I flew high over a grey city, people milling below like ants as they scurried about their day. It was an interesting feeling, watching them from above. It was hard not to feel just a touch superior. I doubted they even knew I was there.

  I wasn't quite sure which city it was, though... It wasn't as if I'd extensively studied many settlements from this angle, and roofs looked rather different to walls.

  No, actually, I did know: it was Greyforge. Not that I'd recognised the city, but there was a familiar row of mountains off in the distance.

  Mountains which I was, for some reason, heading towards. Apparently I didn't quite have control over [Float] yet.

  Then again, wasn't I moving a little fast for a sedately named Skill like [Float]? Not to mention that I didn't actually remember using the skill crystal. I couldn't. I didn't have any skill points spare.

  Oh well, whatever. I was flying, so at some point, I must have learnt how to fly. The exact mechanism wasn't important.

  The barren wastes of Harvent Canton sped past below as the mountains grew larger. From above, the devastation wrought in the fight between the kingdom's armies and the Unbound was plain to see, great rents torn in the mountainside and vast tracts of forest uprooted. I confirmed with a touch of detached disappointment that the village in which I'd encountered Old Three-eye was indeed gone, flattened by a crater.

  Old Three-eye herself seemed to have survived, though. I saw her sitting on the edge of a deep chasm, legs dangling into the abyss. I knew full well it was her by the way she turned towards me and waved.

  I tried to wave back, but it occurred to me that I didn't seem to have anything to wave with. When I'd gone flying, had I forgotten to bring my body somehow? That was a bit of a serious cock up, if so...

  Again, it didn't seem important, and so I simply kept on flying. Up and up until I crested the mountain, revealing the lands beyond. Lands outside the kingdom. A vast jungle, an ocean of green spanning from the roots of the mountains all the way to the horizon in every direction.

  Despite the time of year, fully leafed trees rustled below, presumably as wildlife beneath the canopy pushed their way through. Colourful birds flew above the greenery, still far below me.

  ... Right. Far below me. I was observing this from the top of a mountain, yet I could pick out individual trees. I wasn't used to the perspective, and it took a moment to adjust.

  The birds were big. The trees were bigger. The hidden wildlife, bending the trees as they forced their way through the jungle, were probably not things I ever wanted to meet. I'd wondered why the kingdom—or, for that matter, any other nearby country—hadn't claimed the land, but perhaps it simply wasn't viable. What levels would someone need to combat whatever was lurking down there?

  Not that it was a problem for me. I maintained the height I'd needed to crest the mountain, flying far above, and nothing spared me so much as a glance.

  I wasn't quite sure why I was headed out into this untamed jungle, but it wasn't as if I had anywhere else I needed to be, so there was no reason not to continue. The scenery was gorgeous. I'd wanted to explore the world, to see sights just like this, with my time in the royal canton nothing more than a means to that end. If I was to explore the world, I needed the power to survive the world.

  The world wasn't always a pleasant place, as evidenced when one of the enormous birds beneath me suddenly went into a dive, bombing straight through the canopy, and coming back up seconds later with an enormous beast caught in its beak. Something that had paid special attention to leg day, but had apparently been stuck in bed ill on arm day. A thick, muscular tail and an elongated head, full of teeth large enough for me to see from my considerable distance.

  Something in the depths of my lost memory threw up the term 'dinosaur', which was certainly not a word I'd heard in this world.

  The jungle continued to drift by below until, at last, something other than green appeared on the horizon. A small, purple spike stabbing into the sky. I headed towards it, wondering what it could be.

  Of course, I'd once again forgotten about perspective. The spike was not small. It was, in fact, a towering spire that dwarfed even the royal palace of the sapphire city. It had the height of a mountain in its own right, if not a mountain's girth. Even then, as I drew nearer, I realised the structure was at least as wide as a small village. It was set into a clearing in the jungle large enough to fit a town, and yet perfectly circular, as if there was an inviable distance around the tower in which plants were simply not permitted.

  I flew down, losing height as I approached the tower. As with the rest of this journey, I had no idea why I was approaching the tower, but it was an obvious point of interest in the homogenous green surroundings, so why not?

  And then the tower vanished.

  It was weird. One moment there was a spire reaching a mile or two into the air, and then the next, the jungle just continued unabated. The clearing was gone. And yet I still continued flying in that direction and continued losing height.

  Something felt wrong. There was a strange feeling of dread. A sensation that I really shouldn't be going this way, but as hard as I fought, there was nothing I could do to stop it. It finally occurred to me that I did not, in fact, have any control over my flight. I was being brought here, but by who or what, I didn't know.

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  What had I been doing before I was up in the air?

  I'd just finished something like nineteen hours in a dungeon, and while my Constitution may have kept me operating at peak efficiency throughout, it wasn't as if any amount of Stats would completely do away with the need for sleep. I'd booked myself an inn for the night, or what was left of it. And then...

  I'd slept.

  Was I sleeping? Was this a dream? If so, it was remarkably detailed, but it would explain away the... oddness.

  However, before I had a chance to dwell on the fact that I was apparently having my first ever lucid dream, the tower reappeared.

