Hide closed his eyes, his breathing ragged, and forcefully pulled the corrupted energy into his Dark Abyssal Core. He guided the violent stream, filtering the density of the mountain’s ambient mana to fuel the creation process.

He finally completed another cycle. But the moment the internal connection severed, a sharp, excruciating spike of pain shot through his temples, radiating down his spinal cord like liquid fire. Hide gasped.

He had hit a cooldown.

Hide gritted his teeth, wiping a bead of cold sweat from his pale forehead. This was an entirely unprecedented sensation. Back when he only started here, Hide had easily managed to chain ten consecutive cycles of phantom creation without stopping even once.

His body had processed the energy with terrifying, flawless efficiency. But now after 17 cycles, his physical vessel was loudly and violently protesting. His muscles felt like lead, and a deep, agonizing ache had crept into his very being.

The reason was the environment itself. The dark mana that comprised these cavern walls wasn’t the simplified mana found in normal gates. This was ancient, solidified, hardened Dark mana. Extracting it was like trying to drink water from solid. His Dark Abyssal Core was working overtime, grinding against the hyper-dense energy to break it down into something usable.

The friction of that process was putting a catastrophic strain on his physical and mental limits—a self-inflicted deterioration that the Universal Adaptation System simply would not adapt to, as it classified the strain as internal biological fatigue rather than a hostile external attack.

He sat back on his heels, panting softly, and looked up. Hovering just above the emerald core, the dark mana was finally beginning to hold a solid shape. The Doom Overseer. Soon, he would be seeing that majestic, terrifying being once again.

Hide watched the wisps of shadowy energy knit together, forming the vague silhouette of a massive, antlered feline. He wondered, with a mix of dread and anticipation, if the beast would look almost as dangerous and stunning as it had before, in its original, tragic form in the subterranean prison of the Sihue estate.

A small, comforting thought settled in the back of his mind. The Phantoms, after all, were not the real beasts. They were just highly intricate imitations, constructs created by Hide’s own mana, using the defeated beast’s core solely as a foundational base.

Because of that inherent connection, this new iteration of the Doom Overseer would be entirely bound to his will. It would, at the very least, be far less creepy than having an actual, living A-Ranked Calamity Beast prostrate itself in a pool of its own blood and call him "My Liege."

Hide sighed, a heavy, exhausted sound that echoed against the cavern walls. His mind inevitably drifted away from the suffocating darkness of Rilth, traveling millions of miles across spatial dimensions back to the sun-scorched sands of Ufrifa.

The World Exterminator Ranking Tournament. He had to go back. His team—Sora, Gideon, Rol, and Claire—were out there fighting the best prodigies in the world without him. Getting into the Top 10 of the solo brackets wasn’t just about pride or agency rankings; it was his only guaranteed path to legitimacy. It was his only way to force Commander Maddox’s hand and secure the classified federal files detailing his mother’s murder.

But that thought immediately hit a massive, jagged roadblock.

Maddox was missing!

The S-Rank Commander had gone completely missing right before the tournament started. No communications, no presence at the stadium. And now, standing on the hostile soil of an alien world, the pieces of the puzzle were rapidly clicking into place in Hide’s hyper-analytical mind.

He thought about the Reverse One-Way Gate he had used to cross over to Rilth. That gate had been situated in the Northern Continent of Earth, buried deep within a desolate, forest with absolutely nothing but wild animals around it for hundreds of miles.

The security surrounding it had been laughably minimal, relying entirely on the sheer impossibility of anyone ever wandering into that specific patch of uncharted wilderness to find it.

But someone did come. Someone had found it, and He was here now!

According to the ancient memories Drogon had shared with him, there were exactly three Reverse One-Way Gates connecting Earth to Rilth in existence. If the first one was hidden in the northern wilderness, the locations of the other two were far more sinister and revealing.

The second gate, Drogon had revealed, was buried directly beneath the heavily fortified headquarters of the International Exterminator Commission, situated in the very heart of the Central Continent. Hide’s blood ran cold at the implication. The ruling powers of the world didn’t just know about Rilth—they were actively guarding the door. The people who sent Exterminators to die in gates were hoarding the ultimate secret.

