Chapter 251

They had escaped that insanely dangerous place, but getting all the way home was a whole different headache. As they crossed a sea filled with darkness instead of water, Sion and Anne kept talking incessantly. Do-Jin had nothing to add and his body felt completely wrecked, so he just shut his eyes and listened.

“Seriously... I thought the voice I kept hearing was just a hallucination. I never imagined it was really you talking to me.”

When Anne heard that Sion had been sending her voice and stories into the Void for her all this time, she looked nearly overwhelmed with emotion. Hearing that Do-Jin had crossed the boundary, heard her voice, and passed the message along to Sion almost sent her drifting in pure gratitude.

“If this guy hadn’t told me that, I doubt I would have searched for you with this much certainty,” Sion replied.

“I think... I remember...!”

Yeah right. As if she actually remembered a damn thing. That was all pure bullshit.

Do-Jin kept his eyes closed as he thought it. Anne had spent so long alone in the Void that she had started rebuilding her memories however she wanted whenever she heard something new.

Well, considering her first reaction, she could not even tell if she was dreaming or staring at some illusion.

From Do-Jin’s perspective, that worked out pretty well. If things went south, he had been ready to pin everything on partial amnesia just to cover his lies, so this saved him a lot of annoying trouble.

Right when he started wondering when they would finally arrive, the space around him stretched like taffy and swallowed him whole. The sensation twisted his insides like someone had grabbed them and wrung them out.

“Ugh...!”

A sudden wave of nausea came over Do-Jin. Sion had forced a long-distance spatial jump, and the aftereffects slammed into him like a truck.

“Hmm, are you still nauseous? I thought you had recovered quite a bit by now,” Sion muttered casually.

Shooting her a glare, he responded, “I’m a patient.”

“I know.”

Sion’s shameless confidence left Do-Jin completely speechless.

“I’m sorry. The little one here is sort of bad at socializing...” Anne apologized on his behalf.

Sion ignored her and launched another spatial jump without hesitation. Do-Jin nearly panicked, but weirdly enough, the second jump didn’t make him dizzy at all.

“Hmm... Adjusting it based on the damage really does help.”

Sion had recalibrated the teleportation spell after a single trial, tuning it perfectly to his wrecked circuits. Do-Jin felt something click in his head as he watched her.

I guess it doesn’t matter if someone’s personality is a complete mess. If their skills are insane, people just roll with it.

In the end, Sion had been right. The recalibrated teleportation magic shot their travel speed through the roof.

“This is the coordinate I remember.” Sion stopped in the middle of absolutely nothing and began preparing to rip open the dimensional barrier by force.

That was when a problem revealed itself. Sion hadn’t fully recovered yet, so she couldn’t pierce the membrane surrounding Lostania.

Do-Jin tried to open it with the key.

[Not enough power remains in the Draining Key.]

There wasn’t enough energy left to open the door leading back to Lostania.

They gave me a time limit to leave, but nothing to come back with. Now they are straight up blocking escape too.

It felt like the game was telling him to bring back Sion Grace or die where he stood. Then again, this game had always been cruel like that, so it wasn’t anything new. Right now, opening the door mattered more than complaining.

“How about we wait here until Master recovers?”

It sounded like the safest option, so Do-Jin said it out loud.

“Hmm... That might take quite a while.”

How long was “quite a while”? He was about to ask when Sion finished calculating on her own.

“Considering the mana density here and the conversion efficiency, it will take about a year before I can use my power comfortably.”

Yeah... that’s not happening.

Do-Jin thought for a moment and landed on a simple answer. “Let’s open it together then.”

He handed Sion the key he had been holding. On her own, or with just a half-dead key, it wouldn’t be enough. However, if Sion dragged out every last bit of potential inside the key and fused it with her own power, it might actually work.

His guess was right as Sion accepted the transparent cube-shaped key and studied its structure.

“I don’t understand its exact design, but I think I can create an environment where it will function more effectively.”

If she focused only on thinning the dimensional wall the cube needed to break, their current condition might be enough. However, that meant pulling power from the magic protecting Do-Jin as well.

“I’ll have to withdraw the spell that is shielding you.”

“It’s not like I’m going to drop dead the second we start, so let’s do it.”

They still had some time left on the limit, so Do-Jin chose to push forward.

Sion nodded once and handed the cube back to him before starting the process. “When I give the signal, use it.”

She began by materializing the very concept of space through magic. Then, she slowly pushed her mana into the membrane that wrapped around the world itself. She moved carefully, almost painfully slow, trying to delay the moment the barrier realized an alien force was slipping inside and triggered its immune response.

Trying to maximize efficiency like this is a real pain in the ass.

It had been ages since she had rationed her strength and used it this cautiously, and Sion found herself quietly grumbling inside her head.

After a while, the space in front of her started to ripple. Sweat formed on her forehead as she continued shaving the barrier thinner and thinner. Yet once she reached a certain depth, the resistance from the wall blocking them surged violently. She couldn’t push any farther.

It’s still not enough.

