A faint light seeped up from the ground. Beneath the gray canopy, everything in the world was illuminated by that phosphorescent glow, even the shadows stretching thin and pale. There was no sky. No sun. Only an endless, leaden shroud. Minato walked along the outer edge of the Hazel Fault Zone, each step deliberate, as though pressing his footprints into the earth. His arms, visible beneath a frayed gray tunic, were thin. A tattered cloak covered a chest where his ribs showed through. His dull black hair hung unkempt and overlong, and his deep brown eyes moved constantly, scanning his surroundings. He stood 167 centimeters tall—slightly above average for a ★2—but his hunched posture made him seem far smaller. *Clack.* His sole struck a rock. The shoes were crude things, little more than scrap lashed together. Old leather bore countless scratches, from the tips of his toes to the base of his little finger. "…A whole month already." He spoke the words aloud, then closed his mouth, feeling their weight settle over him. What were the odds of a ★2 surviving more than a month in the Summoning Ring World? He didn't want to know the number. His companions had vanished one after another. None of them had ever passed through a gate. They'd all had their cores shattered by someone, scattered into nothing. A blackened, scorched stone lay by the side of the path. The remnants of a battle that had caught someone here long ago. A single core fragment caught the base-light and glinted dully. Minato crouched, swiftly picked it up, and tucked it into a hidden pocket of his cloak. The work of a core scavenger. Gathering core shards from the dead, trading them at the core markets of Grey Haven for scraps of information or repairs. Not for food. Copies didn't need to eat. He was just buying the means to survive. *(The next gate that opens will be the end of me anyway.)* Minato gazed out across the gray wasteland, thinking idly. The Karano Plains stretched endlessly flat, with barely any rise or fall. No cover anywhere. Good visibility, in this world, meant a direct line to death. It meant being spotted by enemies from far away. That was precisely why he moved along the outer edge of the Hazel Fault Zone—the rim of a canyonland where the earth had split open. A pebble crumbled beneath his foot and tumbled into the valley, two hundred meters deep. No sound returned. The Hazel Hiding Valley. Some hundred and twenty combat-refusers huddled together there. Minato usually slept in one of the hollows carved into the canyon wall. The living spaces bored into the cliff face were hard to spot even for Vanagloria patrols. But today was different. He was heading for the Graveyard of Gates. North. Further north. At the northern edge of the Karano Plains lay a place where the remnants of gates that had appeared in the past accumulated. A place no one knew about—or if they did, no one paid any attention to. Even Vanagloria had judged it to have no strategic value. Minato was after the core fragments he could scavenge there. Around the dud gates, he'd heard, the cores of those who had once fought and killed each other to reach a gate—only to be summoned by no one—still lay scattered. *(Pick up whatever I can. The rest is luck.)* That was all he thought, dimly, as he walked. It wasn't long before he reached the abandoned generation-hole site on the Karano Plains. The ground was unnaturally sunken. A circular depression, roughly ten meters across. Once, vast numbers of low-rarity copies had been generated here. Now it was just one of the generation holes that had ceased to function. Minato's feet stopped of their own accord. *(This is—)* Something twinged, sharp and small, deep in his chest. Memories from three months ago surged back like a muddy torrent. Six ★2s with the same face. They were still young. Copies who hadn't even been generated a week, who knew almost nothing. Before they could even understand that they were "same-types"—beings born from the same original—they were found by a Vanagloria patrol. Three ★3 members. Minato had pressed himself against a rock and just watched. "Hey, they've all got the same mug." "Clean 'em all up at once. The more of 'em that pass through a gate, the more core rewards we get." "Heh heh, easy work." Laughter. Screams. The first one was cornered and pierced through the chest. The sound of a core shattering was lighter than he'd imagined—like a glass cup breaking. The second tried to run and was cut down from behind. The third wept and begged for mercy. The fourth couldn't even make a sound, just trembled. The fifth— Minato couldn't move. He pressed himself against the rock, holding even his breath. Only the sound of his heart hammering against his ribs from the inside echoed unnaturally loud in his ears. *(If I help them, I'll just die too.)* He told himself that, over and over. The sixth one's throat was torn open, and they collapsed to the ground. Instead of blood, the phosphorescence of the base-light leaked from the wound, then faded. All that remained were core fragments. The Vanagloria soldiers gathered them up and left, chatting idly. Minato hadn't been able to move from that spot for three hours. *(Back then, if I had—)* There was no point thinking about it now. Same-type aversion—the instinctive custom of this world, the refusal to watch a copy with your own face be killed. Minato was no exception. And yet, even so, the faces of those who had died before his eyes were still seared onto the backs of his eyelids, impossible to shake. The same face. The same voice. A version of himself from beyond the mirror, who might have shared the same fragments of memory. "…I have to go." His voice was hoarse. Hunching his back even further, he started walking again. He arrived at the Graveyard of Gates just before the light-intensification period began. A circular zone, two kilometers in radius. There, the remnants of hundreds of gates flickered like ghosts. Faint light, a mix of silver and gold. All of them semi-transparent—even up close, the rocky ground on the other side was visible through them. There was no wind, yet the air itself seemed to ripple. *(That's an incredible number.)