Lucien and Seran did not delay.

Seran had already bound a silent world in the void near the target coordinate and prepared it as a stepping point. The moment Lucien arrived at the Liberator Headquarters, the two of them exchanged only the necessary words before moving.

There was no reason to waste time.

The more hidden a world was, the more likely it held something worth hiding.

And if Lucien’s guess was right, then this was not merely some goblin outpost built on stolen land.

It might hold another bark of the Tree of Creation.

That thought alone was enough to make his blood stir.

Soon, the two entered transit.

The teleportation disc activated, space folded, and the corridor opened around them in dim and unstable silence. The passage lasted longer than Lucien liked.

That told him enough.

This world was very far from the Big World.

While the corridor carried them onward, Seran spoke.

His tone was calm, but Lucien could hear the interest beneath it.

"It was hidden well," Seran said. "Better than the others."

Lucien glanced at him.

"That bad?"

Seran nodded once.

"The veil wasn’t just concealment. It was layered with false absence. The kind that makes the void itself insist nothing is there." He paused, then added, "It took time to crack."

That alone said much about the goblins.

Their talent for filth was matched only by their talent for survival.

Lucien folded his arms and asked, "And after you cracked it?"

Seran’s eyes narrowed slightly as memory surfaced.

"I used Reflection to peer through the veil."

Lucien waited.

"There are Black Mass entities inside," Seran said. "A lot of them. Goblins for certain. Possibly other creatures too, though the goblins are the dominant pattern."

"That much was expected."

"Yes," Seran said. "The world itself was not."

Lucien’s interest sharpened immediately.

Seran let the silence build for one breath before continuing.

"It should not exist in the state it does."

Seran showed him a reflection of the world.

The world was strange from its bones upward.

There was no true sky in the ordinary sense. Instead, the inner vault of the world curved like the inside of a great hollow sphere, as though the world had once been broken open and then healed inward rather than outward.

Vast rootlike formations of pale mineral and wood crossed the upper reaches like frozen lightning, threading through the firmament in branching arcs and carrying warm luminescence through their lengths.

There was no sun.

And yet the world glowed.

Lucien watched the reflection with growing attention.

Seran continued.

"The world feeds its own light through those upper root-veins and through the ground beneath it. There are warm vents everywhere. As if the whole place is being sustained from inside."

Lucien’s eyes glowed.

"And the miasma?"

"That’s the strange part." Seran’s mouth curved faintly. "The monsters are there. The Black Mass is there. But the world itself refuses contamination."

That was enough.

Lucien smiled.

"Yes," he said softly. "That sounds like a bark."

Seran glanced at him and nodded.

"Yes. That is also what I thought."

The corridor carried them onward in silence after that.

Lucien’s excitement rose with every passing moment.

The weirder a world was, the more likely it held something profound.

And the deeper the goblins hid it, the more likely it was worth taking.

•••

They arrived first at the bound stepping world.

It was small. Just a lonely drifting world in the void.

Neither of them wasted time admiring the emptiness.

They departed at once.

Here, Seran led.

That was when Lucien once again got to see how unreasonable Law of Reflection truly was in the hands of someone who knew how to abuse it properly.

Seran raised a hand, and space before them rippled.

The distant void ahead of them folded into nearness. One moment they stood in one region of empty dark, and in the next they were unimaginably farther away.

Then again.

Then again.

Lucien approved greatly.

"You abuse your law beautifully," he said.

Seran smiled without modesty.

"I practice."

Both of them wore the black robes designed to dull probing.

Soon, the space around them changed.

The farther lights of distant stars faded until they felt theoretical rather than real. This region of the void was dim enough that even Lucien’s senses found it unpleasant.

Dark matter currents drifted in silent bands. Broken stone, old wreckage, mineral ice, and dead fragments of forgotten things floated through the region like debris from ideas the cosmos had already discarded.

It was not empty.

But it felt abandoned by light.

Even Lucien narrowed his eyes as he looked around.

"There’s nothing here."

"That," Seran said, "is the point."

