Ethan carefully pours the faintly glowing sphere from the ziplock bag onto a blue shop towel. It rolls half an inch, then settles, pulsing softly like a lazy heartbeat. He leans in with a magnifying glass, arm fully extended, face angled away as if the thing might suddenly spray acid.
After a long moment, his shoulders slump.
“It just looks like a glowing ball,” he says after a moment.
“It is a magic stone,” Abigail says immediately, arms crossed. “Monsters always drop mana stones in anime.”
Ethan lowers the magnifying glass and gives her a flat look. “You cannot keep using anime as peer-reviewed research.”
She shrugs. “Hasn’t failed me yet.”
“That’s not a counterargument,” he mutters, but he nudges the stone with a screwdriver anyway, just to be sure it doesn’t suddenly do something dramatic. It doesn’t. Still glowing.
Abigail grins and hops into his chair, plugging her phone into the shop computer. Videos and photos begin transferring onto the screen. “Okay, Professor Skeptic. Let’s look at the gate again.”
She pulls up the clearest image of the crystalline frame, zooming in on the etched text.
Ethan leans over her shoulder, squinting. “I see English. Japanese. Probably Chinese.” He hesitates, pointing at two others. “This one’s like… Arabic-ish or something. And this other one’s like Eastern European—whatever that’s called.”
Abigail snorts. “Those are Cyrillic languages. But yeah—those last four?” She gestures at the remaining scripts. “They don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.”
Ethan studies the image a little longer. “They’re all arranged the same way,” he says finally. “Three lines, placed in the same position on the frame. Whoever put them there clearly wanted every version to line up.”
Abigail nods. “So the intent’s the same, even if the writing isn’t. One message, translated for whoever’s reading it.”
Ethan taps the English section and reads it aloud.
“Gates arise by unseen will.
Step beyond to grasp the strength within.
Manacite gathered, its mystery untold.”
The garage is quiet when he finishes.
“Plural,” Abigail says. “Gates. More than one.”
Ethan nods. “Yeah. Not ‘this gate.’ Gates.”
Her fingers are already moving. She opens social media, news sites, forums—anything even vaguely conspiracy-friendly. Dungeon. Gate. Blue crystal portal. Nothing.
“…Nothing,” she says after a minute. “If someone else had found one, it’d be everywhere by now.”
“So… are we the first?” Ethan asks. “Or just the first anyone’s discovered?”
Abigail glances back at the inscription. “By unseen will. That’s… not great.”
“No,” Ethan says. “That sounds intentional. Like something decides when these show up.”
“Something made it,” Abigail says slowly.
“Or something set rules and walked away,” Ethan replies. “Automated. System-based.”
She hums. “Or it’s watching.”
“I really hope it’s not watching,” he says.
“Same,” she says. “That’d be creepy—and not in a fun way.”
She tilts her head. “But step beyond to grasp the strength within?” A grin spreads across her face. “That’s basically an invite. We go in, we get stronger. Levels. Skills.”
Ethan exhales slowly. “Or we die.”
Abigail shrugs, still smiling. “Sure. Just a minor risk.”
He looks at her for a long second, unimpressed. The smile only widens.
“And the last line,” he says, nodding toward the workbench. “Manacite gathered, its mystery untold.” His eyes drift back to the glowing sphere. “That’s this.”
Abigail swivels the chair toward the stone. “So we killed a slime, got manacite, and discovered the world’s first dungeon.”
Ethan watches the light pulse for a moment.
“…We are really not ready for this.”
Abigail laughs. “Speak for yourself. I’ve been training for this my entire life.”
Ethan smirks, then lets it fade as his gaze drifts toward the open garage door.
“What?” she asks.
“That thing glows,” he says. “Just the frame, but you can’t miss it at night.”
“It’s in a ravine on your family’s property,” Abigail says. “There are no trails. No reason for anyone to be there.”
“I know,” he says. “But it’s still a permanent light source. Fog. Snow. Someone flying a drone someday.”
She leans back. “Okay. Fair.”
“And it’s not subtle,” he continues. “Five meters wide. Three tall.”
“So… what. We report it?”
Ethan rubs the back of his neck. “I don’t love that idea.”
“Me neither,” she says. “Best case? They fence it off and we never get near it again.”
“Worst case,” Ethan says, “they classify everything, take the manacite, and we’re stuck signing NDAs until we’re forty.”
She snorts. “Assuming they don’t just decide we’re a liability.”
“Exactly.”
The garage hums quietly around them.
“I don’t trust the government with something like this,” Abigail says. “Not because I hate them. Because this turns into concrete and acronyms.”
Ethan nods. “And tanks,” he adds.
“And tanks.”
She looks back at the screen. “So if we don’t report it…”
“We hide it,” Ethan says.
Abigail raises an eyebrow. “You’re aware it’s the size of a box truck, right?”
“I’m aware.”
She nods slowly. “So the goal is simple—hide the glow and make the whole thing as boring as possible. No signs, no trails, no posts, and definitely no people poking around.”
“Including friends,” Ethan says, “at least until we have a better idea what it is.”
She grimaces, but keeps going. “For today, we can grab tarps in town after we drop off Chairman for processing. The big ones—semi-truck sized. A few of those should cover the frame well enough.”
Ethan thinks it through, then nods. “That’d work short-term.”
“They’re fast,” she says. “Tie them off to the trees, peg them down into the dirt. Ugly, but effective.”
“And easy to pull down if we need to,” he says.
“Exactly.”
She straightens. “Okay. We hide it. For now.”
“For now,” Ethan agrees. “Until we understand what it actually does.”
Her eyes flick to the glowing stone.
“…We’re still doing it, though,” she says.
Ethan exhales slowly. “Yeah. We are.” He glances at the stone again before looking back at her. “But we plan it out first. No rushing in, no assumptions. Whatever that thing is, it’s not something we treat casually.”
Abigail nods. “It’s a dungeon,” she says. “Not a whatever. And we definitely need to plan things out.”
She hesitates, then adds, “For example, in most anime, modern firearms either don’t work at all or only work on weak monsters.”
Ethan snorts quietly. “This isn’t an anime.”
Then he sobers. “But you make a good point. We don’t know how anything in there reacts to normal weapons yet. Could work. Could be useless.”
“Which means guessing is a bad idea,” Abigail says.
Ethan nods. “Yeah. A really bad one.”
Chapter 1 Part 1
Chapter 1 Part 2
Chapter 1 Part 3
Chapter 1 Part 4
Chapter 1 Part 5
