivalents, the ordinary population of the first layer.
But toward the west, farther than standard Void Sight should have reached, but the Underworld's ambient mana seemed to amplify it, a cluster of red auras in two different sizes. The smaller ones were C-rank equivalents. The larger one
His Portal began to close.
He stepped back through into the warehouse with one second to spare and the window sealed behind him with a sound like a lock turning.
He sat down on a piece of rubble and let his breathing slow.
The system updated: [VOID AFFINITY +7 (Ambient Absorption, Underworld, First Layer)]
Seven points from ten minutes of standing there. The training implications of that number were significant.
He pulled up his status screen and examined what three weeks of questing, dungeon clearing, and daily training had built:
[LEVEL: 11][STRENGTH: 28 | AGILITY: 31 | ENDURANCE: 24 | PERCEPTION: 36 | VOID AFFINITY: 1,287][SHADOW REGISTER: 67 units - Composition: 12 Bone Sentinels, 8 Draugr, 4 Frost Shades (converted), 9 Shadow Crawlers, 6 Hellhounds, 3 Void Wraiths, 2 Gargoyle Hatchlings, 4 Myth-Born Echoes, 18 assorted D-rank variants, 1 Fenris (ALPHA-CLASS)][TITLES: Shadow Born, Dungeon Sovereign, Null No More, First Portal]
Sixty-seven soldiers. And tomorrow he planned to run a Class C Gate using only his army, no personal engagement, and extract everything that fell.
He pulled out his phone to check the Gate listings and found, instead, a message from an unknown number.
It was four words.
[I know what you are.]
He stared at it for a long time. Then he looked around the warehouse with Void Sight, all white auras, ordinary humans in the buildings around him, no one close. The message had no follow-up. No name, no location, no context.
He saved the number and labeled it: [UNKNOWN - WATCH]
He went home. He slept well despite the message, or perhaps because of it.
People who announced that they knew your secret before they explained what they planned to do with it were usually trying to open a negotiation. That was manageable. People who simply acted on the knowledge were the problem.
This person had chosen to talk. That bought them some time.
For now.