“So it’s a mind-affecting illusion,” Archmage Quint concluded. “Annoying, but solvable.”
Inside Windrest City’s hostel, Orton—finally coherent after the potion—recounted what the six of them had experienced on the Sorrow Theater’s first floor.
Perry hovered nearby, tidying glassware and pretending to be busy while he listened.
They’d entered the Theater and been forced to watch a violent performance. Then their bodies had moved without permission, and each of them had “acted” the scene themselves. Even after escaping the building, the imagery kept replaying. Reality and hallucination blurred until they couldn’t tell one from the other.
Quint, a fourth-rank-six Weavecaster, listened without interrupting. When Orton finished, Quint tapped the table once, as if sealing a verdict.
“The show, the acting—none of it was real. It was a layered illusion. Next time, we go in prepared and break the illusion first. Once the illusion collapses, the Theater’s first floor won’t hold.”
Relief washed through the Violet Eye delegation.
Perry understood the mechanism now too—at least enough to file it away. As an apprentice, he didn’t get to argue with archmages. He got to wash cauldrons.
Outside, he pulled a towel over his mouth and nose and tied it behind his head like a crude mask.
Bonnie’s potion worked. Bonnie’s potion also smelled like something that should’ve been illegal.
They had a duty now: help the Violet Iris Church distribute the cure to citizens who’d gone mad from the Theater’s nightly singing.
Bonnie, with her diluted giant blood, boiled batch after batch in the hostel courtyard under a forest of hanging cauldrons. The quality was excellent. The stench was… heroic.
Perry inhaled through the towel and tried not to gag. “Maybe that’s her Talent,” he muttered. “Guaranteed emotional damage.”
Still, the cure changed everything.
The hostel food improved. Not because the city suddenly loved the Violet Eye—far from it. The cook’s incident had turned the populace bitter. But once the potion started working, the city couldn’t ignore who had saved them.
And the rumor everyone repeated wasn’t “the Violet Eye fixed it.”
It was: “Rhine fixed it.”
Perry heard it in the kitchens, in the streets, in the rebuilding crews.
“If not for Mr. Rhine, those Violet Eye people would still be drooling in their rooms.”
“So it’s our scholar who cures weirdness, huh?”
Perry ate his hot potato soup and decided he could live with being hated, as long as it came with warm food.
If Rhine came back, Perry swore he’d make sure Rhine met Miss Warner.
For the official players, that connection couldn’t be allowed to die.
…
August 19. Dawn.
Weak sunlight gilded the Sorrow Theater on Lighthouse Isle. On the rooftop, ancient gargoyle statues glowered with chipped stone faces.
After a night of planning, Quint, Firebrandy, Orton, and the Violet Eye’s high-ranked Weavecasters prepared to enter again.
Just like before, when Quint placed his hand on the Theater’s heavy front door, it opened by itself—just enough for a line of people to slip through.
They filed in.
The door shut without a sound.
Outside, Bonnie glanced at Perry. “With two archmages inside… they’ll clear the first floor this time, right?”
Perry remembered carrying feverish mentors back to bed while they screamed at shadows. He stared at the Theater and sighed.
“Who knows,” he said. “Worst case, we make them drink your potion again.”
Bonnie frowned. “Is it really that bad? I think it’s fine.”
Perry pinched the bridge of his nose. “Bonnie… sometimes I think your potion and the Sorrow Theater are the same thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“Both cause psychic damage.”
Bonnie didn’t have a reply.
Inside, the Violet Eye team moved carefully. This time, with preparation and archmage-level control, they didn’t get lost in the first floor’s staged illusion. They used a ritual array they’d prepared in advance and cracked the enchantment like glass.
They saw the first floor’s true face.
Ruins.
Broken pillars. Collapsed arches. A hall torn open like a corpse that had been scavenged.
Orton froze. Quint froze. Even Firebrandy went quiet.
Where were the artifacts? Where was the power?
Lostlands didn’t exist for millennia just to be empty. Without something anchoring them, they rotted away under the Sea.
Quint’s jaw tightened. “This shouldn’t be possible.”
Orton crouched and ran a hand along a jagged fracture in the wall. Then he sucked in a breath and raised his voice.
“I get it.”
Everyone turned.
“These breaks are fresh,” Orton said. “New damage. We already suspected someone entered before us—before our first attempt.”
He pointed at the fractures. “This was done by whoever got here first.”
Quint’s eyes widened.
