Chương 51: The secret of the second world

The rain had finally given way to winter cold — it was fairly sunny outside, though the frost cut straight to the bone, slipping under clothing with cold, clinging fingers with every gust of wind. The dry leaves had long since fallen from the trees, and now bare, black branches stood frozen against the sharp, piercing blue of the sky, like fine cracks etched into glass, making it unmistakably clear that winter had truly settled in.

The sidewalk was patched here and there with a thin crust of frost, crunching faintly under the feet of passersby, while short puffs of steam burst from every passing mouth, dissolving instantly into the frigid air. The sun hung low over the rooftops, giving off almost no warmth, only flooding the streets with a cold, blinding light that forced people to squint, while the shadows of buildings stretched long and sharp across the pavement, as if drawn out by the frost itself.

The city hummed with its usual morning life — somewhere in the distance a tram rattled past, its wheels creaking around a bend, someone hurried by bundled up to the nose in a scarf, and a small cluster of people shifted from foot to foot at a nearby stop, stamping to keep warm. The steam of their breath mingled with a faint frosty haze hovering close to the ground, while somewhere from an alley drifted the faint smell of fresh baked goods — apparently some small bakery Lloyd had never even known existed.

Shop windows along the street glinted with frost along their edges, and the few pedestrians hurried past with heads down, necks tucked into raised collars, as if trying to take up as little space as possible under that cold sky. Lloyd walked briskly down the city street, both hands shoved into the pockets of his thick hoodie.

He wore his now-familiar red sneakers, which he'd managed to scrub clean of the dried green sludge, though a faint, barely visible dark tint had stayed soaked into the rubber soles — a reminder that seemed like it would never fully wash out. The past month had done him good: his arm had long since healed, leaving only a thin, barely noticeable scar as a reminder that it had once been wrapped in bandages from wrist to shoulder.

The cold wind whipped at his black pants, and the thick hoodie, zipped up to his chin, did an okay job of shielding him from winter's damp bite, though the tip of his nose and his cheeks were already starting to sting unpleasantly from the frost, and his fingers, despite being tucked in his pockets, were growing slightly numb. Each step echoed dully against the emptying sidewalk, and his breath came out in short, frequent puffs that the wind immediately swept away.

Suddenly he pulled his battered phone from his pocket, its screen still faintly webbed with cracks from that memorable night, and checked the map, squinting against the sun's glare on the glass.

"Looks like this is it." Before Lloyd rose a massive building, about ten stories tall, gray and utterly unremarkable against the neighboring structures. An ordinary office building — there were dozens, if not hundreds, like it in the city, and nothing about its appearance betrayed the enormous significance it actually held. The glass windows reflected the cold winter sun, blinding to look at, and on the roof an antenna glinted faintly, jutting up into the frosty sky like a thin needle.

At the building's base, along a wide stone staircase, ran a low metal railing coated in a thin layer of frost, and the massive glass doors at the entrance reflected the movement of passersby in a distorted way, like ripples on water. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"Is this seriously where the exam's going to be held?" He doubted his own guess, studying the dull windows reflecting the light, but as he got closer and noticed the staff standing by the entrance, all his doubts vanished without a trace.

Right at the entrance stood two figures — both in dark blue uniforms, long coats draped over them, flapping in the wind, and caps on their heads bearing the sharply defined emblem of the WPA, familiar to every resident of this world, gleaming with a metallic sheen even in the dim winter light.

Their faces remained utterly impassive, their gazes sliding over passersby mechanically, indifferently, as if they had been standing in that cold for an eternity and had long since stopped feeling the frost, their coats billowing and settling with each new gust of wind, like the wings of some dark birds frozen in place.

Suddenly something clicked in Lloyd's mind, the thought slamming into him hard enough to stop him dead in his tracks in the middle of the sidewalk, prompting the pedestrian behind him to step around him with an irritated mutter under their breath.

"God, what an idiot I am. How did I not know about this sooner?" The thing was, over the past month, while his arm had been slowly healing and he'd spent most evenings endlessly reading articles online to the quiet patter of rain, which later gave way to the season's first frosts outside, he had finally managed to figure out how that reanimated corpse he'd encountered at the very start of the dungeon had ended up there in the first place.

Dungeons, as it turned out, weren't separate, isolated spaces at all — at least not in the way Lloyd had originally pictured them, naively assuming they were just random anomalies, holes in reality with no meaning or system behind them. Dungeons were part of an entirely different world. The very world from which, over a hundred years ago, all these wonders had begun seeping through, turning humanity's ordinary life upside down.

A dungeon was one of the ways to cross into that other world — assuming, of course, you didn't use a Return Crystal to get back. But that was a far harsher, more grueling path. Gates were used far more often. Gates provided a direct crossing to the other side, bypassing the need to travel through an entire dungeon, and unlike dungeons, they didn't close on their own after a certain amount of time. They didn't break after a single use the way Return Crystals did, crumbling to dust the moment they were activated.

But Gates were quite rare. Every known Gate was under the control of one guild or another, or of the five global powers — organizations whose reach and influence stretched far beyond a single country, spanning entire continents. WPA happened to be one of those very powers...