Byrne stumbled upon magic in the 1970s after his first business venture went south. Before becoming a real estate tycoon, he had been a gold smuggler moving bullion for those eager to evade government control: drug cartels, arms dealers, and paranoid wealthy individuals. The risks were high, but the money was good. He knew that the trick to survive was to only dip his toes into society's underbelly. He would never be blinded by the wealth, and he would never let them have a hold over him.

Byrne moved the gold from one place to another, got his cut, and then moved on to the next operation. Repeat customers were profitable, but the longer one played the game, the more dangerous it became. Byrne had a motto: if nobody knew you, nobody could connect you to the crime scene. He kept his dealings clean and his hands as far from the mess as possible.

Until he couldn't.

After a particularly messy operation with a Colombian gang, Byrne abandoned his operations center in New Orleans and moved to the West Coast with a few suitcases full of money. He needed a fresh start—a place out of the reach of both the law and his old clients. California was perfect. The sunny beaches and steady cash flow from Hollywood and Silicon Valley made it the ideal place for an eccentric millionaire with dubious wealth to lay low.

In Santa Monica, Byrne moved into a rented house and laundered his money through real estate and an import business. However, he couldn't lie low for long. Dubious people seemed to attract other dubious people, and sooner or later, he gained a large social circle of the same rotten people he used to frequent in New Orleans. It was during a social gathering hosted by a wealthy casino tycoon that he met the cult.

The group called themselves the Luminary Circle. They were one of hundreds of New Age collectives that plagued the city back then. Like their counterparts, the acolytes of the Luminary Circle dressed in loose, pale clothing, spoke softly, and kept close to one another, finishing each other's sentences like they were speaking from some sort of rehearsed script.

At first, Byrne dismissed them as wealthy eccentrics with too much money and not enough purpose in life. However, they were different from other New Age collectives. He felt like they had quite a strange obsession with him.

It all began with a strange interest in his line of work: questions about gold sources, purities, and routes. It wasn't strange for customers to obsess over the operative details, but this was different. Byrne couldn't help but compare them to drones collecting information for their queen bee—well-groomed, articulate, and plastically optimistic drones.

Eventually, after a hundred and one invitations, Byrne agreed to meet the queen bee.

Byrne wasn't sure what to expect, but a lavish manor nestled among the hills wasn't it. The place looked like one of the luxury homes that plagued that part of the city. However, he felt uneasy. Despite the modern facade, the manor's interior looked like an old Victorian house. The people living there wore white robes and walked barefoot through the gardens.

The leader of the group, a woman called Seraphine—definitely not her real name—greeted him in a study with brass navigation instruments, old books, and taxidermied animals. She was tall and thin, with piercing blue eyes that seemed to gaze beyond the physical realm. She certainly had the appearance of a proper cult leader. There was also something magnetic about her presence, like she knew something others couldn't see.

Byrne was expecting an invitation to the cult, accompanied by a hefty entrance fee. However, Seraphine was all business. She wanted gold—not in bars or coins, but raw gold. The price was more than generous, and the risk was very low, so he arranged the purchase.

Byrne was ready to deliver the gold in a small, sealed canvas bag. As requested, he drove it up the hills to the manor. That day, the peaceful atmosphere at the Luminary Circle had changed. The barefoot cultists who once plagued the gardens were nowhere to be found. All the New Age fluff was gone. Only a few high-ranking acolytes remained in the manor.

Handing the bag of gold to another member, Seraphine invited Byrne to witness the ritual.

He replied with a snarky comment, but the doubt remained.

What if it works?

In the end, curiosity got the better of him, and he was led into the house, past the lounges, the soft carpets, and the beaded curtains, and down a spiral staircase. The scent of incense and myrrh hung heavy in the air. The atmosphere was charged, dizzying. A heavy door opened at the end of the corridor, leading to an old Roman-style bathhouse.

The room was lined with old, spotted mirrors framed in oxidized brass and iron. In the center of the room was a pool filled with a few centimeters of water, no more than two or three fingers deep. A waist-high stone platform stood in the pool with a small depression in the middle. The gold had been placed there, shimmering under the faint light of candles.

The cult gathered around the perimeter of the pool, standing in silence. This time, they were wearing midnight-blue robes thrown over their heads. Each held a brass bowl filled with Palo Santo, White Sage, and Sandalwood. The smoke slowly filled the room like a thick mist, and Byrne remained near the entrance where the air was more breathable.

Seraphine entered last. She moved without sound, barefoot, the edges of her white robe blending with the smoke and the marble. With a peaceful, cult-leader smile, she signaled for Byrne to close the door. He did, ensuring he could get out if the atmosphere became too hazy.

