Earth had survived the first day—barely. The monsters pouring through the Gates had not stopped, and they never would; the only thing that had changed was the rate. Every champion who fell in the Spirit World returned alive to Earth, their injuries mysteriously healed by the Salvation System. The moment another champion was eliminated, the Gates pulsed violently before widening ever so slightly at an increasing rate. Every death mattered, not because humanity lost a fighter, but because every death made the invasion stronger.
Fortunately, eliminated champions weren't returned as corpses. They returned alive, healthy, and completely restored—confused and exhausted, but alive. Their experiences became humanity's first reliable source of intelligence from the world they had been sent to, now known as WorldHeart through the system's guidance library.
It was also quickly discovered that the system, which originally should have also been possessed by the champions, could be transferred to them by staying in contact with other system carriers. Being in the proximity of a carrier automatically caused the system to break down, allowing some of the fragments to flow into the champion. The system quickly restored what it sent, and with the repetition among multiple carriers, enough fragments would gather until a menu appeared where there was previously nothing. The system could be shared.
Within hours, nations that had been enemies for generations were sharing intelligence. Military satellites, civilian drones, university laboratories, and private corporations—anything capable of collecting useful information was folded into the rapidly growing Human Alliance Command. Arguments still existed, and politics still existed, but everyone understood one truth: there would be no countries left to argue over if humanity lost.
Scientists rushed to understand Qi as returned champions demonstrated cultivation. Biologists examined blood samples, physicists measured environmental changes around the Gates, and chemists analyzed monster remains. Nothing made sense, yet everything worked, and absolutely nothing followed Earth's physics.
Meanwhile, another breakthrough appeared almost by accident. One returned champion was sitting in a medical observation room while absentmindedly experimenting with his newly acquired System. He selected Spectate, only he chose to spectate himself. Normally, you couldn't spectate returned champions, but searching for himself yielded a result. Instead of displaying Earth, the image shifted somewhere else—a barren wasteland of crimson snow, showing his own corpse lying motionless where he had fallen. The body the System had originally selected still remained inside the Spirit World; only his soul had returned.
The room erupted into motion. "Repeat that!" "Open Observe Self again!" "Nobody touch anything!"
Researchers crowded around dozens of displays. The connection was unstable, and static distorted nearly everything, but it was undeniably real—the Spirit World, viewed through the perspective of an abandoned corpse. Someone proposed a ridiculous idea: "If the observation point still exists and we have the system owner here while the body that was supposed to possess the system is there... maybe we can synchronize with it?"
Massive computing clusters began comparing every frame—terrain contours, rock formations, and movement patterns—searching for anything that could stabilize the image. It failed again, again, and again. Hours passed. Eventually, one pixel moved.
"It moved."
"What moved?"
"The interface."
Silence swallowed the room. "It actually moved."
The synchronization was far too crude to display text. It couldn't draw maps or project images, but after dozens of refinements, the interface managed to display something: a single glowing arrow.
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Nobody spoke until someone whispered, "...That's enough."
The Human Alliance Navigation System was born under the name Project Compass. Every observation station became another eye, and every supercomputer became another brain. Thousands of operators monitored WorldHeart around the clock through the spectate function, which allowed them to view all surviving champions. Terrain, monster migration routes, safe caves, ruined settlements, fresh water, and food sources—every scrap of information was catalogued. Maps for various areas were being created based on the views of the champions, and whenever sufficient confidence was achieved, the arrow changed.
A survivor unknowingly walking toward certain death saw an arrow telling them to turn left. A starving group wandering in circles saw an arrow pointing toward fresh water. Someone pursued by monsters was guided to an escape route, and a powerful survivor capable of clearing an area received an arrow requesting a rescue.
It wasn't perfect—far from it. Inside Human Alliance Command, every recommendation carried a probability.
"Champion 3187."
"Recommended route?"
"East."
"Estimated survival probability?"
"Sixty-three percent."
"Alternatives?"
"Thirty-one."
"Send the sixty-three."
Nobody pretended certainty existed anymore; humanity was surviving on educated guesses.
Trust quickly became another obstacle. Some champions followed the arrows immediately, while others ignored them completely. Many believed they were hallucinating, and a few insisted the arrows were traps created by monsters. Behavioral analysts soon found a solution. "If people won't trust the arrow... they'll trust another person."
Verified survivors who had repeatedly followed successful guidance were quietly redirected—not toward safety, but toward skeptics.
One exhausted woman stared suspiciously at the floating arrow before shaking her head. "I'm not following some invisible ghost."
A voice answered from behind, "You probably should." She spun around as a middle-aged man limped toward her. "The arrow saved my life three times."
"You can see it too? I thought I was going crazy."
He laughed. "Turns out we're all seeing the same thing."
One conversation became two, two became ten, and ten became hundreds. By the end of the day, belief spread faster than any official broadcast ever could. It wasn't because humanity trusted the System, but because humanity trusted each other. Casualty rates immediately declined. Lost survivors regrouped, small teams became larger ones, hopeless battles were avoided, and winnable battles were encouraged. The first primitive network of human cooperation stretched across another world, with Earth acting as headquarters.
Elsewhere inside Human Alliance Command, another research team stared at a different monitor. One analyst frowned. "Does anyone else find this strange?"
Another looked over. "What?"
"The group surrounding Champion Leon." Several heads turned. "What about them?" He enlarged the data. "Selection probability was one in one thousand."
"So?"
"He personally knows five members of his current group."
Silence. A statistician immediately began typing.
Expected acquaintances under random selection: Approximately zero.
Someone blinked, and a senior researcher folded his arms. "Coincidence?"
"...Not statistically."
Silence lingered until finally someone spoke. "Could the anomaly detected during the selection process have influenced who was sent and where?"
Another scientist rubbed his exhausted eyes. "We still don't even know what that anomaly was."
Nobody had an answer, leaving only another mystery.
Several floors below, another operations team monitored Leon's group. One operator suddenly froze. "Sir..."
The supervisor looked up. "What is it?"
"I've been calculating navigation routes for Group Twenty-Seven."
"And?"
"...they're already following them."
The supervisor frowned. "What do you mean?"
The operator overlaid Humanity's optimal escape route onto the live observation feed. The paths aligned almost perfectly. He checked again, and they were still identical. Another analyst independently recalculated, but the answer remained the same. Every projected course matched Leon's decisions—no hesitation, no wasted movement, and no unnecessary risks.
The supervisor stared silently at the screen before quietly asking, "...Who's navigating them?"
No one answered because the answer was already walking through the crimson wasteland—half-conscious, bleeding, and unable to stand. Yet somehow...still leading everyone exactly where humanity's greatest collection of scientists believed they should go.