And the third gate? The third gate was located in Tarita. The Eastern Continent.

The exact same place the old, terrifying patriarch of the Sihue clan had hurriedly flown off to handle a "sudden emergency."

Hide’s glowing blue eyes narrowed into dangerous, icy slits. The coincidence was statistically impossible. He had a lingering, bone-chilling feeling that his time on Rilth wouldn’t just be spent harvesting mana and interrogating phantoms.

He was almost certainly going to encounter the old man of the Sihue clan here. And if Maddox was missing on Earth, there was a very high probability that the grinning, manipulative Commander was currently walking the corrupted soil of Rilth as well.

The scale of the conspiracy was staggering. Hide leaned his head back, staring at the cavern ceiling. He thought about the name that had triggered such terror in the commander back on Earth: Estopia.

Hide finally understood what it was. Estopia wasn’t a kingdom, a myth, or a pocket dimension. Estopia was simply a landmass on Rilth. It was a like a continent on Earth, governed ruthlessly by the Seven Rulers.

But what truly made the blood prickle in his veins, sending a profound chill down his spine, was the sheer scale of the threat looming over his home. Rilth was massive. According to the draconic knowledge settling into his mind, this dying planet was almost ten times the size of Earth. It was a colossal, decaying titan whose gravity and mana density defied all human logic.

And the phenomenon of the gates finally made terrifying, structural sense. Loop gates—the anomalies that constantly regenerated their Gatekeepers—were created when a physical chunk of this massive world broke away from the dying planet and got caught in the dimensional void, unable to return back.

These fragmented islands created their own closed, tragic ecosystems of infinite death and rebirth.

Dungeon gates, however, were entirely different. They were intentional acts of war. Dungeon gates were created when a Lord of a specific landmass on Rilth willingly tried to invade and merge the area they controlled directly with Earth. The twenty-four-hour limit the Exterminator Agencies relied on wasn’t just a random timer set by nature. It was the exact window of time it took for the spatial merge to finalize. If the Dungeon Master wasn’t killed within those twenty-four human hours, the merger would complete, the boundaries would shatter, and the alien landscape would permanently overwrite a piece of Earth. A catastrophe that was absolutely inevitable if left unchecked.

Hide swallowed hard, the dryness in his throat a stark reminder of his current reality. The sheer weight of the universe pressing down on him was suffocating. He needed power. He needed the answers locked inside his A-Rank Phantom.

Slowly, Hide recovered his strength. He forced his aching muscles to comply, crossing his legs back into a lotus position. He gritted his teeth, his jaw locking tight as he opened the floodgates of his core once more. The hardened dark mana of the mountain tore through his core. He endured the agony, his Abyssal Scale Carapace threatening to manifest purely out of survival instinct, and completed another grueling cycle.

When he finished, he slumped forward, his hands flat against the cold stone, gasping for air. He felt incredibly, deeply exhausted. His vision swam with dark spots, and his limbs trembled uncontrollably. But considering he was running completely out of time, with a tournament to win, friends to protect, he couldn’t afford to rest.

He pushed his fragile human body completely off its limits. He ignited his core, violently dragging the ambient darkness into his chest for one, final cycle.

The sheer pressure of the hardened mana ruptured the capillaries in his throat. Hide violently lurched forward, coughing up a mouthful of dark, crimson blood onto the shattered stone. His ears rang, and for a terrifying second, he thought his body was going to shatter entirely.

But as the blood splattered against the floor, the heavy, suffocating atmosphere in the cavern suddenly snapped. The violent pulling of mana ceased.

It was finally over!

Hide wiped his mouth with the back of his trembling hand, his breathing ragged but a triumphant, manic grin spreading across his pale face. He slowly lifted his gaze.

Hovering directly over the massive emerald core, the violent vortex of dark mana finally settled. The lumps swirled, merged, and intricately knitted together with absolute, biological perfection. The mist faded, revealing the breathtaking, graceful figure of the A-Ranked Supreme Calamity Lord.