I crumpled up the note and tossed it into the embers of the dying fire of the fireplace. At once, the fireplace glowed bright green before I heard a ‘thromp,’ and green light shot up and out of the fireplace's chimney.

I rushed outside and looked up to see a green flare hang in the air for a moment before vanishing. What the hell is going on?

I waited, looking around the valley’s walls for any indication of something happening, but nothing changed. Trusting in the note maker, I constructed a smaller Void Gate to converse my Mana. Instead of thinking of a location, I willed it to materialize fifty meters in front of me.

The construct clicked, and the gate opened. Immediately I felt all of my Mana get sucked from me. I glimpsed at the portal for a moment and noticed blackness on the other side. I let the portal vanish, crashing to my knees, gasping for air.

Why hadn’t that worked? I pulled my Full Status up and noticed my Mana ticking up twenty points a second. What in the world? I sat there watching as it rose. My pool had been filled back to full in a little over three minutes.

I repeated the same thing again, willing it to materialize fifty meters in front of me. Again, blackness and large chunks of my Mana vanished. What was the issue here? I waited for my Mana to regenerate once more, and I slowly created the construct in my mind, going step by step.

As soon as I willed the gate in front of me and thought fifty, it clicked. The spell didn’t wait for me to think meters or kilometers. So what was the spell using? Fifty of what distance in front of me?

I allowed the construct to vanish and begin again once my mana restored itself to full. This time I thought of one in front of me and willed the creation of the gate. My Mana did not leave me anywhere as fast as last time, but looking through the gate I could see nothing but inky blackness.

“How far away is one unit of what the spell was using?” I asked the valley and got zero response.

It only took less than a minute before my Mana was full again. This time I faced the widest part of the valley and created it again. This time I willed it to only be a quarter of one as the distance. When the gates materialized, I could finally see both of them. The gate in front of me showed the grass and the mountain close to it.

If that was a quarter of whatever unit of measurement the spells used, then every time I had created a gate before had I created them on the inside of the mountain in front of me?

I looked at the gate in the distance and guessed it was around a hundred and fifty meters away, maybe less. Dismissing the gates I thought about I would be able to measure things out. Coming up with an idea, I raised a small stone platform above the grass and then hopped off. I began walking forward, putting one foot in front of another so they were touching. I counted out a hundred and fifty steps then willed another stone platform to rise. Three of my steps would be pretty close to a meter in length, give or take a centimeter or two.

I hopped up on the new platform and faced the first platform. There should be around fifty meters in between the two. I didn’t have to wait as my Mana was already full, so this time I willed another Void Gate at twelve and a half percent of a unit away. The gate materialized a couple of meters beyond the first stone platform. Close, but not close enough.

I repeated it again, but this time at only a tenth of a unit, and now f the exit gate sat just on the edge of the platform closer to me.

Was this what my savior wanted me to learn? How to control distance with the Void Gates? I recreated the gate a few more times making sure that a tenth would always get me the exact same distance away from me.

I calculated that the distance of one unit had to be close to five hundred meters or a few meters below that. So that meant when I was trying to make the gate fifty away, It was popping up almost twenty-five kilometers away. No wonder my Mana was draining so fast. I was putting my gate somewhere in the mountain behind the one I was facing.

I went back down to the bigger Underground Campsite. I thought about making a couple of bags with the amount of Mana regen I had here and decided I would return here and do just that.

I stood where I found the note and faced the fireplace. I made the gate again, but this time I willed it to be a tenth of a distance underneath me. When the gate finished, and I could see through it, I shrieked in surprise as the small half-man, half-octopus screamed on the other side.

The gate snapped shut as I let go of it, and I stared where the odd-looking man had just stood. I then remembered back to arriving at the port in Mythtide and seeing a man just like the man who had been on the other side of the portal. I realized it was probably the same race who had been smoking a pipe on my chair at the peak of the mountain.

Calming myself down, I recreated the last portal and looked around. The man was gone, and the room seemed large and round. Hoping it wasn’t a trap, I walked through the gate and allowed it to vanish after stepping through it.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the lower levels of light. When they accumulated, I looked around the room. It wasn’t as round as I had expected. The room had twenty-four sides, and against almost every side of the room stood a stone gate.

It looked like a portal room I had designed in my mind while I was bored one day. To my left instead of a stone gateway, an opening led into a hall. I looked around the inert gateways once more. The creature or man I had seen before was nowhere to be found.

Shrugging and deciding to leave where he had gone for later, I walked through the only door and down the hallway. It turned ninety degrees at the end and then into what I could only imagine was a kill room as it was filled with guards all eyeing me distrustfully as I stepped into the room.

“Halt!” one of the small half-man, half-octopus shouted.

I stopped and looked around. I counted over a dozen of the armor-clad men fanned out in a half-circle around me. I could see holes above me, with what I assumed had more of these creatures on the other side of them.

“Who is your god, and not the one from here?!” the same guard from before shouted at me.

“Elune?” I asked, surprised by the question.

