Somehow, someway, we lived in the frontier.

Calling it difficult wouldn’t be right. It wasn’t just difficult, it was harrowing. We had to adjust, every moment, be ready to fight. Being high-strung wasn’t enough.

There were nights I woke up to yelling. There was no time to get ready. We slept in our clothes, because our armor had long since broken a bit. Because when there was screaming, there was no time for hesitation.

A single whiff of plum at night made my eyes tear open, and my spear appear in my hands. I had to summon it so often that my speed improved significantly. Spending so much time holding the weapon… I felt closer to it.

Things got so far, that I began to try and cycle Qi during my sleep. [Golden Body] was my highest technique now, after all, so I tried to push that to its very limits. We fought, and then we would cultivate, then scramble for food and rest wherever we could get it.

Every living moment was fraught with danger. Because of this, maybe we should have argued more, gotten angry and snapped at each other, but… it didn’t happen.

When we were woken up in the middle of a night by some abomination looking to kill us, trying to claw my gateway from my soul, we got up and fought it together. No one got angry. No one yelled, no one argued. We simply battled and went back to sleep.

My least favourite nights were the ones where I was woken up by blood splashing over my face. It was always miserable. But we lived, and got stronger.

This kind of gauntlet forced it. I felt the effects of everyone else’s talents, too. The network got stronger as we worked with each other. I could pull more from some if I wanted to.

In order to get my Qi coursing through me at night, I leaned heavily into [Prodigy] from Matt, as well as [Stalwart Patience] from Emilia. The longer I tried, the more likely I’d be to succeed.

A couple days passed like that. The world was starting to grow darker, and with the dim twilight being the brightest it got, our sleep cycles were thrown off. We would fight, then half of us passed out from exhaustion, usually waking up to more fighting.

In the rare moments we got to choose to sleep, I would hold Ann close, and run my fingers through her hair. She was doing the same thing as me, trying to practice her mana control until she could do it in her sleep. Holding her helped her focus a little, but it was more about showing that I loved her.

Those little gestures became all the more important as exhaustion set in. Doing things for one another became a high priority. We divided up tasks, helped each other cook. I often went foraging with Marie or Chris, who could find food the best. Matt and I meditated together.

Reya taught us a bit about how Divinity healed wounds, and we practiced emulating the effects with Qi or Mana, slowly learning to improve our healing. Liam showed us a trick about cloaking himself in shadow, which would become more important to learn as our clothing degraded. I had spare sets, of course, but not infinite of them.

Ann would summon water with any spare mana she had, both to wash ourselves and to drink. Whenever my wells were full, Cass would summon herself and keep watch, or talk to the others. It was important to retain morale.

I wouldn’t call it peaceful, but it was strangely… meditative. Simple, almost. Fight when there was fighting to be done, walk when there was walking to be done, help when there was helping to be done.

The cycle of journeying, battling, and interacting advanced my cultivation. I immersed myself in that, too. Feeling the limits of my wellsprings grow slowly. Not enough to break through a new realm, but steadily, observably, they grew.

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It was something I noticed, too. When my cores were full, my wellsprings would still produce more Qi, simply doing so far slower. They’d expand the boundaries of my power. Giving me a larger total pool. It was not immediately noticeable, since cultivating my paths did that same thing, but thinking about it in a time sense - how big must the pools of old monsters be?

I let that thought trail off; there were better things to do than worrying. We were walking again, after all, so I closed my eyes and immersed myself in the golden depths, journeying to see ever new magical sights as I digested things.

Every fight, every emotion, every experience, was fuel for my path. Sorrow, anger, fear, worry, determination… I let it all feed into the endless waters, growing them. And we journeyed on.

After five days of heading southeast, we finally reached the location where the city had once been. In the meantime, we had picked off another creature carrying a single gateway fragment, raising those from 19 to 20, and my gateway’s strength from 15 to 16. My network now had two open slots.

It was satisfying to know, but any satisfaction was crushed when we saw the ruins.

The city was a scene of ruin.

So much carnage. Buildings had been broken down to rubble, walls cracked and knocked over. Dust and death hung heavily over the ruins, monsters still crawling through them, searching for more morsels.

There were elemental auras from stronger foes hanging heavily in the air, creating colourful clouds that merged into one giant, chaotic mess. The walls of the city served only to contain the tide of horrors inside.

But none of that was the worst part.

When we got close enough, I could feel the Qi in the air shift. I could usually feel its affinities - forests were dense with nature Qi, while the black sands had a lot of death Qi and so on. This city, though? It wasn’t just chaotic, as we would have expected given the amount of monsters… it was different than that. Sinister.

And it was easy to tell why. There was a rift in its center, after all.

Seeing a rift for the first time is hard to describe, you know. It simply hung there, in the air. It looked two dimensional. Flat, really, and it had no backside. No matter where I went, I was always facing the front of the strange portal.

It didn’t have any proper colour. I could have called it iridescent as well as I could have called it monochrome. A tall, jagged scar, which seemed entirely out of place, defying all rules of physics and reality.

In as clear terms as I could put it: Staring at the rift felt like looking into another universe.

Physics didn’t apply to it. Gravity didn’t make sense. It broke space, and it broke logic, and it, in the most real sense of the world, carved a tear into reality. There was a whole different world behind it, a myriad of perspectives that shifted as I moved, and I could make sense of none of them.

Eden and Neamhan were at least similar, you know? They had the same amount of spatial dimensions, similar gravities, overlapping species. But this…?

Looking at it made me dizzy, and I wanted to throw up. It felt wrong - I knew it technically wasn’t, that it was simply something I could not understand, but I could feel that it had no place here. No place on Eden. That it would, inevitably, damage the integrity of this world.

Slowly, I tore my eyes away from it, turning to face my companions. They, too, had strange looks in their eyes. Staring at the rift.

The city was broken, destroyed, and a gouge of reality right in its middle. It was, in all meanings of the word, a hunting ground. There was just one more thing to look for…

Channelling Qi into my eyes, my vision improved, and I began swiping my gaze over the city. Ruin after ruin was passed by and discarded. I was looking for something very specific, something important… There.

Halfway between the rift and the northern city walls, there was a ruined building. One with its roof caved in, broken and devastated. It had, once, been the gateway hall, housing dozens of entryways in and out of this world, as well as the statues of the gods.

[Lost and Found] told me that none of the gateways remained in there anymore. They had been shattered and usurped, taken and twisted to bring more usurpers into this world. I still felt some chunks write and slither in the city.

But that did not make this building useless. All that we needed was a single divine altar, and we could exchange contribution points. Beat back this plague, before it had time to become an even worse infestation, and bring one city back.

The archmages could hold the line. Perhaps one would visit us, eventually, if we established a channel of communication with the divines, or maybe an angel. But first, we needed to carve a path through the city.

It was time to get to work.