"You’d be surprised how rare that is." He leaned back in his chair, and the wood groaned in a way that suggested the furniture was as old as the man sitting in it. "I’ve placed seventeen souls in systems across nine realities over the past four thousand years. Twelve of them optimized perfectly. Built their harems, leveled their stats, cleared their gates, accumulated power with the ruthless efficiency of someone playing a video game they intended to complete one hundred percent. They treated every person around them as a resource node and every relationship as a quest objective."

"And?"

"They all died." He said it simply, like reading a weather report. "Not because they were weak. Not because the systems failed. They died because when the moment came where they needed someone to catch them, there was nobody left who wanted to. You can build the most powerful character in any game. You can min-max every stat and equip the optimal loadout and memorize every boss pattern. But games don’t love you back. People do. And people can tell when they’re being played."

Something uncomfortable moved in my chest that had nothing to do with the claw wounds. I thought about Naomi sending nothing before deployment, the absence louder than any message. About Belle’s fourteen-point list at three in the morning that ended with just come back. About Addison demanding coffee jellies with the desperation of someone who’d found something worth demanding things from.

"So what, you’re telling me the secret to your system is caring about people? That’s the big cosmic revelation? Be nice to your harem and you won’t die?"

"I’m telling you the secret to surviving what comes next." The old man stood, and the library seemed to contract around him as if making room for his full presence. He was taller than I remembered. Or maybe the room had gotten smaller. "The Void Gate you’re trapped inside is not an accident. The sensor failure was not a malfunction. The entity density, the seal, the evolved fauna, the coordinated behavior patterns. None of this is random."

My stomach dropped. "Someone did this on purpose."

"Someone. Something. The distinction may not matter." He walked around the desk, his robes trailing across the floor in patterns that left fading light behind them like footprints made of stars. "The Under has been pushing against your world’s dimensional boundaries with increasing force for decades. Your professor Vale understands this. He sees extinction in the data where others see market fluctuations. He’s not wrong. But he’s also not seeing the complete picture."

"And you are?"

"I see more of it than he does. Whether the complete picture exists at all is a question above my pay grade." He stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the tea on his breath and something else underneath it, something that smelled like very old paper and very cold stars. "What I see tonight is a boy in a cave with a girl who hates him, surrounded by a forest that wants to eat them both, in a dimensional pocket that was specifically engineered to trap whoever entered it."

"Engineered by who?"

"The wrong question." He held up a finger. "The right question is why you specifically."

"I’m a lottery winner. Nobody special."

"You’re a walking anomaly who steals abilities through orgasms and grows stronger through sex with a death timer that forces constant engagement with the most powerful women available. You’ve acquired four abilities in six weeks, attracted the attention of a Platinum-tier mentor, made an enemy of the most politically connected family in the American hunter economy, and you carry inside you a system that I personally designed to produce exactly the kind of hunter that the current generation cannot."

He poked me in the chest with one bony finger.

"You are the most special person on that island, Jace Monroe. And whatever is orchestrating the gate escalation patterns that Vale worries about has noticed. The same way Vale noticed. The same way Cassandra noticed. The same way Blair notices every time you walk into a room and she can’t stop looking."

"Blair doesn’t..."

"She does. The system tracks attraction percentages for a reason. Check hers sometime. You might be surprised." He turned away and walked back toward his desk, waving a hand as if dismissing a minor concern. "But that’s a problem for another night. Tonight’s problem is the gate you’re in. The core you’re hunting. And the thing you haven’t realized yet."

I waited because the old man clearly wanted me to ask.

"What haven’t I realized?"

He sat down in his chair and picked up the teacup again, sipping with the casual patience of someone who had all the time in every universe.

"The core isn’t hiding from you." He looked at me over the rim. "It’s waiting for you."

The library flickered. The edges of the shelves went soft and transparent, the glowing books dimming as if someone was turning down a dimmer switch. The dream was ending. My body, the real one lying on stone in a canyon on the wrong side of reality, was pulling me back.

"Wait." I stepped forward. "Wait, who are you? Actually. Not the cryptic old wizard routine. Not the Divine Milking System creator backstory. Who are you really?"

He set down the teacup. The brass eyes found mine, and for the first time I saw something behind them that wasn’t amusement or calculation or the detached benevolence of a god playing with a favorite pet. I saw concern. Real concern. The kind that sits heavy in a person’s face because they know something terrible and can’t figure out how to say it in a way that won’t break the person listening.

"I’m the person who put you where you are," he said quietly. "Because where you were before was nowhere. Because the soul I found drifting between iterations was too good to waste on nonexistence. Because you, specifically you, have something that my system needs and my other subjects lacked and the world you’re currently bleeding in is going to require before the gates stop being a problem and start being an apocalypse."

"And what’s that?"

The library dissolved. The shelves, the books, the impossible desk with its living chess game, all of it folded inward like origami in reverse, collapsing into a point of light that shrank until it was smaller than a star and then smaller than nothing.

But his voice followed me down through the dark, through the layers of unconscious processing and damaged nerve tissue and a body that was doing its best to knit itself back together on a rock shelf in a dimension that shouldn’t exist.

"You jump." His voice, fading now, warm at its core despite the cold words wrapped around it. "Even when it doesn’t make sense. Even when the math says don’t. Even when the person you’re saving would rather burn than be caught. You jump. And that, boy, is the one thing I could never design into the system. I had to find it. I had to find you."