“It’s him! Someone go get Frirwick!” shouted the same guard.

All of the guards still held their small spears at the ready. Slowly, one of the men closest to the back door lowered his spear and took off running into the next hall. We all stood in silence, staring at one another. I was about to create a stone chair out of the floor when I heard the guard returning a moment later.

Behind him was the same man I had seen in front of my Void Gate earlier, and possibly the same from the mountain’s peak. He looked at me with wide eyes, removing his hat and then bowing to me.

“It’s an honor to meet the master’s young apprentice,” he said.

“What? Who’s an apprentice?” I asked, confused.

“We were told by the Void Lord, that one such as yourself would find his way to us. We are to allow you to use the fifteenth and seventeenth gates till you return from The Trial of Adrihel.”

“Who is the Void Lord, and where do the fifteenth and seventeenth gates lead to? Do I need to go to the trial?”

Every guard in the room looked back at the red hat-wearing man.

“Umm. He said his identity was catslafield? I think that’s the word he used. You would find out later. As for the gates, we don’t know the ninth runes to turn them on outside the two you’re allowed to use.”

“Catslafield? Do you mean classified?”

Frirwick shrugged.

“Come, follow,” said Frirwick as he walked past me and towards the Gate Room.

The small man began counting the gates to his left. He seemed to have lost count and had to walk back to the first one and begin counting again. I counted to fifteen as he stopped in front of the same gate I had counted to, and then reached into the bag at his side and pulled a letter from it.

“The Void Lord said to give you this letter and to tell you the rune would only work on this gate. You will learn the rune for the seventeenth gate soon,” he said as he handed me the folded-up letter with a wax seal holding it closed.

The wax seal had an odd symbol imprinted at its center. It had a large circle at the center with eight smaller circles spread around it evenly, with the circle looping around the larger circle’s edge.

The wax seal dissolved when I touched it. Unfolding the letter, it held a small message telling me the gate’s ninth rune was below the message. The rune was in the shape of Luin’s head. The same shape her Stigmata took when it branded me.

As I thought about the Stigmata on my chest, the gate in front of us blazed to life. At first, the portal had taken on the shape of swirling water before slowly calming down. As the portal began to calm, I could see the familiar gray-blue stones on the other side.

“Whelp, my job is done. When you come back from the trial, please stay inside this room. If you need anything, ask one of the guards to come and get me,” said Frirwick as he walked out the room.

I watched him leave and was startled when the gate behind me snapped shut. I looked back at the gate and studied its runes. I recognized a few of the symbols but didn’t know the one that was set up for the power source. I removed my notebook and wrote all the symbols down and their locations.

Finished, I thought back to Luin’s head-shaped Stigmata, and the gate came to life once more. I stepped through and into a square room. At the center stood a stone pillar with what looked like a piece of paper lying atop it. To the side were two large but empty and opened treasure chests.

I walked forward and picked up the piece of paper.

Zeal,

I’m sorry about all the secrecy. I had to get you here quickly. In front of you on the wall, place your hand upon it. Then place your hand on the stone table in the next room as well. Just to sate some of your curiosity, the creatures you just met are called Octagnomes. It’s an interesting tale of how they came to be. I’m sure you’ll hear it sometime on an adventure. This will be the last time you hear from me. I’ve meddled enough as it is.

That was it. No ‘P.S’ nothing else. I didn’t know if I should be mad or happy. I had an idea of where I was. I walked over to the back wall and placed my hand on it. The familiar door with the bluish metal simply came into being in a blink.

I pushed the door open and could see the very familiar metal pipes and glowing crystals of my spawn altar. I walked in and allowed the door to close behind me. I turned around to the now bare stone wall and placed my hand on the wall. The door instantly materialized again.

Turning around, I walked over to the stone altar and laid my hand on it.

[ Altar of Resurrection ]

Zeallendric: Alive: 0

Luin: Dead: 500

???: Alive: 0

Lucian: Alive: 0

Five hundred what? Possibly Energy? I removed one of the Rank S, Class Azure cores from my bag. I waited for some kind of a prompt, but nothing came. I then sat the core on the stone altar and watched as the core liquified before being absorbed by the top of the table.

I placed my hand on the table again.

[ Altar of Resurrection ]

Zeallendric: Alive: 0

Luin: Dead: 436

???: Alive: 0

Lucian: Alive: 0

The alter wanted Energy. Hoping it would be enough to bring Luin back for me, I took out a handful of S Rank cores and placed them on the table. The counter was at zero when I looked once more.

I scanned the room, waiting for a new message or something to happen. Noises or movement, anything to tell me Luin was being revived. I stared at the empty table, then around the room. Maybe it wasn’t a fast process?

I turned and moved towards the same door I had used before to leave the room. I stopped and placed my hand on the wall next to the door, and it vanished. I took a step back and opened my Magic Map. It didn’t show my location, and I thought that was odd. I closed my map and was about to place my hand on the wall once again, but I heard an angry cry from behind me.