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It felt just like waiting for a shuttle bus at a busy transfer station.
The waiting hall was cavernous, capable of accommodating three to four hundred people. Currently, there were fewer than two hundred present, but the wait was still agonizingly long—surprisingly, over an hour.
The teleportation array here had a safety limit of ten passengers. Sure, they could technically squeeze forty people onto the platform, but that risked "spatial chaos." No one wanted to be accidentally teleported into a different dimension to play sumo wrestling with void monsters.
Since teleportation was charged per use, passengers often tried to fill the slots. If a group wasn't full, they would shout to the hall: "Anyone going to [Location]? We're seven short, need three more!"
The goal was to split the hefty activation fee. In these situations, cutting the line was implicitly allowed.
Caelan and his companions didn't hear anyone calling for their destination, so they honestly stood in line. When it was finally almost their turn, Caelan couldn't help himself. He turned and shouted to the back of the hall.
"Anyone heading to the Dragonspire Empire? We have space for two!"
Cassius and Victor looked at Caelan in surprise, then shrugged. They hadn't planned to shout—nobles rarely did—but they understood the logic.
"Yes! Two people here!" a voice responded happily. Two middle-aged men grabbed their bags and ran up from the back of the queue.
A few minutes later, the magic array hummed with recharged mana. The five of them stepped onto the platform.
"That will be eighty-three gold crowns in total," a mage staff member announced monotonously.
"16.6 gold crowns per person," Caelan stated instantly.
Cassius and Victor were used to it—Caelan was a human calculator who aced every math exam at the Academy. The two strangers and the staff member, however, stared at him in surprise. It was rare to see someone crunch numbers that fast.
They paid the money and the circle activated.
The sensation of teleportation wasn't the instantaneous "blink" Caelan had imagined. Instead, it felt like being squeezed through a wormhole while heavily intoxicated.
His vision warped and twisted into impossible shapes. Looking at the swirling void made him nauseous, so he squeezed his eyes shut. Aside from the visual distortion, the journey was dead silent.
Time became irrelevant; it felt like minutes, yet also like mere seconds.
When sound returned to his ears, Caelan opened his eyes. They were standing on the solid ground of the Dragonspire Empire.
"Ugh—"
One of the other passengers, a bald man, couldn't hold it in. He bent over and vomited onto the platform.
A soldier walked over expressionlessly. He waited for the man to finish retching, then immediately handed him a slip of paper.
Caelan glanced at it. Fine for vomiting within the teleportation array: 2 Gold Crowns.
The bald man looked pained, but he paid the fine without argument.
They had arrived at a checkpoint.
This wasn't a city for living; it was a massive, militarized transit hub. High walls surrounded the area, and hundreds of soldiers patrolled constantly to maintain order—and to catch anyone trying to smuggle themselves through the arrays.
Despite the military presence, the area was bustling with commerce. The road leading to the connecting teleportation array was lined with shops selling Dragonspire specialties: dragon meat jerky, horns, scales, and bones.
They merged with crowds arriving from other regions. The central waiting hall was enormous. Here, staff assigned numbers to travelers automatically.
The trio received ticket #268. The current number being called was #247.
Based on a cycle of eight to nine minutes per transmission, Caelan conservatively estimated a wait of nearly three hours.
He immediately missed the smartphones of his previous life.
"So many people, yet they only operate eight gates? are they out of their minds?" Victor complained, kicking at the floor.
"It's a bottleneck," Cassius sighed. "Let's just wait patiently."
"I'm going to buy food. My treat," Victor announced, unable to sit still. "What do you guys want?"
"I haven't eaten Dragonspire food before," Caelan said. "I'll go with you. I'll eat whatever you buy."
"Then let's get Roasted Cloudwing Dragon meat. It's better than the Crimson-Scaled Dragon meat—that stuff smells too gamey for beginners."
Victor nodded and headed for the stalls.
Caelan thought for a moment, then jogged outside. He returned a few minutes later carrying a discarded wooden board he had scavenged.
Cassius laughed. "Right! We have an Illusionist. We can play games while we wait!"
Since the projected keyboards were usually fixed in place, the seating arrangement in the hall made playing on a standard runestone awkward. But for the creator of the game, modifying the display surface was trivial.
By the time Victor returned with the steaming meat, a crowd had gathered.
Victor squeezed through and found the wooden board propped up on a bench. Caelan was projecting the game screen onto the wood, while the controls were projected directly onto their thighs.
They were playing Squirrel War.
At this moment, Caelan was relying entirely on his own skills rather than the automated tester in his mind palace. He retrieved his memories of playing Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2 and synced his fingers to the illusory buttons on his lap.
"Victor, you eat first," Caelan said without looking up. "When you're done, swap with Cassius. Then it's my turn."
Victor complied happily, tearing into a chunk of Cloudwing meat.
The crowd around them whispered excitedly.
"What is that?"
"It must be an 'Illusion Game.' Our news has been reporting on them for three weeks. I heard they're exploding in popularity over in Crimson Port."
"Oh, so this is what it looks like? It's mesmerizing."
"Crimson Port? Are you from the Moonwatch Empire? I haven't heard a word about this."
One bold onlooker stepped forward. "Excuse me, are you the Illusionist creator? I bought a game runestone, but I can't get it to work. Also, I've never seen this game before."
Caelan replied while dodging a robotic bee on screen. "Yes, this is a new title. It came out a few days ago. It's called Squirrel War."
"Do you have any copies for sale?"
"I do." Caelan paused the game and pulled a stock runestone from Victor's spatial ring. "Thank you for your patronage. Five silver marks."
"I want one too!"
"Me too!"
Seeing the demand, Caelan deleted his character instance, leaving Cassius to play solo. He turned the waiting hall bench into a pop-up shop. He even set up a demo runestone on the floor, looping a tutorial video for the new customers.
"Little brother," a merchant from the Moonwatch Empire asked, "I remember you invented a board game called Chess. Did you bring any sets?"
"No, I didn't," Caelan replied. He was about to offer to engrave a custom board on the spot when a voice piped up from nearby.
"Brother, you play Chess? I have a set here! Let's play a match."
Caelan shrugged internally and went back to collecting silver. He glanced over and saw the two men had activated a chessboard projection directly on the floor.
They were already deep in a match, with a ring of spectators cheering them on.
PLZ THROW POWERSTONES.