[SYSTEM] You have successfully advanced to Tier 1 Infiltrator.
Ethan stared at the text, then blinked hard, as if the message might shatter and reveal it was a hallucination.
The memory of the place he’d fallen into still clung to him – a black-and-white world soaked in fog, quiet except for a thin wind that sounded like breath.
No voice had spoken there.
And yet his mind felt stuffed with information, as if someone had slammed an entire book into his skull and closed the cover.
Even without the system prompt, he knew what had happened.
The Stranger in Shadow had accepted him.
It wasn’t what he’d expected. No follow-up quest. No marching orders.
Just a strange certainty that when the timing was right, the Stranger would reach for him again.
Maybe every Infiltrator’s advancement looked different. Tailored to the moment, the person, the opportunity.
If the Stranger truly guided followers that precisely… then among the Seven Gods, it wasn’t just influential.
It was ambitious.
Ethan let the thought go. He couldn’t rewrite the rules of the world.
He could only keep moving.
He pulled up his status and watched the system translate change into neat, ruthless numbers.
[SKILL] Learned: Enter Shadow Realm.
[SKILL] Learned: Shadow Traverse.
[SYSTEM] Stamina Boost +5%.
[SYSTEM] Strength Boost +5%.
Shadow Traverse he’d already seen in action. The second skill was the real prize.
Enter Shadow Realm.
Slip sideways. Become untouchable – at least to anyone at his tier or below. See everything, be seen by nothing. Move through a world of warped monochrome where the sea didn’t crush and lungs didn’t drown.
There were limits. Higher-tier Awakened could still catch him. The Shadow Realm wasn’t a cheat code, just a weapon with an edge.
He tested it once, letting the world wash into black and white, then back again, just to prove he could.
He remembered the other thing that mattered.
Faraniel’s pages.
He dug the ten handwritten sheets out of his pack and found a brighter corner amid the ruin, the light-orbs now long gone. The pages were written in Endless Sea common tongue – words he could read, technically.
But the meaning?
The meaning was a brick wall.
Alchemy notes, forging insights, scattered thoughts on inscriptions… The individual words made sense. Together they became nonsense.
It was worse than chemistry and higher math put together, because this world had supernatural fundamentals that didn’t care about the rules he’d grown up with.
“Fine,” Ethan muttered. “We’ll do this my way.”
He tapped the stack with his fishing rod.
[ITEM] You obtained: Forging Blueprint – Mithril Rounds.
Ethan froze.
He didn’t get much from the pages – but what he got was worth more than most people’s lives.
Mithril itself was rare, sure. But the real reason mithril bullets cost a fortune was the craft. The forging method was controlled by a high-tier smithing lineage and guarded like a crown jewel.
A monopoly. Prices set by whoever held the secret.
Ethan had started this run with a hundred mithril rounds.
After the heart chamber, he had eight.
And Flint still wasn’t fully bonded. Ten percent remained. Ten percent that could get him killed if he ran out at the wrong time.
Even after Flint was fully fused, its Relic Skills – Ignite and Pierce – would belong to him. He could use them without the gun, without the bullets, if he had to.
But mithril rounds were still power. Still money.
He pocketed the blueprint like a stolen fortune and forced himself to think about the other problem he couldn’t ignore.
Jamie and Jerry Tilly.
They’d tried to kill him. Not because he’d wronged them, but because he’d seen them fail. Because he’d seen them hide.
What would happen if he returned to shore, alive, in daylight, in front of witnesses?
They’d come for him again.
First to erase him.
Second because he’d shot at them – and nobles didn’t “let it go” when a commoner raised a weapon.
Could he report it?
Who would listen? In a world where nobility owned the narrative, the courts, the violence… a nobody’s words were just noise.
Justice wasn’t a door you knocked on here.
It was something you took.
So… swallow it? Smile. Rely on the Earth Circle for protection. Play polite games with two men who’d already drawn blood with a grin.
Ethan sat in the Shadow Realm, the ocean around him a warped monochrome, and let the question hang for a long, cold second.
He exhaled a laugh. Soft. Ugly.
“Swallow it?” he whispered. “Yeah. No.”
He pulled out the loot he’d barely looked at earlier.
A small, crystal-clear glass dolphin – delicate like a cheap trinket from another life.
Artifact: The Nonexistent Dolphin.
With the Eye of Insight, he’d confirmed its function: it could manifest a phantom dolphin and carry him quickly through the sea for a limited distance.
The cost was simple. Three uses. Then it dissolved into nothing.
He could live with that.
Shadow Realm light never changed, but Ethan could see the sun in the real world sinking toward the horizon, bleeding gold into the waves.
Night was coming.
He tossed the glass dolphin forward.
A translucent dolphin formed in front of him, as if shaped from seawater and moonlight. It waited, patient and unreal.
Ethan climbed on without hesitation and nudged it toward Storm Island’s harbor.
Everyone thought he was missing. Possibly dead.
That was perfect.
If he reappeared openly, the Tilly brothers’ revenge would follow like a shadow.
So he’d use the shadow first.
In the Shadow Realm, black-and-white waves slid past beneath him. In the real world, nothing disturbed the surface. No wake. No sign.
As he traveled, he drifted close to a smaller ship above him – not the steamer they’d arrived on. Voices carried down through the hull, distorted but clear enough.
“How long are we gonna wait?” someone complained.
“Yeah. Ocean’s huge. Where are we supposed to fish people out of that?”
Ethan listened, filing the information away. Windrest soldiers. A search party. They still thought the wreck might have survivors.
He let their voices fade behind him and kept going.
He would mourn later.
Benjamin. Amu. Red Falcon. Jane. Candice.
Alive or dead, he couldn’t help them if he was a corpse.
Storm Island’s lights drew nearer – and with them, opportunity.
First step: erase the men who’d tried to erase him.
***
Thea moved like a shadow with teeth.
She had spent the day listening, stealing scraps of conversation from docks and taverns and patrol lines until she hated the sound of the sea.
The mission to hunt the Mist had returned in pieces – survivors, corpses, wounded, stories.
But Ethan Vale was the one name that refused to show up.
If he was dead, she should have felt it. The Everlasting Contract bound them.
If he was alive… where was he?
Worse, she couldn’t sense him at all anymore. Not faintly. Not at the edge of distance.
Either he was too far away, or he’d slipped somewhere the contract couldn’t reach.
Thea had heard old rumors. Things that could drag a person into another world, another layer. A place you couldn’t touch.
Still, she’d hoped that if she got close enough – close to the wreck site, close to the harbor, close to anything – she’d feel him.
She felt nothing.
Night fell. The dock district stayed lit anyway, patrolled hard after the demon incident. Soldiers watched the seawall in pairs, complaining loudly as if their voices could scare off bad luck.
“This is a joke,” one of them said. “Alive, dead – why do we have to see the body? They’re just messing with us.”
“Shut up,” the other muttered. “We’ll look again at dawn. The Earth Circle is searching too. Tomorrow we talk to them, see if they’ve got anything we can use to report back.”
Their footsteps faded.
Thea tugged her hood lower and slipped away from the pier, darting through alleys and gaps between stacked crates until she found a quieter stretch of beach outside the busiest patrol lanes.
Out on the water, the wreck zone glimmered with scattered pinpricks – rescue ships, lanterns, moving lights.
Thea watched them for a long moment.
Her mouth curled.
An idea took shape in her mind – sharp, reckless, and very much like Ethan.
Maybe she couldn’t sense him through the contract.
But the sea had other ways of answering questions.