The next morning, I woke before the camp bell rang.
I washed up, wore the plain training outfit the university had issued, and walked down to the dining hall. The place was already half full. Students sat in tight clusters, comparing wounds, trading tips on which beasts to avoid, and arguing over the leaderboard projected on the far wall.
My name sat at the very top. Five thousand points. The second place was barely above eight hundred.
I took a tray, picked a quiet table near the window, and started eating. The meal was made from the beast meat I had submitted two days ago. Even this cheap version carried a faint warmth that spread through my limbs with every bite.
"Mind if I sit?"
I looked up. Teacher Sally Carter stood beside my table with her own tray, her expression calm but her eyes sharp. Several students at nearby tables stopped chewing and pretended not to listen.
"Please," I said.
She sat across from me and ate in silence for a minute. Then she set her spoon down.
"Sonu, I will be direct. The faculty has been reviewing your performance. Hundreds of level-five beasts in a single afternoon, with no team, no tamed partner and no injuries. Your records show an elemental mage with no beast contract at all."
"I'm a fast learner," I said.
A small smile touched her lips. "That is not an answer, and we both know it."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
She studied me for a long moment. I kept my face relaxed and my breathing even. Everyone has secrets, and the Alliance had not earned mine yet.
Finally, she sighed and picked up her spoon again. "I am not here to force you. Some of the other teachers wanted to run an assessment on you. I told them a student's strength is not a crime. But there is something you should know."
"Go on."
"The test boundary is twenty kilometers from the base. Beyond it, beast levels climb quickly, and the portals out there are not marked green." Her voice dropped. "Every year, one or two students decide they are special and walk past the line. Some come back changed. Some do not come back."
"And the university's position on that?"
"Officially, forbidden." She looked out the window, toward the forest. "Unofficially, the base cameras cannot see past the twenty-kilometer mark, and I have a very bad memory for where my students go before lunch."
I almost laughed. "Thank you, Teacher."
"Do not thank me. Come back alive, that is all." She stood, picked up her tray, and paused. "And if you find something that you cannot explain to the faculty, explain it to me first."
She walked away. Around me, the whispers started again, louder this time. I finished my breakfast without hurry and left.
---
Beyond the Line
The twenty-kilometer boundary was marked by a row of old stone pillars, each carved with a warning glyph. Nothing else. No wall, no guard, no barrier.
I stepped past them without slowing.
The change was immediate. The trees grew taller and darker. The air felt heavier on my skin, thick with mana that had no clear source. Even the sounds changed. The chirping birds from the inner forest were gone, replaced by a deep silence that felt like the forest was holding its breath.
I extended my divine scanning ability and let it spread through the land like a net.
Dozens of presences lit up in my awareness. Level eighty. Level one hundred and twenty. A pack of armored wolves at level two hundred, moving in formation to the east. Something enormous at least three hundred levels strong sleeping in a lake further north.
None of them felt special. Strong, yes, but ordinary in the way that matters. They were strength without a law behind it.
What I wanted was different. I wanted the beasts the codex never mentioned.
I opened my customized watch. Three portals glowed on the map. Two showed yellow. One showed a flickering mix of yellow and red, as if the detector could not decide what it was looking at.
"That one," I said.
It lay nine kilometers to the northwest, in a region of broken canyons.
---
The Crystal Canyon Portal
It took me forty minutes to reach it, mostly because I avoided the wolf pack. The portal hovered inside a narrow canyon, its veil a restless swirl of amber and crimson. Small fractures of light spread across the stone around it like cracks in glass.
I touched the veil with a thin thread of mana. It rippled and pushed back, as though it did not want to be read.
Unstable. Dangerous.
Exactly what I was looking for.
I stepped through.
The world on the other side was silent and still. I stood on a plateau of pale crystal under a sky the color of bruised violet. Giant shards of glass-like stone rose from the ground, each one reflecting a different version of the landscape. In one shard the sky was clear. In another it was burning. In a third there was no sky at all.
I frowned. Reflections should not disagree with each other.
My watch beeped once, then went dark.
"Space distortion," I murmured. "Interesting."
My divine scan stuttered but did not fail. Deep in the crystal field, I sensed something faint and trembling. It was small and weak, and it was wrapped in a layer of energy unlike anything I had touched in this world.
Spatial law.
It was only a thread, thin and fragile, but I knew that feeling. I had spent too many years studying space manipulation to mistake it.
I moved toward it carefully, stepping over cracks that opened and closed on their own. The deeper I went, the stranger the terrain became. Gravity tilted slightly with every few steps. A boulder drifted past me, rotating slowly in the air before settling back onto the ground.
Then I heard it.
A low, wet snarl, and under it, a thin, frightened whimper.
---
The Cornered Cub
I crouched behind a tall shard and looked into a shallow basin.
A beast stood at its center. It resembled a lizard the size of a bull, with obsidian scales and eyes like molten gold. Pale lines of spatial energy flickered across its body, folding the air around its claws so that every swipe landed from the wrong angle.
I read its aura. Level three hundred and ten. A Rift Drake, an apex predator of this portal.
At its feet, pressed against the base of a crystal pillar, was a tiny creature.
