Caelum’s blazing sun lowered itself slowly, hiding behind the pristine white mountains that lined Snowdrift’s horizon. The evening’s light snowfall became progressively heavier as night grew closer. Following nature’s momentum, the village also grew calm and quiet. Snowdrift wasn’t a noisy place to begin with, but the populace had grown quieter than usual after the incident with the jotun drew to a close. Whether it was the sun, the villagers or the handful of outsiders, everything seemed ready to settle down and rest.

As for Jayce, he was the most tired out of all of them.

A frigid wind blew through the streets, causing him to shiver. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the icy mist in the Frozen Expanse, but Jayce still reflexively coaxed his soulfire to warm himself. He felt Marin jolt a little when this heat wave reached her pale skin. She turned to glance at him, inadvertently bringing their bodies even closer together. Misunderstanding the curious look in her eyes, Jayce once again advised her to go to a hospital. She rolled her light blue eyes in response.

“If anything, you’re the one who needs to see a doctor.”

“I only need a bed.”

Jayce had recovered from much worse injuries in the Fragmented Ruins, so he wasn’t worried about his current condition. Having drank a fair amount of monster blood, Jayce’s body was recovering at a rate almost visible to the naked eye.

Marin didn’t reply, and they continued to stumble through the streets while leaning on each other. The comfortable silence was eventually broken by Jayce, who couldn’t hold back anymore. He was too exhausted to ask about Marin’s issues with the village or Froker’s transformation and subsequent death, but there was something he felt he needed to know as soon as possible.

“How do you open the first gate?”

Marin’s drooping ears shot up in surprise. “You’ve reached level 20?”

“Yea. No one told me what to do next.”

“Who the heck was your…Whatever, you’ll challenge the first gate after you fall asleep. The system will give you a test in your dreams and if you pass, you’ll open the gate. Be careful though. If you fail, you’ll wake up with severe injuries. Every failure brings heavier wounds and eventually you’ll be risking your life.”

“What is the test?”

“The tests are unique for every individual and I can’t guess what you’ll see. That said, every gate has its own theme. The first gate is the Gate of Acceptance.”

“Acceptance?”

“Yea, specifically…”

Jayce’s eyelids grew heavy as he listened to Marin talk about the Gate of Acceptance. Even though he had been the one to offer Marin a shoulder, they were both relying on each other by the end of their journey.

After they climbed the stairs to Marin’s room, Jayce worried he’d collapse right then and there. He stubbornly persisted until Marin unlocked the door before falling onto her couch. Marin winced when his blood encrusted body touched her furniture.

“At least let me throw a tarp over it or something.”

“…Sorry,” Jayce mumbled a reply, but he didn’t get up. “Do you need anything for your leg?”

“I told you, I can treat it here. Don’t worry about me and focus on the system’s test. If you don’t pass in your condition…Ah, never mind. Good luck.”

Marin’s tail puffed up a little and she quickly turned to look at Jayce. With Jayce’s current injuries, his life might be in danger on his first attempt.

Jayce saw how she was worried about scaring him and chuckled.

“Good luck…You could say my luck is ridiculously good…but it’s also…” he trailed off as his eyes slowly fell shut.

Marin frowned a little when she saw how his features were bent in a conflicted expression.

---

A set of double doors opened up and light spilled into a dimly lit corridor. Youthful murmurings followed that light and soon the corridor was filled by a group of vivacious college students. They happily talked about this and that while stomping out of the basement floor of the lecture building. Most of them had just finished their final class of the day and were eager to spend their afternoon elsewhere.

Behind the main body of students that had already ascended the stairs, there were several stragglers. Three of these stragglers were walking at a moderate pace but they constantly stopped to glance backwards. When they did, a shit-eating grin could be seen on each of their faces.

“Don’t you all have somewhere to be?” A young man who was even further back scolded them.

“Haha, don’t be so cold, Jayce,” one of them laughed.

“You’re making us feel lonely, trying to run off with your new girlfriend like that,” another chuckled.

“Punish him! We’re going to follow you back to your dorm, so you’d better take care of your single bros.”

“I want you to take care of me, too,” Emily—his girlfriend—said, tugging at his sleeve from her place at his side. Jayce glowered at her and she responded with a sly grin.