  One moment I was skimming the top of the canopy, and I could see the trees in front of me, and the next they were gone. The air shimmered, and then I was in the clearing, the tower right in front of me. The distortion in the air circled the full clearing, reaching up high into the air. An illusion of some description, and I must have originally been above it, but how that let me see the entire tower rather than only its tip, I had no idea. Even in dreams, magic was stupid.

  My flight didn't stop, even if I was now hovering only a couple of metres above the ground. I continued towards the tower. While the structure was largely a featureless purple cylinder, without decorations or even windows, it did have a door. A big door that slid upwards as I approached, rather than doing the more traditional door-thing of opening outward.

  Still unable to control my flight, I continued straight in.

  I blinked, not having expected a System message. This was a dwarven ruin? But the architecture was nothing like Terminus Septem, the entire thing seemingly carved out of purple stone. Nihil? Nothing? But zero wasn't a number. It was an absence of number. This wasn't a terminal? But why would it explicitly be called 'not a terminal'?

  My lost memories once again pinged, helpfully informing me that I was interpreting things incorrectly. They weren't so helpful as to tell me what the correct interpretation was, of course, but this place certainly had some relation to Terminus Septem.

  I flew down a corridor wide enough to drive two carts side by side, passing door after door on both sides. All were closed, and unlike the front entrance, none responded to my presence. The corridor wasn't long, though, and after reaching what I judged to be the centre of the tower, it came out into another room.

  Maybe calling it a 'room' wasn't doing it justice. The entire core of the tower was hollow. A space a few tens of metres across, but the ceiling a mile above. A spiral staircase circled the perimeter of the chamber, made up of stairs sized far too large for human legs. At regular intervals, it flattened out into a platform, another wide corridor leading from each one.

  I ignored them all, flying straight up instead. Higher and higher, until the ground was a distant memory. Still the staircase continued, more corridors down which I could see nothing of interest. They must have numbered in the hundreds. Just what was this place, that needed so much space?

  Unlike the bland corridors, the ceiling was anything but. A vast constellation of stars, glowing in all the colours of the rainbow.

  Except that they weren't stars. As I approached, my flight gradually slowing, they resolved into very familiar crystals. The familiar crystals were linked together in equally familiar ways, and with [Mana Manipulation], I could see the way the mana flowed through the entire thing.

  Lots of mana.

  An absolutely unbelievable amount of mana.

  A dangerous amount of mana.

  If my [Mana Sensitivity] hadn't been sealed back in Terminus Septem, and the smaller version there had anywhere near the same concentration of mana as this, I would never have dared shove a dagger into it. It wasn't just lucky I hadn't blown myself to bits, but it was lucky the entirety of Harvent Canton wasn't a burning crater.

  'You madmen...' I tried to say, but failed on account of having no lungs.

  "Yes," agreed the gods.

  I came to a full stop, halting before the deadly construction, built as a literal crown on this tower. And then things changed. The lights darkened, the tower walls fading, yet the machine became, if anything even more real. It stood there, in this strange dream space, an undeniable fact, glowing with its tightly harnessed power.

  Something else stood there, too. Someone else. Quite a few someones. I found myself unfortunately surrounded by things I couldn't quite see, but that I damn well knew were there.

  'You brought me here to show me this?' I guessed. I still couldn't speak it out loud, but it seemed I didn't need to.

  "Yes."

  'Why?'

  "Because the worlds move."

  'You're going to have to give a bit more of an explanation than that...' I thought, but I was wrong. They didn't. This was a boundary, all right. A boundary between this world and another. This was a... gate? An anchor? The knowledge was there, right on the cusp of Memory.

  Knowledge that I knew I mustn't try to seize, lest 'Robin' be replaced by something I had no desire to unleash upon this world.

  "This place exerts a pull," continued the gods, confirming what I had almost remembered.

  The worlds move. This place bound two worlds together, like... like a rubber band. And rubber bands pull. The worlds would collide. 'How long?'

  "Centuries."

  'Oh, good. For a moment, I thought you were going to tell me I had a week to destroy this place or something.'

  "Worlds have momentum."

  'Okay. Fine. So how long until a collision becomes inevitable, even should this place be destroyed?'

  "About a hundred and fifty years ago."

  'Oh...'

  For a moment, there was silence, countless ineffable figures simply watching me intently.

  'So, why show me this?' I eventually asked.

  "We want only what we requested of you upon our first meeting, [Guardian]. Clean up your mess."

  With that, the show seemed to be over, because the gods faded away, the magical construction following them. Yet, at their prompting, I couldn't help but notice that certain crystals were familiar in a way other than a this-is-like-the-thing-Count-Harvent-used sort of way.

  They were familiar in a yellow-glowing 'they're mine!' sort of way.

  Not just one, as had been the case back in Count Harvent's ruins, but many of them. This place was built using past-me's stuff. I had no evidence past-me had actually been involved—back in Harvent Canton, I'd been pretty certain the crystal had been stolen—but it was definitely my stuff.

  Then again, I wasn't having the same angry reaction to this bit of machinery as I'd had in Harvent Canton. Maybe, in this case, it wasn't stolen.

  As the lights finished fading away, I opened my eyes back in some nondescript inn, not having moved a single inch from my bed. It was nice having lungs again, though, along with a mouth and a voice box. I had a rather immediate use for them.

  "Fuck."

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