The Iron Gates did not open for the living. They opened for data.
Rai Kurotsuki sat in the knee-deep mud of the "Processing Buffer," a three-mile stretch of wasteland between the Hwarin Kingdom's border and the towering Aegis Wall of the Astra Dominion. Above him, the sky was a permanent bruise of gray, illuminated every few seconds by the sweeping searchlights of the Astra Border Drones.
Around him were hundreds of others—ghosts in rags. They were the "Causal Refuse," people whose lives had been disrupted by drought, war, or failed magic, all seeking entry into the city of light.
But Astra didn't want refugees. It wanted compatible vessels.
Rai clutched the stolen White Neuroshard in his pocket. It felt cold, like a piece of hail that refused to melt. Every time his skin touched it, the *Tamashii no Kagi* (Soul Key) against his ribs throbbed in a dissonant rhythm. The key was a jagged shard of gold and bone; the Neuroshard was a polished sliver of synthetic crystal. They were two different eras of power, and they hated each other.
"Next batch! Move!"
The voice came from a hovering platform. An Astra "Evaluator" stood there, encased in shimmering white armor. He held a Causal Scanner that looked like a long, silver tuning fork.
Rai stood up, his legs cramping. Beside him, a young girl named Hana, whom he had protected during the long trek from Oakhaven, gripped his sleeve. She was barely ten, her eyes wide and clouded with the "Fringe Fever" that came from drinking unfiltered Inga-water.
"Rai," she whispered, her voice a dry rasp. "They're going to take me to the White Rooms, aren't they?"
The White Rooms were the stuff of nightmares—the labs where the "incompatible" were processed into raw biological essence for Neuroshard production.
"No," Rai said, his jaw tightening. "Stay close. Don't look at the light."
As they reached the scanning line, the Evaluator pointed the tuning fork at the woman in front of them. The device hummed, turning a dull, flat green.
"Compatibility: 12%. Rejected. Move to the processing chute."
The woman screamed as two mechanical "Recoverer" units—headless, four-armed droids—dragged her toward a dark opening in the wall. No one moved to help. In the Buffer, compassion was a causal weight no one could afford.
Rai stepped forward. Hana was behind him.
The Evaluator aimed the scanner at Rai. The hum began, but as the waves hit Rai's body, the sound changed. It became a sharp, screeching feedback.
[ERROR: CAUSAL NULL DETECTED. SCANNER MALFUNCTION.]
The Evaluator blinked, tapping his visor. "Wait. Stand still, stray."
He tried again. The scanner flared a violent red, then emitted a puff of black smoke.
Rai felt the *Tamashii no Kagi* burn. It was as if the key was eating the scan, refusing to let the Dominion's machines define Rai's existence.
"You," the Evaluator growled, his hand moving toward the pulse-pistol at his hip. "What are you hiding? You're a Null. You shouldn't be breathing."
"I'm just a man," Rai said, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"Nulls are a threat to the network stability," the Evaluator said, his voice dropping the facade of bureaucracy. "Recoverers! Apprehend this unit for deep-tissue analysis!"
The four-armed droids turned toward Rai, their hydraulic joints hissing.
Rai felt the White Shard in his pocket suddenly grow searingly hot. It was reacting to the danger. He had never used a shard before. In the Hwarin Kingdom, these were the tools of the gods who lived in the cities.
*"Break the command,"* the voice of the Soul Key whispered. *"Reject the definition."*
Rai didn't think. He didn't have time for a plan. He reached into his pocket, grabbed the White Shard, and—instead of swallowing it as the addicts did—he crushed it in his bare palm.
The crystal shattered.
Usually, a crushed shard would simply dissipate. But between Rai's hand and the Soul Key, the shard's energy had nowhere to go. It was trapped in the field of *Ketsubetsu*.
"I reject the scan!" Rai shouted.
A shockwave of pure, white light exploded from his hand. It wasn't a blast of fire; it was a blast of *un-being*.
The two Recoverer droids didn't explode. They simply ceased to function. Their lights went out, their metal bodies turning to brittle clay that crumbled into the mud. The Evaluator's hovering platform lost its causal tether and crashed into the filth, the soldier screaming as his white armor cracked like an eggshell.
The searchlights above flickered and died. The Aegis Wall groaned, a massive section of its holographic barrier flickering into static.
The silence that followed was terrifying.
Rai stood in the center of the chaos, his hand bleeding from the shards of the crushed Neuroshard. He looked at the Iron Gates. For the first time in history, the barrier was open. A jagged hole in the reality of the Dominion.
"Run!" Rai yelled to the refugees. "Go! Through the wall!"
The hundreds of ghosts didn't need a second invitation. They surged forward, a tide of desperate humanity pouring through the gap Rai had torn in the world's logic.
But Rai didn't move. He felt a strange sensation—a feeling of being watched, not by drones, but by a mind.
***
In Nexa City, Ryo Kanzaki stopped typing.
He was in his study, the only light coming from the monitor. He looked at the paragraph he had just finished. He had been writing about a character he called 'The Anomaly'—a boy who broke a gate because he refused to be a number.
"A pulse," Ryo whispered.
He touched his temple. His Cognitive Echo hearing was picking up a massive resonance from the border. It wasn't a thought. It was a *rejection*. It was the sound of a period being erased from a sentence.
*"He's early,"* Nox Lucis hissed from the shadows. *"The boy in the mud… he's moving faster than your pen, Ryo."*
Ryo's eyes widened. For the first time in his life, he felt a flicker of something he hadn't planned.
Uncertainty.
He looked at his 'Obsidian Crow' ink. It was vibrating in its glass well.
"He crushed the shard," Ryo realized, his mind racing. "He didn't consume the power; he denied the power's right to exist. That… that isn't in the script."
Ryo stood up and walked to his balcony. He looked toward the distant horizon where the Aegis Wall stood. He couldn't see the hole, but he could feel the cold air rushing in—the air of the wasteland, the air of the unplanned truth.
"Mika was right," Ryo murmured. "I need to see the fringes. I need to see if the mirror is starting to break."
***
On the other side of the Aegis Wall, inside the Dominion's territory, Rai Kurotsuki knelt in the grass. It was the first time he had ever touched real, green grass that wasn't poisoned by Gen-leaks.
But he wasn't happy.
The *Tamashii no Kagi* was glowing a deep, angry gold. In his hand, the remnants of the White Shard were no longer white. They had turned black.
Rai looked back at the Iron Gates. He saw the refugees scattering into the forests of Astra. He had saved them, but at what cost? He felt a void opening inside him—a hunger that the Soul Key was trying to fill with his own memories.
"Rai?" Hana asked, standing beside him. "Where do we go now?"
Rai looked toward the towering spires of Nexa City, shimmering on the horizon like a cruel promise.
"We go to the source," Rai said. "We go to find the man who's writing this hell. And we make him stop."
The boy from the mud had entered the city of light.
And in the wasteland behind them, a man with a crimson sword reached the edge of the Buffer, looking at the broken gate. Raigen Kurosawa didn't care about refugees. He only cared about the resonance.
"The Author is close," Raigen growled, his hand tightening on Shinketsu no Kiba.
The three points of the triangle were finally on the same side of the wall.
The blood, the curse, and the ink were about to meet.