"Alon, can you hurry up? I'd rather we spend as little time in this disgusting place as possible."

At his partner's urging, Alon nodded and flew after the female ascendant's butt. If they were back home, he'd want to give it a nice good squeeze even though his wife would "playfully" smash his face in. But given their current location, he couldn't even muster the strength to think of anything lascivious.

While flying through the darkness, Alon scanned his surroundings, trying his best to penetrate the deep fog that perpetually permeated the Outlands.

'Hopefully, nothing pops out this time. And even if something does, with any luck, it's not too strong...'

A fact that would surprise anyone hearing about the place for the first time, was that all knights shared the same opinion about the Outlands: the deformed monsters weren't even the scariest aspect — it was the endless darkness that seemingly devoured the world outside a few meters around someone.

For the decades he'd served in the order, Alon spent quite a lot of time in the godforsaken world beyond the portal. The first time around, he had been a weak little mortal boy who almost pissed his pants after some freaky something tried to eat his face. But over time, he grew stronger and the monsters started becoming more manageable. Dealing with them was reduced to a cumbersome chore for someone like him.

Consequently, the subject of his fear shifted to something else.

Becoming an Ascendant afforded him with a whole host of powers — including, but not restricted to, perceiving everything in a large area around him.

The range was different for every ascendant. But Alon was one of the lucky ones in that regard. Just like the Sword Star had a ridiculous perception range when compared to other Transcendents, Alon was top of the shelf amongst the Ascendent knights. If he was someone who completely lacked morals, he could sit in the comfort of his own home while simultaneously "watching" the newlywed couple three blocks away consummate their love — not that he would actually do that though.

'In here, my gift means nothing.'

The Outlands, just like death, was equal to all.

To the Outlands, the talent that Alon took pride in was worthless. Ascendents were just as blind as mortals here — when one took away an Ascendent's ability to "see" from every direction, that is.

The darkness around them steadily chipped away at their sanity, whittling them down with the fear that literally anything could be eyeing them from beyond the impenetrable darkness. If there were a hundred Transcendent Nightmare Spawns having a dinner party a few yards away from him, Alon would never know until he made it to the afterlife — if there really was one, he doubted.

'If Sormon wants a rise in adherents, all they'd have to do is bring a bunch of non-believers here.'

This wretched place would put the fear of god in anyone. Alon himself had started attending mass because of the Outlands.

"This should be the last beacon." His wife, Runasvanna, held an arm out to signal him to stop before slowly coming to a halt herself. For good measure, she preemptively sent a pulse of vibration outward, closing her eyes to more easily feel its return — one of the few ways of perception that worked in the Outlands. It was an elemental application idea born from "echolocation", which was a concept that the first king wrote about before he left the world peacefully in his sleep.

Too bad only those with the wind attribute could use it to a meaningful enough extent.

"All clear." Runasvanna looked at him as she started descending. "Your turn to work."

"Yes, ma'am." Alon nodded with a chuckle as he started flying down as well.

The moment their feet touched the cursed soil that acted as the Outlands' ground, both of them got to work. Runasvanna knelt down and took out all sorts of tools that Alon knew nothing about how to use.

While she got to work utilizing her skills as a grandmaster rune artisan, Alon tried to be useful despite his wide perception range being mostly useless. He enveloped her with a thick earthen dome that had a significant amount of his essence in it. It looked simple and unassuming, but Alon was confident it would protect his wife against most things — as long as a Transcendent didn't come around.

In the case one did though, nothing they did would matter anyway. He would just have to settle with the fact that he would share his final moments with the love of his life.

Alon gave the stone dome a good knock with his fist and nodded in satisfaction when no sound was produced — except for his bone's scream of protest from striking something impossibly hard. With that done, he sent a few "anchors" of earth essence deep beneath the cursed soil. After only a few seconds, it reached a sufficient depth for him to activate it as a wide-area domination aetherblade art.

'I wonder how the fight's going...?'

As he replicated the technique, he remembered the young knight who had created it with him. Surely, the second prince was getting beaten up by that girl.

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Or maybe not. Reality often tended to surpass expectations. Who knew how the fight would turn out? Not him, certainly. At least not yet.

After all, instead of enjoying the founding festival, he was suddenly called in for work. It was a small fortune that his wife was called in with him.

'Three times in a month is a bit much.'

It was a fact confirmed over a long time that the portal on the outland's side changed locations every so often. Luckily, the portal in the palace didn't, otherwise, they would have a lot of questions to answer to the public.

And it was also a fact that the "portal shift" happened every decade or so.

At least, it was a fact until a month ago, when the portal's location changed before the expected shift period. And then it happened again a week later. Then another time three weeks later.

Three times.

The portal switched locations three times in a month when only one shift was expected per decade.

It was a reality that overturned all the data that Aizen had collected throughout the years. In the end, the scholars simply shrugged and decided that either they had simply gotten lucky that the shifts followed a general pattern for a while, or something had changed in the outlands, causing the portal shifts to happen more often.

