Deep Storage
Two weeks later, Ruyi received an opportunity she hadn't anticipated.
Her father’s small logistics firm was hired to transport surplus equipment out of a decommissioned Guild supply depot on the outskirts of the city. Because the facility was being systematically cleared out, civilian contractors were allowed inside the lower staging bays under administrative supervision.
Ruyi volunteered to accompany her father as a logistics assistant, claiming she wanted to earn extra spending money for the upcoming college semester. Her true goal, however, was simple: she wanted to see high-tier Guild hardware and spatial-containment equipment up close without raising suspicion.
The decommissioned depot was a massive, subterranean concrete bunker built during the First Gate Era. Heavy steel blast doors sealed the lower sectors, and the damp air smelled faintly of rust, machine oil, and stale ozone.
While her father was busy discussing transport manifests with the site manager in the main office, Ruyi walked down the quiet, deserted rows of storage crates in Staging Bay 3.
Most of the crates contained mundane, decommissioned gear—dull iron weapons, worn leather armor straps, and drained mana-battery casings waiting for recycling. But near the back of the bay, hidden behind a rusted forklift and half-covered by a dusty tarp, sat a heavy, reinforced steel chest marked with a faded red warning seal: DISCARDED ANOMALOUS MATERIEL - FOR DESTRUCTION.
Ruyi stopped in front of it.
Her spatial senses tingled. Deep beneath her collarbone, her void instinct reacted to a faint, hollow vibration emanating from inside the chest—a subtle frequency that mirrored the cold vacuum of her own power.
Glancing over her shoulder, Ruyi confirmed that the security camera in the far corner of the bay had a dead indicator light. She reached out, resting her bare fingers on the heavy iron padlocks securing the chest.
Whishp.
With a thought, she opened a microscopic, needle-sized void seam directly over the lock's internal tumbler. A tiny cylinder of forged steel simply vanished into nothingness. The heavy lock clicked open silently.
Ruyi lifted the reinforced steel lid.
Inside lay a single, damaged object resting on a bed of faded velvet: a shattered fragment of a Spatial Anchor Crystal. It was roughly the size of a billiard ball, split down the center, its inner purple light flickering weakly like a dying candle in a breeze.
According to public records, a fully intact Spatial Anchor Crystal was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—a rare artifact used by high-ranking guilds to stabilize portal entrances and construct permanent teleportation gates. A broken fragment, however, was considered volatile trash, destined for high-temperature incineration because unrefined, leaking spatial energy was notoriously unstable.
To Ruyi, it wasn't trash. It was a textbook.
She reached down, her bare fingers brushing against the cold, crystalline surface.
The moment her skin made contact, the dying purple light inside the fragment flared violently. The unstable spatial energy stored within the crystal began to leak out, humming with a high-pitched vibration that threatened to detonate in a localized spatial shockwave.
Ruyi didn't panic.
She unsealed the cold space in her chest and simply drew the chaotic energy in.
The violent spatial vibrations pouring from the crystal didn't explode. They were sucked down a dark, silent drain straight into her void. Her body absorbed the ambient spatial frequency, her instinct analyzing its structural lattice, its density, and its geometric anchoring logic in real time.
Within five seconds, the shattered crystal turned completely clear, its stored energy drained down to absolute zero. It crumbled into harmless, inert glass dust between her fingers.
Ruyi pulled her hand back, her amethyst eyes shining with a faint, violet shimmer in the dim light of the staging bay.
She felt a sudden, profound expansion in her spatial perception. Absorbing the refined structure of the anchor crystal had taught her void how to Anchor.
Before, her spatial jumps were strictly limited to places she had physically visited and could vividly recall. But now? She realized she could leave an invisible, microscopic "void mark"—a spatial anchor—at any location she touched. As long as an anchor remained in place, she could jump back to that exact spot from anywhere in the city, bypassing the need for line of sight or detailed visual memory.
"Useful," Ruyi whispered softly, brushing the harmless glass dust from her palm.
She closed the heavy steel chest, re-aligned the broken lock mechanism so it appeared completely untouched, and casually strolled back toward the main office just as her father stepped out with his clipboard in hand.
"Find anything interesting down there, Ruyi?" her father asked, wiping sweat from his brow with a tired, warm smile.
"Just old boxes and rust, Dad," Ruyi replied smoothly, falling into step beside him. "Nothing worth keeping."