This entrance to the secret realm hadn't actually been discovered by the trio themselves.
While wandering through the desert, they had robbed a Trainer and found records concerning this secret realm on his body. Alongside the map was an adventure log the Trainer had kept.
People might joke about who still bothers keeping a written journal these days, but an adventure log is worth far more than an ordinary diary. It laid out an explorer's route and everything they'd gained along the way, which made it valuable reference material on its own, and doubly so now, since the Trainer who wrote it had almost certainly been silenced by the three bandits.
By the light of the campfire Growlithe had lit beside the desert off-road vehicle, Nova skimmed through the log's contents first.
He gathered that the Trainer had been an elder, somewhere in his sixties. He hadn't pushed into the wasteland out of financial need. Already comfortably well-off, he had set out on this dangerous journey again and again purely for the love of adventure.
Perhaps it was that very passion that had let the old man travel farther than most others managed. Seven degrees west of true north from Forest City, at a straight-line distance of two hundred kilometers, he had come across an oasis fed by a small spring.
The oasis itself was nothing remarkable. It was the spring that mattered. Its water didn't rise up from the ground; it poured down out of thin air, as though some legendary river in the sky had come to life.
Of course, there was no river in the sky. What was really there was a small spatial rift, hovering seven or eight meters above the ground. It seemed likely that whatever lay on the other side of that rift had flowing water of its own, which spilled through into this world. Judging by the details in the old man's log, this appeared to be a newly formed spatial passage.
Small secret realms, limited in size, could usually sustain only a single spatial passage. Any additional rift would tear apart the realm's spatial structure, and a fragment that could no longer hold itself together would be forced to merge back into the main world, eventually becoming just another part of it. In fact, the sheer size of this world was largely the result of countless such fragments being absorbed over time.
Ultra-large secret realms were a different matter entirely. Spanning hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of square kilometers, their spatial structures were remarkably stable, stable enough to support hundreds of rifts at once. That meant an ultra-large secret realm could have hundreds of entrances and exits, which made it far harder for any single League to monopolize access to the whole thing.
Of course, scholars had worked out that the more rifts a realm developed, the tighter the connection grew between that realm and the main world. And the more the two spaces interacted, the more they influenced each other, which in turn produced even more rifts. Eventually, even an ultra-large secret realm's space would grow unstable and merge fully into the main world.
Disasters on that scale had happened before. The Black Continent, now classified by humans as a wasteland, was said to have formed centuries ago when an ultra-large secret realm collapsed into the main world.
Nova judged the rift the old man had found to be a fresh entrance to an ultra-large secret realm, since although the spot wasn't on any route Trainers needed to cross, it also wasn't so remote that Trainers never passed near it. A marvel like this couldn't have sat undiscovered for long if it had always been there.
Unfortunately, an entrance to an ultra-large secret realm was an enormously valuable resource for any League. The old man had been lucky enough to stumble onto the discovery of his lifetime during what turned out to be his final expedition.
But his luck ran out just as clearly on the way home, when he crossed paths with bandits.
No wonder the Stocky Man had refused to give up the vehicle's location until the very end. If he'd somehow survived, that well-stocked desert off-road vehicle would have been his only way out of this Uninhabited Area, and the map and log recording the rift's exact location would have been his ticket back from ruin.
What a greedy fool, choosing money over his own life.
Fortunately, men like that never understood the value of treating their partners well. The moment he stopped breathing, the two dogs led Nova straight to the very thing he had refused to give up even in death.
Since this now touched on the discovery of a secret realm entrance, it wasn't something Nova could simply decide on his own anymore. He wasn't just some Trainer carrying an ID card these days; he had standing now.
Either way, he had Mort, Gilbert, and the entire weight of the Layered Peaks Gym standing behind him, along with all the people and matters that came with that backing.
The stakes tied to a secret realm entrance, mining rights to its resources and permits to capture rare Pokémon within it, represented a windfall large enough to matter even to a top-tier Dojo with wealth to rival a nation's.
Nova was deeply grateful, in that moment, that he now held the status of successor to the Layered Peaks Gym. Had he still been just a lone professional Trainer, there was no way he could have claimed a resource this massive on his own. At best, he might have slipped into the secret realm to catch a handful of rare Pokémon to strengthen his own team, or dug up a few resources to sell off.
That was nothing compared to simply going back to Gilbert. Once word reached him, mining operations and transport crews would all be arranged without delay. The bigger the pie grew, the more people like Nova, who got to share in it, could take for themselves.
Nova decided this matter deserved a very high priority, higher even than going to dig up the cache of Trapinch eggs that Taylor had left behind.
Still, he couldn't just turn around and go running back to Gilbert and Mort over this. That would make him look like a child who only ran to his parents the moment something happened. Besides, all the time spent traveling back and forth would accomplish nothing.
Nova decided to head straight for the location marked on the map and stake his claim there first. He was, after all, now a registered Trainer of the Layered Peaks Gym.
As long as he occupied the site, it would mark the place as Layered Peaks Gym territory. Even if someone else stumbled onto it later and tried to claim it as their own discovery, they would have to answer to the Gym itself.