My vision cleared, and I was staring into the flushed face of the beautiful dungeon avatar. Her eyes were watery, as though she’d teared up from the overwhelming emotionality of this incredible moment.

I was met with a notification screen from my newly acquired primary cultivation system:

Jeremy Parker has successfully merged with Kyrine the Dungeon Core!

It was done. I had succeeded. I was now Kyrine's Keeper.

Chapter 12: Agent Amanda Fallon

Rain drummed on the glistening facade of the Extra-Dimensional Intelligence (EDI) shared building on Broadway, in the heart of New York City’s bustling financial district.

The EDI shared the building with the Department of City Planning. To outsiders, this added to the agency’s image as just another bureaucratic department that handled the development and planning of residential areas for non-humans. It also helped that they were based in NYC rather than in DC.

The agency cultivated this mundane exterior. The less attention the EDI drew, the better. The true purpose of the agency was much more interesting—research into new and potentially dangerous forms of cultivation and the handling of any aberrations. However, to remain effective, everyone who worked at the EDI knew that keeping a low profile was important to their work. It allowed them to operate without attracting too much unwanted attention.

For Special Agent Amanda Fallon, the stuffy building on Broadway was her workplace of ten years, and, if she was honest, her home. It wasn’t sexy—the ventilation system never quite worked properly, and some agents were convinced that the heating pipes were possessed by a malevolent entity which caused them to come on and off at random and inappropriate times. But for all that, EDI headquarters was the place Agent Fallon felt the most at home.

Well, when things were going well, at least.

Agent Fallon was a drow elf. It wasn’t common for the drow to be awarded prestigious positions in governmental agencies, but Amanda had worked her damn ass off. Sure, she couldn’t tell anyone that she was a special agent—most of her family and her few friends thought she was just a city planning clerk—but that didn’t bother her. She was serving her people, and, most of all, her Queen.