The subterranean vault of the Fox Kingdom was a masterpiece of ancient, pristine white stone, untouched by the devastating decay that had ravaged the world’s surface. It felt entirely removed from the Beastworld, suspended in a pocket of absolute, silent eternity.

And right in the exact center of this magnificent, cosmic sanctuary, resting on a polished pedestal of black glass, was a spiral notebook.

Roxy stood completely paralyzed, her breath catching in her throat.

It was a standard, seventy-page, college-ruled notebook with a slightly faded blue cardboard cover. The wire binding at the top was bent out of shape, exactly the way it would be if it had been shoved carelessly into a college backpack a hundred times. On the back cover, a terrestrial barcode sticker was half-peeled away. It was an object so unbelievably mundane, so intensely, violently human, that seeing it bathed in the ethereal moonlight of a magical tomb felt like a hallucination.

"What is that?" Zarek rumbled, his deep voice slicing through the heavy silence. The Dragon King’s golden eyes narrowed suspiciously at the object. "Is that a grimoire?"

"No," Roxy whispered, her voice barely carrying across the pristine stone floor. "It’s a notebook. From my world."

She slowly lowered her arms, gently setting Little Fedor down onto the ground. The tiny, fiery-red fox kit immediately trotted over to Kaelen, sitting obediently at the Wolf Alpha’s armored boots, sensing the intense gravity of the moment.

Roxy stepped forward, leaving the protective circle of her husbands. Her boots echoed sharply against the white stone as she approached the black glass pedestal.

Her heart hammered a frantic, heavy rhythm against her ribs. She raised her trembling hand. The air around the pedestal hummed with a faint, dormant energy, but it didn’t feel hostile. It felt incredibly, profoundly sad. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Roxy extended her index finger, gently brushing the worn blue cardboard cover of the diary.

The reaction was instantaneous.

A sudden, brilliant wave of digital, matrix-like green magic exploded from the notebook. It didn’t possess the heavy, humid toxicity of Syris’s swamp magic, nor the ancient stardust of the Trickster. It was a sharp, humming energy that instantly filled the massive vault, sweeping over the white walls and projecting a towering, lifelike holographic video directly into the center of the room.

The Vanguard Warlords instantly drew their weapons. Kaelen’s broadsword hissed out of its scabbard, Torian’s massive claws extended, and Caspian summoned a pair of lethal water blades to his hands. Syris stepped in front of the Fox kit, his eyes glowing.

But the figure that materialized in the green light was not a monster. It wasn’t a god.

It was a woman.

She looked to be in her late twenties, possessing straight, incredibly messy black hair that was tied up in a haphazard, failing bun held together by a single wooden pencil. She wore thick-rimmed terrestrial glasses that were slightly crooked on the bridge of her nose. She was dressed in an oversized, faded grey hoodie that bore the cracked logo of a university, and loose, worn-out sweatpants.

But what struck Roxy the most was the profound, suffocating exhaustion radiating from the woman’s face. She possessed dark circles under her eyes so heavy they looked like physical bruises. She was completely pale, slouched, and looked exactly like a nerd who had literally died at her desk from extreme overwork and sleep deprivation.

The holographic woman let out a long, heavy sigh, reaching up to adjust her crooked glasses. When she spoke, her voice echoed through the vault with a crisp, modern terrestrial cadence that made Roxy’s transmigrated soul violently ache with homesickness.

"If you are watching this," the woman began, her voice flat and laced with a bitter, cynical resignation, "then I am dead. And the system has pulled another one of us into the meat-grinder."

Behind Roxy, the heavy clatter of weapons being slightly lowered echoed in the room. The Alphas stared at the exhausted projection in sheer, unadulterated bewilderment.

"My name is Lin," the woman continued, crossing her arms over her oversized hoodie. "I was the first. And if you are standing in this vault, it means you’ve already figured out that the gods of this world are not benevolent creators. They are desperate, flawed programmers, and their universe is crashing."

Roxy took a step closer, completely captivated by the green projection.

"The diary on that pedestal contains the raw data, but I’ll save you the headache of translating my terrible handwriting," Lin said, running a pale hand over her face. "You need to understand the system. You need to know why human women—specifically women from Earth—are the only ones pulled into this dimension."

Kaelen’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle feathered in his cheek. He stared at the projection, his icy blue eyes burning with a sudden, violent fury at the confirmation that his wife had been kidnapped by the heavens to serve a purpose.

