Year 18, Month 2
The Sapphire Coast – Port of Westgate
Three longships painted black and flying the Empty Circle left the harbor at dawn.
They were not warships.
They carried no bronze spears, no shields, no soldiers.
Only grain.
Only tools.
Only forty-three volunteers who had answered a single notice posted in every village moot:
"The Faceless One seeks sailors willing to cross the great western sea for five years.
Pay: one bronze ring on the Wooden Circle.
Purpose: mercy."
No one had asked why.
In Valdria, when the Faceless One asked, people simply went.
Hyun-woo watched from above as the ships beat south-west against the trade winds.
He had never done anything this inefficient in eighteen years.
Three ships.
Nine months at sea.
Forty-three of his best sailors and scholars.
All to deliver food and timber to fourteen people on a rock in the ocean.
He knew the numbers by heart:
Cost: 2.8 % of annual grain surplus
Risk: 34 % chance at least one ship lost
Strategic value: zero
He sent them anyway.
Because every time Player #189 spoke in global chat, his voice cracked like breaking reeds.
Because fourteen people had kept a god alive for eighteen years on fish heads and hope.
Because the first time one of them carved the Empty Circle into driftwood, Hyun-woo had felt it like a knife in a heart he wasn't supposed to have.
Petty.
Sentimental.
Human.
Global voice chat noticed, of course.
#008 (KaiserDrache):
"THREE WARSHIPS FOR FOURTEEN PEASANTS?
I conquer cities for less."
#044:
"He's wasting an entire fleet on a dead player.
This is why min-maxers don't have friends."
#004:
"...that's actually really wholesome, senpai."
The voyage took eleven months.
Two storms.
One ship cracked a mast but limped on.
On the 327th day, the black sails appeared on the horizon of a tiny, wave-battered island no bigger than Caer Veldris's market field.
Player #189 (real name Park Min-jae) was waiting on the shore.
He had not aged a day since arrival, but his eyes were ancient.
Fourteen people stood behind him:
gaunt, salt-burned, clothed in woven grass.
When the first longship grounded on the coral sand, the captain (a woman named Sigrid with a bronze ring newly set into her Wooden Circle) stepped onto the beach and knelt.
"By command of the Faceless One," she said, "we bring you home."
They did not cheer.
They simply cried.
For three days the Veldrians unloaded:
- 400 sacks of barley
- 120 amphorae of salted fish
- Iron tools (the first the island had ever seen)
- Seed grain, goats, chickens
- A complete set of teaching tablets
- Forty-three blank Wooden Circles and the tools to carve them
On the fourth day, Park Min-jae stood on the highest rock and spoke the Oath of the Empty Circle with a voice raw from disuse.
Fourteen voices answered him.
Then he did something no one expected.
He took the bronze carving knife, cut his own palm, and pressed a bloody handprint beneath the Empty Circle he had carved into the cliff face eighteen years ago.
"I was dead," he said.
"You gave me back a future.
From this day forward, every child born on this island will bear two names:
their own, and Valdria."
Sigrid tried to protest (the journey home would be lighter, faster).
Min-jae shook his head.
"Tell the Faceless One we are not leaving.
This rock kept me alive when the world forgot me.
Now we will make it remember us."
The Veldrians left them with full storehouses, iron plows, and a library carved into coral.
They sailed home lighter by fourteen people but heavier by something no counter could measure.
When the ships returned in Year 20, they brought back three things:
1. A single coral tablet engraved with the bloody handprint and the words:
"Debt eternal. Interest paid in children who will never know hunger."
2. The first nautical charts of the western ocean accurate to within three miles.
3. A quiet, dark-haired boy of seventeen who had been born on the island the year the boats arrived.
He carried a Wooden Circle bearing two names:
Caelan Valdria.
Years later, scholars would argue about why the Faceless One wasted an entire fleet on fourteen castaways.
The answer was simple, and only one man ever knew it.
Hyun-woo had looked at the boy's eyes (gray, calm, sharp as winter sea) and seen the future.
That boy would invent the deep-keel ship.
That boy would map the circle of the world.
That boy would, in future, stand on the deck of the first ironclad and speak the decree that ended the last great war.
But on this day, all Hyun-woo did was watch a bloody handprint dry on coral and feel, for the first time in eighteen years, something perilously close to pride.
Global chat was silent for once.
Even KaiserDrache had nothing to say.