August 15. Midnight.
Weightlessness flashed through Ethan’s stomach.
His white ceiling became a scarlet velvet curtain.
His modern light fixture became a gilded chandelier crowned with hundreds of candles.
He hit one knee on a crimson stage floor, forced into the posture of a penitent.
In front of him sat a birthing bed.
A woman lay on it, belly swollen, face blurred like smeared paint. She writhed in labor, her eyes pleading toward the far side of the bed.
Skye stood there.
The instant Ethan returned to the Endless Sea—and to the Sorrow Theater’s first-floor stage—his body was no longer his.
Skye’s face had been forced into a cold, expressionless mask by the Theater’s script, but her voice came through their contract raw and shaking.
“What do we do? What do we do?”
Ethan’s own face—by the script—was solemn and devout. Inside, he was all teeth and urgency.
“Breathe,” he sent back. “Listen to me.”
He could feel it: invisible hands pulling at his muscles, guiding his arm, guiding the dagger.
The knife was already rising.
Seconds from carving him open.
“Feel the force controlling you,” Ethan told her. “And in your head, recite this exactly.”
He fed her the short verse he’d translated from the inscribed gargoyle head:
“What must be lost?
Where is mercy found?
What words make the earth turn sweet?
Before I walk this road, grant me passage through the Gate of Day—
and the power of my ancestors.”
Skye froze. “W-what?”
For her, no time had passed—no fifteen days of research, no careful stitching of clues. One breath ago Ethan had been as helpless as she was. Now he was handing her a spell.
“Don’t think,” Ethan urged. “Do it.”
The woman on the bed screamed louder. Ethan’s blade hand lifted, slow and certain, toward his own body.
Skye swallowed.
“What must be lost?” she whispered in her mind.
“What must be lost?” Ethan echoed.
“Where is mercy found?”
“Where is mercy found.”
“What words make the earth turn sweet—”
Skye’s eyes widened.
Like a key sliding into a lock, the rest of the verse unfolded inside her, memory blooming where no memory should exist.
“Before I walk this road,” she continued, voice steadying, “grant me passage through the Gate of Day— and the power of my ancestors.”
The Sorrow Theater stopped breathing.
The laboring woman froze mid-tremor.
Candle flames stilled, locked in perfect teardrops of light.
The force wrenching Ethan’s dagger hand vanished, as if whatever held him had suddenly lost its grip.
For a heartbeat, the entire world was motionless—
Except Skye.
Wind rose around her, tugging at her hair, at her skirt. Not random wind. It spiraled toward her like worship.
The Theater broke.
A roar of pressure tore through the hall. The crimson carpeted floor cracked into plates and lifted, suspended in the air like shards of a shattered continent.
Overhead, chandeliers began to explode—one after another—metal and crystal bursting apart.
But the debris didn’t fly.
It hung in place, frozen in the storm of power Skye was stealing back.
Curtains ripped away. Columns buckled. The entire hall began to collapse, not toward them, but away from them—like the building itself was being peeled open.
A blue-lit ghost surged from the side aisle, face twisted with rage. Dozens more followed, wailing as they rushed the stage.
Ethan lifted his gun—
—and Skye stepped in front of him.
She didn’t cast a complicated spell. She simply exerted.
Light flared.
The ghosts disintegrated into sparks, erased so completely they couldn’t even finish screaming.
Ethan stared, half-awed, half-terrified.
So this was what a Black Dragon ancestor had poured into the earth.
In a Lostland soaked with that bloodline, Skye was… absolute.
The collapsing hall blurred.
Black-and-white warped into color.
Suddenly Ethan was seated at his desk in Blue Emerald Manor, breath coming too fast, skin unmarked, limbs his own again.
On the tabletop in front of him rested the snow-white invitation card, edges gilded.
“Was that… the dream ending?” he murmured, flexing his fingers.
Everything felt normal.
No pain.
No blood.
He let out a shaky breath anyway.
The invitation ignited on its own.
White-gold paper burned without flame, crumbling into ash that floated up—then vanished as if the air swallowed it.
Text formed in the drifting soot.
[SYSTEM]
You have cleared the Lostlands—the Sorrow Theater (Floor One).
Hunter Path advancement:
Promoted to Tier 2, Grade 3 Hunter.
You obtained a stage prop from the play “Birth of the Cinnabar Cup”:
Cinnabar Cup.
[/SYSTEM]
A small cylindrical cup appeared on the desk.
Its lacquer was deep cinnabar red, carved with frantic, feverish patterns. It looked ancient. Wrong in a way Ethan couldn’t name.
He picked it up carefully.
“System reward?” he wondered.
But no—System rewards went straight into the inventory.
This was like the Dragonblood Dagger all over again: an object that crossed worlds without being “packaged.”
The System prompt hadn’t delivered it so much as translated what had happened into numbers.
Floor One cleared. Advancement gained. Prop acquired.
Which meant—
“Floor One,” Ethan said aloud, and the words tasted dangerous.
So the Sorrow Theater had more floors.
He remembered the tower he’d seen in the dream. It had never looked like a one-floor building.
Back then, official intel had been blunt: below Tier 3, stay away.
Back then, Ethan had wanted nothing more than to run.
Now?
Now Skye was effectively invincible in that place.
Now each cleared floor meant a leap in power.
The higher the tower, the better.
The only problem was the invitation.
***
Morning sunlight hadn’t even properly warmed the manor when Skye barged into Ethan’s room—in cat form, for the sake of “decency,” as if that made the intrusion polite.
She hopped onto his chest and began firing questions like a crossbow.
“I ranked up! Tier 2, Grade 1 Weavecaster! I jumped a whole grade!”
“So the legends were real—my ancestor really poured godlike power into the earth!”
“Was my mom collecting gargoyle heads because of this?”
“And those lines you made me say—how did you know them?”
“And—and that tower is so tall. Can we go to Floor Two? Three? Four?”
Ethan, who’d spent half a month in the player world holding his breath over this problem, had been planning to sleep in.
Instead he stared at the cat sitting on him like a smug weight.
If she weren’t a cat right now, he would’ve thrown her out the window.
Skye, of course, was too excited to notice the death glare.
Finally, once Ethan’s brain rebooted, he answered.
“First,” he said, voice dry, “books. You read enough, you find the ritual text.”
He did not mention that the “book” had been a gargoyle head with carved letters and a lot of desperate translation work.
“Second—”
Skye’s cat ears perked.
“To go to Floor Two, Three, or Four,” Ethan said, “we need another invitation.”
Skye blinked. “Another?”
Ethan sighed. “Another.”