August 7. Night fell over the player world, neon washing the sky until the stars might as well not exist.
Ethan opened the chat channel, hoping for anything—any scrap of movement about the paper servant.
[CHAT]
Player: “Good news—no major violent-crime headlines all day.”
Player: “Because they’re suppressing it, or because nothing happened?”
Player: “Probably nothing happened. I’ve got sources—firsthand stuff. I haven’t heard about any big murder cases.”
Player: “Thank God.”
Player: “Sure, but it’s been six days. What’s that paper servant doing?”
Player: “Don’t tell me it already revived Paper Crane.”
Player: “No. I took the quest. It hasn’t failed.”
Player: “Hey—what if the paper servant goes after Player 0067 for revenge?”
Player: “┌(｡Д｡)┐”
Player: “Possible. But 0067 is still alive.”
Player: “How do you know?”
Player: “Death list. The System’s list doesn’t have 0067.”
Player: “Nobody’s cleared the quest, and 0067 isn’t dead, so the servant hasn’t reached him yet.”
[/CHAT]
The silence was what scared him.
After the two massacres on August 1 and the global quest trigger, the servant had vanished—no new killings, no new sightings.
A predator didn’t stop moving. It just learned how to hide.
Still, Ethan’s nerves weren’t centered on revenge.
In the player world, there were cameras, databases, forensic labs, and teams that could mobilize in minutes. The institute wasn’t Violet Eye, but it had teeth.
The servant’s primary goal was resurrection. Revenge could wait until Paper Crane had a body again.
Ethan’s real problem was the Sorrow Theater.
He had seen the play. He had felt his muscles being puppeteered. He had watched the knife get placed in his hands.
Next time, the return timer might not save him.
***
He cranked his desk lamp to its brightest setting.
On the table sat a gargoyle’s head—stone-gray, the size of a watermelon, shaped like a bat with a brutal jaw.
Etched across its forehead were lines of glyphs that looked like pictographs and curses at the same time.
He’d fished it up from Paper Crane’s paper-like corpse in Endless Sea.
And from long habit, Ethan trusted the rule of fishing: the catch was always related to the bait, directly or sideways.
Leaves brought water. Rocks brought moss.
So if this gargoyle head came from Paper Crane, it had to matter.
Paper Crane had been reported as a Tier-2 Weaver by the institute’s own people.
But when Ethan killed him, the System announcement called him a Tier-3 Weaver.
Officially, they claimed their intel had been wrong.
Ethan didn’t buy it.
There was one obvious explanation: Paper Crane had taken power from the Lost Land—specifically, the Sorrow Theater.
And the institute had downplayed it to keep copycats from sprinting into the same abyss.
Ethan turned the gargoyle head in his hands and reviewed every gargoyle thread he had.
His advancement quest had mentioned them first: investigate gargoyles and kill the Gargoyle Mother, and the reward would push his Hunter rank up a full tier.
Candice had mentioned dragons once hunted gargoyles in great numbers.
Thea had told him gargoyle heads were rare transcendent materials—but not every dragon needed them. Her mother, the Black Dragon Queen, did.
And now Paper Crane, boosted by Sorrow Theater corruption, had a gargoyle head of his own.
Was the skull a key? A battery? A compass needle pointing toward the theater’s deeper power?
Ethan didn’t know. But he couldn’t afford to ignore it.
He’d already tried fishing knowledge off the skull, hoping to learn its language. The return had been disappointing—minor materials, no translation.
Tonight he stared at the glyphs again until a prickling familiarity crawled over his scalp.
He had seen these shapes before.
He opened the safe in his bookcase and took out the set of red coral cards.
Five cards. Jewel-bright under the lamp. Their backs showed a vast ocean, a starfield, a forest of coral, an underwater palace, and a mermaid turned away from the viewer.
The strangest part was the same as always: the cards refused to enter the System inventory, as if reality itself rejected them.
Ethan flipped one card and compared the markings.
There—two scripts hid among the patterns.
One was troll tongue, which he’d recently learned.
The other matched the glyphs carved into the gargoyle head.
And the symbols on the card backs weren’t random. With the text as anchor points, the designs lined up like a compass—like a route.
***
Out in Cloudrise City that same night, Huang Yanyan paced a patrol route with other official players.
The institute had thrown everything at the search: every major camera feed, every high-performance server the city had.
And still the paper servant was a ghost.
So headquarters had turned to the other tool players had: divination.
But the player world didn’t naturally support the supernatural. A working ritual required preparation, time, and ugly sacrifices of convenience.
The estimate had been six to seven days.
Tonight was day six.
***
At dawn on August 8, Ethan finished a rough translation of the gargoyle text by cross-referencing troll.
It read like a riddle-poem:
“What will be lost?
Where can mercy be found?
What words make the earth turn sweet?
Before I walk this road, allow me to pass through the Gate of Daylight and reclaim the power of my ancestors.”
He read it once, carefully, to the gargoyle head.
Nothing.
He read it again in the common tongue of the Endless Sea, then in troll.
Still nothing. No wind. No shift. No hidden door opening in the air.
Ethan sat back and let out a long breath. “So that’s a dead end, then.”
He locked the coral cards away, wrapped the gargoyle head, and finally slept.
***
At noon, Yanyan’s phone tore her out of sleep.
Headquarters had finished the divination.
Team Lead Qi Heng’s voice was tight on the line. “No time. Get to Building A’s rooftop. Now.”
Building A’s rooftop was the institute helipad.
Yanyan’s stomach sank as she threw on clothes and ran.
On the way, Qi Heng sent the full brief.
The divination couldn’t pin the servant’s exact location—only that it hovered somewhere in and around Cloudrise City and a few neighboring cities.
But it was clear on method.
To resurrect Paper Crane, the servant needed one of two things:
One: sacrifice one hundred seventy-seven living souls.
Two: the heart of its enemy.
The institute’s analysts leaned toward the second option. With security tightened everywhere, a mass sacrifice would be difficult.
A single heart was easier.
Player 0067’s heart.
Yanyan’s hands went cold.
***
The tech division finally found what brute force couldn’t: a glitch in reality caught on camera.
Two people with identical faces appeared on feeds at the same time—in places too far apart for travel.
Records showed no twin.
Which meant one of them wasn’t a person at all.
“It can copy faces?” Yanyan asked when she reached the rooftop, breathless.
Qi Heng nodded. “That’s why we couldn’t track it. We were looking for one face.”
He continued the briefing fast, like he was afraid the information would rot if he left it in the open.
“This morning it went to a funeral-supplies shop and commissioned a paper white cat. Then it took a black taxi to Xuzhou.”
He met Yanyan’s eyes. “We think it’s going for 0067. The cat is bait.”
The helicopter rotors screamed to life.
Most of the institute’s field players lifted off toward Xuzhou.
Yanyan typed into the chat channel mid-flight and sent a warning to Player 0067.
No reply.
***
Less than an hour later, official players—some disguised as property management—stood outside an apartment door in Xuzhou and knocked.
At the same time, in Cloudrise City, another apartment door was knocked.
Ethan had slept poorly after staying up all night with the gargoyle head. The sound dragged him upright with a jolt.
He checked the door camera.
A beautiful woman stood in the corridor, a white cat cradled in her arms.