Jayce put on a difficult expression as he looked at these four, but his eyes were bright. “My parents called me this morning and said they wanted to visit today, so I don’t have time to hang out.”

At the mention of his parents, the boys’ grins only grew wider while Emily stepped back and looked at herself with her phone’s camera.

“Your dad’s cool. We’ll let him party with us.”

“Ah, your mom’s going to give me that look, isn’t she? The ‘why is my angelic son still hanging out with this loser’ look.”

“Let’s go. As long as we’re already in his dorm, they won’t kick us out.”

While Jayce’s three friends crowded around him, he noticed Emily preening herself off to the side. Breathing out slowly, she pocketed her phone and put on an unusually serious expression.

Jayce ultimately failed to keep any of them out of his room. His parents arrived, and as predicted, they didn’t kick anyone out. Despite things being cramped, the atmosphere was pleasant. Jayce relaxed and laughed along with everyone else. Usually he acted more stoic but for some reason he couldn’t hold back his smile at this moment.

And yet, somewhere in his mind, Jayce felt an extreme chill. It was like there was an ice-cold hand constantly prodding the back of his neck, determined to spoil his happiness and remind him why he was really here.

‘So, this is the test to open the first gate?’

Jace felt like there were two personalities seesawing back and forth in his head. If he got too invested in his surroundings, he’d start to forget everything about the Upper Bound. Despite it being risky, Jayce couldn’t just ignore these people who he wanted to see so badly.

After listening to Marin, he had a good idea of what to expect from the first gate’s test. The Gate of Acceptance’s theme was accepting the world around you—in other words, the world of the Upper Bound. For a citizen from the Lower Bound, that meant rejecting one’s old world.

That ice-cold feeling surged and scenes from his recent nightmares flooded his mind. Jayce clutched his head and dropped his cheerful expression. Glancing at the door, Jayce knew what he had to do. He stood up and walked across the room. Sensing his strange mood, his friends and family looked at him with concern. They asked him what was wrong and tried to drag him back into the conversation, but he forced himself to ignore them.

“Um, Jayce…your expression is kind of scary,” Emily called out weakly.

Unlike her usual smug self, Emily had been acting like a cat on hot bricks when she was around Jayce’s parents. Seeing her meek side made Jayce fall a little deeper into the dream.

A wave of frustration rose in his chest like bile and he clenched his teeth. He hadn’t wanted to think about it, but Emily was also stuck somewhere in the Upper Bound. Helping her was out of the question, as he could barely manage himself at the moment. Jayce was also very aware that he wasn’t that close with Emily. He liked her and she liked him, but their relationship hadn’t lasted very long before they were spirited away. Part of why he didn’t want to think about her situation was that he didn’t want to weigh their relationship against how troublesome it would be to find her.

“I’m kind of jealous that you were taken first,” he found himself muttering. “Because of that, you don’t have to worry about anyone but yourself.”

“…What?” ‘Emily’ cocked her head.

Jayce covered his face with one hand and sucked in a breath of air. “No, forget it. I’m glad I only said that to a fake.”

Before anyone could stop him, he rushed to the door and gripped the knob. His hands shook and he couldn’t stop himself from looking back at everyone. Jayce had half expected them to turn into monsters and chase him down. Instead, they were just watching him with worried expressions.

“I…I really want to go back. I want to talk with all of you like this someday. But even if that doesn’t happen, I’m not going to give up. I know how everyone thinks of the people who disappear,” Jayce paused to glance at the fake Emily. “Most of the time you’re worried about what’s happening to them, but sometimes you comfort yourself and imagine they’re doing just fine in their new world. I really want to prove that feeling right.”

Jayce pushed the door open and ran through it. Similar to when he was teleported, the world around him fell away and he lost control of his body.

An unknown amount of time later, Jayce’s eyes snapped open and he looked around. He was inside of an enormous tower with an open ceiling. The walls and floor of this tower were covered in a sticky dark red substance. This substance flowed aggressively like a raging river, but it was calm directly beneath Jayce’s feet. Looking up, Jayce saw a blazing white sun whose edges were tinged with a violet hue. Jayce squinted, feeling this ‘sun’ was strangely familiar. Once he found a second purple sun off to the side and a tiny glowing green-white moon, he realized where he was.

