The Endless Sea, Cycle 13. October 7. Evening.
Windrest Keep—governor’s office.
Skye brewed tea with practiced ease, as if the world outside the windows wasn’t shifting under a royal funeral.
Rhine didn’t touch the cup.
He read.
The folder wasn’t just notes. It was a transcript—cleanly copied, preserved, filed like a collector storing rare insects.
Marsas had interrogated more than one person. He’d built a library of pain.
Rhine flipped to the first complete record.
Interrogation Subject: Pete Bell
Identity: Oyster vendor, Windrest City
Reason for Arrest: Theft of a first-tier confidential item; violent resistance; suspected Awakened; spoke unknown language while attempting escape.
Marsas’s opening notes were cold.
Pete Bell had assumed he’d been caught stealing. He’d panicked, babbled about being hunted, and tried to force his way to Transcendence before “they” could kill him.
Marsas had pressed him.
“Who is hunting you?”
Pete Bell’s answer had been immediate.
“Abyss Thralls.”
Marsas had written a single line beneath it:
Unlikely. Abyss Thralls do not “hunt” quasi-Transcendants for personal reasons.
Marsas continued the interrogation.
“Why would an Abyss Thrall target you?”
Pete Bell had stammered, then blurted the word that made Marsas’s handwriting tighten:
“Mission.”
Marsas had paused there in the transcript, as if the word itself offended him.
“What do you mean by ‘mission’?” Marsas asked.
Pete Bell shut down.
Even when Marsas threatened to treat him as an Abyss cultist, Pete Bell refused to elaborate.
Marsas changed approach.
He asked about the language Pete Bell had spoken while resisting arrest.
He read the city watch’s notes aloud—strings of syllables no local tongue used.
Pete Bell’s reaction in the transcript was immediate.
Terror. Denial. Silence.
Marsas escalated.
The transcript didn’t describe every method, but Rhine could read between the lines.
Soul pain. Memory pressure. The kind of torture that left a person alive but broken.
Finally, Pete Bell cracked.
He didn’t confess to theft.
He confessed to being a player.
“I’m from another world,” Pete Bell said, the words messy in the transcript. “I have a System. I have missions. I thought it was a game. I applied for qualification and then… I woke up here.”
Marsas’s note in the margin:
Consistent with prior “player” testimonies. They share the same vocabulary: System, mission, qualification. They call their origin world “Player World.” Their logic is alien.
Marsas continued.
“Do you return to your world every half-month?”
Pete Bell’s response wasn’t an answer.
It was a collapse.
The transcript described him screaming, sobbing, laughing—his mind slamming against something it couldn’t accept.
Marsas used soul pressure again.
Pete Bell’s words spilled out in fragments.
“Sister Feishen will kill me…”
“We have to do the mission…”
“New Star… only two months left…”
“Glory Vault… Sun City… Glory Island…”
“Cinnabar Cup…”
“Harvest… they’ll harvest us…”
The transcript ended with Marsas’s summary.
Pete Bell’s soul had been damaged. His consciousness unstable.
But the core information was clear:
A stowaway from New Star had orchestrated the Glory Vault robbery.
The stolen sealed item was tied to “saving” New Star.
The name “Cinnabar Cup” appeared repeatedly.
Rhine lifted his eyes from the page.
Skye was watching him, chin resting on her hand.
“That’s what you and Hazel saw in the chat,” Skye said. “Just… clearer.”
Rhine nodded slowly. “It matches.”
He hadn’t expected the System to make it easy.
He had expected pain.
Skye’s smile turned sly. “Still… nobody knows what the Glory Vault lost.”
Rhine looked at her. “You don’t know either.”
Skye’s eyes glittered. “I do.”
Rhine’s brows rose.
Skye leaned forward, pleased with herself. “You and I have both heard of it. You even have a replica.”
Rhine’s breath caught. “A replica…?”
Skye’s grin widened. “From the Sadness Theater. The Cinnabar Cup.”
Rhine went still.
He remembered the performance on the first floor—the “quiet forest” set, the little cabin, the scene where an exhausted mother “gave birth” to a cup.
He remembered the two actors who had killed themselves, calmly, so the cup could be “born.”
He’d written it off as theater madness.
But in the Endless Sea, theater didn’t choose symbols by accident.
Skye tapped the desk. “My information came from the Sea Market.”
Rhine’s mind flashed to Haizan and the trolls, to the underwater bazaar he’d ordered them to run after killing Panglos Fell.
Of course.
He’d built the pipeline himself.
Rhine was still turning that over when the System flashed again.
[SYSTEM]
Quest Progress +50%
Quest: Investigate the missing item from the Glory Vault.
Progress: 50%
Update: The New Star stowaway stole the Cinnabar Cup sealed inside the Glory Vault. Find the remaining truth.
Reward: “Your” memories.
[/SYSTEM]
Rhine exhaled.
The quest reacted.
Skye was right.
Rhine pulled the replica Cinnabar Cup from his inventory—a prop version from the Sadness Theater, small and stained red like dried blood.
He turned it in his hands, studying the rim, the etched patterns that looked too deliberate to be decoration.
“So what is it?” he asked. “What’s the Cinnabar Cup’s origin? Don’t tell me it’s tied to the Gargoyle Mother again.”
Rhine remembered the Sadness Theater collapsing, the trolls dragging the captured Gargoyle Mother away like a chained mountain of stone.
If given a choice, Rhine would take murderous cat demons over gargoyles any day.
Skye’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “If you want the real answer, you should ask the Gargoyle Mother who she serves.”
Rhine frowned. “Who?”
Skye’s smile faded into something more serious.
“The Magma Lord.”
Rhine’s throat tightened.
He’d gone in a circle—Glory Vault, Glory Island, the Cinnabar Cup, and now back to the same name that kept surfacing like an oil slick on the sea.
Magma Lord.
A creature that could be traded for two hundred points of Divinity Fusion in a single catch.
A creature sealed by ancient dragonfire.
A creature tied to “Cocoon.”
Rhine looked at the cup again.
He looked up at Skye.
And for the first time in days, something sharp and hungry sparked in his chest.
Explorer.
Glory Island.
Cinnabar Cup.
New Star.
If these threads all led to the Magma Lord…
Maybe the “truth” the quest demanded was bigger than a robbery.