He smiled then and projected a reflective panel into the darkness before them. It hung like a polished shard of impossible still-water.

He pointed toward one direction.

The panel shifted.

A moment later, something answered.

Through reflected recovery.

And then Lucien saw it.

A world. Invisible from the outside.

Yet unmistakably present once one knew how to look.

It floated in the lightless region like a secret warmth wrapped in denial. The world gave off its own soft radiance, not enough to illuminate the void around it, but enough to prove that life inside was not dependent on any external star.

Its surface shimmered faintly beneath the concealment, the same warm root-light Seran had described pulsing across its hidden skin.

Lucien stared.

"It really supports itself."

"Yes."

Now the only real problem remained.

How to enter without announcing themselves too early.

But Lucien had already solved that.

He took out the Covenant of Pathless Sovereignty.

The chapel’s energy-gathering system had fed it well, and the amount of power stored inside it now was more than enough to force a clean leap into a sealed space if the coordinates were precise enough.

Lucien looked at Seran.

"Find me somewhere quiet."

Seran’s expression sharpened at once.

This time there was no humor in him. He closed his eyes and turned his full reflective perception upon the world.

Through his cheat, he observed without touching, skimmed patterns without fully entering, and searched for a point where transition would be least disruptive and least noticed.

Lucien waited.

Then Seran opened his eyes again.

"Found it."

He gave the coordinates.

Lucien activated the disc.

Space bent.

The two disappeared from the dim region of void—

and reappeared inside the sealed world.

The moment Lucien entered, his heart pounded.

There it was.

That same deep, impossible feeling. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Another bark.

He was certain now.

The place they arrived in was a broken highland beneath one of the world’s hanging mountain roots.

Pale light moved through the upper veins like blood through a sleeping god’s arteries. Far below, silver mist gathered in valley trenches while goblin-made towers of black iron and green-lit bone rose in clusters across the middle distance.

This world was not merely inhabited.

It had been occupied.

Wrongly.

Lucien’s expression sharpened.

Seran shut his eyes again and reflected the world through his cheat. His vision moved outward with terrifying speed, skimming through terrain, fortress-layouts, patrol routes, goblin concentration zones, structural weaknesses, and the deeper movement patterns of the Black Mass entities embedded throughout the world.

Then Seran’s face changed.

He paled.

Lucien noticed immediately.

"What?"

Seran opened his eyes.

"There’s a goblin Monster Emperor here."

Lucien’s own eyes narrowed.

Then Seran added the name.

"The Covenant-Breaker."

Lucien went still for one fraction of a second.

Then he swore.

"A fucking one."

Seran looked at him.

Lucien’s expression had not lost control, but it had definitely lost patience.

"We fought one before and killed it," Lucien said. "So another clone was stationed here too. That means this world isn’t just protected. It’s prioritized."

That was bad.

Then Seran’s face changed again.

This time not into alarm.

Into immediate recognition of a mistake already made.

"Crap," he said.

Lucien turned.

"What?"

Seran’s smile had become pained.

"I got noticed."

Lucien exhaled once through his nose.

Then he nodded.

"No wonder. That cunning bastard had sharp instincts."

Which meant the quiet entrance phase was over.

Lucien looked across the strange glowing landscape of the hidden world, toward distant goblin structures that had not yet visibly reacted but undoubtedly soon would.

Then he made the decision.

"Then let’s not hide anymore."

Seran stared at him for one beat.

Then a grin spread across his face.

"That," he said, "is exactly what I was about to say."

Good.

That was one reason Lucien liked working with him.

No wasted hesitation once subtlety stopped being useful.

The two of them stepped forward together beneath the self-lit sky of roots and hanging mountains. Their cloaks stirred in the strange warm wind of the hidden world.

Ahead of them waited a goblin Monster Emperor, a corrupted occupation force, and something buried in the heart of the world that was almost certainly worth taking.

To the world’s defenders, they were intruders.

To Lucien and Seran—

this was fuel, opportunity, and theft waiting to be corrected.