Joel gazed expectantly at the wooden artifact on the table in the room: a small cube filled with intricate inscriptions that pulsed with a faint, whitish light, as if it were breathing. Several minutes had passed since he himself had sent the first experimental exploration device through the portal. The room remained in an eerie, expectant silence.

  He knew the possibility of failure was extremely high. After all, it was the first time that both the electronic devices and Ashoka's magical artifact had been tested in their original destination.

  The case of the tablet with the digital camera was, in itself, a reckless gamble. Its components were fragile, susceptible to damage from a bad fall, an unexpected impact, or even some natural electromagnetic phenomenon of the place it might land in. And for Ashoka's magical artifact, the stakes were no less high: to receive the message in a reasonable time, the monk, advised by Connor, had used the portal itself as a kind of dimensional repeater antenna. A brilliant, useful concept… but extremely difficult to implement.

  Without this, any physical signal would have taken more than ten years to cover the distance between Myrrial and Gaea. And Joel had no intention of waiting a decade for every attempt.

  As the minutes ticked by without any news, Joel's hopes gradually faded. He stared at the clock with a bitter mix of resignation and weariness. And when the first hour finally passed, he had no choice but to accept defeat.

  “Cancel the portal, Nana…” he murmured.

  But just before she could, the wooden cube began to vibrate. At first, it was a simple shudder, a subtle tremor that made the whitish glow flicker. Then, suddenly, it erupted in a rapid sequence of sounds: high-pitched pulses, clicks, similar to static, as if an old television had come to life.

  Joel froze in surprise. Nana, on the other hand, immediately bent over the device, concentrating completely on the barrage of signals. The cube emitted that strange sound for several continuous minutes, vibrating with increasing intensity.

  When it finally stopped, Nana ran to the computer and began typing frantically, feeding the decoding program the long string of data.

  The following hours were agonizing. Joel stayed behind Nana, pacing back and forth, unable to contain his anxiety. Until, finally, Nana looked up.

  —Joel… the images are ready.

  The first photograph appeared on the screen: a completely white background, barely interrupted by faint grayish patches, as if the device had captured only fog or a thick layer of clouds.

  The second image showed the same thing, but with a portion of the frame tinted blue. A stark contrast: sky and cloud formations.

  And the third… The third revealed a deep blue sky, bathing the entire frame. There, bright and enormous, rose a huge yellow sun. And in the distance, almost floating like a small red wound in the air, a reddish dot was visible: the portal, still open.

  Joel was speechless. It had worked. But the portal's location was a colossal problem. It was high in the sky, far above the clouds… perhaps tens of kilometers up. An impossible place to set foot. A place where any living being would appear only to fall to certain death.

  The success was real. But so was the danger. For while it was something that could be solved with a parachute, what lay beneath the clouds was still unknown.

  Despite the initial setback, Joel couldn't help but feel a profound sense of satisfaction. The exploration system had worked, and that was all that mattered. With a confirmed, albeit perilous, success, he redoubled his efforts, determined to conduct as many experimental trips as necessary to find a safe destination for the final jump.

  What followed were days of anticipation and tension. Each test was a small gamble, a new attempt to "land" the portal somewhere reasonable. But all of them, without exception, ended in failure.

  Most of the time, the portal reopened high in the sky, well above the clouds. Sometimes, it even opened outside the atmosphere, revealing the dark immensity of space. Other times, though more encouraging, it showed the nearby surface… only to reveal that the portal had emerged in the middle of an endless ocean.

  There were attempts where no message even came back, suggesting that the devices had ended up in places too dangerous or had simply sunk to the bottom of the sea.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Joel was beginning to feel frustration building, but he never slowed down. If there was one thing he'd learned in his life, it was to persevere even when failure seemed to be closing in from all sides.

  Nana, meanwhile, could only work by adjusting small parameters and making minute recalibrations, gradually fine-tuning the distances, searching for a more stable entry point to the planet's surface. What had initially seemed like an abstract art form slowly began to take shape in her hands. And her progress became evident: fewer and fewer portals appeared too high. It was inevitable that sooner or later, an image of solid ground would return.

  And so it happened. Four months after the start of the journeys, the last device returned three identical images. They all showed the same thing: dense branches and green leaves. The device, it seemed, had fallen into the canopy of a tree and become trapped among the branches. Although the photos didn't reveal much of the surroundings, they did confirm something crucial: the fall hadn't been fatal. They were, at last, close to a safe point.

  What followed was a series of attempts focused on that same spot. For an entire week, the devices were sent one after another, and although many remained trapped among similar branches, the angles kept improving. Each new image revealed a little more of the environment, slowly sketching the outline of a dense, living forest.

