It was 8:43 PM outside the Moonlight Theater.
Hundreds of people were walking through the open doors of the theater, handing their tickets to the receptionist.
Above the theater, the Lunar mana glimmered like stars in the sky creating a beautiful sight to behold.
On a building not too far away, Lake stood under the moonlight, his body flickering in and out of sight like a mirage as the Lunar mana swirled around him like a thick coat.
If this was a normal night, Lake would have stood out like a sore thumb. However, under the lit up night sky, he blended in with his surroundings, looking more like a shadowy figure than a person.
He was currently observing the fate of the members of staff at the entrance of the theater.
Unlike other scouts, he didn’t have to tread the path ahead to find out information, just laying eyes on a single employee was enough for him to learn the entire layout of the theater.
The building was massive, having several spare rooms for actors to practice in alongside a large auditorium boasting a capacity of over five hundred.
As if to fit the theme of the city, the main attraction of the theater was its extensive use of advanced lighting equipment in an attempt to replicate the appearance of moonlight on the large stage.
On the day of the Moon Bright Festival, the theater would open up the sky liner allowing for the Lunar mana to douse the entire auditorium in its ethereal glow.
Jumping from fate to fate, Lake looked for any possible clues that could reveal even the smallest hint about his quest, but no matter how much he searched, he couldn’t find anything in the fates of the employees.
Lake knew he wouldn’t be able to find out anything concrete from their fates after noticing the disruption in the Web of Fate, but he still felt slightly disappointed that it didn’t work.
If he could avoid having to put himself in danger and just find everything out by just watching from afar, how good would that be?
However, since that wasn’t the case, Lake knew that he had to make a move.
With a light leap, he jumped from building to building before eventually arriving at the top of the theater.
Since the sky liner was opened for the festival, he could see the entire auditorium from the roof of the building.
There were a few guards patrolling the top of the building as well but Lake had already snuck past them all.
Soon, he found a relatively remote place atop the building that allowed him to see the inside of the auditorium while remaining mostly hidden.
"Now, let’s have a proper look..."
Sweeping his gaze across the massive room, Lake used a combination of his enhanced sight and Magic Eye to monitor the area.
Thanks to Magic Eye, he could see the mana around him that was mostly invisible, without much effort, in great detail, allowing him to pick up on certain things that most people couldn’t.
Looking through the room, he could see several Martial Artists inside the auditorium. Some of them had thin streams of mana flowing through them while others had mana rushing through their body like raging rivers.
Lake could tell that most of them were Martial Apprentices with a few Martial Warriors seated in the stands. After quickly glancing around, Lake roughly estimated that there were around sixty Martial Apprentices and around twenty Martial Warriors in total.
When Lake noticed them, he couldn’t help but release a soft sigh. This was because the halos of these Martial Artists were also flickering between black and white.
If even the group of Martial Artists in the auditorium that numbered close to a hundred had unknown fates, Lake simply couldn’t imagine what kind of disaster he had stumbled upon.
After glancing at the Martial Artists, Lake continued to look through the auditorium but ultimately found nothing out of the ordinary except for the black halos.
Since he couldn’t find anything from the audience, he began to look for the next biggest clue he had, the rift.
Theoretically, a rift is a tear in the fabric of space maintained by a large amount of mana. Once the mana maintaining the rift runs out, or is greatly impacted from inside it, the rift collapses and the creatures inside come spilling out.
Following this line of logic, Lake’s Magic Eye should be able to pick up on the large amount of mana used to maintain the rift if it was near him.
The system map showed that the rift was directly on top of the auditorium so Lake decided to look for any sign of mana disturbance.
However, after looking around, besides the Lunar mana in the air, he couldn’t find any signs of a large amount of mana.
"Doesn’t seem to be in the building... then what about below?"
Lake thought to himself as he tried to look at the mana underneath the auditorium. Although he couldn’t see through walls, he could still vaguely sense the other side by using his sixth sense.
His sixth sense’s range had expanded to a hundred meters and the theater itself was only around twenty meters tall. His sixth sense directly passed through the ground going as deep as eighty meters.
However, despite this, Lake still couldn’t sense anything.
Although there was some mana activity deep underground, it was a normal occurrence no matter where you went and the mana was even less active than the mana in the atmosphere, so Lake didn’t relate it to the rift.
For now, Lake ruled it out but he would still consider the possibility that the rift was located even further down than the range of his sixth sense allowed.
"That’s just leaves up."
Raising his head, Lake looked high up into the sky.
The Lunar mana lit up the entire sky as the bright moon floated above the sky.
Usually, Lake could see the craters on the moon with his advanced eyesight. However, tonight, the situation was different.
Above the sky wasn’t the bright moon in Lake’s vision, but a large storm of mana brewing far above what his sixth sense could reach.
"If the rift had formed above or even inside the mana storm..." Lake’s eyes gleamed under the moonlight.
If the rift had really formed inside the mana storm, then that would explain a lot of things Lake had thought strange about the current situation.
Each city was equipped with a wide range scanner used to pick up on great disturbances in the atmosphere like the formation of a rift.
This was also the reason why large cities were usually the safest places on the continent as any rift formed within them was usually found and dealt with immediately.
However, the range of these scanners were limited and usually only covered the city and its immediate outskirts.
Further out into the wilderness was outside the detection range of the scanners which was why rift collapses outside the cities borders occurred so frequently and also the reason why the third years of the academy were constantly sent out with almost no breaks.
As for the rift that had formed high up into the sky, even if we weren’t including the range of the scanner, Lake doubted that it would be able to pick up anything of use even if it was right next to the rift.
This was because the mana storm simply covered far too large of an area and would mess with any signals that tried to get past it.
It was simply a giant dead zone from which no signals or data could escape from.
However, this had Lake thinking of another problem.
The system notification showed that the rift had only just formed, meaning that the mana used to maintain it should be relatively stable and a rift collapse isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
However, Lake had clearly seen a scene of carnage ensue when he tried to observe the disrupted fate.
Although it wasn’t certain that the incident was related to the rift, the flashes of blood and gore he had seen were simply too brutal to be the result of a human’s actions.
As Lake thought of this, he continued to observe the mana storm in the sky, taking note of the small details.
The mana storm functioned almost like a lens from which moonlight passed through before mixing with the mana.
Normally, mana wouldn’t be able to mix with other sources as its nature was too violent, however, if that mana was to be calmed...
Looking at the mana floating in the sky, Lake could see that it was actually flowing in an anticlockwise rotation.
Reverse rotation, it was a concept Lake had used a while ago to help Kate improve her Mana Circulation technique. It basically states that when mana flows in an anticlockwise rotation, its prosperities gets reversed.
He didn’t notice it in the storm at first as the rotation was extremely slow and minuscule so it didn’t immediately stick out to him.
After observing closely however, Lake could clearly see hundreds of thousands of tiny cyclones spinning in an anticlockwise direction.
This wasn’t all though, in between each of those cyclones was another one spinning in a clockwise motion as it grinded against the others.
The two cyclones clashed against each other, causing the gentle and weak anticlockwise cyclone to dissipate before being blasted apart by the stronger and more aggressive clockwise cyclone.
The whole scene seemed extremely chaotic looking like a meat grinder from which any mana that entered was either blasted apart or absorbed into the bigger cyclones.
"If a rift that was maintained by mana was to appear in that mana grinder..."
Suddenly, Lake’s eyes widened as he came to a realization.
The rift was destined to collapse tonight.