After returning from the Mist, Ethan finally had two quiet days.
In the span of half a month, his life had become a moving target. He’d drifted on open water, found Moonshadow Island, and run into an Abyssbound Hunter. He’d boarded the Jellyfish and clashed with Infiltrator pirates. He’d reached Storm Island and become a cleric of Violet Crown Cathedral—only to watch the first mate fall to possession and the island itself teeter on the edge of a demon incursion.
Came White Maple Manor. Earth Ring. A desperate fight. The Mist—a pirate ship that shouldn’t have been alive—dragged into the sea like a dying beast.
Even if he ignored the danger, the sheer logistics were absurd.
In fifteen days, Ethan had “moved houses” four times.
Open ocean.
Moonshadow Island.
Violet Crown Cathedral.
White Maple Manor.
The calm didn’t mean idleness.
His injuries were mostly superficial—cuts, bruises, muscle strain. White Maple Manor’s healers patched him up quickly.
When he was steady on his feet, the first thing he did was visit the teammates who’d boarded the ship with him. They’d known each other for a short time, but in a world like this, short time could still mean shared blood.
Jane’s room had a window facing the garden.
When Ethan stepped inside, she sat by the light exactly as she always had—face blank, eyes empty, a stillness that made the room feel colder than it should have been.
Her right sleeve hung flat and hollow.
Ethan’s rehearsed words died in his throat.
Some wounds didn’t heal. Some didn’t even pretend to.
He avoided the subject, asked how she was, offered help. The conversation limped along awkwardly until he finally stood to leave.
At the doorway, Jane smiled faintly.
“I’ve always written with my left hand,” she said.
Ethan paused, then nodded, returning the smile. “Then keep writing.”
Candice was the opposite of Jane. When Ethan visited, she greeted him with a grin and too much energy, as if refusing to let pain win out of spite.
She told him she planned to travel south to visit a famous potion-maker—an alchemist who sold a tonic that could reduce scarring.
With a dark veil pulled across her face, Candice posed in front of the mirror and laughed.
“I swear it makes me look five years younger,” she said, turning her head side to side.
Ethan couldn’t help laughing with her. Optimism was contagious.
Benjamin, too, wore his loss like a badge. He’d lost an eye in the fight, but he’d acquired an extravagant pirate-style eyepatch—the kind an opera star would wear on stage.
“Maybe I should try singing,” he joked. “I’ve got the look.”
The only one Ethan didn’t see was Am.
He’d left White Maple Manor shortly after Ethan returned.
But Am had left Ethan a letter—short, blunt, and oddly helpful. It contained a shelf number in the manor’s archive room, along with a single line:
You may find what you need there.
Ethan found the shelf. He found a book.
A county gazetteer.
Wood County.
Again.
Jamie Tilly had mentioned it. He’d tied Ethan’s revolver to Faraniel of Wood County, as if the name were a key.
Flint. Faraniel. Wood County.
The thread tightened.
If Flint had anything to do with Faraniel, and Faraniel had been from Wood County, then this gazetteer was the closest thing Ethan had to a map.
He checked it out immediately and focused on the last century.
Two days of careful reading later, he found… almost nothing.
No “Faraniel.” Not once.
The only entry that caught his attention was a story from fifty years ago.
A noblewoman had died of illness. At her funeral, a ragged, unstable alchemist appeared and claimed he could bring her back. The widower, wealthy and furious, had him thrown out.
Months later, the widower went to pay respects at the grave—and discovered the coffin empty.
The city erupted. The widower funded an investigation with everything he had.
It went nowhere.
Eventually he remembered the desperate alchemist and tried to find him. When he finally located the man’s home, he found the alchemist dead—shot through the head.
The coroner’s report stated the body had been there for weeks.
The case collapsed. No suspect. No motive. No corpse.
A scandal turned into a legend, then into a paragraph in a dusty book.
Ethan stared at the final line, unsettled.