That was when a single spear shattered the balance between both sides. The Ego Spear Anne pulled back slightly before lunging forward in a sharp burst.

“I will help too!”

Anne slammed into the dimensional membrane that Sion had forced into visibility. After drifting through the Void for countless years and building up karma, the spear had become more than enough to wound space and dimensional boundaries themselves.

“Now!”

Before Sion’s shout even finished, Do-Jin had already thrust the cube forward. He had seen it clearly with his own eyes, a thin white crack spreading through space itself. The fractured space shattered and collapsed all at once, and Do-Jin, Sion, and Anne were sucked straight back into Lostania.

“Hah...!”

The moment they returned to the original world, a crushing rush of speed enveloped him, followed by wind slamming into his face.

“Why the hell are we in the sky again?!”

The exit had opened ridiculously high in the sky. Worse yet, a deep blue ocean stretched below them. The Central Continent lay off to the right, and when he twisted his head, he spotted the Floating Continent hanging high in the sky above. Judging by the view, they were somewhere in the eastern skies over the sea near the Central Continent.

“The coordinates are slightly off,” Sion said calmly as they were falling.

Do-Jin answered just as calmly, “How about you save us first?”

Completely at peace with whatever happened next, Do-Jin let his body go limp and surrendered to gravity. He figured there was no way he would die from a fall while an Archmage was right there, and honestly, he just wanted to rest for a minute.

[Welcome back to Lostania!]

[System functions are being restored.]

[Rewards for quest completion are being calculated.]

[The achievement you have reached is mythic. Reward distribution will take some time.]

[Rewards will be granted sequentially.]

The moment they returned to Lostania, reward notifications started flooding his vision one after another. A flood of delayed world messages followed right behind them, stacking up like they had been waiting for this exact moment. Stuff about mythic achievements and the world’s praise barely even registered in his head.

[You have crossed a branching point of fate! The world’s sleeping secrets will begin to awaken!]

[Hidden doors connected to other worlds are opening across the land.]

What the hell does that even mean?

Doors connected to other worlds? Did that mean people here could open them from this side now?

Do-Jin thought back to his previous life. Back then, he had fought beings from other worlds plenty of times. The difference was that they had always been the ones invading first. Rifts tore open, the land got terraformed like it was nothing, and forward bases popped up everywhere. Yet now, without getting attacked first, this side could open doors into other worlds on its own.

The storyline has changed this much already...

For the first time, Do-Jin truly felt the full scale of what he had pulled off.

Right as he finished checking the messages, the fall suddenly stopped. Sion had recovered at high speed thanks to the dense mana in the air, and before he could even react, his vision went dark. Do-Jin figured she had dragged them into another teleport without a single warning.

***

The moment Do-Jin and Sion stepped into the highest floor of Elthomagia, the first thing they saw were the Tower Masters.

Ever since Sion vanished and Do-Jin left to search for her, they had done nothing but wait here. No one understood better than they did how slim the chances were for someone who entered the Void to return alive. Even so, none of them could bring themselves to let go of hope.

So when Sion suddenly appeared, they flinched and let out half-choked cries that hovered somewhere between “oh” and “ugh,” spilling from the throats of old mages who looked like they might keel over at any second.

In public, they were the Violet Rank of Elthomagia, figures treated with more respect than imperial dukes. In this moment, however, they just looked like a bunch of miserable old folks slumped on the floor, barely holding themselves together.

“L-Lady Sion!”

Nothing else existed for them in that moment. The only thing that mattered was that their Grand Master had come back.

“You have returned!”

“We thought you were gone forever!”

“You should at least tell us before you disappear like that!”

One old mage even wiped at reddened eyes, overcome with emotion. Sion, on the other hand, looked completely unimpressed.

“What are you all doing here? Oh... The dimensional isolation spell has vanished.” She spoke as if she had no idea how desperately they had been waiting.

“Of course we were worried! If you never came back, what were we supposed to do?”

“What do you mean what would you do? I was a Tower Master who might as well not have been here anyway. You could have carried on just fine.”

She traced Magic Circles through the air with casual flicks of her fingers, restoring the spells that protected her personal space. The seven Tower Masters watched her for a moment, mouths half open as if they wanted to argue, then quietly shut up instead. It wasn’t like they had followed her without knowing what kind of person she was. The fact that she had returned was enough to them.

Their gazes slowly shifted away from Sion, who barely paid them any attention, and toward Do-Jin, the one who had actually gone beyond the world and brought her back after promising he would. Of course, their eyes burned.

That doesn’t look like simple gratitude.

Do-Jin could see it clearly, the madness unique to mages mixed with a raw, obsessive hunger.

Are they seriously about to ask what the hell happened in the Void... yeah, that has to be it.

He was certain now. The moment Sion came back and their biggest worry disappeared, curiosity had taken over their brains. If she were not standing here, they would have already rushed him and buried him under a mountain of questions.

Just as Do-Jin started thinking about how to dodge the incoming interrogation, Sion finished restoring all the magic and flicked her hand once.

“Shoo. You are in my way.”