ding
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates <Error>
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates <Error>
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates <Error>
2398 further administrative notifications follow.

Even more? It didn't take much consideration to decide this was an emergency situation, and the portal needed to go right now.

"(Another two thousand! We're killing the portal.) Darren, close the portal! Vargalas, shut down the generator!" I yelled in a panic, not being bothered by the half of the cable we'd lose.

"(Forget my request. We'll open the next one from our side once we've moved the kit to a deserted island somewhere,)" shouted the minister, before retreating.

"It won't close! It's stuck!" called Darren.

"What? Let me try, child," said Bruleg, focusing on the portal. It rippled but didn't close.

Tilyana screamed.

"It's off!" shouted Vargalas.

Not wanting to wait for them to unplug it at their end, I pulled my short sword from [Item Box] and slashed, the cable slicing cleanly and half falling each side of the portal. "Try again now!"

The portal rippled once more, but still remained open.

"Keep trying, child," said Bruleg to Darren, before flying to the ceiling and messing with the mana blocking enchantments of the dome.

ding
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates 0.062, 0.011, β
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates 0.062, 0.011, β
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates 0.062, 0.011, β
75280 further administrative notifications follow.

They had valid coordinates now! It had apparently used the portal site as the zero point. Not to mention the number of affected people was increasing exponentially. And Tilyana was still screaming her head off.

With the mana supply completely cut off, the violet glow around the edges of the portal dimmed, but the hole in the world remained. It was stable with zero supply of mana.

"I... I can't!" sobbed Darren, who wasn't reacting well to the panic. "It's not magic!"

How was that possible? Had he created a completely stable portal that no longer required mana to sustain itself? Was Earth sustaining it from the other side? That option seemed unlikely; from the reactions I could see through the portal, they were as blind-sided by this development as we were.

How else could we close it?

"Bruleg! Let mana in! All of it!"

"Is that not the exact opposite of what we wish to do?" he asked, after taking a second to work out it was him I was talking to. Those dragons really didn't appreciate people shortening their names.

"I have an idea. Everyone get away from the portal! (You on that side too! Get as far away from the portal as possible!) Darren, remember in the institute, when I made bad mana and you protected us all from it? I'm going to do that again, so protect us, okay?"

Darren nodded, still clinging to Cluma, with tears in the corners of his eyes.

The mana flooded in and, as expected, the portal greedily lapped it up. I pulled on the full force of [Expert Mana Control] and twisted, flooding the portal inside and out with unstructured spatial affinity. The portal rippled, but this time, so did the surrounding space. For a brief moment, the mana appeared to catch, the ripples and distortions frozen in the air, before space tore and shattered, the portal shattering with it with a noise like the biggest plane of glass in existence crashing into the world's largest cymbal.

I watched the tangled knot of mana fade away, with no sign of the portal remaining.

ding
Skill [Expert Mana Control] advanced to level 16
Skill [Expert Mana Finesse] advanced to level 16
Class [Eldritch Mage] advanced to level 28
Class level increased intelligence by 1
Class level increased strength by 1
Class level increased dexterity by 1
Class level increased endurance by 1

Good for skill and class levels, but not so great for my blood pressure...

"Is everyone okay?" I asked, glad to see Tilyana had stopped screaming. She was still left kneeling on the floor, head in her hands, though, which wasn't a huge improvement.

"It appears so. Now, would you please explain what just happened?" asked Serlv.

"The System started spreading into Earth. Close to eighty-thousand people affected, then it started producing language skills, and adjusted the coordinate system so that it could refer to locations on either planet. It was learning and adapting."

"And that is undesirable to them?"

I had to pause to think about that, but I couldn't see any answer other than a solid yes. Even if they did want it, without mana, there was no guarantee it would work correctly. For that matter, how was it working at all? My own [Soul Perception] and [Mana Sight] worked through the portal without issue. There was simply no mana there to see. Did something similar apply to the System? It could use the mana here to reach through to Earth and apply its effects there?

