The summer sun glared off the taut fishing line.
Rhine planted his feet and let the rod bend, letting the pull run through his shoulders and down into his stance. Whatever was on the other end wasn’t a normal fish. It hit like a chain yanked by a winch.
He grinned anyway.
So the Talent worked.
The thing thrashed under the surface, trying to surge sideways, trying to snap the line with brute force. Rhine didn’t fight it head-on. He let it run, then reeled in slowly, steadily, the way you handled something that wanted you tired and careless.
Strength Enhancement gave him a solid edge. And the special rod—built in his own world—was the difference between “challenge” and “broken in half.”
Minute by minute, the pull softened.
Rhine shifted, leaned back, and hauled.
Water exploded.
A long red body shot out of the sea—then, instead of flopping, it twisted midair and lunged for his throat.
A mouth opened like a torn seam, packed with razor teeth.
Not a fish.
A hunter.
Rhine’s left hand was already up.
Bang. Bang.
Two shots punched down through the spray.
The creature snapped, lost its trajectory, and crashed back into the water. The line went slack in the same instant.
Rhine reeled hard, not giving it time to recover, and dragged the corpse onto the reef.
It was a water snake as thick as a punchbowl, patterned in rust-red ripples that made his eyes itch if he stared too long.
He focused and invoked the Eye of Insight.
[PANEL]
Rustwater Snake
A common, mediocre supernatural creature.
It likes to coil beneath steel ships and “listen” to secrets.
It then twists those secrets into temptations, luring naïve sailors into mistakes—
And finally eats their hearts.
It is deceptive by nature. It has rudimentary intelligence.
[/PANEL]
Rhine stared at the description.
So even something this “common” had a mind.
No wonder it had used the line’s pull to launch itself into an attack.
A fresh System prompt flickered.
[SYSTEM]
You have killed a Rustwater Snake.
Flint fusion progress +0.5%
Total fusion progress: 0.5%
[/SYSTEM]
“Only half a percent…”
Rhine wasn’t disappointed. He was doing the math.
He was currently a Tier 2 Hunter. Flint was a Tier 3 Relic.
If he wanted to advance to Tier 3 Hunter, Flint needed to reach full fusion—one hundred percent.
The System’s progress milestone required Tier 3 within eight Cycles.
Eight Cycles meant one hundred and twenty days.
If every day he only killed something like this—0.5% per kill—he’d reach sixty percent by the deadline.
Not enough.
But this was a “common, mediocre” creature.
Which meant there were rarer, stronger things out there. Things worth more progress. Things that would push Flint’s fusion faster.
And if he was willing to drink a Luck Potion on the right days…
Rhine’s chest loosened.
The path was brutal, but it existed.
He hooked the snake’s body with the rod, anchored it, and cast again—fishing the corpse itself the way SSS-Rank Infinite Fishing demanded.
The line trembled. The System rewarded him with something that looked like a joke.
A strip of strange red kelp.
Rhine appraised it.
[PANEL]
Strange Red Kelp
Dried and steeped like tea, it can induce vivid fantasies of pleasure.
Side effects: nausea, headache, and lingering obsession are possible.
[/PANEL]
Rhine deadpanned.
“Great,” he muttered, and stuffed it away anyway.
He stored the snake’s corpse as well, packed up, and left the reef.
Back in the Dock District, Windrest still looked like Windrest: workers shouting, carts rolling, the smell of fried street food hanging in the air. The city was rebuilding. Life kept moving.
For a brief stretch, Rhine let himself enjoy the motion.
The fourth Cycle had ended. He’d climbed to Tier 2. He’d earned two major rewards:
One was Locate Fishing Spots—his new daily engine for steady growth.
The other was a System reward quest that could raise him an entire tier in one leap.
If he held that quest and finished it later—say, at Tier 4—it could push him straight into Tier 5.
Demigod territory.
And if he became a demigod, even the merfolk’s “no one below Tier 5 may enter the Sea City” rule would stop being a wall.
The thought lit him up so hard he had to stop walking and breathe.
Easy, he told himself. Don’t get drunk on your own plans.
