No one knew when it had appeared.
Perhaps it had existed since an age long past.
Or perhaps it had arrived suddenly, just yesterday.
It was a gate, a black archway that appeared to be made of steel. Yet when people in later generations, equipped with advanced technology, scanned it with cutting-edge analyzers, they discovered that the elements composing the seemingly steel material did not exist in this world.
Its molecular arrangement was an entirely new structure as well.
This meant it did not belong to this world.
The first person to discover it was Klaf.
A man from the Western Continent-a merchant, to be precise.
When circumstances forced Klaf and his caravan to risk taking a new route, it stood right in the middle of their path.
So jarringly out of place, so mysterious.
It stood 56 meters tall and 18 meters wide, its two leaves tightly shut, their surfaces carved with patterns and symbols of some symbolic significance.
When Klaf ignored his men's objections and pushed open the gate, which looked heavy but in fact weighed almost nothing,
he did not know that he was opening the gate to a new era.
Beyond the open gate lay a dim world, where the blurred silhouettes of towering mountains were faintly visible.
Klaf made an utterly insane decision: to explore the world beyond the gate!
That decision made him the single greatest man of the new era.
Despite the objections, Klaf overcame all resistance. With the promise of generous rewards, a makeshift expedition took shape.
Led by Klaf, the expedition, made up of guards and laborers, stepped through the gate.
Three days later, they returned.
Eleven people had set out, but only two came back.
Klaf and a single guard. They looked dazed and utterly bedraggled. Anyone who was not blind could see that they had experienced something extraordinary on the other side.
People asked about the world beyond the gate, but Klaf said nothing. He merely ordered them to close it.
For a long time afterward, he did not say a word about his journey through the gate. Only two years later did he take pen and paper and write these words.
"...It was a world that defied all reason, where hope and despair coexisted, where light and darkness played in concert. There were unimaginable riches there, but devils guarded them. Those denizens of darkness, those beings that blasphemed against the gods. They were deceitful and cunning. Do not dream of defeating them. How could a single drop of seawater drown the entire ocean?"
Even as those words of warning spread far and wide, people continued to venture through the gate, one after another. After all, Klaf had indeed brought back something resembling gold.
It was lighter than gold, yet more brilliant in color. It became known as "devil's treasure" and sold for prices that made others green with envy!
And so the gate named after Klaf became known to more and more people.
Tales of the Inverse Realm, the denizens of darkness, and devil's treasure continued to emerge...
Then, 37 years later, a second Klaft Gate was discovered.
Beyond it lay an entirely new Inverse Realm.
People therefore had to assign numbers to the Inverse Realms.
A thousand years later, a total of 127 Klaft Gates had been discovered!