What this possible change was, though, nobody could possibly imagine. The Outlands was a bottomless hole that would create more questions about it every time one question was answered.

All the kingdom could do was adapt to it.

The beacon his wife was setting up was part of that adaptation.

Thinking about it, Alon wondered why they didn't do this earlier. But he also understood that everything was clearer in hindsight.

The beacons themselves possessed only basic functions: to attain near-undetectability and transmit their precise locations to a separate enchanted device. Constructed from a material called "Aizenite," an alloy named after the nation itself, the beacons didn't corrode, exhibited exceptional durability and relative flexibility, and served as an ideal material for creating enchanted items.

As for the idea behind the beacon, it was fairly straightforward.

The beacons transmit their location to the palace constantly. It was akin to the beating of a heart right after exerting oneself — every beat sent a tick to the palace.

This meant that it became possible to know when the portal on the Outlands' side shifted.

Moreover, another possibility became a reality with this innovation — they could now obtain data on how much distance was covered each shift. Doing so enabled them to predict future portal shift locations. And although somewhat vague, it also allowed them to map the Outlands, which had been an impossible endeavor in the past.

'It's revolutionary. Revolutionary, I tell ya.'

Mapping would make exploration incredibly easier. It would also alleviate some of the risk of getting lost — though it was better to not get lost than to discover a way back. Still, contingencies must be prepared for, so smaller beacons were made available to individuals so they would be easier to rescue.

Really though. This should have been invented much earlier. And by earlier, he actually meant eighty or fifty years earlier.

The beacons had only been around for a couple of decades.

'Maybe my sense of time is slowly getting corroded...'

Despite Alon's thoughts running idle, he didn't neglect his duty to act as a guard. Being alert was second nature to him, however, so although it was ironic, he could be alert even when he wasn't. That hardly made sense when he put it like that, and people would think he was crazy if he said it out loud, but that was just the way it was.

Perhaps the world was eager to provide a way for him to prove himself, since suddenly, an object broke through the darkness and headed straight for his face.

"Whoa there," Alon's eyes widened in surprise, but before he even noticed it, he had already grabbed the foreign object out of the air with a generously essence-pumped hand. There wasn't any force behind the object though, so there was no hostility behind its motion. Most likely, the wind or something blew it in his direction.

Which was strange, since natural winds were rare in the Outlands.

"What's this?"

'A feather?'

That was the only way he could describe it — or rather, that was exactly what it was. The feather was of a sleek, elegant black color. Even though there was barely any light in the Outlands, the feather seemed to still reflect luminescence. For a feather, it was huge too. Far too big for something like a chicken or a falcon. If it did belong to a chicken, the chicken must have been big enough for him to ride.

As that was the case, Alon's first thought was that the feather belonged to a nightmare spawn. But just his intuition was telling him that wasn't the case — and his intuition had rarely failed him.

'I'll keep it for now.'

Alon decisively chose to stow away the feather for future investigation. This wasn't the time to be looking at it. Furthermore, he was a knight with a focus on scouting and defense. He was old too, but that didn't mean he was intelligent. There was no way his muscle-brained self would discover anything worthwhile no matter how much he studied it on his own.

But that was the beauty in belonging to Aizen — he didn't have to do it on his own.

There were plenty of people smarter than him and more well-informed than him. It was also their job to be smart, whereas Alon's job was to be a knight and fight things. Once upon a time, it was also his job to increase the population, but unfortunately, he and his wife had graduated from that duty — though it didn't mean they didn't reaffirm their affection for each other when time allowed.

"I'm done. Let's go." Runasvanna, his beautiful and loveable wife, the apple of his eye, the owner of his heart, a grandmaster rune artisan, a knight, and a damn good baker, destroyed his earthen dome from the inside and immediately flew into the sky. It was an event that would have shattered Alon's confidence in the technique if he hadn't intentionally made the dome brittle from the inside.

'I guess she doesn't wanna stay here any longer than I do. Well, nobody in their right mind would, I suppose.'

It was an understandable sentiment. Who would want to spend any amount of time in this dark and wretched place when they could instead be getting drunk out of their minds enjoying the founding festival? Alon could no longer get drunk, but that didn't mean he wasn't patriotic enough to party with his fellow citizens. This week was a time of rest and thankfulness for the nation's founding, throwing homage to how the endless wars ended when the first king united the peninsula.

Alon wanted to celebrate so badly.

'Work is work though.'

With one final scan of his surroundings, Alon flew up to follow his wife. Despite not having a visual of her, he knew from the beacon she had on her person that she was flying slow enough for him to catch up. Once he did, they smiled at each other, wordlessly celebrating a successful mission where they didn't have to fight anything — which was, in any knight's opinion, the best kind of success.

Unbeknownst to them, a pair of bright cyan eyes that emanated a deep intelligence watched them from far beyond the darkness of Outland.