Levi walked.
He had no destination. No plan. Just the mechanical rhythm of one foot in front of the other while the world blurred at the edges and refused to come back into focus.
He didn't know how to face his mother.
She had worked herself to exhaustion for years — selling eggs, hauling vegetables to market, patching his torn school uniform late at night when she thought he was asleep — all because she believed in the dream of a dragon. Of her son standing tall where his father had fallen. Of the Maxwell name meaning something again.
How could he look her in the eye and tell her he had summoned a chicken?
He walked for five hours.
He only realized something was wrong when the trees closed in around him and the familiar dirt road was gone — replaced by dense undergrowth and the rustling of leaves in a wind that smelled of moss and old rain.
He had walked straight into Gorge Forest.
Not the edges, either. Deep in.
BOOM.
The explosion hit before he could process the thought. The shockwave rolled through the trees hard enough to flatten the grass at his feet and send his hair whipping across his face.
Levi froze.
He knew this forest. Every child in the village was told the same warning before they could walk: Gorge Forest is not for people. The things that live in its depths do not negotiate. Even the village head — the strongest man in town — refused to venture past the second treeline.
Dimensional beasts lurked in those depths. Things with teeth and hunger and no interest in mercy.
Another explosion. Closer. Louder. The trees groaned.
Whatever was fighting out there, it wasn't a beast.
That was cultivator-level output.
Levi stood very still for a moment.
Then, slowly, the grief he'd been carrying all day compressed itself into something cold and decided.
…Might as well get it over with.
His mother's face surfaced in his mind — soft eyes, tired smile, flour on her hands.
Tears slid quietly down his cheeks.
"If there's another life," he whispered to no one, "I want you to be my mother again."
He walked toward the sound.
The explosions had gone quiet by the time he pushed through the last wall of tall grass and emerged into a small, scarred clearing.
What he saw made his blood run cold.
Two figures. Ten meters apart. Both completely still.
One was propped against a thick oak tree — barely upright, one massive hand pressed against a ragged hole punched clean through his abdomen. His body was half-transformed: black fur crawled up his arms, his eyes had gone narrow and predatory, fangs extended past his lower lip, and two curved horns jutted from his temples.
Even half-dead and bleeding, the monstrous pressure radiating off him made Levi's legs want to buckle.
The second figure was on the ground — what remained of him, anyway. Both legs were severed. One arm was gone. His body had partially transformed as well, four eyes stacked where two should have been, and the ruined stumps of spider-limbs twitched uselessly behind his torso.
But the power pouring off both of them was unmistakable.
Man and beast, unified. The Lifebound Realm.
The state where a summoner and their beast merge completely, doubling strength beyond what either could achieve alone. Levi had only ever seen it once — his father, on a day Levi had never forgotten, showing him just a single glimpse of what true power looked like.
He hadn't expected to see it again in a dead-end forest behind his village.
His eyes dragged to the figure against the tree.
Recognition hit like a punch.
…Grant Stonewood.
Son of the village head. Top-ranked talent of Golden Storm Monster Training University. The same Grant who had stolen their harvest, killed their livestock, and smiled while doing it — because who was going to stop the village head's son?
And now here he was, half-transformed and bleeding to death against a tree.
Both men turned toward Levi the instant he stepped into the clearing. Their eyes locked onto him with the sharp, immediate attention of people who had been waiting to see if they'd need to deal with a witness.
Grant's cracked lips pulled into something ugly. "…It's you. Traitor's whelp."
But his voice was aimed past Levi — at the other figure on the ground.
"This is Slicer Frank!" he shouted, sudden and forceful. "The serial killer — he's wanted by the Federation! He's been trying to murder me!"
The man on the ground — Frank — tilted his ruined face toward Grant with an expression of mild amusement.
"Oh? You two know each other?"
Levi's throat locked up.
Slicer Frank. Even in a village this far from civilization, that name had traveled. A rogue cultivator turned serial killer. The Federation had been hunting him for years.
His mind screamed at him to run.
But his legs weren't moving.
Frank's four eyes drifted to Levi, and the smile widened slowly, like a wound opening. "It seems Grant knows you, kid. That's interesting. It seems tonight just got more complicated for everyone."
Think. Think. Levi's thoughts were racing, stumbling over each other, trying to assemble a coherent picture of the situation. Two Lifebound Realm cultivators. Both critically injured. Neither one can move freely. Frank is missing an arm and both legs. Grant has a hole in his stomach. They burned each other out trying to land that last hit.