An alchemist. A bullet. A stolen body.
There were echoes there—faint but undeniable.
Except the timeline didn’t fit.
Jamie Tilly had claimed Faraniel died over a hundred years ago. That might be wrong, but even so… the gazetteer described the alchemist as destitute, living off charity.
Ethan couldn’t make that part line up.
If Faraniel had written notes dense enough to twist the mind—notes that even the existence behind Moonshadow Potion seemed to care about—then why would he ever be starving in a cold shack?
Even selling one formula would have made him rich.
Maybe the alchemist wasn’t Faraniel. Maybe it was a student. A thief. A lunatic who’d found a page and thought it made him a god.
For now it was only speculation.
But it was the only thread he had, and Ethan had learned not to ignore threads.
***
Moonlight faded. Dawn’s pale edge appeared.
July 15.
Ethan sat at his desk and stared at the calendar, at the number printed large enough to shout.
Fifteen days since the players arrived.
The last day of Cycle 1.
The System had never explained what Cycle 1 truly meant. Most players assumed it was a “settlement” date—mission evaluation, faction selection, some kind of formal progression gate.
Ethan opened his interface and pulled up the player mission tracker.
[PANEL]
Cycle 1—Player Mission Progress
Tasks completed (3/3): 618
Survivors: 787
Killed by Abyss faction: 90
Killed by other causes: 123
Below the numbers, the countdown that had read “< 2 days" yesterday now ticked down by the second. Whatever was coming, it was close. Ethan stared for a while, then forced himself to breathe. There was no sense trying to guess the System's shape from a single shadow. Windrest City had its own major event today: Governor Panglos Fell planned a grand parade banquet to celebrate "repelling the demon." Ethan had his own business. He went to see Bishop Frey. Yesterday afternoon, Cleric Ralph had visited White Maple Manor to check on him. Along with news and polite concern, Ralph had told him what had happened while Ethan was tangled in the Mist incident. The dock district had been overrun with mutated rats. Dozens of people were bitten or mauled. Bishop Frey—kind to the point of self-destruction—had spent days treating the wounded. During that time, he'd found a boy with injuries bad enough to kill most adults. The boy was an orphan. He survived by running errands around the docks, sleeping wherever no one chased him away. Frey saw too much of his own childhood in that thin, stubborn face. He decided to keep the boy at the cathedral. Feed him. Educate him. Give him a chance. The boy repaid the kindness with work. Once he could stand, he helped with anything he could—carrying water, folding cloth, sweeping, bringing bandages to the clerics. It should have ended there. Instead, one night, it happened. Without warning, the boy changed—just like in Frey's nightmares. Something like a shark's head split from his ribs, tearing through skin. His body twisted into something that wasn't human. He became a demon. And the worst part—the cruelest part—was timing. Before he changed, he'd been tending the sick. After he changed, the sick became his first prey. The massacre happened in minutes. Dozens of patients died. Several clerics died. Jory Fell and his knights eventually arrived and put the boy down. And after the boy's death, the mutated rats vanished from the dock district as if someone had flipped a switch. Windrest Keep's soldiers searched for days. Not a single rat remained. Governor Fell declared victory. Tonight's banquet was his celebration. But for Bishop Frey, it was a funeral he couldn't escape. He blamed himself for keeping the boy. If he'd sent him back to the docks when he recovered, would everyone else still be alive? If he'd somehow foreseen the outcome—if he had refused to heal the boy, or killed him preemptively—would the demon never have had a vessel? Ralph said Frey had been spiraling for two days. He'd wanted Ethan to talk to him. To pull him back from the edge. Ethan wasn't a therapist. But he had survived modern internet "motivation culture," and sometimes people didn't need answers—they needed someone to keep them from drowning in their own questions. Inside Violet Crown Cathedral, Bishop Frey looked thinner than before, hollowed out by sleeplessness. "I keep thinking…" Frey said, voice raw. "What if I made