"The Beastworld is a closed magical circuit," Lin explained, pacing slowly within the green holographic space. "The Architect and the minor gods built this place, but they made a catastrophic error. Abaddon. The Demon King isn’t an outside invader. He is a corruption of their own. And because the gods’ magic is native to this dimension, they cannot delete him. It’s like trying to cure a virus using the virus itself."

Lin stopped pacing, turning her dark, exhausted eyes directly toward where Roxy was standing. It felt as though she was looking straight through the centuries, directly into Roxy’s soul.

"They needed an outside variable," Lin whispered, the cynicism in her voice fading into a profound, heavy sorrow. "An anomaly. Something entirely disconnected from the magical resonance of the Beastworld. They needed a soul from a world completely devoid of magic. They needed an Earth soul. A transmigrated human soul acts as an antiviral program. We are the only entities in existence capable of absorbing and neutralizing the Demon King’s corruption without becoming corrupted ourselves. He thinks we were brought for his entertainment but he didn’t know the gods had other plans./"

Torian let out a low, feral growl that vibrated off the white stone walls. The Tiger Alpha’s massive fists were clenched so tightly his knuckles were completely white. The realization that their Matriarch was brought here simply to act as a filter for the gods’ mistakes was pushing the Warlords to the absolute brink of rage.

"But the gods lied to me. And they will lie to you," Lin warned, her voice hardening. "You cannot just fight Abaddon with an army. You cannot kill him with swords or elemental magic. To finish him off, you have to submit."

Roxy raised an eyebrow.

What do they mean by submit? Haven’t I been doing that all that the time I have been here?

Roxy decided ot focus more on what he was about to say.

"You have to completely give up your own purpose in living," Lin explained, her voice cracking slightly. "You cannot fight for your own survival. You cannot fight for your husbands, or your children, or your own happiness. You have to actively surrender your autonomy. You have to submit your soul entirely to the Architect, allowing the gods to hollow you out and use your soul as a pure, empty vessel to execute their weapon."

The holographic woman looked down at her hands, her shoulders trembling.

"But executing that plan requires a massive sacrifice," Lin whispered, a single, digital tear tracking down her pale cheek beneath her thick glasses. "A toll you can never, ever recover from. I couldn’t do it. When the time came, I looked at the price they demanded, and I chose to walk away. I chose to hide in this vault and let the world burn instead of paying it."

Lin didn’t explain what the sacrifice was. She didn’t detail the specific horrors of the hollowed-out soul. She just looked back up at the room, her expression utterly haunted.

"Don’t let them make you the weapon," Lin pleaded, her image beginning to flicker and distort as the green magic began to run out. "Find another way. Break the system."

With a sharp, static hum, the green holographic projection violently collapsed inward, vanishing entirely and plunging the room back into the soft, ethereal light of the moonbeam.

The silence in the subterranean vault was absolute, deafening, and suffocatingly heavy.

Zarek was vibrating with pure, unadulterated hellfire, his golden eyes completely swallowed by a ravenous, murderous fury directed entirely at the heavens. Syris’s elegant face was completely blank, his magical senses reeling from the cosmic revelations. Caspian held his water blades so tightly his hands were shaking.

Roxy stood perfectly still in front of the black glass pedestal.

She still had more to things to know about.

It wasn’t complete.

She looked down at the mundane, blue spiral notebook. The green magic had automatically flipped the cardboard cover open, revealing the first page of terrestrial, blue ballpoint pen ink. The handwriting was indeed frantic, messy, and deeply indented into the paper.

Roxy didn’t touch the book. She simply leaned forward, reading the frantic scrawl left behind by a woman who had died centuries ago, crushed by the weight of a god’s mistake.

Her eyes scanned the page, skipping over the mathematical calculations of soul resonance and native magic, until she reached the very bottom of the visible page.

It was a single line, underlined three times in dark blue ink.

Roxy’s blood ran completely, entirely cold. The horrific, cursed whisper that the dying demonic beast had forced into her mind just days ago on the frozen wasteland suddenly, violently clicked into place, aligning perfectly with the terrestrial ink on the page.

Roxy slowly raised her head. She turned around to face the five towering, terrifying Alpha Kings who loved her more than the universe itself. Her face was completely pale, her brilliant green eyes wide with a staggering, paradigm-shifting horror.

"Roxy?" Torian asked, his voice trembling slightly at the absolute devastation in her expression. "What is it? What does it say?"

Roxy swallowed hard, her voice a hollow, fragile whisper that echoed loudly in the pristine white tomb, completely changing the trajectory of their war forever.

"Abaddon isn’t a native god," Roxy read out loud, her voice shaking violently. "He was the first human they summoned to fix the system. And he rebelled."

What the fuck?