But even if it all worked correctly, most countries had, to pick a random example, gun control laws. The System would give a large swath of the population fireballs with no permit required. The lawmakers and police forces would have a fit. From what I remembered about the purpose of the System, that was kinda the point; if someone could kill their enemy with a fireball, why bother inventing guns? And if they don't get around to inventing guns, no-one was going to invent nukes. It wasn't supposed to prevent murder on an individual level; it was supposed to protect civilization on a planetary level.

But Earth already had nukes. And a fully functioning System would give people [Item Box] and teleportation. How well secured were military munitions against that?

"Definitely," I answered, the single word insufficient to sum up the horror that would result in a Lawless and nuclear armed world if System-powered abilities were foisted on the full population in an uncontrolled manner.

"What of you, Tilyana?"

"So many voices. Shouting, hissing, screaming. So loud, so angry. Speaking over each other, letting me hear nothing. So much they wanted to tell me, but they were held back. Prevented from comprehension. I was not allowed to listen."

I knew doing soul stuff around her caused her to wince. She'd previously said something about not being allowed to hear things when the Law was involved. If her skill just picked up the infected section of Earth, there may well have been a lot of Law-denied stuff going on.

"It's likely her skills malfunctioned when exposed to the manaless Earth," I said, making an excuse.

"No. My skills were faultless. I was simply not permitted to hear."

"Was there any risk to this world, were the portal not closed?"

I took another brief period to consider it. The dome had successfully prevented the portal from bleeding out our mana. If we'd evacuated and sealed it off, the only danger remaining from the portal itself would be people coming through it. A bigger worry would be if the System managed to corrupt itself while trying to integrate Earth. The [Language: Common] skill was bad enough in that respect. Would everyone in the world now need to expend soul points in order to speak? And if so, how could that be explained to them before they had the skill?

[Language: Common] - The language spoken and written by the occupants of realm α. (Rank 1)
[Language: English] - The language spoken and written by the occupants of realm β. (Rank 1)

They had sensible descriptions, but the description of English was inaccurate. It apparently thought that was the global language, rather than what happened to be spoken where the portal opened. Would the description change if the System influence continued to spread? But there must have been some bilingual people out of the eighty-thousand. What had the System done with them?

I'd gained both language skills at level ten. [Eye of Judgement] showed everyone else had gained common at ten, too, aside from Darren who only had it at level six. Cluma was the only other one who picked up English, albeit only at level four in her case.

"I don't know what effects Earth would have on the System. At the least, we need to investigate the behaviour of this [Language: Common] skill."

"I agree. If you are correct about the value of these books, then perhaps this exchange has proven its worth, yet I find myself hoping that Earth never opens the promised next portal."

I didn't disagree. At the rate things were going, another anomaly may well impact an entire country. A few more, and it would be the entire planet.

Thankfully, should the worst happen, there was something I could try to reverse the damage. As a superuser of the System, I had the required access rights to sever individuals from the System. I'd just need to get back into the ark to do so. Krana had said he could no longer do so, but when he had, it had been simply by stating his purpose politely. Was that really a password, or was an intelligence listening and comprehending?

Krana flew Darren home while Horail packed away the unwanted corpses and textbooks into his own [Item Box]. Perhaps that was why they'd gone for smaller monsters; his skill was capped at level ten. They should have asked me to do it. I'd have loved to see the faces of the watchers on the other side when I shoved a dinosaur through the portal.

Everyone else drifted off too, Cluma using my teleportation to get home and Bruleg flying off with the elves. Serlv had me teach her a few sentences of English, in case Earth followed through on opening yet another portal. Not enough to hold a conversation, but to inform them how long it would take to get me there, or to say we'd open a portal back if that was too long. With those few phrases memorised, she took off too, leaving me on my own.

Cluma had left by the time I teleported back home. The day had been stressful, but it was over, and it hadn't come without rewards. On a personal level, I'd gained two class levels and a few skills. On a broader scale, we'd received enough knowledge to keep civilization advancing at a breakneck pace for decades. Even if we never traded with Earth again, we'd already made valuable gains.

It wasn't until I'd pottered into my kitchen to make myself some lunch that it occurred to me I hadn't seen a single message about connections to foreign souls being lost.