In a throne room, five shadowed figures sat around a table, each throne bearing the symbol of a sun carved into its back while the main throne sat higher than the others.
"Has the trap been set?" the figure on the main throne asked.
The other figures nodded, and one leaned forward. "Good. We have been holding the seal for far too long."
The shadow on the main throne looked down at himself, though the others could not see him and he could not see them. Still, he watched them all the same.
"I will release it once the humans take the bait and try to suppress most of its power, and you four will help me guide the humans against the beast. I hope you all succeed. May the heavens bless you."
The shadow disappeared into the darkness, and the four figures on the lesser thrones revealed themselves as knights in golden armor with a sun crest burning on each of their chests. They looked at each other and nodded.
Around the breach, Awakened warriors moved back and forth while the sounds of battle cries and beast roars echoed across the land.
Corvin and Orson had found a hiding spot to keep their spoils for the day, and Orson looked up at the five suns still hanging in the sky.
After their exploration—collecting monster cores, as Corvin called it—Orson had learned more about this world. Collecting was a generous word, since stealing was more accurate, but call a dog what it is or whatever the saying was.
Orson could not remember, so based on the information he had gathered, he would call it collecting for Corvin’s sake.
There was a ritual people in this world performed to become Awakened, and it involved checking how strong your life force was.
Corvin had mentioned something about there being seven ranks of power, and to keep his act, Orson had played like he already knew all of this. Seven ranks. The first was the Awakening rank, the second was called Resonant rank, and the third was just—
Corvin hit him on the head. "Orson, you okay? You’ve been spacing out after talking to those Awakened. What were you even asking?"
"Oh, I just wanted to know how to check for your life gate."
Corvin looked at him like he was an idiot. "Wow, really? Why would you want to know that?"
"To check, I guess."
"But you do remember you have no life gate, right? I mean, isn’t that why you were kicked out of the family and forced to marry your wife?"
Orson looked at him, speechless, because he had already put this together except for why his family abandoned him. Now he knew. No life gate, so they decided his life and everything else simply because he did not have one.
"But a life gate—if I don’t have one, I should not be alive."
"I know, right?" Corvin replied. "That’s the big question."
Orson looked at Corvin and thought about how all of this made sense as he put it together. Just then, Corvin looked at him.
"You stay here. We have like eight cores, so I’ll check if I can find more. Okay?"
Orson nodded and watched Corvin leave.
Life gate.
Orson removed his mouth breather and sat cross-legged on the floor. Every living being had a life gate, but this one had none, and that was impossible because everybody had a life force—what this world called a life gate. But what if a new soul entered this body? Maybe it would have a life gate.
He sat and meditated.
Three hours had passed since he discovered this breach had the same energy as his world, and he had been using the opportunity of finding cores to cultivate his former world’s techniques.
His body was not up to the power, and he was already tired from all the hunting he had barely done while Corvin was still full of energy. Orson had tried to feel his life gate, but nothing happened. It was like a brain trying to find out what made it work, and so far there had been no results.
Funny enough, the speed at which you could cultivate was insane, and Orson planned to enter the first realm of cultivation in this world with the energy around him, but he needed more time to accumulate his energy. Soon he would reach Qi Gathering stage and start his cultivation again.
As Orson sat and continued to cultivate, he could feel the energy entering his body, and although the energy was the same, it was still strange.
Even when he reached the peak of cultivation in his past life, the amount of energy he could absorb was still good, but in this new body it was as if years of cultivation were cut down to hours.
What everyone called a useless body absorbed large amounts of energy, and the energy in the air also made the absorption faster and faster.
The energy gathered all around him and entered his body through his skin before flowing into the body’s meridians, which for a strange reason were wide and strong—maybe even stronger than his past life, though Orson could not tell and did not want to remember anything about his past.
As the energy entered his meridians, it traveled to his lower body, and entering the first stage of Qi Gathering was easy because it was only hard when people spent time sensing it.
Orson could already sense it, and since he had been in this world all he had done was sense it, so his body was attuned to it like a sixth sense, and now it had paid off.
Entering Qi Gathering stage should not have taken this long, but because his absorption was faster, Orson quickly realized this body needed triple the amount of qi a normal user would need, and the qi was doing something strange to his body.
But before Orson could look at what it was doing, he simply continued to meditate as the energy kept entering him.
On another floating island, lightning rained down as multiple beasts collapsed to the ground. Rain was breathing heavily as her legs buckled and she dropped to the ground. She let out a long breath before looking at the screen in front of her, staring at it for a while before calling it off.
"Rain, are you alright?"
Rain looked at Lucas, her right-hand man. "I’m fine. Don’t worry."
"So do you think we will find what we are looking for?"
Rain looked up at the island still floating above them. "We take a break. We still have six more floating islands to cover before we reach the temple."
Lucas looked up, then at the island they had cleared, and with about four done, he sighed and agreed.
High above, the five suns shone down on the breach, and one of the golden suns cracked just a little, unnoticed by anyone.