“Case details?” Hannah’s concern narrowed into suspicion. “Ethan, don’t tell me you’re fishing for story material because you’re out of inspiration.”
Ethan stared at her.
After a decade of writing, getting called out like that was almost nostalgic.
“I’ve been writing for ten years,” he said. “Since when have you ever seen me run out of ideas?”
Hannah considered. Then, annoyingly, conceded with a shrug. “Fair.”
She lowered her voice. “Officially, the investigation’s still early. But I can tell you one ridiculous thing that happened today.”
Ethan’s hand stilled around his chopsticks. “Go on.”
“We ran the initial ID sweep based on the body. The system spit out a match fast—everything lined up. Name, biometric markers, a bunch of metadata.”
She exhaled through her nose like she still couldn’t believe it.
“So we contacted her. And she answered the phone. Very much alive.”
Ethan’s stomach tightened.
Alive.
A corpse that belonged to someone alive was a kind of wrong Ethan had already seen once—on a dock in the Endless Sea, under a sky that didn’t care about logic.
“What’s the name?” he asked, trying to keep his tone casual.
Hannah chewed, thinking. “Susan. Local influencer. Big following.” Her eyes flicked up at him. “She wiped her accounts about a month ago, so at first we wondered if she’d vanished. Turns out she just decided it wasn’t profitable anymore.”
Susan.
Same name. Same weirdness. Same smell of broken rules.
Ethan finished dinner with Hannah, kept his face neutral, and drove home with a plan forming like a bruise.
The moment his door shut behind him, he pulled out his phone and searched Susan’s handle: SunnyShan.
The results confirmed Hannah’s story—Yun City, young, famous enough that people had reposted her content.
But her main accounts were either empty or private now.
Ethan dug deeper, chasing mirrors: fan reposts, forum threads, old screenshots.
Susan’s face was everywhere… and then it wasn’t.
In the reposted photos, he caught the detail that mattered.
A mole at the outer corner of her right eye.
Not huge, but distinct—placed perfectly enough that it looked like a signature rather than a flaw. She even angled her selfies to show it.
In the Endless Sea, the corpse they’d suspected was Susan had that mole too.
And Ethan’s own face—his own body—had carried across worlds almost unchanged.
If appearances matched between worlds, then a recognizable face became a liability. For ordinary people, it was a risk.
For someone with close to a million followers?
A disaster.
Ethan understood why Susan had wiped her presence. He also remembered a passing detail from the Endless Sea: Susan had asked someone to remove that mole—small, desperate surgery to make two lives look less like one.
He kept scrolling.
The more he read, the sharper Susan’s outline became.
Smart, quick with words, and vindictive.
People wrote about her livestream arguments like they were sports highlights. Most influencers smoothed things over for brand deals; Susan would clap back hard, vicious enough that some viewers loved her for it.
Until she crossed the line.
Mobilizing fans. Doxxing. Turning “drama” into a weapon.
Her name became a target. The internet did what it always did: it turned her into a case study. Threads appeared cataloging her takedowns, her worst quotes, the way she kept score.
Ethan stared at one archive post and felt something cold settle in him.
A person like that could plan.
A person like that could decide someone deserved to die.
He checked the timeline. A month ago was when she’d gone dark online.
A month ago was also a plausible window for her first cycle.
So older players really were coming from this world.
And if Susan was a player, then the suitcase body wasn’t just a murder.
It was a spillover.
Something from the Endless Sea had reached into the player world and left teeth marks.
Ethan’s irritation rose, slow and bitter.
This world—his home—was quiet. Safe. Predictable. After living through collapse once, he knew what a gift that was.
And players could ruin it.
Not just by accident. By choice.
Especially the Abyss-aligned ones. For them, killing to grow stronger wasn’t a nightmare—it was a playstyle.
He thought of the zombies in Windrest City.
If someone dragged that kind of horror into Yun City…
Ethan’s jaw tightened.
He could tolerate being forced to live between worlds.
He could not tolerate watching this world break.
The system chose that moment to speak.
[SYSTEM] Random quest triggered: Investigate Susan in the player world.
[SYSTEM] Quest reward: When you pay a price, a gift will follow.
[SYSTEM] Accept / Decline
Ethan stared at the text as it blinked and vanished.
Investigate Susan.
Of course the system wanted him to step closer to the fire.
The mystery around her wasn’t subtle anymore. In both worlds, “Susan’s death” refused to behave like death. Her body appeared where it shouldn’t. Her timeline didn’t match the calendar.
In the Endless Sea, Ethan had heard rumors: an Infiltrator’s poison, a stalker named Marcus who’d gone insane and ranted about demons.
On the surface, Susan and Ethan had never crossed paths there. Yet the shape of her shadow kept touching his.
And now she was here.
The player world had rules. Cameras. Network logs. A paper trail for everything.
