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Yang Yi glanced at another headline.
【Exit to the Bountiful Sea Announced, This Voyage May Be Nearing Its End.
— Written by Mo Dayan, Information Provided by the Caravan Leader】He already knew the general coordinates of the exit, so he read quickly at first.
But soon he sensed something was off. He reread the entire article from start to finish, word for word, his eyes widening in shock, because the “end” mentioned here didn’t refer to the Bountiful Sea, it referred to the Sea of Origin!
Beyond the Bountiful Sea, the map now showed: Sea of Origin (End Point)
“Suna, you have to see this issue!”
Yang Yi sent her a private message.
She was holed up in the Witch’s Laboratory, organising the newly added second floor.
She had turned it into an archive room to store various samples. Each one was numbered and sorted by type and characteristics, aquatic, terrestrial, animal, plant, insect, and so on.
With everything neatly arranged, the once-cluttered lab finally looked orderly. Tools and samples no longer piled together in chaos.
Suna accepted the newspaper handed to her by an ancient skeletal arm. She had just started reading when Yang Yi’s message popped up.
“Yeah, I know, you made the news,” she replied.
“No, I mean another article!”
Suna looked at the next page, read the title and first few lines, and her eyes widened in surprise.
The Sea of Origin was coming to an end.
When players left the Bountiful Sea, the system will display a message:
“Congratulations on clearing the Sea of Origin. You’ve earned the right to explore the true ocean. More information will be revealed once all players have left the Bountiful Sea. Please wait here.”
The message carried a lot of weight.
It suggested that all the previous voyages through different seas had only been a prologue, or rather, a tutorial, for the real journey.
Only those who cleared the prologue would gain the right to explore the actual ocean.
The article’s author, Mo Dayan, proposed what he called the Garden Hypothesis.
He argued that all the seas players had crossed so far were artificial enclosures created by the system, not parts of the real world.
That would explain why there were no large indigenous factions, no villages, no towns, and nothing resembling true settlements.
“I believe these seas were carved out from the real ocean.
We’ve been inside a system-made garden built from fragments of sea.But now, the system is about to release us.The game will enter a new version.The garden may soon become an open world.Whether that’s good or bad... remains to be seen.”Mo Dayan ended with a call for survivors to share any information they had about indigenous forces.
He promised to compile the reports into a collection to help players understand the world more deeply.
Of course, the information fee wouldn’t be small, but the paper guaranteed authenticity. Their team had ways to tell true reports from false ones.
…
The article wasn’t long, but Suna read it several times before putting it down.
“Mo Dayan’s theory matches what we suspected,” she messaged Yang Yi.
“Yeah. This ocean must be something the system pieced together. We’re about to be thrown into the real sea. We need to be ready.”
Yang Yi’s tone was heavier than ever.
He was one of the players most familiar with the local inhabitants. Every time he met them, he managed to get along well.
He had some understanding of the native powers.
For example, the Radiant Church was a strong faction, though far from friendly. At least, not towards him or Suna.
So far, every voyage had been under the system’s control. You could feel the difficulty rising step by step, but never to the point of being impossible.
Out on the open sea, that safety net would disappear. The difficulty would become freeform.
One moment you would be fighting long-legged sardines, and the next, you could run into a being of unimaginable power.
The seas ahead would be far more dangerous.
Without a clear course, players could easily get lost. Supply levels would have to be monitored constantly.
Yang Yi and Suna discussed the system’s intentions for a long time, trying to figure out what it wanted. But with so few clues, they couldn’t draw any firm conclusions.
What role the system would play next, or what its goal was, no one knew.
They stopped speculating and focused on the task ahead: leaving the Bountiful Sea and reaching the end point as soon as possible.
The article also mentioned a new resource players would receive upon exiting the Bountiful Sea: Player Points.
No one knew yet how to earn them or what they were for.
Maybe their purpose would only be revealed after all players left the Bountiful Sea, or after all those inside it were dead.
The caravan leader, Xu Da, had already earned some points, though far fewer than his original crew. Only 1,297 members remained.
They likely correlated with players’ performance in earlier regions.
Yang Yi contacted Song Yingwen to sell what information he had on local factions, but aside from the Limb Spider Cult and the Order of Secrets, others had already been reported by different players.
He received 4,000 Shell Coins in total: 3,000 from the Spider Cult, and 1,000 from the Order of Secrets.
Yang Yi himself had no idea what kind of organisation the Order of Secrets was.
As for the information on the Forest Sprites, it had already been published in the issue of the paper. Yang Yi had even provided photos, earning him a 20,000 Shell Coin reward.
The voyage continued.
With the old captain now at the helm of the Nightmare Star, Yang Yi had much more free time.
The captain managed to catch two or three edible fish a day. Some Yang Yi dried into salted fish; the rest he used as fuel for the Life Fireplace.
Yang Yi, for his part, focused on training.
After twenty days, he had gone from overweight to solidly built, through sheer effort.
He opened his status panel:
Yang Yi (Transcendent)
Path: Corruption depth: 35%
Status: Healthy (a full-body diagram glowing green)
Height: 189 cmWeight: 142 kgStrength: 9 (6945/—) 【Devourer bonus: +1 to all except Spirit and Perceptio】
Spirit: 10 (—) 【Iron Will bonus】Agility: 11 (4574/—) 【Captain’s Uniform bonus】Constitution: 13 (3792/—) 【Gluttonous Maw bonus; adds +1 Constitution】Perception: 9 (1122/8000) 【Third Eye bonus】Sanity: 100/100
Stamina: 58/100Vitality: 100/100Mana: 10/10Talents: Iron Will, Refuse to Die
Spells: Limb Enhancement, Limb Restoration, Limb Explosion, Invocation of the Spider Mother, Flame’s Healing, Burn With MeAbilities: Third Eye, Lycanthropy, Gluttonous Maw