It looked like a fox cub, no bigger than my forearm, with silver fur that seemed to blur at the edges. Three tails curled behind it, each ending in a small spiral of dark light. One of its legs was injured. Every time the Drake lunged, the cub vanished and reappeared a few meters away, but each jump was shorter and slower than the last.
It was running out of mana.
The Drake knew it. It was not rushing. It was playing with its prey.
I watched for three more seconds, long enough to confirm what I suspected. The cub was not just using a spatial skill. Its body carried the law itself.
A Void Fox. Born, not made.
"Hm," I said quietly.
The Drake finally tired of the game. It opened its jaws, and the air in front of them folded inward, preparing a rift strike.
The cub looked up at it and did not run.
It had nothing left to run with.
I stepped out from behind the shard.
"That is enough."
The Drake spun around, golden eyes narrowing. It had not sensed me at all. Its tail whipped through a fold in space and came at me from behind and above at the same time.
I raised one hand.
Ice crystallized across the air, and every spatial fold the Drake had made froze solid. The tail stopped an inch from my head, locked in a cage of white frost. I had not used my full power. I did not need to.
The Drake roared. It tore its tail free, leaving scales behind, and tried to open a rift directly beneath my feet.
I let it. The rift opened, I stepped sideways through the same fold using my own space manipulation, and appeared beside its head.
"You are strong," I said. "But you are playing with someone else's law."
A single blade of compressed ice entered through its eye and found its core.
The Drake collapsed with a long, shuddering breath. The watch, which was somehow working again, chimed softly.
+640 Points (Level 310 Beast)
I ignored it.
---
The Offer
The cub had not moved. It stared at me with wide silver eyes, its three tails trembling. Its injured leg was bleeding thin lines of light instead of blood.
I knelt slowly and kept my hands open, the same way I had with the Gladehart.
"I won't hurt you," I said. "And I won't force you either."
It sniffed the air. Then, to my surprise, it spoke.
Not with words. A faint thought brushed against my mind, small and uncertain, like a voice speaking from the bottom of a well.
*Warm.*
"Yes," I said. "I have a place that is warm. It has grass, water, and a very large tree. It is safe."
*Alone?*
I thought of the Gladehart, the Tyrant Trees, and the sleeping sapling.
"Not anymore. There are others there. They are quiet. They are kind."
The cub's ears twitched. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then it limped forward, one painful step at a time, and pressed its small damp nose into my palm.
The taming seal lit up.
This time, the light was not blue. It was deep silver, spiraling outward in a pattern I had never seen before. The seal did not push against the cub's will. It simply opened, and the cub stepped into it willingly.
---
Beast Acquired: Void Fox (Level 40, Spatial Law Bloodline)
HP: 20,000 | MANA: 80,000 (+800/s) | ATK: 2,000 | DEF: 1,500 | SPD: 30,000
Skills: Blink, Fold Step, Void Tail (Locked), Law Resonance
Blink: Instantly teleports up to 500 meters. (Mana Cost: 500, Cooldown: 10s)
Fold Step: Folds the space between the tamer and the beast, allowing mutual teleportation. (Mana Cost: 2,000, Cooldown: 1 minute)
Void Tail (Locked): Unlocks as tails increase. Current tails: 3 of 9.
Law Resonance: Strengthens the tamer's mastery over space-attribute abilities by 20%.
---
(Ding: Spatial Law Bloodline detected. The Tamer Seal's inner realm has been upgraded. Space stability increased. Additional beast zones unlocked.)
I closed my eyes and let my consciousness slip into the seal for a moment.
A new zone had appeared beside the plains, a small silver valley under a night sky that did not exist anywhere else. In the middle of it, the cub lay curled up on a bed of moss. The World Tree Sapling had already stretched a thin root toward it, and the Gladehart was standing guard nearby, cautiously sniffing the air.
My eyes opened again.
Level forty, only a cub, and already carrying the spatial law in its blood. If it grew to level five hundred, the seal itself would change.
I looked down at the dead Drake. The beast was a good meal for the base, and I could use its core to buy time for my fox to recover. I stored the body in the seal.
That was when the crystal field started to shake.
---
The Portal Wakes
Cracks spread across the ground. Every shard in the canyon lit up at once, and each reflection began to show the same thing, a single enormous eye opening in the violet sky.
My watch screamed.
*WARNING: PORTAL CLASSIFICATION UPDATED. RED. RED. RED.*
"So the Drake was only the guard," I murmured.
The voice that answered came from everywhere and nowhere.
*Thief.*
The word rolled through the canyon like thunder. The sky folded. The crystal ground peeled upward into thousands of floating mirrors, and in each mirror stood another version of me, with the same face and the same shocked eyes.
I looked at the nearest one.
It smiled. I had not.
*You have taken what was ours,* the voice said. *Return it, or be folded.*
I felt the fox cub stir in the seal. It was awake and afraid.
I raised my hand, and the cold of true battle seeped through me, a feeling I had not had since I arrived in this world.
"Fold me, then," I said. "If you can."
The first mirror shattered, and a hundred crystal blades came flying out of it.
---
*To be continued in Chapter-69*