September 29, dawn.
Windrest City—Outer District.
Ethan stood on the rooftop terrace of his rented home, eyes fixed through branches toward the Outer City Plaza.
The plaza was huge—three football fields of open stone—separated from him by a few rows of low buildings and a screen of trees. In the Endless Sea, commoners didn’t build upward. A second-story roof was enough to see most of the district.
He woke the Tracker again.
A crooked street map filled the screen, and a dim white dot pulsed in the middle of the plaza.
Ethan had checked the location right after returning with the Earth Ring fleet. It had taken him less than an hour to confirm the plaza matched the Tracker’s indicator.
Unlike the volcano’s bright mark, this dot was faint and smeared—more a vague “somewhere here” than a pin.
Cocoon wasn’t fully awake yet. The Tracker couldn’t lock precisely.
Stowaway X had made the same choice Ethan would’ve made: when offered a bright, confident marker versus a weak, ambiguous one, you go where the signal looks real.
X had simply tried first—and paid the price.
Ethan let the Tracker hang at his side and kept watching the plaza.
His plan wasn’t elegant, but it was workable.
He wouldn’t go in alone. If Cocoon truly slept beneath that stone, then Ethan needed overwhelming numbers and a clean moment.
He’d already secured an Angelic Sigil—an anchor meant to seal or drive out the unclean.
The idea was simple:
Gather allies. Sweep the plaza.
If a large group of transcendents suddenly entered the area, Cocoon would react—shift, stir, lash out. Anything.
The instant it moved, the Tracker’s lock would tighten.
Ethan would strike then, planting the Angelic Sigil before Cocoon could fully wake.
A crude plan.
But better than waiting until the monster opened its eyes.
Footsteps sounded behind him.
Delanna—the mermaid—stepped onto the terrace, hair still damp from the morning air.
“I’ve told the chieftain,” she said softly. “Our people will arrive soon.”
Ethan glanced at the Tracker again. The dot remained dim. No pulse change. No movement.
Good. Still time.
Delanna’s smile turned sly. “You know… if you could drag this out until tomorrow midnight, it would benefit you.”
Ethan understood immediately.
Tomorrow at midnight, Cycle 11 ended.
He would be pulled back into the player world.
If he carried the Earth Core with him, he could trade it to Xueyu for the promised half-divine spark. Then, fifteen days later, he’d return stronger—strong enough to handle Cocoon with far less risk.
“It would be safer,” Ethan admitted. “And airtight.”
He shook his head.
“But I’m not sure we make it that long. Cocoon hasn’t woken yet. We have initiative. If we wait, it’s just asking for trouble.”
Delanna lifted a shoulder, amused. “Fair. And either way, the half-divine spark is yours. Sooner or later.”
***
On a lonely reef along Windrest City’s docks, Stowaway X hauled himself onto stone, coughing seawater and rage.
“Damn it!” he snarled, stumbling onto the shore. “This is bullshit! I’m done with this five-tier world. I’m done!”
He was soaked. Bruised. His wrist still felt empty.
Every step reminded him of what he’d lost.
He had come to Storm Island for one reason: a shortcut.
Below the island, buried in ancient ruins, was an Earth Core—one of Panglos Fell and Marsas’s hidden treasures. An Earth Core could be exchanged for half a divine spark.
With the divine spark, he could become the island’s “chosen” on paper and build a local faction around himself.
That was always the play.
Seal Cocoon. Claim the Creator Shard.
Trade the shard for Contribution Points.
Use the Earth Core to obtain a divine spark.
Jump the line.
In the System’s exchange list, a divine spark cost 200 CP.
Two hundred.
Most Level-2 Players spent lifetimes scraping for fractions of a point.
But Storm Island had a divine spark sitting under it like buried gold.
If X could seize the island’s authority, the spark was practically in his hands.
At first, when he’d found traces of the spark in the deep, he’d shaken with excitement. This was the kind of luck Level-2 Players didn’t even dare fantasize about.
A five-tier world was dangerous—yes.
But dangerous worlds sometimes paid out.
Now?
Now he’d failed the Cocoon mission and lost the Tracker he’d bought for fifteen CP.
Worse, he still owed the Reaper League five CP—plus interest in the form of three world explorations.
He stared at the sea and spat. “I can’t believe I got played.”
He wanted to quit.
But quitting didn’t erase debt.
X wiped ash off his face and forced himself to think like a survivor.
“Fine,” he muttered. “I’ll be a hired gun.”
For a Level-2 Player, that meant joining a guild, working under a Level-3 boss, taking whatever crumbs of CP the leadership chose to share.
It wasn’t glory.
But it was income. Protection. A way to pay off what he owed.
He was still cursing under his breath when the air turned… wrong.
A chill crawled up his spine.
Boots scraped stone.
X spun, raising his weapon—the Harbinger Crow, a gun that did not belong to this world.
Figures in dark coats emerged from the fog and dock shadows, moving without urgency, without fear. Their faces were hidden. Their presence was wrong in a way the ocean itself seemed to dislike.
“Who the hell are you?” X barked.
No answer.
A thin, violet beam lanced out from one of them and struck his throat.
Pain—sharp, cold, burning all at once—hooked into his spirit like a barbed wire.
X screamed and fired.
A bolt of brilliant electricity erupted from the Harbinger Crow, writhing like a solar serpent. It smashed into one of the hooded men and blew him backward.
The others didn’t flinch.
More violet light struck. More hooks. X’s vision swam. His mind filled with static, with whispers he couldn’t understand.
“Disgusting supernatural world,” he spat, firing blindly while he activated his escape skill.
Electric arcs wrapped his limbs. His body flickered—
—and he blinked ten meters away.
He landed poorly, one knee slamming the stone. His head felt like it had been cracked open.
He pushed up, trying to run—
—and found someone standing in front of him.
Not a group this time.
One figure.
Gaunt. Too still.
A heavy hood hid most of the face, but the eyes… the eyes were red, sunk deep in a skull-like mask of shadow and bone.
The figure spoke in a language X didn’t know, but the meaning crawled into his thoughts anyway.
“Found you at last,” it said. “Foreign parasite.”
Terror punched through X’s ribs.
He tried to raise the gun—
—and something seized his soul.
A crushing pain flared at the crown of his head, as if invisible hands were ripping him out of his own body.
X lasted half a second.
His eyes rolled back.
He collapsed into darkness.
***
In the wake of the capture, Marsas stepped out of the fog, calm as a man inspecting livestock.
He looked down at the unconscious outsider and gave his apprentices a single order.
“Take him,” Marsas said. “Bring him to the basement of Windrest Keep.”