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The small bone boat broke away from the edge of Bone Island, sailing toward the deeper, more oppressive black sea.

Ryan sat at the stern, holding a crude wooden oar cobbled together from a rough whale rib and a broken plank from a shipwreck. He turned slightly, looking back behind them one last time.

The thick, grey-white fog was closing in again from all directions, like some massive, living, viscous liquid. The eerie island—built from countless shipwrecks, the skeletons of behemoths, and the shriveled dry bones of countless versions of “themselves”—shrank bit by bit in his vision, growing increasingly blurry and pale.

In the very last instant before his line of sight was completely swallowed by the suffocating grey fog, Ryan's eyes suddenly narrowed.

His heart skipped a beat.

On the pale, gleaming shore of Bone Island, amidst the piles of bone fragments washed by the waves... a few figures seemed to appear.

There were three of them.

Through the distant fog, Ryan couldn't make out their faces. But he was all too familiar with those three silhouettes—one tall, one sturdy, one thin. They were struggling to pull themselves up from the cold, wet shore, agonizingly slowly.

Ryan fell silent for a full two seconds. When he finally withdrew his gaze and turned back around, he did not utter a single word to his companions.

Simon, who was wiping his dagger with his clothes, keenly sensed something. He looked up in confusion. “What is it, Ryan? Is there something in the fog?”

“Nothing,” Ryan said, his voice as calm as a pool of dead water untouched by the wind.

He lowered his head, resting his hands on the rough wooden oar, and continued to row forward mechanically and steadily.

He knew.

A new cycle had already begun.

Just as they had escaped Bone Island on their crude little bone boat, another three oblivious, unfortunate souls had set foot on those white bones. Or more precisely... another three versions of themselves had opened their eyes on that beach.

Had time branched? Or was this eerie stretch of sea originally a ribbon that had been folded, crumpled, and smoothed out again countless times?

Ryan didn't know. He only knew that he absolutely could not stop, nor could he look back.

Over the next few days, the bone boat kept sailing toward the eastern sea.

There was no wind. The surface of the sea was as flat as a black mirror; only the faint ripples left by the bone boat broke the unsettling, dead silence.

During the day, the temperature began to climb at an extremely unreasonable rate. The sun hanging above the thick fog grew hotter and more tyrannical day by day. Pale light pierced through the fog and spilled onto the boat, evaporating a sickening stench of shriveled fish fat and rotting wood.

At night, the thick fog would thin out slightly, revealing an utterly unfamiliar starry sky.

During these times, Simon and Alvin would fall into a deep sleep due to extreme physical exhaustion. Only Ryan had to force his eyes open, keeping watch on the stars to correct their course.

As time passed, the non-mortal knowledge in Ryan's mind began to grow more and more complete.

The trajectories of the constellations, ancient marine cartography, the flow of the tides, the minute deviations in direction... this hidden knowledge, which he had never learned, began to surface naturally in his mind, as clear as instinct. He didn't even need any instruments; by simply mapping the angles of the stars' alignments with his naked eyes, he could sketch a nautical chart in his mind that was precise to the millimeter.

He could even accurately determine the current season based on the height of the starry sky.

On the fourth night, as Ryan habitually traced a star with a faint yellowish glow at the zenith of the sky with his finger, his hand suddenly froze in midair.

A subtle unease sprouted from the deepest corner of his heart for the first time.

By the fifth day, this unease had completely devolved into an uncontrollable dread.

Because the positions of those stars, and the dim river of stars stretching across the night sky, told him an indisputable fact:

It was no longer winter.

Ryan gripped the gunwale tightly. He didn't even notice when bone fragments in the wood pierced his palm.

The angle of the stars in the sky now was clearly close to late summer or early autumn.

Ryan knew better than anyone what this meant.

Time was passing. Not only in the world they couldn't see, but also around this bone boat, in this seemingly static black sea. Time was drifting forward frantically at a terrifying speed that far exceeded mortal comprehension.

He began to act like a neurotic madman.

During the day, he would stare fixedly at the blazing sun radiating dry heat, recording every arc of its rise and fall. At night, he would check the waning and waxing of the moon over and over, even starting to observe the hungry seabirds that occasionally flew overhead, migrating south.

Every observation ultimately pointed to a single conclusion:

The time was wrong.

None of it was right.

They were being forcefully pushed by the invisible hand of this sea toward an incorrect future that did not belong to them at all—a December 14th, 1865, that they could never reach.

But Ryan said nothing.

Because he looked at his companions, knowing deep down that speaking up would achieve nothing.

Simon was hunched over, using his rusted dagger to expertly skin a strange fish just pulled from the black sea, humming a vulgar tune from an East Port tavern. Alvin was huddled in a corner of the boat, using a hammer and sticky caulking paste to patch a whalebone seam that had started leaking again, working with absolute concentration, blow by blow.

Telling them would serve no purpose other than spreading panic in the boat and driving them mad with despair ahead of time.

On the evening of the sixth day.

A viscous, dark orange sunset glow rose where the sky met the sea.

As Simon straightened his back, he suddenly rubbed his eyes. Then, overcome with excitement, he stood straight up in the rocking boat, pointing ahead and shouting:

“We're here! Ryan! Alvin! Look! Land! We've finally made it!”

Alvin, who had been resting with his eyes closed, also snapped them open. A trace of relief, bordering on deliverance, finally appeared on his gaunt face as he let out a long sigh.

However, the moment Ryan clearly saw the outline on the horizon, his body felt as though an invisible icicle had pierced him straight from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet.

He stood up abruptly. Because his movement was too sudden, the small bone boat pitched violently on the water.

His face turned deathly pale in an instant, and even his fingernails lost all color.

In the distance, a dark grey outline of land indeed rose and fell against the sunset.

But... there was no port.

There was no breakwater, no lighthouse, no workers, no equipment.

There was nothing at all.