Seraphine moved across the room, extinguishing candles as the acolytes chanted. The air thickened, and the reflections in the mirrors became muddy and distorted. Then, Seraphine entered the pool, her footsteps creating ripples in the water. She stood behind the stone platform and waited for the water to calm. Without a noticeable cue, the chants grew louder.

Seraphine spoke in a language Byrne hadn't heard before.

At least it wasn't a corny spell in English.

Byrne was about to roll his eyes when he noticed something in the room had changed. The surface of the water around Seraphine shimmered, as if it were covered in a fine layer of gold. The color changed to silver, then to a milky white, before disappearing completely. The pool wasn't just a pool anymore. There seemed to be a hole in the ground, under the water. Byrne stepped forward, vertigo gripping his stomach. Inside the hole, he saw an aerial view of a valley at night, as though the room were floating in the sky. He glanced around. The acolytes were unshaken. Their eyes were open, but lost in the mirrors, as if they saw nothing happening inside the pool.

Walking closer, Byrne leaned over the pool's edge and saw white cities suspended over gargantuan trees. Nobody stopped him. The vision was sharp. Too sharp to be fake. He touched the water. It was cold, almost freezing. He leaned closer.

Something moved in one of the white towers, like a shadow in front of a candle.

The image under the pool moved rapidly towards the tower, and Byrne felt like he was falling, though the floor remained solid under his feet. Through the window, he saw a woman of unrivaled beauty with long white hair dressed in the most exquisite silk dress. The woman moved her hands, and a flame appeared out of nowhere. She repeated the exercise again and again until the flame grew into a basketball-sized, spinning ball of fire.

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Byrne gasped, and the fireball disappeared.

The woman turned around and stared through the window. She said words he couldn't decipher and extended her hand toward him. Byrne extended his hand, but before he could touch her, the picture vanished, leaving only the white marble bottom of the pool. Byrne stood up and retreated to the edge of the room, his heart beating like a hammer against an anvil.

Seraphine asked each acolyte to mark the mirror where they had seen the vision and dismissed them one by one. When only Seraphine and Byrne remained in the room, she didn't offer him the piece of chalk. Instead, she asked him a single question.

Do you want to go there?

Byrne nodded.

The Luminary Circle was a facade for Seraphine's real endeavor. The robes, the rites, the ritualistic affirmations, and the talk of inner lights and cosmic alignment were only a useful disguise. Most of her followers were happy burning incense, meditating under copper pyramids, and donating money, convinced they were unlocking new inner dimensions. Seraphine encouraged that behavior. The illusion kept both them and their wallets docile. What she truly sought was the truth buried beneath layers of religion and mysticism: a system designed to harness supernatural powers.

Seraphine called the source of magical power the Flaming Heart. Most people were too numb to feel it, but there were a few—rare, scattered, and unnaturally perceptive—that could feel its presence. Those were the ones Seraphine recruited for her inner circle.

The Flaming Heart, Seraphine said, wasn't a being or a god, but a field. A current. An ancient fire coiled beneath the blanket of reality. She wasn't seeking enlightenment, but attunement to that source.

Seraphine had studied the Heart for years, and her father even longer before her. With his induction into her inner circle, Byrne studied her journals. They were dense and meticulous, strip mining every avenue of research for the slightest trace of the Heart. She described ancient religious rituals, planetary alignments, mineral compositions, and even specific emotional states that seemed to 'thin the wall' between this world and the other. She recorded all sorts of anomalies: birds flying in spirals above certain spots, ships getting lost at sea, dreams shared between people who had never met. Then, she distilled the experiences into a few, flimsy drops of true knowledge.

. . .

"Do you understand now? Do you realize what Seraphine was looking for? Have you seen it?" Byrne whispered despite the [Silence Dome] surrounding us.

I nodded.

"The Flaming Heart is that energy source beneath our mana pools. That white sun floating in the void."

"Yes! Yes!" Byrne exclaimed, almost jumping to his feet. "The Fountain! That's the source of all magic! It turns out that the Fountain is closer to Ebros than Earth. That's why we can use magic here and not back home!"

Byrne laughed like a kid on his first day of summer break. He hadn't contradicted a single thing I knew. The man-made System, natural magic, Runeweaving, Corruption, the Man in Yellow's quest—everything was the absolute and complete truth. Only one piece of the puzzle was missing: the part where he parted ways with the System Avatar.

"What happened next? If there are only traces of magical power back on Earth, how did you get here?" I asked.

Byrne cleared his throat.