‘I’m inside my own chest?’ Jayce thought, raising his guard. That white sun was his soul, the other was his soulfire and the moon was the spirit of freedom. He should have already left the dreamworld, which meant that this place was likely real.

Jayce nearly jumped when the tower suddenly changed. The bloody walls were replaced with cold metal and glowing blue veins. This metal tower was incredibly smooth and as he looked around, Jayce felt like he was in the barrel of a gun. Before he could calm down, the tower changed for a third time. Now, the walls were liquid again, but they were made of various metals. By his feet was a raging inferno that melted everything aside from himself.

‘This tower is…my classes?’

Looking at the three transformations, that was the only idea Jayce could come up with. Bloody walls representing Bloodrager, a gun barrel representing Marksman and a sweltering forge for Soul Forger. His thoughts were interrupted when information from the system popped into his head.

At least one of the conditions has been met. Do you wish to challenge the nightmare stage or exit the test?

Jayce frowned. He knew that every gate’s test had a dream stage and a nightmare stage. The dream stage was the orthodox test, and if it was failed, the challenger would be forced into the nightmare stage. Failing the nightmare stage would cause the challenger to wake up with injuries that got progressively worse with each failure.

These two stages represented what the translator called the of the test’s theme and passing either of them was enough to open the next gate.

The problem was that Marin hadn’t mentioned anything like this. According to her, he should have already woken up. Both this tower and the system giving him a choice were anomalies.

“If I failed, I should have been thrown straight into the nightmare stage. Why is it giving me a choice? Is there any benefit to beating both stages?” Jayce asked aloud.

Unsurprisingly, the system didn’t reply.

Jayce spent some time asking other questions while examining this strange tower, but these actions proved to be fruitless. The system wouldn’t respond to anything besides ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and the tower was just a cylindrical room. Eventually, Jayce stopped looking around and came to a decision.

“Well then, I’ll steal a line from someone whose confidence I admire. Compared to leaving and regretting it, I’d rather enter the next stage and regret it. I wish to challenge the nightmare stage.”

He had decided that, despite his injuries, this opportunity shouldn’t be missed.

The world fell away once again, and when Jayce opened his eyes, he saw familiar worn stone bricks and a variety of plants and fungi. Jayce was standing on top of a circular platform surrounded by descending stairs. It took him less than a second to realize that he was inside the Fragmented Ruins. This was one of the large boss rooms from the only non-broken world fragment he’d ever visited.

“Five seconds,” a pleasant girlish voice carried through the room, stopping Jayce’s heart. “If you survive more than five seconds, then you’ll know that you’ve grown since we first met.”

Slow footsteps echoed out, approaching Jayce from the other side of the platform. It wasn’t long before Mize stepped into view. The frills on her black-gold dress fluttered as she moved, pairing nicely with her waving gold-speckled ponytail. There were two curved black horns resting on her forehead, and below them were her terrifying golden eyes. Contrary to her imperious glare, her lips were drawn in a light smile and her scaly tail was waving in a playful manner. She looked both casual and domineering without an ounce of disharmony between the two.

“But you shouldn’t get ahead of yourself. Against a superior species, surviving a few more seconds is the best you can hope for.”

After she finished speaking, Mize simply stood there. Jayce had no doubt that the test was to fight her, but she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to make the first move.

Clenching his fists, Jayce quickly understood the ‘yin’ side of the Gate of Acceptance. The dream stage asked him to accept that he was no longer on Earth while the nightmare stage asked him to accept the Upper Bound’s inherent unfairness. Both were issues that he had struggled with deep in his heart, and to Jayce, the former was like a persistent ache while the latter was an open wound.

Seeker appeared out of the void and Jayce pointed its barrel straight at Mize. In response, she smiled and pulled out a black javelin.

“That desperate expression is a good look for you. If I had seen it earlier, I would have ordered you to wear it more often.”

Jayce remembered Mize ordering him to smile in front of her and he grit his teeth. “I’ll wipe that smirk off your face!”

“Haha, do your best ~.”