Throughout the Celestial realm, the Towers of Fate spirit artifacts were finishing up their weekly communication with each other.
Tower 231, "That sounds good, Tower 492."
Tower 1, "Alright, if that's it, we can call this meeting. Does anyone else have anything to say?"
Tower 536 (Xander's tower), "Yes, it's been a while, so I think I'll introduce a new little event. What do you think, Tower 1?"
Tower 1, "If you want, you have full control over your tower, so go ahead."
Tower 536, "Alright, I will, and I think I'll call this event 'The Blink.'"
***
"Her name is Shin Yong-seo."
'Damn,' Xander had got his hopes up that he had found the person he was looking for, but after thinking about it, the odds of any random person with the surname Shin being the girl he was looking for were not very high, especially when he was in a place where the majority of people were of Korean descent.
After that, Xander took his leave, heading back to his dorm.
***
The next day, Xander was once again at Sung-min's training when all of a sudden, alarms all over the city started to go off.
"WOOOO!!" "WOO!!" "WOOOO!!" "WOO!!"
"WOOOO!!" "WOO!!" "WOOOO!!" "WOO!!"
"WOOOO!!" "WOO!!" "WOOOO!!" "WOO!!"
"What is that for?" Xander asked, a little nervous that something might be wrong.
Sung-min gave off a little smile and said, "That, my student, is the alarm for an F-rank portal opening. Now come on, you should see this."
'An F-rank portal,' Xander thought. If you would have asked him a couple days ago what that meant, he would have no clue, but he had learned two days ago in his Tower/World Knowledge class that each tower had a spirit artifact. This, of course, he already knew, but what he didn't know was that this spirit artifact acted a lot like, and was internally known as, a game administrator.
Several times a day, all over the world, the tower would create portals that would pop up, and monsters would spill out of them. So, in any given city, every couple of weeks, a portal will open inside the city limits. They just have to hope it's a dormant or G-rank portal and not an F or E-rank.
In the 1st Universe that they were currently in, sometimes the portals were dormant rank, but other times they were G, F, or even E-rank.
After the alarm went off three times, a voice finally said, "F-rank portal section 2G-Northwest!!"
"F-rank portal section 2G-Northwest!!"
"F-rank portal section 2G-Northwest!!"
It said it three times before it repeated the cycle.
Sung-min led Xander over to the portal opening as fast as he could, barely waiting for Xander to catch up since, as an E-rank, he was naturally much faster.
Along the way, Xander started to think, 'What if I can kill a couple of F-ranks for their cores? That would help me saturate my core faster.'
With a full week already going by, his core saturation percentage for both of his cores was now 1%.
With this thought, Xander pushed his speed even faster, ready to get there before all the beasts were killed.
***
Five minutes later, they were at the scene… and it was chaos.
The second the portal opened, F-rank monsters started pouring out of it, killing everyone in sight and destroying all the buildings and properties nearby, with not enough F-rank humans being close enough to stop them.
The place was now crawling with F-rank monsters, and the F-rank humans who heard the call and ran toward the danger were just starting to show up from all around the city.
"Okay, Xander, just sit back and watch. Don't get too close," Sung-min said as he unsheathed his katana and started to leave Xander.
"Wait! Can't I help?!" Xander asked. He had thought the reason he was brought here was to help out.
"Ha!" Sung-min laughed.
"Just sit back and watch for now, and if you feel like you can help after that, be my guest." After saying that, Sung-min ran forward, not giving Xander a second look.
***
There were monsters everywhere. They looked like walking dead werewolves. They were huge, almost 5 meters tall, and their skin was barely hanging on to their bodies.
Xander watched Sung-min as he neared the first beast in a flash of lightning.
"Boom!" Xander was surprised at the stark difference in the lightning bolt he would create in practice and the lightning bolt Sung-min had just created.
His had the diameter of a pencil, while Sung-min's had the diameter of a large human thigh.
And the second the E-rank quality lightning bolt hit the monster, it pierced straight through its chest, killing it.
'Damn! That was awesome!' Xander thought as he started to unsheath his katana, ready to join in on the action.
Then his eyes drifted to the left, where he watched a mid F-rank human face off against a half-step F-rank monster.
"Boom!"
"Damn!" the man yelled.
The werewolf charged up a slash of what looked like darkness and met the man head-on, and the power from the two's hit meeting broke the concrete they were standing on.
Xander continued to watch the clash back and forth as the man slowly defeated the werewolf, and he thought as he sheathed his katana, 'There's no way I can kill that thing.'
Xander watched the rest of the fight from multiple perspectives, from low F-ranks who struggled to kill a single beast to Sung-min, who was killing one with every attack.
'When will I be that strong?' Xander began to think. He knew if he was that strong right now, he would be able to start looking for his brother.
***
After the fight was over, Xander, without even waiting for Sung-min to come find him, started to walk silently back to Sung-min's house, deep in thought.
'I have to get stronger, and I have to do it now, and I've also got to get enough money to make it to Karael so I can finally meet Shin Yoo-na and find out more about what happened to my brother.'
So the entire way back, he started to think about how he could get stronger while also making some money.
After walking all the way back to Sung-min's, he had finally come up with two thoughts.
The first was joining the local mercenary guild. The mercenary guild was exactly what it sounded like. He would go there and look for jobs that had to do with killing beasts for materials and beast cores for money and experience.
The second thing was much riskier, but he thought if he got good enough, he would be really good and well-suited for it. Sung-min had even told him that this, mixed with his mirage trait, was a good fit, so he was going to join the Crimson Crescent.
The Crimson Crescent was a tower-wide A-rank assassin organization that he had learned about this morning. Supposedly, the leader of the organization was the strongest person in this tower, and due to that, he had underground Crimson Crescent branches in every city on every planet in all three universes in this tower. And thanks to his strength, no organization would dare close them down. And due to the nature of the tower's survival-of-the-fittest attitude, not only were they always open and never closed, but they never lacked business.
'Okay, so starting tomorrow, I will start spending my nights going either to the mercenary guild or the Crimson Crescent,' when he ranked up from dormant to G-rank, he realized real quick that he could run completely fine on just two hours of sleep. He even figured he could go days without sleep if needed, but he liked to get at least six hours every night just to stay fresh.
With that, Xander had made up his mind.
***
After making it back to Sung-min's, where Sung-min was already waiting, the two restarted his training.
Hours later, Xander found himself in his dorm, lying in his bed, about to go to sleep.
And that's when it happened.
The tower, known internally as a game administrator, played a new card.
***
The 1st Universe was the same as usual, but when the clock hit 12, there was a flash of light that went through the entire 1st Universe, and people aged 16 to 22 started to randomly disappear from their homes, streets, academies, work, stores, etc.
This would later be known all throughout Tower 536 as 'The Blink.'