Noah didn't move for a long time.
The light hung in the middle of the clearing at about the height of his eyes, a flickering point no bigger than a coin. Around it, the air had a faint ripple to it, the kind you see coming off asphalt in summer, except the clearing was cool and damp and there was no sun hitting it. The blue system text floated in front of everything, crisp and impossible to ignore.
[Anomaly Detected]
[Source: Harvest Gate]
[Quest Status: Unresolved]
'Harvest Gate.'
He read it three times. The words didn't change.
The Harvest Gate was a system thing. It lived in the same place his status screen lived, the same place quests and rewards and level-ups came from. It had opened in his bedroom when he put a key into a keyhole floating three feet off the floor, and he'd stepped through a red portal into a world with a frozen sunset for a sky. That world wasn't on any map. It wasn't on Earth. You couldn't drive to it.