Grant's battered, furious voice cut through his spiraling thoughts.
"Levi, you idiot — Frank won't let you leave now that you've seen this! But look at him! He's spent! That last exchange took everything he had left! If you move NOW—"
"How very generous of you, Grant," Frank said pleasantly, cutting him off. "Wanting the boy to spend his energy killing me so you can deal with a tired child afterward. I genuinely admire the efficiency."
He looked at Levi. Considered him. Then sighed, like a man making a reasonable business decision.
"I'll be honest with you, kid. I'm not a monster." A pause. "Well. Not entirely. What I'm proposing is simple: Grant over there has something on his body worth taking. I cannot move to retrieve it myself. You can. Kill him, search him, we split everything evenly — and tonight never happened."
Levi's mouth went dry.
He thought about the stolen harvests. The dead livestock. The nights his mother had quietly cried in the kitchen because she couldn't figure out how to feed them through winter. The way Grant had always grinned, knowing there was nothing they could do.
He thought about all of that for a very long, quiet moment.
"…I'll do it," he said.
"DIE!"
Grant's voice cracked with fury and desperation. The air in front of his open mouth ignited — a torrent of blazing flame surged across the clearing toward Frank, brilliant orange and roaring.
Even near death, the power behind it was terrifying.
Frank's remaining hand shot up. A faint blue light condensed around him like a cracked shell — his depleted shield flickering and groaning under the assault. Fractures spidered across its surface. Then it shattered.
Several tendrils of flame punched through and slammed into Frank's chest.
He flew backward with a strangled grunt, crashing into the earth.
But even as his body was still airborne —
His mouth opened.
A sphere of dark, viscous liquid launched from between his teeth and streaked across the clearing faster than Levi's eyes could follow.
It hit Grant dead center.
The effect was immediate and horrifying.
Grant screamed. The sound lasted approximately three seconds before it was swallowed by the hiss of accelerating dissolution. The corrosive liquid spread across him like ink dropped in water — eating through flesh, through bone, through the remains of his beast-form transformation — until the screaming stopped.
What remained was a skeleton, already half-dissolved, and somewhere amid the ruin, a small watch glowing with a faint, steady green light.
Silence.
Frank coughed. Blood painted his lips. He reached slowly into the folds of his clothing with his one remaining hand and produced a small vial of medicinal liquid, which he drank in a single long pull.
"…Tch," he murmured, almost to himself. "Never expected Grant to land a technique that refined. I really almost didn't make it."
His four eyes found Levi, still frozen at the edge of the clearing.
He looked at him with something that might have been satisfaction — and then his gaze drifted, deliberately, to the faint green glow in the ruins of Grant's corpse.
A spark appeared in Frank's eyes.
Gone in an instant. Replaced by his easy, reasonable smile.
"My offer still stands, kid. Everything on Grant's body — split evenly between us. Then we walk away. We forget tonight happened." A beat. "Unless you think you can kill me and take everything for yourself. You're welcome to try, of course."
"N-no," Levi said quickly, injecting the right amount of fear into his voice. "Half is more than enough for me. I wouldn't dare."
"Smart boy." Frank gestured loosely. "I can't move. Could you go ahead and check what Grant was carrying? My interest is purely in what's worth splitting."
Levi moved toward the remains, taking slow, deliberate steps.
One. Two.
Frank's voice followed him, conversational and unhurried. "Funny thing about Grant's recent breakthrough — do you know about it? Word is his talent was completely average. For years, his cultivation barely crawled along. Then, two months ago, everything changed. In under twenty days he went from the Verdant Realm to the Lifebound Realm." A pause weighted with implication. "That's not natural. Not for a 1-star talent. Not for anyone."
Three. Four.
"The timing, too. It overlapped exactly with Golden Storm University's dimensional rift expedition."
Five.
"Whatever he found in that rift — or whatever he took from someone who found it first — it's almost certainly what I'm looking for."
Levi stopped.
He turned his head slowly toward Frank's prone figure.
Frank was staring at him.
His eyes had gone cold. The easy smile was still there, but the warmth behind it had evaporated completely. The fingertips of his remaining hand glinted — a thin blade, impossibly sharp, balanced between them with the relaxed precision of someone who had done this ten thousand times.