September 30, night. Windrest Keep’s basement—where moonlight could never reach.
A few dying flames clung to rubble, their weak glow barely bright enough to show the dust and broken stone.
“BOOM.”
The last remaining pillar collapsed.
It should’ve smashed into the floor and stayed there.
Instead, in the thick cloud of debris, the bricks didn’t fall.
They rose.
Chunks of masonry shot out of the dust and hovered together, gathering into a single mass. Under invisible pressure, the irregular fragments compressed like wet clay. Every gap vanished. Even the porous hollows inside the brick tightened until the density changed.
The material changed.
A column that had once been as thick as an ancient tree was crushed into a spear as wide as a man’s thigh.
And the instant it formed, it launched forward—so fast it was almost invisible.
Ethan twisted away just in time.
The stone-spear detonated into the ground beside him, blasting rock outward like shrapnel. A razor fragment sliced across his chest with a sound like tearing cloth.
“Damn—”
He swallowed blood, braced against the nearest standing wall—one of the basement’s edge walls, the only structures still pretending to be intact.
Half a Divine Spark.
Ethan had finally seen what it could do besides healing.
Not just “stronger” magic.
Law.
It took ordinary matter—brick, mortar, dust—and rewrote its properties into the perfect weapon, without needing a forge, without needing time. Panglos Fell didn’t lift a finger. He stood there like a god who could punish mortals with thought alone.
Across the basement, Skye was forced into a corner.
In her dragon form she should have been terrifying—an ancient species, a Tier 4, Seventh Seat Weaver, a creature that could burn armies into ash.
But Panglos had divinity.
Against that, even a dragon felt small.
Skye coughed once. Blood spilled at the edge of her mouth.
She narrowed her golden eyes, understanding the ugly truth: revenge was a luxury. Tonight, survival was the goal.
The stone-spears paused.
The howling wind of flying debris went quiet for a beat.
Skye seized the breath, looking across the ruin.
During the fight, Ethan and Skye had been forced to opposite sides of the basement, separated by the constant rain of compressed brick-spear projectiles.
Now Panglos seemed to be stopping—not because he was tired, but because he wanted something.
Skye watched him blur through the rubble in a series of flickers, crossing broken walls and collapsed stone as if the distance didn’t exist. His figure vanished into the far side—the side where Ethan stood.
Ethan wiped blood from his mouth, keeping his weight on the wall so he wouldn’t collapse. His ribs screamed. His lungs burned.
Still… he was satisfied.
Because now he understood the second gift of half-divinity.
And understanding meant planning.
Panglos appeared in front of him as if he’d stepped out of Ethan’s shadow.
His expression held a polite smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Rhine,” he said. “Tell me where it is.”
Ethan met his gaze. “Tell you what?”
“The other half.” Panglos’s smile sharpened. “Don’t pretend. You’re a player. You have tasks. You have clues. You have the kind of luck that keeps handing you answers.”
Ethan’s mind flicked to the invisible countdown he’d been watching like a lifeline.
Seconds.
Not many.
He couldn’t beat Panglos head-on. Not here. Not now.
So he did the only thing that worked.
He spoke.
“Before you kill me,” Ethan said, voice steady, “there are things you should know.”
Panglos’s brow lifted.
Ethan fed him a thread, then another—information meant to hook attention. A name. A secret. Jory.
Another secret. Lannis.
Each fact was something Panglos cared about… but not as much as divinity.
And that was exactly the point.
Panglos stepped closer, half amused, half irritated, trying to decide whether Ethan was bargaining or bluffing.
Ethan kept talking.
Kept stretching.
Kept breathing through pain while the countdown ran.
Panglos’s eyes widened.
Understanding hit him like a slap.
“You’re stalling.”
His polite smile vanished. Anger rose fast—faster than when he’d learned Jory’s truth, faster than when he’d learned the king had planted Lannis beside him.
Because now divinity was within reach, and Ethan was daring to waste time.
The basement darkened as Panglos’s intent shifted from “question” to “punish.”
A stone-spear that Ethan hadn’t even sensed—one Panglos had hidden behind him the entire time—exploded to life.
It surged up and punched through Ethan’s abdomen.
Ethan looked down at the spear in his stomach.
He looked back up at Panglos and smiled faintly, as if the wound was irrelevant.
“Do you really think I care?” he asked.
Because the countdown had just reached zero.
And the System’s prompt surfaced, cold and absolute:
[SYSTEM]
Cycle 11 has ended.
All players return to the Player World.
Cycle 12 begins.
…
Deep night.
Under pale moonlight, the blazing daytime yellow of the dunes became a sheet of black.
Near the Wasteland camp, stowaway X appeared out of nowhere—returning from the Endless Sea to his own Game World.
His boots pressed two shallow prints into the sand. The sand layer was thin, only a few centimeters.
Beneath it, rustsoil stretched forever—orange-red, barren, refusing all life except the unlucky thorn grass.
This was X’s world.
A true post-war wasteland.
He looked up. It was almost midnight.
In the sky hung a huge, broken moon—off its old orbit, cracked and ugly. People called it the Falling Moon.
Some said it would fall for real one day and end the rustlands. End the world.
X checked the time, flipped the Falling Moon a crude gesture, then started toward the faint glow in the distance—the players’ camp.
Survival here meant cities, gangs, raids, and the constant squeeze for resources.
After years of bloodshed—one wave of players after another—the survivors had built organizations. “Our own people,” they called it. The only way to last.
But like the game’s warning said: every gift had its price.
Organizing players helped them live…
…and it also turned them into something else.
X knew the truth behind the camp’s discipline, behind the obedience, behind the way the strong were treated like kings. It wasn’t nobility. It was necessity.
And hope.
Rumor said the Falling Moon could be stopped only after someone gained divinity, became a Level-3 Player, and then used Contribution Points to buy Divinity Fusion progress—pushing it past 800.
Only Level-2 Players could reach Level 3.
So the entire wasteland’s hope rested on the handful of Level-2 Players still standing.
X was one of them.
Level-1 Players feared him, respected him, obeyed him. Among Level-2 Players, resources flowed his way first, because his Talent and strength made him an obvious candidate.
But—
A knife-cold wind screamed through the camp, lifting sand and exposing the endless rustsoil beneath.
X didn’t go to his private tent.
He didn’t spare the fawning Level-1 Players a glance.
He stared into the dark instead, thinking of the worst possibility:
If they learned he’d lost the Earth Core—the foundation of a Level-2 Player’s climb to Level 3…
If they learned he’d been controlled by an organization from a low-tier world…
What would they do?
X clenched his jaw until his teeth hurt.
He replayed the memory of the Endless Sea castle basement—of the Lava Lord’s cocoon, of the mess he’d escaped by luck and lies.
He made a decision.
He would go back to the Harvesting Union.
He would go back to Greedwolf.
And he would add another deal.