In the Endless Sea, you could disappear into the Shadow Realm and nobody had a database to prove you existed.
In Yun City, even searching someone’s name left a footprint.
Investigating Susan here was risky.
But Ethan was an Infiltrator.
Risk was the job.
He reopened Susan’s reposted photos and studied the backgrounds instead of her face—balcony angles, skyline shapes, the layout of streetlights. It wasn’t perfect, but he narrowed it down to a few upscale neighborhoods.
Satellite maps did the rest.
By midnight he had one best guess: Cloudrise Gardens.
A gated development. Expensive. Quiet. The kind of place where neighbors called security if your shoes sounded wrong.
From the window perspective, Susan’s unit was likely on a low floor—third to fifth.
More than that required eyes on the ground.
Ethan leaned back, then pulled an item from his system inventory.
A slim blade with a polished handle: the Diviner’s Letter Opener.
The system had said it clearly on return: items carried between worlds. Abilities carried too.
But the warnings carried as well.
Don’t expose your identity.
Which meant: don’t let normal people see this.
Ethan lived alone. Behind a locked door, he could use it.
He took paper and pen.
Where can I find Susan?
He folded the paper, sealed it in an envelope, and wrote his own name in the “recipient” line. Then he pricked his finger.
A drop of blood hit the metal.
The blade warmed faintly, flushing red as it drank the payment.
Ethan slit the envelope open, pulled out the letter, and unfolded it.
Tomorrow morning, at the place you fish.
Ethan blinked.
Stared harder, as if anger could make the sentence grow up into a real answer.
“This thing is allergic to being helpful.”
If the price had been more than a drop of blood, he might’ve snapped the blade in half out of spite.
He crumpled the paper… then paused.
The place you fish.
Clearwater Lake.
The spot where he’d hauled up a suitcase with a discarded body.
Criminal psychology had a theory: offenders returned to scenes. They watched the investigation. They couldn’t help themselves.
Susan wouldn’t have known about the lake scene immediately. But the police had already contacted her to confirm she was alive.
That meant she knew.
Would she come back?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But the Diviner’s tool had pointed there, and Ethan didn’t have time to ignore leads just because they were inconvenient.
July 3, 4:30 a.m.
Ethan dressed in clothes he rarely wore, pulled on a cap and a mask, and stepped into the Shadow Realm before leaving his apartment.
If he had to exit the Shadow Realm in an emergency, the disguise would buy him seconds. Seconds mattered.
The world drained into warped grayscale. Streetlights smeared into pale halos. Signs became unreadable shapes unless he focused.
He’d tested the Shadow Realm rules before. To stay inside it for long, he had to stop interacting with the real world. No touching. No direct interference.
Old records described it the same way: an assassin could appear behind you without a sound… but couldn’t slit your throat without stepping back into reality.
Ethan walked to Clearwater Lake. No cars in the Shadow Realm. No bikes. Just his own two feet and a city rendered into a dream of angles and noise.
By six, he reached the park.
Morning exercisers were already flooding in—joggers, retirees, couples walking dogs. Ethan took position at an open intersection with a clear view of the lakefront path.
He waited.
Time crawled. The crowd thickened. The same old anglers from yesterday arrived, hauling gear like it was sacred.
Like a wrong note in a familiar song, a young woman appeared among the retirees.
Even in grayscale, Ethan recognized her from the reposted photos.
Susan.
What didn’t make sense was the way she showed up.
No hat. No sunglasses. No mask.
A woman paranoid enough to wipe her online existence was now strolling into a public park—at the exact stretch of shoreline where a corpse that matched her had been fished out—wearing her face like she wanted it seen.
Ethan’s instincts tightened.
Why would she make that choice?
Unless—
Unless she wanted an audience.
Unless she wanted someone specific to recognize her.
Ethan felt the hair on his arms rise.
Was she baiting him?
That was ridiculous.
And yet Susan walked to the lake and paced, back and forth, back and forth—never straying more than a few steps from the exact spot where the suitcase had come up.
An hour of that.
She turned and left.
Ethan followed at a five-meter distance, moving like a shadow behind her shadow.
The moment she exited the park, she put on a cap, dark glasses, and a mask.
Like she’d only been barefaced while she was on stage.
She wandered through streets, bought groceries, and never once used a vehicle. Always walking.
Ethan kept tracking until Cloudrise Gardens rose in front of them—tall gates, private security, manicured trees that looked too expensive to touch.
Susan used a key card. The gate clicked. She crossed to her building.
Ethan stayed behind her, still in the Shadow Realm, still invisible.
Susan reached her door, inserted the key, and paused.
At the threshold, she turned her head toward the stairwell—toward Ethan’s position—and spoke without raising her voice.
“You’ve been tailing me for a while,” she said. “Come in and catch your breath.”