Revan stared at the floating gauntlet for a long ti.
The black tal rotated in the still air, the grooves along its surface catching faint light with each lazy turn.
He knew what this was.
In Legends of Valtheris, the garbage-tier ga that had sohow beco his entire life, Territorial Phenona weren’t just environntal hazards. They were dungeons.
Each one followed the sa fundantal structure as any instanced content in a role-playing ga: enter, survive, defeat the guardian, claim the reward.
The reward was always an artifact. Always. Without exception.
The ga’s internal logic was rigid about this. A Territorial Phenonon was, at its core, a test. The fossilized leyline network that ford the labyrinth wasn’t just leftover geography. It was a system.
A chanism that filtered, challenged, and judged anyone who entered its boundaries. Those who passed received sothing from the land itself, a crystallization of the residual mana shaped into a physical object that carried properties unique to the Phenonon that created it.
Every artifact was different because every Phenonon was different.
A thermal loop in the fire-scarred wastelands would produce sothing attuned to heat manipulation. A tidal distortion on the coast would yield an object resonant with compression and expansion.
The artifact was always a reflection of the environnt that birthed it.
And in a Dead Zone, where mana had been annihilated and the fossilized leylines ran dry through dead earth...
’An artifact from a place that has no mana. That shouldn’t be possible.’
He frowned. Sothing didn’t add up.
’In the ga, every Territorial Phenonon had a guardian. A boss. Sothing tied to the land that served as the final filter before the reward. You couldn’t just walk in and take the artifact. You had to earn it.’
He glanced back over his shoulder, toward the corridor he’d followed the boy through.
’Was THAT the boss?’
He thought about it. Replayed the fight in his head.
’For a Dead Zone guardian? That was too weak.’
The creatures the ga placed as Phenonon guardians were always proportional to the value of the artifact they protected.
A low-tier artifact in a minor Phenonon might be guarded by sothing that a competent squad could handle. A high-tier artifact in a major Phenonon would be protected by sothing that required a full battalion.
This was a Dead Zone. The most hostile, mana-starved environnt in the known world.
Any artifact that survived in a place like this, that managed to crystallize from fossilized leylines that had been dead for centuries, would be extraordinarily rare by definition. The guardian protecting it should have been proportionally terrifying.
And the fog creature, for all its tricks, was sothing Revan had killed alone. In terrible condition. With a non-magical sword. While bleeding from twenty cuts and running on fus.
’That doesn’t match. Either this artifact is weaker than it looks, or that creature wasn’t the real guardian.’
His eyes drifted back to the gauntlet. It continued its patient rotation, indifferent to his analysis.
’Or... option three. The Dead Zone doesn’t follow the sa rules as the ga.’
That thought landed heavier than the others.
He’d been operating on ga knowledge since the mont he reincarnated into this world. Every decision, every strategy, every long-term plan was built on the foundation of what he’d learned from playing Legends of Valtheris.
And for the most part, the ga’s logic held. The world followed the sa general rules, the sa power systems, the sa political structures.
But the ga had never included Dead Zones as explorable content.
The Dead Zones in the ga were background lore. Flavor text. Colored patches on a map that the developers had labeled "inaccessible" and populated with exactly zero gaplay chanics.
No quests, no dungeons, no loot tables. Just a wall of suppression that prevented the player from entering, and a paragraph of text explaining that these regions had been destroyed during the Unification War.
Which ant everything Revan knew about Dead Zones ca from the world itself.
From textbooks. From Academy lectures. From Mirael’s research notes and Cassian’s political briefings and Dain’s soldier stories.
Not from the ga.
’I’m flying blind. My cheat sheet doesn’t have answers for this one.’
He looked at the boy. The boy was still standing at the edge of the clearing, hands clasped, watching Revan with that sa nervous, expectant expression.
Revan let out a heavy sigh.
’Co on, Revan. Let’s not take a risk that’ll send your blood pressure through the roof again.’
The boy shifted his weight. One foot to the other.
Revan rubbed the back of his neck. Winced when his fingers found a cut he’d forgotten about.
’Alright. Let’s think about this differently. Forget the ga. Forget the rules I think I know. Look at what’s actually in front of .’
A gauntlet with Aura channels, designed for a left hand, floating in a sealed chamber at the heart of a Territorial Phenonon.
His left arm’s channels had burned out less than an hour ago.
The boy, the original soul of this body, had led him directly here.
Coincidence didn’t stack that neatly.
’Either this place read my condition and generated a response, or this artifact has been sitting here for centuries and I just happen to be the first person with a dead left arm and enough stubbornness to reach it.’
Neither option was comforting. The first implied the Dead Zone was watching him. The second implied luck so absurd it bordered on divine intervention.
’And knowing my luck, it’s probably both.’
Revan stepped into the clearing.
The air thickened around him instantly. Warr. Denser. Charged with sothing that pressed against his skin like the mont before lightning struck.
The gauntlet’s rotation slowed as he approached, the lazy spin tightening into smaller and smaller circles until, by the ti he was within arm’s reach, it had stopped completely.
Revan looked at his dead left arm.
At the fingers that hadn’t moved in an hour. At the forearm where the Aura channels had collapsed into dead static, leaving the limb as useful as a piece of wet rope.
’If I put this on and it kills , I want it noted that I had serious reservations. Multiple reservations. I voiced them clearly and at length. And then I did it anyway because a mute ten-year-old ghost gave a look.’
He glanced at the boy one last ti.
Through the curtain of black hair, the boy’s eyes were steady. No fidgeting. No flinching.
Revan reached out with his right hand and lifted the gauntlet from the air.
It was heavier than it looked.
He slid his dead left hand into it.
The tal closed around his fingers with a precision that made his stomach flip.
Every groove aligned perfectly with the dead channels underneath, as if the gauntlet had been cast from a mold of his own forearm.
For one heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the gauntlet pulsed.
A single beat. Deep. Resonant.
It traveled through the tal and into his flesh and through the channels that hadn’t carried energy in an hour.
The dead pathways lit up, not with his own Aura but with sothing else entirely.
Sothing that had been sleeping inside the tal for longer than Revan could comprehend, patient and ancient and cold, now pouring into the empty riverbed of his burned-out channels like floodwater filling cracks in dry earth.
The sensation hit his brain like a hamr wrapped in ice.
His vision whited out.
And the Dead Zone lit up.
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