While the portal experiments yielded success after success, Joel's mind remained in constant turmoil, saturated with unanswered questions and paths that seemed to lead to disaster. Every breakthrough, every perfect stabilization of a portal, was like seeing an exit open up… only to find a different abyss beyond. Because, however far he advanced, Joel still didn't know where he could flee without condemning those who depended on him.

  And it wasn't just a small group anymore: it was a small community. Children, teenagers, and a few adults who stayed with him more out of faith than logic. Sometimes, in the long silences between trials, Joel found himself regretting having allowed the responsibility to grow so much. Especially with the new children.

  But it was too late. And even if he could turn back, he wouldn't. Each of them was part of his gamble for the future. Each showed increasing signs of magical power, almost as if their proximity to Joel further catalyzed their awakenings. And among them all, Abigail shone brighter than ever: his favorite; the girl with a calm aura and a steady gaze, now reacting promisingly to the experiment with Connor's heart tissue. The first signs were there, subtle but unmistakable: a second magical affinity, and not just any affinity, but probably a dimensional one. A gift… or a key to greater misfortunes.

  What Joel most desired, if he could allow himself a selfish wish, was to return to Aeskar. To the headquarters of the Cult of Dawn. To a place where at least he knew who was friend and who was foe. But he simply had no way of locating it. A world without reliable coordinates was a dimensional game of Russian roulette. Nana had no position markers on any planets other than Myrrial; any blind leap would be a potential death sentence, especially considering that the empires maintained constant surveillance for possible invasions from other planets, even though they were now in a sort of truce.

  Consequently, only two real alternatives remained: continue moving within Myrrial, among constantly pursued shadows… or gamble on Gaea, the only world beyond the direct reach of the empires.

  But when he managed to decipher the planet's exact coordinates and tried to calculate the portal with Nana, he discovered that it wasn't just difficult: it was a mathematical monstrosity.

  Unit conversions revealed a distance bordering on the absurd: about 10 light-years between Myrrial and Gaea. Trillions of kilometers (or billions in Europe). An inconceivable gap, both for the average human mind and for the best dimensional walkers. Worse still: between the two worlds lay an intermediate solar system, distorting any attempt to trace a linear path.

  It was like trying to throw a needle off a cliff at a moving target… blindfolded.

  When Joel, frustrated, asked Connor how the empires had managed it, the answer was as unsettling as it was unavoidable.

  Connor didn't know for sure, but he had a theory. Apparently, the only way they could have opened a stable path was through trial and error, literally. Thousands of "volunteers" were sent through unstable prototype portals, loaded with artifacts designed to send basic signals or, at best, confirm whether the individual had survived a few seconds beyond the crossing. And it's no surprise that most didn't.

  The difficulty lay in the fact that, although the portals looked like doors, their function was more like one-way tunnels. One couldn't return through the same portal, so to go back one had to use a different one. Only permanent portals could be used easily in both directions, and dimensional walkers capable of reversing an already created portal were extremely rare, and even then, only under very specific conditions.

  It took empires centuries to send a human being who didn't die in the process. Thousands of lives were sacrificed to map a minimally reliable dimensional corridor. And only when they managed to get a dimensional walker to Gaea alive and establish a mark, did the real exploration begin… and, with it, the future invasions.

  The real problem for Joel began when he introduced the parameters representing Gaea's coordinates into the calculation system. Instead of simplifying, the improved mathematical models produced an avalanche of equations that seemed to defy all known logic. These were figures that could not be addressed with any conventional method. Even Nana—always precise, always unflappable—showed a hint of frustration for the first time. She was unable to simplify the calculations or propose a viable solution.

  For a moment, Joel considered giving up. Or at least postponing the idea of ??a direct portal to Gaea and looking for an alternative path, any other. But the mere thought of retreating made his stomach churn. So he made a decision he didn't usually make: he would attack the problem head-on, without compromise.

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  He locked himself in his room for days, dusting off all his programming memories. He didn't fully trust his technical memory, but he believed he had enough material to give it a try. He started with small tools, then built more complex functions, until finally he began to sculpt an entire program, made exclusively to handle that hell of dimensional variables.

  It was obsessive, almost feverish work. And thanks to his mental capacity, infinitely superior to that of an ordinary human being on Earth, he only needed two months to achieve a working prototype.

  But the fact that the program worked didn't mean they had the resources to run it. To obtain a coherent result, Joel had to gather more than twenty laptops—the only ones that weight limitations could overcome—and network them like an improvised computing swarm. They were barely enough to process the problem, and even then it took them nearly one hundred hours to produce a final answer.

  With more powerful machines, the kind of scientific equipment he vaguely remembered from laboratories and universities on Earth, it might have taken a fraction of the time. But those machines were monstrous: enormous towers, massive cooling systems, hundreds of kilograms of weight. Besides, Joel had never owned a high-end desktop computer that weighed less than 15 kilograms, much less taken one apart to try and reconstruct it piece by piece. He had to make do with what he had available.