He started moving again, slower, thinking.
For players, Endless Sea was a death game.
For the natives, it was just… life.
There was no clean moral line. Not anymore.
—
“Fourteen-hour shifts watching four machines… bloodsucking capitalists…”
The words were soft, muttered low.
But Rhine heard them anyway.
Because they were in Chinese.
He slowed, heart dropping.
A young man in a worker’s outfit trudged past him, head lowered, expression twisted with resentment. His lips kept moving, spilling curses that didn’t belong in this world.
Rhine turned and followed at a distance, blending into the flow of the street.
The worker kept ranting under his breath—money, bosses, quitting, how it was the same no matter what world you were in. Then, as if remembering where he was, he switched to the common tongue.
Rhine almost laughed.
If you were going to be careless, you might as well stay careless.
From the man’s accent and posture, Rhine guessed he was from a later batch—newer, less adapted. Probably his third Cycle. Still fighting the idea that this place was real.
The worker turned into a narrow alley.
Rhine passed the entrance and glanced in.
The alley was dim, empty, damp with shadow.
The man was walking fast, anger carrying him deeper.
Two figures snapped out of a side passage between buildings.
A sack flew over the worker’s head.
He struggled, muffled, kicking—
And the two attackers yanked him backward, dragging him into the maze of back lanes like predators hauling prey into a burrow.
They vanished.
Rhine froze.
Kidnapping?
Kidnapping a player?
His mind sprinted.
Abyss-aligned killers? Unlikely—deep abyss followers weren’t this calm, this coordinated, this clean.
Natives?
Had the locals discovered players?
Rhine flashed back to the worker’s Chinese muttering.
A cold certainty settled into his gut.
Players had been exposed.
This wasn’t a rumor. This was happening.
Rhine slipped into a different alley, away from eyes, and stepped into the Shadow Realm.
Color drained. The world twisted into black-and-white distortion.
He raced back through the ruin-choked lanes of the Dock District, tracking footprints and movement the way a hunter tracked blood.
He found them.
The kidnappers had already emerged onto a crowded road. In the open, Rhine couldn’t attack without exposing himself.
He followed.
In the Shadow Realm, their disguises were obvious: peddler clothes, a wheelbarrow, the posture of men who wanted to look harmless.
The sack in the barrow bulged.
It didn’t move.
They’d knocked the player out.
Rhine tailed them all the way to the Inner City gate.
They shouldn’t have been allowed through.
But the guards waved them in.
Rhine went with them.
He didn’t know the inner streets well. He kept distance, careful not to drift too close.
Shadow stealth wasn’t invincibility. If a Tier 3—or higher—supernatural was nearby, he could be spotted.
The peddlers turned again and again until they reached a quiet road lined with guards.
Rhine’s nerves went taut.
He watched them push the wheelbarrow into a building with an iron door.
The door slammed.
A lock clicked.
Rhine stared at it in silence.
That player wasn’t coming out.
Was it coincidence? Were they snatching random civilians?
No.
Rhine refused to lie to himself.
He lifted his gaze.
In the Shadow Realm, Windrest Keep loomed like a clenched fist.
The answer was right there.
He studied the guarded road again, the way it funneled toward the Keep’s rear.
The back entrance.
A private prison.
Rhine waited, but no opening came. No chance to save the captive without walking into a trap.
Finally he retreated, staying in the Shadow Realm until he cleared the Inner City, then slipping back into the real world in a quiet corner.
Heat hit him like a wall.
The street was the same as ever—signboards, shops, laughter, food smells.
But Rhine felt none of it.
His earlier ease was gone. His skull throbbed.
Windrest Keep capturing players wasn’t new.
That meant they’d already caught others.
And those others had talked.
Players from a peaceful world didn’t last long under supernatural torture.
Worse—newer players might not know the warning: talk about the System, and madness would come for you.
So they’d confessed. Probably everything they could.
Rhine forced his breathing steady.
If Storm Island had started the hunt, then other islands weren’t far behind.
Native governments across the Endless Sea were going to start culling players.
He climbed into the carriage back to White Maple Manor, and opened the player chat.