Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

"What the hell was that?"

Isera stopped in her tracks, failing to complete the hundredth and fifty-fourth lap of her back-and-forth stroll.

Something changed.

She couldn't quite really put her finger on it, but a change had occurred.

That was the one thing the girl was perfectly certain about.

'My instincts wouldn't lie like that,' Isera thought, turning all around in hopes of spotting anything that would shed light upon what actually happened.

The gut that warned her about the change wasn't kind enough to provide her with a detailed explanation of what kind of change it sensed, just its existence.

Figuring it out was something Isera had to do on her own.

"But there isn't much that I can go off on here, is there?" she muttered to herself, staring helplessly at the vast openness of the plain behind her and the uniform emptiness of the barrier lands ahead.

'Or is there?'

Staring at the star flower, the only living organism that could somehow live and thrive under the onslaught of the direct light of the stars, Isera went back to her thoughts to the sight from two days ago.

For the first time in recorded history, she somehow managed to see someone on the other side!

'Given how far into the past the records of this place go, surely, this couldn't be the first time?' Isera continued to argue with herself over the point.

It was long since theorized what exactly lay on the other side of the barrier. A question quite a lot of those trapped in this hell of boredom tried to answer.

And it was exactly due to the lack of sightings of people on the other side that quite a lot of theories about this place continued to fail to answer any existential questions.

'If this trap works in the exact same way on its other side, then there should be hundreds if not thousands of people trapped there. And throughout all the time that this barrier exists, between all the people that survived for millennia here…'

Isera gulped her saliva down.

'Someone would see someone else. There's no other way about it!'

What the girl initially thought to be some sort of a control center of the barrier turned out to be nothing more but storage for a being that she sighted.

A being that went against all that came to be commonly known within the trapped society.

A being that existed and apparently thrived on the other damn side of this god-forsaken trap!

'And it waved at me…' Isera thought, gulping her saliva down at the mere memory of the event. 'And then…'

At a loss for words, Isera crumbled down on her knees.

There was no one around for miles to see her breakdown, making it all the easier to surrender to the empty desire to give up.

It's been two days.

Enough time for Isera to realize that whatever that strange being gestured at her, it couldn't be what she hoped the message to be.

'Why would it tell me to wait if it failed to show for the next two damn days?' Isera continued to doubt, even as she rolled to her side and brought her knees up to her chin before enclosing them within the hold of her arms.

'If it was capable of walking past the barrier, it surely wouldn't take it that long to get here, would it?'

Isera continued to spiral down the hole of negative thoughts.

In this empty world of the plain, there was nothing for her to latch on to to break the fall.

And yet, somewhere at the bottom of her soul…

'You are still alive.'

A silent, muffled voice continued to ring throughout everything.

The silly spark of hope, the last ember of Isera's fighting spirit.

A source of unreasonable grief to those who gave up on it and accepted their fate.

And with each passing moment, Isera grew to realize its importance.

'Without hope, there's no expectation,' the girl thought, the air of the starlight plain growing to be too much of a burden for her to even stand up.

If hope was the source of her grief, then why exactly did she grasp it with all her might?

Was this the true curse of this place, for those who feared the instant death of walking into the abyss of the barrier to suffering through nigh eternity by clinging to this foolish hope?

'Maybe we are all trapped because we disrespected the wishes of whoever blocked this place off,' Isera thought grimly, her analytical mind desiring some sort of a logical reason for her suffering.

An end so grand it would justify the unsavory fate she forced upon herself when she went against Jay's pleas and accepted the mission down south.

'You were right, after all,' Isera muttered to herself, struggling to even find a reason to push a new breath through her mouth.

If she was bound to rot alive in this place, what use would be breathing?

Just an effort put towards no end, an exercise unwarranted by a purpose.

'Honor my ass, I should've never taken this job!'

A single tear dropped down Isera's cheek.

And then, she committed the unthinkable.

She broke the only taboo, a seemingly small bet she made with herself just to condition her mind to endure everything.

With her trembling hands, Isera reached out to her throat and pulled on a thin, silver necklace adorned with a small, round pendant.

Staring at the reflective surface of the polished silver, Isera took a deeper breath, urging herself to stop.

This was nothing but a mental trick.

To create a condition that solidified the concept of surrender and then always keep it ready and near.

And in her specific example, a small trinket worth no more than a few coins on the regiment's flea market, that Isera bound with some shady scroll to Jay's favorite ring.

In theory, the scroll was supposed to bind the two in ways no modern person could understand…

In reality, though, as it was with most of the ancient technology or knowledge, it simply failed to work, deprived of whatever it was that human ancestors used up.

In the end, Isera never had any hopes that flipping the pendant open would ever cause any change to Jay's ring… And she never dared to test it out, for doing so would not only mean her surrender but also give her the certainty she actually was better off without.

'I bet that with the starlight interference, it wouldn't work even if it wasn't broken,' Isera thought, caressing the cover of the pendant…

Only for her fingers to move on their own, flipping the cover of the pendant to the side and revealing a small, extremely detailed painting of her younger self proudly standing side by side with Banjay as they reached the ascended status and joined the military.

'It's been so long, Jay,' Isera thought, smiling through her teeth as she caressed the photo.

Deep down in her guts, her regret, defeat, sadness, and loneliness compounded into one massive knot that threatened to squeeze the last out of her willpower and snuff whatever it was that made Isera so desperately cling to her life.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

'As long as you are alive, the mission is still doable.'

Jay's words once again sounded in the girl's thoughts, bringing forth the image of his naively confident face when he spoke those words.

It was a sentence that Isera carried through numerous improbable exploits. And it was a sentence that Jay spoke before he dove into the bad crowd, ending up on the wrong end of the political dispute.

'At least, he should be doing well,' Isera thought, smiling through her tears.

She parted with Jay in a fit of anger. She left him with a look more pained than anything she saw on his face ever before. And she did so all for his sake…

Or so Isera used to tell to herself.

'Knowing you, you are doing well, regardless of what ended up happening.'

It was her own, arrogant belief that only by accepting this dangerous and possibly lethal mission of crossing the impassable plain she could pay the kingdom back for Jay's sins, possibly gaining enough favors with the patriarch to buy her friend's life once his plots and schemes would inevitably fall.

'Who knows, maybe you were the right one all along?'

A small, helpless smile sprouted on Isera's lips as she lay down on the path she had beaten by walking back and forth a thousand times. Her eyes, locked on the picture that brought her the memory of happier times.

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'I just wish I could see if you are doing well before I go,' Isera wished, smiling through the tears flowing down her cheeks.

And so, with a short and dim flash, her only solace in this trying moment, the picture of her younger self laughing out loud with Jay… vanished.