Her name was Sera Ashveil.
He found that out the same evening via the Association's public Hunter directory, A-rank, ice-type specialization, twelve years registered, currently ranked fourth on the national combat power index. She was known in Hunter circles as the Frost Sovereign, a title earned not through any system or external designation but through the kind of reputation that accumulates when you clear S-rank Gates as a solo A-ranker. She had come close to the S-rank reclassification threshold twice. Both times the panel had held firm on A-rank due to what the official reports called 'incomplete demonstration of peak output.'
She was also, according to two separate Hunter community forums, the person most likely to be the Association's unofficial intelligence operative within the A-rank tier. Which was to say, she was probably reporting on other high-ranked Hunters and their activities to someone in the upper administration.
To Voss.
He filed that under 'complications' and moved on.
The gold aura to the north was now close enough that on a clear night, with Void Sight at full extension, he could make out its rough shape. It was enormous, the size of a building in aura-terms, though the physical form producing it was unclear at this range. And it was no longer moving toward Veramore. It had stopped, approximately thirty kilometers north of the city, in the forests of the Ash Ridge wilderness area where no permanent structures existed and no humans were likely to be.
It was waiting.
He took a transit north on Friday morning, leaving the city in early grey light, and walked into the Ash Ridge forest with Shade at his heel and Fenris contained in the Register.
He found the source of the gold aura in a clearing where the trees had pulled back in a perfect circle, not fallen or cut, but grown away, their trunks curving outward as if the space had requested politely to be left alone and the trees had complied. At the center of the clearing was a woman.
She was old. Or she looked old, the long white hair and the deep facial lines said centuries, but her posture was the posture of someone in their physical prime, straight-backed and still, seated cross-legged on bare earth with her palms on her knees. She wore simple clothing: grey wool, practical boots, nothing that identified her as a Hunter or as anything else recognizable.
Her aura, this close, was overwhelming. Gold so deep it was almost orange, layered in rings like a planet's atmosphere, with a core of something darker at the center, not malevolent, just profound. Ancient. The kind of aura that made his Void Sight stutter slightly, like looking at something the ability had not been designed to fully process.
She opened her eyes when he entered the clearing. They were gold. Not the metaphorical gold of unusual irises but the literal gold of something that had never been human and had grown very comfortable in a human-shaped vessel.
'Shadow child,' she said. Her voice had no accent, or rather it had all of them, layered beneath each other like strata. 'You came quickly. I've only been waiting eleven days.'
'What are you?' Liu Yun asked.
'Oracle is the word your current cultural framework would use. I am a transmission medium for divine information, assigned to your lineage generation.' She tilted her head. 'Your father was also supposed to receive the transmission. He died before I could reach him.'
The clearing was very quiet.
'My father.'
'B-rank Hunter. Died in a structural collapse twelve years ago.' She said it without softening, not cruel, simply factual, as if facts were things that should be stated cleanly. 'The collapse was not an accident. There was an entity in that dungeon that should not have been there, a creature from the Seventh Layer, the domain of the Demon King Bael, that had followed the Gate through and hidden inside the dungeon structure. It triggered the collapse to eliminate the Hunter party because it had identified your father as a potential threat. His Void Affinity, while unawakened, was already registering to entities capable of detecting it.'
Liu Yun stood very still.
'Your father had the same gift,' the Oracle said. 'It rarely manifests in the same bloodline twice in consecutive generations, but the Void Chronicle chose your lineage specifically because of him. Because his death created a particular kind of debt.'
'What kind?'
'The kind that the Void Chronicle was built to collect.' She stood, unfolding from the cross-legged position with the fluid ease of something that did not experience physical discomfort. She was taller than she had appeared sitting, nearly as tall as him. 'Bael is aware you exist. He has been aware since you opened your first Void Portal. The Seventh Layer touches all layers, and when a Void Sovereign opens a portal, it resonates downward. He has already sent three scouts to observe you.'
'I know. I've seen them.' The three gold-aura anomalies he had detected at the edges of his Void Sight range over the past week, he had assumed they were Gate fracture phenomena. Now he reclassified them.
She looked at him with something that might have been approval. 'Then you understand the timeline.'
'Tell me anyway.'
'Bael will send an Avatar to your world within three months. An Avatar is not the Demon King himself, it is a fragment of his power given physical form, sufficient to breach the First Layer and enter the mortal world through a controlled Gate fracture. It will be equivalent to four S-rank Hunters. When it arrives, it will announce Bael's claim on the mortal world and begin the process of weakening the barriers between layers.'
'And if it succeeds?'
'Then the Gates will stop being passages and become permanent openings. The Mythological Underworld will begin to overlay the mortal world. Not invasion, absorption. Your reality will become a new layer.'
Liu Yun looked at the gold-eyed Oracle in the silent clearing and thought about Director Voss and his billboard and his conference room and the words VERAMORE IS SAFE.
'You mentioned a debt to collect,' he said.
'The Void Chronicle was created by the first Void Sovereign, a being that predates the current divine order, specifically to produce a counterforce to the Demon King's expansion. The debt is Bael's: he owes a death for what he did to your father and to a hundred lineages before him.' The Oracle looked at him steadily. 'You are the collection.'
Shade's violet eyes burned bright at his heel.
'Three months,' Liu Yun said.
'Less, now, that he knows you exist and are growing faster than predicted.'
Liu Yun looked up at the curved-away trees of the clearing and the grey sky above and thought about how three years ago he had been Null Morrow and now the Demon King of the Seventh Underworld Layer considered him a threat.
'I'll need more shadows,' he said.
'Yes,' the Oracle said simply. 'You will.'