[SYSTEM]
SSS-Rank Infinite Fishing has been used on Storm Island.
Pending reward: Creator Fragment.
Choose a world to repair.
On successful repair: Contribution +5.
Windrest City’s outer plaza didn’t explode into celebration. Not right away.
People were too exhausted to cheer. Too stunned to move.
They simply knelt there, staring at the sky, whispering the same two words as if repeating them might make them real.
“Weave Mother.”
Above, Skye’s draconic silhouette wobbled like a mirage. The huge body swayed once—just once—then climbed higher, fading into the clouds as if she’d never been there at all.
Only the cratered plaza, the shattered windows, and the scorched taste in the air proved it wasn’t a collective hallucination.
Elsewhere, in a sealed room that reeked of dried blood, Player X watched the same sky through a narrow slit of glass.
The System prompt hit him like a hammer.
[SYSTEM]
Notice: Another player has successfully sealed the Lava Lord Chrysalis.
Task 1 failed.
His fingers clenched so hard his nails cut skin.
Across the room, Huang Yanyan lifted her head. A line of blood slid from the corner of her mouth, bright against her pale skin. Her pupils looked a shade too dark, like something had been poured into them.
Bloodtide.
She didn’t need to say the name. The pressure in the room said it for her.
“That wasn’t the Weave Mother,” Yanyan said, voice hoarse. “The Weave Mother doesn’t have a godhead. She can’t answer prayers like that.”
Player X swallowed. “Then what was it?”
Yanyan’s gaze sharpened, fever-bright. “A lie. A dragon wearing a god’s face.”
She coughed, and more blood speckled the floor.
She grabbed the edge of the table and leaned forward, as if forcing her own body to stay upright by pure spite.
“But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “If the Creator Fragment appears, we can still win.”
Player X’s breath caught.
The Creator Fragment.
A single shard of the Creator’s authority. The thing the System claimed could repair a world.
Repair Blue Star… and maybe everything that had broken—cities, families, graves—could be rewritten.
“We still have the Earth Core,” Yanyan pressed. “Right?”
Player X’s stomach dropped.
“Marsas took it,” he said, barely audible. “He betrayed us. I didn’t see it coming.”
For a moment, the room went utterly silent.
Yanyan smiled.
It wasn’t the smile of a young woman.
It was the smile of something that had learned to hate patiently.
“If Blue Star can’t be repaired,” she said, “I’ll peel you like a fish.”
Player X didn’t doubt her for a second.
And right then, the System hit them again.
[SYSTEM]
Notice: Another player has used the Earth Core to extract Storm Island’s godhead.
Task 2 failed.
Yanyan froze.
The blood on her lip trembled. Her eyes went empty for half a heartbeat… then filled with something jagged and laughing.
“So that’s how it is,” she whispered. “Everyone’s racing. Everyone’s stealing.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing red across white skin.
“Fine,” she said softly. “Then we change the board.”
Back in the outer plaza, Ethan Vale didn’t have the luxury of despair.
The Lava Lord Chrysalis was sealed, but the seal still bled heat. The crawling larvae in the city hadn’t vanished. The air tasted wrong.
The Angelic Sigil waited, hungry and unfinished.
Ethan stepped to the center of the array and drew out a small seed—dark, hard, heavier than it had any right to be.
The Purification Tree Seed.
He lowered it into the black sphere that hovered above the Angelic Sigil like a wound in the world.
The seed fell… and didn’t fall.
It hung for a second, suspended over nothing.
The black sphere swallowed it.
A shudder rippled through the plaza. The wind changed. The stench of sulfur thinned, replaced by the clean bite of rain-on-stone.
Green light leaked out of the blackness.
A sapling thrust upward as if time had snapped.
Leaves unfurled, wet with luminous dew. Roots sank through the air itself, latching onto the Angelic Sigil and knitting it tighter.
Purification rolled outward in waves.
The parasite-larvae that still crawled in gutters and rubble spasmed, smoked, and curled into ash.
Weavecasters nearby staggered as if a weight had been lifted from their lungs.
Ethan leaned back against the new-grown trunk, breathing hard.
Under the tree’s shade, the world finally felt… quieter.
Quiet enough to think.
And the moment he thought about the Creator Fragment, the System obliged.
[SYSTEM]
Notice: Another player has used the Earth Core to extract Storm Island’s godhead.
Divine Trial completed by another player.
Your godhead task has failed.
Ethan closed his eyes for a second and let out a slow breath.
So Panglos Fell got there first.
Of course he did.
Deep beneath Windrest Keep, Panglos Fell and Marsas stood in a chamber carved straight into bedrock.
The Earth Core hovered between their palms, shedding a dim, earthen glow.
Something answered it from below—something old and heavy, like the island’s spine awakening.
The godhead rose.
Not whole.
Half of it—no bigger than a child’s skull, half-transparent, filled with drifting motes of light like silt in water.
Marsas stared, stunned. “Why only half?”
Panglos didn’t answer.
Because something else had answered first.
A killing intent swept through the chamber, cold enough to frost breath.
The candles snuffed out in unison.
The air warped, as if a vast presence had pressed its face against the world from the other side.
“Move,” Panglos hissed.
They didn’t run. There was nowhere to run.
Instead, Panglos thrust the half-formed godhead against the stone wall.
The wall rippled.
In the next instant, both men slid into the rock as if it were water—vanishing from the chamber just as the unseen force slammed down.
Marsas’ voice shook inside the stone. “That… that was the Weave Mother.”
Panglos’ eyes were knives. “Maybe.”
The System finished twisting the blade.
[SYSTEM]
Notice: Another player has successfully sealed the Lava Lord Chrysalis and obtained a Creator Fragment.
Contribution quest completed by another player.
Task 1 failed.
Panglos Fell’s jaw tightened until it looked like it might crack.
Somewhere above, in the city he’d sworn to rule, Rhine was still breathing.
And now Rhine had the fragment Panglos wanted.
“Find him,” Panglos said, voice flat as a guillotine. “And find Red Falcon.”
Marsas swallowed. “Yes, Governor.”
In the darkness of the stone, Panglos’ eyes burned with a vow he didn’t bother to speak aloud.