  Despite all the limitations, despite the failures, restarts, and sleepless nights, the result finally arrived.

  Less than a year after awakening her dimensional magic, Nana finally managed to open her first stabilized portal to what was meant to be Gaea. A reddish vortex that, until then, had become a common sight, oscillating in the air like the entrance to a dream that could end in a nightmare.

  And although the achievement was monumental, the silence that followed was even more so. No one dared to set foot inside. No one wanted to be the first to discover what was—or wasn't—on the other side.

  To confront the new problem, Joel turned to Ahsoka, the only one capable of creating magical artifacts to replicate what empires had done centuries before. The monk, however, wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the request. Creating magical artifacts was no trivial act: each one demanded a vast portion of his spiritual energy, a resource he didn't possess in infinite quantities and which only he could replenish through long periods of meditation. And worse still, the artifacts Joel needed had to be capable of transmitting information across absurdly long distances.

  Even so, with his characteristic cold persistence, Joel eventually convinced the monk, who agreed on one very clear condition: He requested permission to thoroughly explore Joel's spiritual realm.

  As he explained, after Adam's departure, he had managed to trace the direction in which the killer's spirit had disappeared. It wasn't a simple disappearance, like when a normal person dies: there was an apparent destination, a specific point within Joel's vast mental and spiritual landscape. The monk had a disturbing theory. He believed that within Joel's mind there existed a place where fragments of the souls of people from Earth resided—or were trapped.

  The revelation left Joel speechless. "Why didn't you tell me this before?" he demanded immediately, driven by a mixture of anxiety and fascination. "We could have explored it from the beginning!"

  Ashoka replied calmly. He didn't want to risk acting rashly. He needed to confirm that the place Adam went to was the same place other spirits would go if another possession arose. But for more than a year, no strange incidents had occurred in Joel's mind.

  With no new signs, no new invaders… and no further opportunity to observe the phenomenon, Ashoka decided that, despite the uncertainty, perhaps the time had come to explore anyway.

  However, this also presented a serious problem. Exploring Joel's spirit world would take months, perhaps longer. And while he did so, Ashoka would be completely cut off from the real world, with no way to communicate or offer assistance. It was, in every sense, an expedition that had to be undertaken at the right time.

  While Joel wasn't comfortable with the idea of ??someone delving into his mind, he had learned to trust Ashoka, both his judgment and his respect. And deep down, he also wanted answers. Perhaps, he thought, he could discover what was really happening inside his head. Perhaps he could even communicate with those presences that had marked his life in indescribable ways: Hoshinobu… and maybe even Adam.

  Returning to the subject of portals, Joel devised a rather ingenious method for exploring them safely, making the most of both magic and technology. Considering the severe limitations of the artifacts Ashoka could create, Joel proposed a minimalist, yet incredibly effective, communication system: a sequence of short and long signals based on Morse code, chosen primarily for its reliability.

  The idea was simple on the surface: Joel would send a small device through the portal, equipped with a tablet containing a digital camera and running a specially designed program. Upon crossing the portal and detecting that they had emerged on the other side, the device would take a series of photographs. It would then immediately convert this data into a code of sound pulses. This sound sequence would be transmitted back via a magical artifact crafted by Ashoka, whose simple mechanism ensured reliability and minimal energy consumption.

  It was a strange system. A bridge between worlds built with a cheap computer, a crude, magical transmitter, and a code invented over a century ago on a planet completely unaware of the existence of the world Joel inhabited.

  Nana, to no one's surprise, turned out to be a key piece in the communication, being the only one capable of effectively receiving the test messages. Joel tried to use the software he had designed in reverse to decode the sounds, but the interference and background noise left by Ashoka's artifacts made that method impossible in the short term. Nana, on the other hand, was able to understand the messages immediately, filtering out all interference, memorizing them, and later typing them directly into the computer.

  Joel was proud of the system. Not the arrogant kind of pride, but a deeper one, the kind that arises when an impossible idea becomes reality. Nana celebrated beside him, thrilled by the system's elegance. Ahsoka, for his part, seemed relieved: it was rare to see him satisfied with a project, but this time he was. The magical artifacts only needed to function for a couple of minutes, so they saved a significant amount of energy.

  Connor… Connor watched all of this with a mixture of fascination and bewilderment. It was like witnessing an act that violated every rule he believed to be unbreakable. Nothing made sense. Physics, logic, magic: everything seemed to have been bent, twisted, and assembled into a project that, in theory, should fail at every turn.

  But it didn't fail. Every adjustment fit perfectly. Every test progressed. And every part of this absurd plan seemed to be moving, without a hitch, toward an improbable success.