the wrong choice?" Ethan sat with him. He talked. He listened. He offered what he could: imperfect comfort, blunt reminders, and the simple truth that compassion wasn't a crime. It helped. A little. And once Frey found someone willing to listen, he kept talking. At first it sounded like grief spilling out in circles. Ethan noticed two details that refused to sit right. First: Frey hadn't kept the boy only out of sympathy. Frey was a Dawncaller—a candle-reader, a light-seer. He'd seen the boy's future in flame. In that candlelight, the boy had become a powerful and righteous Dawncaller. Someone who would bring a brighter future to Violet Crown Cathedral. Frey had believed it was a revelation from the Goddess of Wisdom and Life. That was why the tragedy shattered him so completely: it hadn't just killed people. It had mocked his faith. But Ethan's System knowledge made his skin prickle. The Dawncaller class description had come with a warning. [SYSTEM] Dawncaller—Notes Fate may grant you glimpses. Be careful: some "revelations" are the whispers of dark gods. If Frey's vision had been wrong in a way that destroyed him, then it looked less like a blessing… and more like bait. Which raised a harder question. Would a demon—or something deeper—risk influencing a Goddess's follower just to kill a handful of patients and break one bishop? Or was this only the opening move? Second: after the boy died, the rats vanished. Windrest's officials claimed the demon had been "driven back to the sea," and the rats had gone with it. To Ethan, it sounded like a cheap game mechanic. Boss dies. Minions despawn. Except this wasn't supposed to be a game. Not in the way people meant when they said "just a game." Were the rats really marching off in orderly lines to drown themselves? How did that make any sense? The more Frey spoke, the more Ethan felt a shadow hanging over the entire incident. And there were still missing pieces. Susan and Marcus were still unaccounted for. Susan had ties to the Infiltrators. Marcus… Marcus had sounded like he'd broken in the head. None of it felt finished. Summer heat rolled through the cathedral courtyard, stirring leaves into restless motion. Red Falcon visited as well, paying respects to the bishop. As prominent figures in Windrest, both men were invited to Governor Fell's banquet. Ethan, thanks to Red Falcon's paperwork, had also made the list—hero of the Mist incident, survivor, useful story for the right kind of audience. "You sure you don't want to go?" Red Falcon asked Ethan. "The King's envoy will be there. Some of Earth Ring's senior people too." Ethan understood the offer. Connections mattered, even in a world of miracles. But Ethan shook his head. "Not tonight." Red Falcon tried again, almost like he couldn't help himself. "The High Seer from Windrest Keep will attend," he added. "She doesn't have much standing here, but Earth Ring pays attention to people with real divination talent." The implication was clear. Meet her now, while she's underestimated. That's how you build a future network. Ethan's mouth twitched. He still wasn't convinced her divination was "real" in the way Red Falcon imagined. If Earth Ring got too fascinated, they might end up funding their own fraud. But he thanked Red Falcon anyway and refused. Too many mysteries were unresolved. Too many pieces on the board were moving without names. And there was still the System. Cycle 1 ended tonight. Ethan had been calm about it for days, treating it like a distant deadline. Now that it was here, his unease sharpened. If there was a Cycle 1… then there could be Cycle 2. Cycle 3. More missions. More tests. Or worse— More players. A new batch pulled into this world the way they had been fifteen days ago. If that happened, what became of the bodies they'd left behind? Did they die? If so, why hadn't Ethan heard of mass death back home? Unless the players didn't all come from the same Earth. Unless there were parallel worlds stacked like pages. But then how did he explain the alchemy lamp—identical to a Bunsen burner from his old life? Coincidence? Echo? Something copying reality too cleanly to be random? Ethan stared at the late afternoon sun and felt a chill that had nothing to do with weather. A System that could datafy miracles—shape the awakened world into numbers—didn't exist for fun. And it wouldn't stop at Cycle 1.