"We hunted the Fountain for decades with a handful of others attuned enough to mana to sense and manipulate it. Seraphine was a bloodhound. Her gift was finding things, and I was the final piece of her machinations. As you might have guessed by now, my gift is teleportation. It took us years of precise preparation, but the alignment was almost perfect. We had one chance, and we took it. We used the pool to open a vision again, and focusing on the image I saw, I used my magic to jump into the Fountain's world. Oh, you can imagine the feeling of true magic. After the jump, the proximity to the Fountain recharged my magical powers almost instantly. However, when I turned around, I realized I couldn't see the pool anymore. There was no sign of Seraphine or the ritual room. I tried to make a blind jump back home but ended up in Ebros."

The story continued with what I already knew about his history. Byrne popped up near Farcrest, had his natural magic sealed after accepting the System, was captured by orcs, finessed his way out of prison, met Mister Lowell, and cultivated his class until the System contacted him with bad news: the code was faulty, and Corruption was piling up.

"At first, I decided to help him. After all, the System was what kept the common folk from living in caves like rats. However, I soon realized it couldn't be fixed. Corruption is inherent to the System because Corruption is a natural byproduct of magic. You see, Seraphine was wrong. The Fountain isn't an electric field; it is more like a living being, one with a life cycle of birth, buildup, and release. The System accelerated this cycle by drawing enormous amounts of mana from the Fountain. We have now reached the part of the cycle where the Fountain can't keep up with the Corruption buildup, so it must die and be reborn again. Don't panic. This has happened before. Earth's distance from the Fountain protects it from side effects, but Ebros is a different story. During the release cycle, Corruption skyrockets and available magic plummets. As you might imagine, that would result in the collapse of the System and civilization as we know it. Please don't panic."

I did my best to feign surprise.

"I'm not panicking… yet. There is a way of fixing this, right?"

Byrne took a deep breath.

"That's why I need your help. I have a plan." He popped the [Silence Dome] to call a waiter over and grabbed two cups of hard liquor from their tray. He handed me one and summoned the dome again. "There were other Runeweavers before me—people who stumbled into this world by chance and were employed by the System Avatar to perform various quests. One of them was Baram. He lived a few hundred years ago, by Ebros's time. His quest was to anchor the timeframes of Earth and Ebros. This was my saving grace. I could not control where I would teleport without a visual guide, but I was able to use Baram's anchor points as a guide to direct my teleportation, letting me return to Earth."

"But what's your plan? How will you fix Corruption with your teleportation?" I asked. "Do you want to bring the military here?"

"No! No, no, no. We can't disturb life in Ebros. We already messed up Earth with our greed and our wars. We can't mess up another world," Byrne said, emptying his glass. "Listen, we can't stop Corruption just like we can't stop a hurricane, but we can evacuate the zone. I want to take the people of Ebros back to Earth until the Fountain enters a stable era again."

I fumbled my glass, and it shattered against the floor. A waiter saw and jogged over but stopped outside the [Silence Dome]. Byrne didn't dispel it. Instead, he gave me an intense look. I thought about the orphanage. The Fountain's death might not be avoidable, but maybe we can take everyone to a safe place during the Corruption era.

"Is that even possible? I've been doing magic for a while now, and even picking a stone ten meters away requires a lot of mana."

"The amount of energy required is… quite large. Luckily, the System Avatar didn't strip me of my runeweaving when I decided to go off on my own. I can scale up my teleportation portal and take everyone to safety before the worst part of the release cycle hits."

I nodded in silence, the last pieces of the puzzle falling into place. Byrne's plan sounded much more plausible than the System Avatar's quest. However, a part of me, the one created when Janus betrayed me, refused to trust Byrne.

"What happened to Seraphine?" I asked.

"She wasn't thrilled that I took my time to return. She was even less thrilled when I told her Ebros was a dying world and that I wanted to bring everyone here. She was obsessed with harnessing the power of the Fountain, and I knew that wasn't possible, so we parted ways. I've been working on my teleportation machine ever since. The royals bankroll my whole operation; they believe I'm reviving an old teleportation system."

[Foresight] told me Byrne was telling the truth.

"I'm really sorry to burden you with this, Robert, but the teleportation device has to be extremely precise, so I need someone who knows how to crunch the numbers. Most of the groundwork is done. I just need to scale up and aim for Earth," Byrne said, popping the [Silence Dome] and switching back to the Ebros dialect. "It might have been destiny, but I really need someone with your skill set. Think about it and come see me after the selection exam. I'll teach you the runes."

Then, Byrne greeted me formally, in accordance with the party etiquette, and exited the ballroom. A huge question floated in my mind: was he trustworthy? Byrne's story matched what I already knew about this world's history, and he didn't seem to be withholding any information—a far greater courtesy than the System Avatar had offered—yet part of me refused to trust him.

"Would you like to exercise your right of reply?" I asked, to no one in particular.

The System Avatar, however, remained silent.

"That's what I thought."

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