* Minato caught his breath. Normally, the appearance of a single gate turned the surrounding area into a battlefield. A single summoning meant a silver gate. A ten-pull meant a golden gate. Either way, the characters fought desperately, killing each other to try and leap through. Summoning—passing through a gate, going to the Creator's world—was believed to be the only salvation. But what lay here were "dud gates." Gates that, for whatever reason, had summoned no one and ceased to function as gates. Remnants that only emitted light outward, no longer drawing anyone in. Minato advanced cautiously. The sand beneath his feet trembled faintly. The effect of spatial distortion. He couldn't stay long. Two hours was the limit—any longer and his core would resonate and suffer damage. That was common knowledge among core scavengers. *(Pick up the cores and get out fast.)* He sharpened his gaze and searched the ground. Core fragments were scattered everywhere. All of them old. Their light had already drained away, leaving only gray crystals. These were worth almost nothing on the market. Barely enough for a cup of memory water. He was about to sigh— When his feet stopped. Deep within the cluster of remnants. There, a single dud-gate husk stood, a size larger than the others. That in itself wasn't unusual. The size depended on the scale of its original appearance. But what was strange—was the sand around it. The gray grains, illuminated by the phosphorescence of the base-light, were being drawn slowly but unmistakably toward the gate's edge. And then, being sucked in. *(Sucked… in?)* Minato couldn't believe his eyes. Normally, dud gates only emitted light. They absolutely never pulled anything in. That was how it was supposed to be. He wasn't an expert on the Graveyard of Gates, but that was what was said among core scavengers. But the phenomenon before him was different. The grains of sand were flowing in reverse, toward the center of the gate. *(What is this?)* He crept closer, almost crawling. He curled his already hunched body even smaller, killing his breath. He put his hands on the ground, brought his face close to the sand, and stared at the movement. There was no doubt. The sand was moving. One grain after another, crossing the threshold of the gate and vanishing inside. *(The gate is pulling something in.)* Even though it was supposed to be a dud gate. A remnant that should have no function at all was faintly, but undeniably, drawing energy inward. Something stirred uneasily deep in Minato's chest. *(This isn't normal.)* He didn't know what it meant. He'd never even thought deeply about the mechanisms of gates in the first place. Gates of salvation, gates of selection, gates of death—that was all they were. But this phenomenon alone was different. *(This…)* Still lying flat on the ground, he continued to follow the movement of the sand. That was when it happened. He heard voices. Multiple footsteps, from the south. Minato's body went rigid. *(Vanagloria—)* A patrol. Two of them. He could tell by the spacing and weight of their footsteps. ★3-class, trained movements. Minato slipped behind a rock in an instant. Not a second's delay. His hunched body shrank down as if melting into the earth. He made his breathing as shallow as possible, consciously suppressing even his core's output. Erasing his presence. "Nothin' here again." A rough, thick voice rang out. "This place has zero strategic value. Why're we even patrolling it?" "Lord Rect said to be thorough." The other voice was calm. "Just do the rounds and keep quiet." "Yeah, yeah." The footsteps drew closer. Minato closed his eyes. The cold sensation of the stone pressed against his back through the rock. *(Don't get found, don't get found, don't get found.)* His heart was too loud. It pounded until his ribs seemed to creak. But—the footsteps moved away. "Just write 'no abnormalities' in the report." "Understood." The voices grew smaller. Eventually, he heard nothing at all. Minato didn't move. Ten minutes passed. And still, he couldn't move. *(I thought I was going to die.)* Fear had taken root in his body. The trembling in his limbs wouldn't stop. *(Again. I hid behind a rock again, and just—)* He opened his eyes. On the ground, the sand pattern he'd been observing earlier remained. The traces of the reverse-flow phenomenon, where the grains had been sucked in. Slowly, he reached out and ran his fingers over the pattern. *(I have to investigate this.)* The thought came to him suddenly. He didn't know what investigating would accomplish. This phenomenon had no name, no theory. What could a ★2 core scavenger possibly do, anyway? But— *(If I don't investigate, nothing will ever change.)* It was a small, but for the first time, an active will. Until now, he had simply lived swept along by circumstances. When a gate opened, he fled. When enemies came, he hid. He picked cores from corpses and just got through each day as it came. A resignation—that he was a disposable ★2 anyway—had lain at the root of all his thoughts. But now, this pattern of sand etched into the ground—something he himself didn't understand—had seized his heart. Minato stood up. His knees were shaking. Cold sweat clung to his palms. *(First, information.)* If he returned to Grey Haven, there was the information broker Harmonix. The owner, Gale, was a ★3 veteran copy who had accumulated records of gate appearances. He might know something about that reverse-flow phenomenon. But— He groped at the hidden pocket of his cloak. *(I barely have any core fragments.)* Gray crystal shards rolled in his palm. Not enough to buy information. *(First