Marc had had a long day.
The kind you forget by the time you're home — no disaster, no memorable moment, just eight hours of professional existence in an open-plan office that smelled like reheated coffee and moderate ambition. He was heading back with a paper cup in one hand, phone in the other, earphones in.
It was enough. It was his life. He liked it fine.
Chapter 847 was open on the screen. After two years following the series, the Demon King was finally going to understand what he truly was — and Marc had a theory about that, one he'd been sitting on for weeks. A good one. The kind that itches.
He glanced up before crossing the street, out of habit.
That's when he saw the screen.
The usual ad had been replaced. In its place: a live news desk, red breaking banner along the bottom, sound off but white subtitles scrolling fast.
The image behind the anchor was an aerial shot of Tokyo.
And above Tokyo, hanging in the sky over Shinjuku like it had always been there, was a door.
Marc stopped on the pavement.
Not a normal door. A structure several hundred meters tall, perfectly vertical, resting on nothing, openly defying every law of physics he'd ever learned. Black, with edges radiating a slow pulsing violet light — steady, rhythmic, like breathing.
The subtitles kept scrolling.
...identical phenomenon reported in New York...
...similar structure confirmed above Berlin...
...Paris: authorities confirm...
Marc didn't move for ten seconds.
Alright.
So. This.
He didn't panic — that wasn't his default mode. He looked at the image, read the subtitles, let his brain run at full speed in silence while the rest of him stood perfectly still on that Parisian pavement on a Tuesday evening in November.
Giant doors. Multiple capitals simultaneously. Appeared from nowhere.
Part of him — the part that had spent hundreds of nights reading stories where exactly this kind of thing happened — recognized the pattern with almost embarrassing precision. He had an entire mental library of scenarios that started like this. Unexplained anomaly. Doors to elsewhere. Ordinary world tipping over.
So the real world too then.
The excitement arrived before the fear, honestly — a sharp guilty spike, the kind you don't say out loud. Then fear took over, reasonably, because he wasn't an idiot.
Then he thought: what about Paris?
He found the banner. Read it.
...structure appeared above La Défense ...
There. Same city. Same night. Fifteen kilometers from where he was standing right now, a door several hundred meters tall was floating in the Parisian sky and he was drinking lukewarm coffee outside a supermarket.
There was something absurd about that gap in scale that made him want to laugh — not from nerves, just the pure disconnect between the enormity of the thing and the complete banality of what he was currently living.
Someone nearby said out loud what everyone was probably thinking:
— What the hell is that.
Marc put his earphones back in, took a sip of coffee, and crossed the street.
He hadn't made it three meters into the intersection before the city seemed to lose its mind.
Not gradually. All at once — like a switch. Horns to the left, a car door slamming, voices rising from a balcony above. A motorbike riding up the opposite pavement at an entirely unreasonable speed. And in the road, coming from the left, a car taking the bend too fast — driver's eyes on his own phone, probably watching the same thing as everyone else tonight, tires screaming on the wet cobblestones when he looked up a second too late.
Marc took all of this in within a fraction of a second.
He also saw the little girl.
Seven or eight years old. Red coat. She'd run out between two parked cars chasing a balloon without looking, and she'd frozen in the middle of the road when she heard the tires — right in the path of the headlights, completely still, eyes wide open.
The car wasn't going to stop in time.
His body made the decision before his brain finished the calculation. He dropped the coffee, sprinted, grabbed the red coat with both hands and threw the kid toward the pavement with everything he had.
She landed on her hands and knees.
Alive.
He didn't have time to take another step.
The asphalt was cold against his cheek.
Concretely, immediately cold — wet stone, the smell of rain and motor oil, gravel against his cheekbone. His phone was intact thirty centimeters from his open hand. Chapter 847, page still open. The Demon King on his knees.
He couldn't move.
No sharp pain — just an immense pressure in his chest and a exhaustion that wasn't quite physical anymore. The noise of the street was erupting around him — voices, footsteps, someone shouting — but growing more distant, like the volume was slowly being turned down.
The little girl was crying. Alive, then.
The thought arrived cleanly, without hysteria.
I'm going to die.
He waited for regrets. For his life to flash before his eyes. For some grand revelation. They didn't really come — no close family who'd miss him deeply, no abandoned dream demanding justice. A decent, ordinary life. The kind that leaves a clean absence behind it rather than a gaping hole.
He thought about the doors in the sky.
He thought that what was going to happen next was going to be fascinating — and that he wouldn't be there to see it. That was the only real sting of regret. Not for himself. For the story that was starting without him.
His gaze drifted to the screen. The Demon King finally understanding.
I didn't finish the story.
And then, completely involuntarily, one last thought — not heroic, not transcendent, just human and stupid and true: the coffee he'd dropped while running, and the absurd idea that it was a shame because he'd just bought it and hadn't even drunk half of it.
The world went out.
No light at the end of a tunnel.
No wise old man.
Just a total absence — without duration, without dimension, without himself.
Like a blank page between two chapters.
Then text. In the dark, text.
[UNDERWORLD SYSTEM]
Wandering soul detected.
Compatibility : DUNGEON CORE
Initial rank : Broken
Core vacant for : 82 years
Accept the binding ? YES / NO
Marc — or what was left of him, the abstract entity that remembered having been Marc, thirty-one years old, Paris — looked at the interface.
A Dungeon Core.
Interior silence.
An actual Dungeon Core.
Something warm and strange rose up — not fear. Something that felt, oddly, like excitement. The guilty, immediate kind you never say out loud.
Really.
He let the information settle. Turned it over. A Dungeon Core. In an underground world. Him inside it. And giant doors that had just appeared above every major capital on Earth — including Paris, fifteen kilometers from where he'd died thirty seconds ago.
That's not a coincidence.
His brain was running fast now, very fast, with that cold almost-joyful clarity he only got when something genuinely interesting was happening.
Core vacant for 82 years.
Not random. A Core waiting eighty-two years between masters — that didn't happen normally. Either a massive system anomaly, or something — or someone — waiting for a specific soul.
Why me? Why now?
The questions existed. He filed them away carefully. Not the moment.
Refusing wouldn't give him answers. Staying in the void wouldn't either.
He selected YES.
Three seconds. No hesitation.
Logical choice, pragmatic — that's what he told himself. He didn't put into words the other reason, the one that wasn't logic at all. That something about this interface, about those eighty-two years of waiting, about the way this prompt had appeared in the dark with no preamble and no explanation, felt right in a way he couldn't yet name.
Like something, somewhere, had been waiting for him for a long time.
The dark closed in one last time.