When Ryan shook the sleeping Simon and Alvin awake, bloodshot veins still webbed their eyes.
“A lot of time has passed,” Ryan said, looking at them.
Simon rubbed his temples and sat up, his joints letting out a series of strained, aching pops. He stared at the pale glow radiating from Ryan. “What was in that cave?”
“There is no exit. It's a trap designed specifically for us. If we go in, we die, and when we die, we restart.” Ryan turned his head to look at the colorless sky. “We're trapped here. I've died over sixteen hundred times already. With every loop, a day passes in the outside world.”
Alvin stood up, clutching his broken rib, his face as pale as paper. He did not doubt Ryan's words; for a follower of the Forge, the deep-seated fatigue left behind by instinct could not lie.
“So...” Alvin asked hoarsely, “what year is it now?”
“It was the winter of 1860 when we entered,” Ryan said, his lips curling in self-deprecation. “Now, it's probably the end of 1864, or the beginning of 1865. We are very close to the moment East Port is actually established.”
“Which means the land route is dead.” Simon spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva, looking out at the thick, dull black sea before them. “The real path is on the water.”
“We need a boat,” Alvin said, breaking the silence. He walked to the edge of the bone island and began to survey the massive scrapyard with eyes flecked with metallic dust.
The entire bone island was not a natural landmass. It was a massive graveyard of shipwrecks, whale bones, desiccated human remains, fractured oak keels, and rotted planks that had accumulated over countless years after being smashed by Black Bone. It was a mass grave for the end of all voyages.
Alvin squatted down and tapped his finger against a fractured keel, producing a dull, lifeless thud.
“I can build it,” Alvin said.
Over the next few days, they did not touch the caves again. Alvin used broken masts as levers and tore rotted canvas into strips to serve as ropes, piecing together the relatively sturdy planks from the shipwrecks one by one.
Four days later, an extremely crude sailboat rested by the edge of the black tide.
It looked crooked and lopsided, its hull pieced together from oak, human bones, and unidentified whale ribs, with the gaps sealed with a mixture of fish fat and bone ash. The ragged canvas sail was covered in patches of various sizes, looking like the eyelid of a blind man.
Simon stood waist-deep in the black seawater, holding a freshly speared fish. He called for Ryan to use his glowing eyes to roast it while turning to look at Alvin. “Can this thing actually float?”
Alvin wiped a layer of bone ash from his face and let out a self-deprecating laugh. “It'll float.”
“And then?” Simon asked.
“The rest is up to fate.”
The shipbuilding process did not go smoothly, not only because of the physical toll, but also due to certain eerie "traces" that gradually began to surface.
While gathering materials and scavenging from abandoned camps, they began to discover remnants of human survival in the hidden corners of the island.
“There's a shelter here!” Simon called out from deep within a pile of whale bones.
It was a crude lean-to made of rotted canvas and three ribs. In the corner of the shelter lay a pile of licked-clean fish bones, the teeth marks on them still fresh. Yet, when Ryan and the others carefully searched the entire island, there was absolutely no heartbeat of a fourth living person.
Even more spine-chilling were the carvings.
While Alvin was selecting a keel, he noticed a dense row of scratches carved into the side of a thick piece of oak.
Simon picked up a wooden plaque that had fallen into the gravel, wiped away the mold with his hand, and read it softly:
“‘Attempt 47.’”
As the timber was turned over, more and more items were unearthed.
Beside an abandoned hearth built of rubble, Alvin spotted a line of words scratched into a crevice between the stones:
“‘Attempt 103.’”
Deep within the keels, on a wooden plank bleached by seawater, was written:
“‘Attempt 512. Simon broke his leg. We didn't survive the winter.’”
On a wall of bones near the beach, a dense cluster of carvings read:
“‘Attempt 921.’ ‘Attempt 1440. Do not go to the caves anymore. Do not understand it.’”
Simon stood frozen, staring at the bone fragment in his hand that read "1440," his face as pale as a corpse. He slowly turned his head to look down at the bone island beneath his feet, which crunched crisply with every step.
The wooden planks they stepped on, the whale bones used to build the shelter, and even the shipwreck debris they were using to construct their boat... none of it came from strangers.
“We have been living on top of our own bones and relics all along,” Simon said, his voice finally carrying an uncontrollable tremor. “Ryan, those sixteen hundred loops... it wasn't just you dying in the cave. We died out here right along with you.”
Every inch of land they now trod upon was built grain by grain from the flesh and bones of their past selves from countless failed loops.
Half an hour before the sailboat's mast was about to be secured, the thick fog over the sea began to churn violently without warning.
The black seawater was no longer calm. A dull, creaking sound—the unmistakable friction of a wooden hull grinding against waves—echoed from the depths of the mist. Ryan instantly gripped the dagger at his waist, the glow in his left eye locking onto that direction.
A ship drifted out of the fog.
The vessel was slightly larger than the sailboat they had just built, though not by much. It was also a crude patchwork creation, with the skull of a massive whale serving directly as a ram at the bow. Its tattered grey sails billowed eerily on a windless sea.
As it slowly drifted to a halt beside the bone beach, the three of them clearly saw the word carved deeply into the rough hull with a sharp blade:
【East Port】.
“Someone successfully left this place?” Alvin's voice pitched slightly higher.
Without any hesitation, the three of them warily boarded the bizarre East Port.
The cabin was thick with the scent of heavy rust and dried grease. There were no living souls on deck, nor any corpses, only the scattered remnants of past daily life.
In the listing wheelhouse, Ryan found a logbook bound in fish skin resting on a moldy table.
The pages of the logbook were yellowed and brittle, covered in frantic, twisted handwriting.
【Attempt 1457.】
【We succeeded. We avoided the Black Bone cavern. Alvin spent seven days building a flat-bottomed boat capable of carrying the Heart Principle. Together, we rowed out of this damned grey mist.】
Seeing this, Ryan's breathing quickened. He hurriedly flipped to the next page.
【Day 5. The water outside turned blue. We saw seagulls. Simon said he could smell civilization. We are approaching the East Port of 1865.】
【Day 15. We reached the coordinates.】
【But this is wrong... East Port does not exist. There is nothing here. No docks, no people, no lighthouse—only a vast, burning sea of pure white. East Port is a lie.】
【We returned. We had no choice but to return.】
The handwriting after that completely lost all structure. Large sections of frantic, overlapping lines tore right through the paper, the space between the words filled with meaningless curses and gibberish.
Ryan's hand trembled as he flipped to the very last page.
On the entire sheet, only a single sentence was written in dried blood:
“‘Do not trust yourself.’”
Thud.
Rate on N.U.