Someone had broken the illusion without their preparations, taken whatever the first floor held… and then destroyed the entire level.
Firebrandy paced among the rubble, her gaze tracking the shattered ceiling. A faint, unfamiliar chill climbed her spine.
“Whoever did this,” she murmured, “has a level of power that makes me very, very unhappy.”
…
Noon.
Sunlight filtered through leaves outside Rhine’s window, splashing gold onto the polished desk in his room.
August 19—Cycle 7 of the Endless Sea.
Rhine sat at the desk, turning a snow-white invitation card edged in gold between his fingers.
The Ambush had docked the previous night in Windrest City’s harbor. Most of the crew slept aboard—too dark to stumble home, too tired to celebrate.
Rhine and Thea took advantage of that darkness.
They slipped to Lighthouse Isle and offered up a Lightning Sea Eel.
A sacrifice.
An invitation.
In the morning, Captain Andrew and John insisted on celebrating at a restaurant. Rhine went along, expecting nothing but food and awkward thanks.
Instead the owner recognized him and nearly cried.
During Rhine’s days at sea, Windrest City had been plagued by nightly self-harm incidents. The Violet Iris Church’s Lightbearers saved bodies, but minds broke. Even archmages arriving to help had no answer.
The Violet Eye apprentice Perry brewed Rhine’s potion formula—left behind in a letter—and it worked.
The owner’s son was alive because of it.
Windrest City’s residents had started saying it outright: Rhine had saved them again.
Rhine accepted the praise politely. Internally, he was already counting the political cost.
Sure enough, once the lunch ended, Governor Panglos Fell invited him to a private midday meal. It wasn’t an interrogation. It was a probe.
Rhine answered everything with truths wrapped in harmless lies: childhood studies with a teacher, translating old texts, running into seafaring acquaintances, taking work at sea.
And the most important detail—
Panglos Fell still read him as only a second-rank Hunter.
That plain cufflink—an “unremarkable” relic—blurred the truth the way a foghorn blurs distance.
Strength unchanged. Story plausible. Suspicion contained.
Rhine returned to his room, spread the invitation open, and read the elegant script.
“My dearest Mr. Rhine, please attend a performance created for you. Tonight at midnight.—the Sorrow Theater”
“Tonight,” Rhine whispered.
Fear had been the first emotion the last time he’d held an invitation.
Now, with Thea at his side, the card looked like a promotion voucher.
At 11:30, they’d enter the second floor.
If nothing went wrong, Rhine would walk out a second-rank-four Hunter without lifting a finger.
He lay down for a nap… and noticed the System chat channel had piled up with unread messages.
Curiosity won.
He opened it and immediately found a wall of panic.
[CHAT]
“This System is insane. It hands out quests and doesn’t care if you get buried.”
“Does it even scale missions by level? This is a joke.”
“If I try this, I’m dead. I won’t even know how.”
“I haven’t even awakened and I still got this mission.”
“It’s probably regional. Only players in the area receive it.”
“Like the ‘suicide mission’ the officials tried to stop Player 0067 from taking back then.”
“Yeah, this one qualifies as a suicide mission too.”
[/CHAT]
Rhine scrolled.
At noon, players on Maplefall Isle—and nearby waters—had received a System mission: obtain the Tidal Scepter.
Reward: an immediate rank-up.
Tempting. Dangerous.
Rhine kept scrolling until someone who sounded local added context.
[CHAT]
“Remember that storm a couple cycles ago, off Storm Island?”
“The one that trapped the Violet Eye ship and kept them from catching Paper Crane?”
“That’s the one. I heard it wasn’t natural. It was caused by people fighting over the Tidal Scepter—the key to opening and controlling the Sea Market.”
“If that’s true, a new island should’ve surfaced at the storm’s center. The Sea Market will be held there from now on.”
“Wait… what’s the Sea Market?”
“Think of it as a black market, but with anonymity and protection.”
“So the System wants us to steal a staff that can summon storms? That’s suicide.”
“You don’t have to do it. You can ignore the mission.”
“Okay. That makes me feel better.”
[/CHAT]
Rhine closed his eyes.
Storm-born island.
Tidal Scepter.
A “Sea Market.”
And in the back of his mind: a voodoo doll, a candle whose flame refused to die, and the crew’s report of something blue drifting in the air.
He wasn’t going to chase the Scepter.
He told himself that.
But sleep, once again, refused to come.