  Until finally, one of the devices broke through the vegetation and fell to the ground, sending back clear images of a forest of robust trees, with thick trunks and bark similar to that of terrestrial oaks, stretching in all directions.

  That was the decisive moment. The room erupted in shouts of joy. Even Ashoka, usually so solemn, couldn't hide the joy in his voice. And Nana, who rarely displayed such human emotions, let out a squeal that only Joel could interpret as pure euphoria.

  They had a safe spot. For the first time, Gaea ceased to be a distant dream… and became a real possibility.

  Now all that remained was to take the big step, one that Joel had to take with everyone else. He would have to travel with Nana, no matter what, and he wasn't willing to leave the others behind on Myrrial. The idea of ??something happening that would prevent them from returning, after everything they had been through, was unthinkable.

  He gathered Liam, Ariel, and Alicia to tell them the big news. They knew, in general terms, what Joel had been working on during those months, but none of them imagined that a day would come when they would actually leave their home planet.

  The siblings, as well as the children who had recently arrived, didn't feel a strong attachment to Myrrial. For them, home was wherever Joel and Nana were.

  Alicia, on the other hand, had more complex feelings about her past life as a noble. She deeply missed her father and some of the friends she had left behind. But she showed none of that to the others; she chose to let go of her past and embrace her new life. She even declined Joel's offer to send a message to her father. She didn't want him to risk everything for something like that, fully aware of the constant danger they all faced.

  In the end, they all nodded in agreement about the new destiny that awaited them: an adventure in a completely unknown world, perhaps a place where they would no longer have to hide. A place where Joel's vision could finally blossom.

  Joel, however, made it clear that the beginning wouldn't be easy. They would likely face barriers with the local population from day one, starting with the language. Everyone would have to be patient and keep working as if the whole world were against them… at least until he found a way for them to adapt.

  The next conversation Joel had was with Connor, someone who, paradoxically, had been crucial in Nana developing her new powers and a key figure in the search for the path to Gaea. Joel sincerely thanked him for everything, even knowing that the former agent had posed a huge danger during the time of the hunt. Even so, gratitude outweighed any resentment. He offered to set him free and open a portal for him to some distant destination within Myrrial, where he could ask for help and return to his old life. After all, by then Joel and his group would be on another planet, far beyond the reach of the empires.

  But to Joel's surprise—and that of anyone who knew the situation—Connor rejected the offer and asked to stay with the group. The reason was as obvious as it was unsettling: the man was fascinated by the technology Joel controlled, and even more so now, after the near-impossible feat of opening a secure portal to Gaea.

  Connor loved power, and with the same intensity, he loved technology. He was obsessed with the electronic gadgets in the shelter, like a bright child staring at a new world. And now that he could read English, he also devoured books in his free time, as much as he was allowed, accumulating knowledge as fast as he could acquire it.

  Joel didn't know when they had reached this strange dynamic, where the former agent seemed to have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Joel genuinely enjoyed his company, but that didn't mean he trusted him. Not yet.

  He considered the request seriously, weighing the pros and cons. He couldn't deny that Connor's experience was valuable, especially if they ever found a way to remove his mental blocks. Ashoka assured him that it wasn't impossible to infiltrate his spirit world and remove those seals manually, but he also warned that it would be a long process, full of preliminary experimentation. One mistake, and Connor could be left with irreversible mental damage.

  In the end, it was decided that Connor would remain as he had been until that moment: a prisoner with too many freedoms. And strangely enough, that didn't seem to bother him at all.

  It was then that everything was ready for the imminent jump.

  Nana, with the serenity of someone who carries entire worlds within her, compressed the shelter back into herself. The structure—the tree that for years had given them shelter, warmth, laughter, and security—folded in the blink of an eye, as if swallowed by the air. The children took a step back, eyes wide, watching not only wood disappear, but a part of their history.

  Even so, no one protested. Astonishment overcame any nostalgia.

  The plan was simple in theory, but fraught with responsibility: Joel and Liam would be the first to cross the portal, several minutes ahead, escorting Connor. An advance party tasked with preparing the ground before the rest arrived.

  And it was necessary. The portal was still manifesting in the air, at an unknown height; they could fall from twenty meters… or perhaps fifty. So the two of them would be the ones to receive everyone, especially the children. Small, vulnerable bodies that wouldn't survive a fall from that height.

  Joel took a deep breath, then turned around and looked at the place one last time: the base of the tree that was no longer there, the roots carving furrows in the earth, the rocks where they had once sat to eat, the familiar shadows of the forest. Myrrial… His home, though it had always been a prison disguised as a refuge.

  He had learned, suffered, and grown there. And now he was leaving it, perhaps forever.

  He forced himself to exhale slowly, like someone letting go of a thought that had served its purpose. Then he nodded firmly to Nana.

  "You can begin."