More than forty years ago, the first gates opened — cracks between this world and somewhere with monsters in it. Nobody knows why they started. Everybody knows what happened next: the monsters came through, ordinary armies learned what mana does to doctrine, and ordinary people began waking up with the strength to hold the line. You are one of those people. This chapter is the world you clock into every morning: what it is, who runs it, and where you stand in it. The mechanics of your trade — dice, classes, gates, the window only you can see — start in the next chapter.
The gates
A gate links our side to a dungeon and starts a clock: clear it before it breaks, or the far side comes through here. Gates are ranked E to S by the mana they emit, and a gate's rank is the district's weather report. Most are somebody's Tuesday. Some types change lives: red gates that seal behind you and become survival stories, double dungeons with laws written in stone, and expanse gates — the ones that never close. An expanse gate is a permanent door onto open territory: walled, garrisoned, and farmed for everything the world's mana economy needs. Whole institutions exist because of the ones that stay open. (Full rules in Gates.)
You: awakened, licensed, ranked
Nobody chooses an Awakening. It arrives without pattern — lab studies, prayer, bribes; nothing has ever predicted it. One morning you can lift what you couldn't, and a few months later the window opens: the Lyte System, translucent blue, visible only to you, showing what you are. What a rare few carry instead — a window that talks — is the System chapter's business, and the campaign's long secret.
After Awakening you report to the Association, which tests your attributes, trains you in one of its 24 sanctioned classes, certifies your rank, and issues your license. No evaluation, no license; no license, no gates. The ranks, and what the district calls them:
| Rank | Attributes | What the district calls them |
|---|
| E | 30s–40s | Porters and almosts. The future, allegedly. |
| D | 40s–50s | Working hunters. Rent paid in sweat; the backbone of every party. |
| C | 50s–60s | Party players. The rank raids hire for. |
| B | 60s–70s | Guild muscle. Names on recruitment posters. |
| A | 70s–80s | National assets. Weather with a passport. |
| S | 80s–100 | The reason evacuation routes exist. The district has a few — and a noodle shop that isn't impressed. |
| National | past 100 | A handful worldwide. Rumors with body counts. |
Who runs the world
- The Hunters Association. Public, quasi-governmental, understaffed. It licenses hunters, surveys and ranks gates, runs dispatch, audits the loot economy, and maintains the evaluation machines that print your window on request. Its paperwork is the closest thing the impossible has to a filing system.
- Guilds. Private corporations of licensed hunters — locally, Baekho and Geumho — that charter raids, hold gate claims, and compete for talent the way football clubs do. Guild hunters live better and answer to more.
- Free Companies. Twenty-five to thirty hunters under one banner, contracted to hold a single expanse gate and paid from the gate's own output. They marry, feud, and raise apprentices. The game's middle game, made geographic.
- Everyone else. The district runs on people with no class at all — shopkeepers, dispatchers, porters, cooks. Theirs are the doors hunters come home through.
The economy
Gates produce; the world consumes. A dead monster is a paycheck: mana crystals, rank-stamped and exchangeable at the posted rate, plus hide, bone, venom, core, and essence for the crafters who turn kills into gear. Everything the world's mana economy needs comes through a gate — which is why the crystal exchange rate is the district's mood, and why E-rank is a grind. Won and shards both spend on Hunter's Row, and the gradient is simple: what hunters need is sold downhill toward the water; what hunters are is sold uphill toward the Association. (Equipment and Crafting; Jobs.)
The life
Hunters are celebrities and municipal infrastructure at once. The Row shuts down for an S-rank's visit, and the same S-rank gets a dockworkers' schedule. Paydays are processions. Funerals are frequent enough to have a shrine: on Hunter's Row, forty years of the district's dead, framed and named and dated — and one frame that has been empty since the shrine was built. Nobody knows why. Nobody replaces it, either.
Your district
A port district on the west coast, built around its work and its water. At the bottom of Hunter's Row sits the harbor gate, walled off behind its exclusion zone — floodlights, fence, and a ledger that has read holding for years, kept honest by an old lighthouse and the A-rank who keeps it. Up the hill: the Association office, the guildhalls, the notice board. Down the hill: the crystal exchange, the armorers, the vehicle yard, the beast broker, and the noodle shop with the line out the door. Mei's house rule is the district's one universally enforced law: rank means nothing at her counter. Everyone eats the identical portion. The S-ranks queue like anyone else — and they come back, which tells you most of what you need to know about the food and all of what you need to know about her.
What the world doesn't know
Every district has its weather — hums with schedules, tides that go out too far, faces that are wet on dry nights. The paperwork closes these as coincidence, and hunters live long enough to wonder. When you find what the world doesn't have words for — trials behind doors, things with titles, windows that talk — the world will not believe you, and you will be right anyway. That's the job.
Your first day
Start at E. Take a licensed gate, mind the exchange rate, carry a backup weapon, befriend a smith. Eat at Mei's. Level 1 is not an insult; it's an invitation — the System keeps score, and the climb is the whole story.