Five months.
That was how long it had taken them to confirm the location of a single anchor site.
Five months of searching through old ruins, cross-checking fragmented records from the destroyed book, analyzing abnormal energy signatures, and surviving one monster-infested region after another. The deeper Grace dug into Earth's ancient history, the more obvious it became that the anchor sites had never been meant to be found easily. They had been hidden deliberately, buried beneath forgotten civilizations, erased by time, or swallowed by modern development long before humanity ever realized what they truly were.
And now, they had finally found one.
A portal shimmered briefly in the narrow alley before collapsing into nothingness behind them.
Grace stepped out first.
