Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

The pale window steadied, and words finally resolved out of the drifting static.

> [WORLD BOSS DEFEATED]

> [ASSESSMENT: SOLO CLEAR — UNPRECEDENTED]

> [EXP GAINED: 200,000]

> [CLASS LEVEL UP: PROFESSOR — LEVEL 3 → LEVEL 8]

> [LEVEL-UP BONUS: +4 TO ALL ATTRIBUTES, PER LEVEL — 5 LEVELS GAINED]

> [LOOT: RESTORE POTION — TIER: MYTHIC]

Milo lay in the settling dust for a long moment, blood drying against his cracked ribs, and laughed — a short, disbelieving, wheezing sound, because his body still hadn’t finished arguing with him about whether laughing was currently permitted.

Five levels. Twenty more points scattered evenly across every attribute he owned, stacked on top of everything he’d already bled the Ashfen Marches for. He didn’t even bother checking the exact numbers yet. He was too busy staring at the second half of the window, at the single item hovering patient and gold in front of him, because that was the part that had actually stopped his breath.

Restore Potion. Not a healing draught. Not a suppression treatise dressed up as hope, the kind he’d once bought with a stolen recipe and a market he’d broken his own conscience cornering. Mythic. A tier of item he had never once, in either life he currently remembered living, heard spoken of as something that actually existed outside of old, half-believed stories.

He forced himself upright despite his ribs’ loud objections, and reached for it, and felt it settle into his palm — small, heavier than it looked, humming with a low, patient warmth that reminded him, uncomfortably and gloriously, of the same gold light that had once bled out of a suppressant draught brewed over a campfire that smelled like wet dog.

[APPRAISAL: ACTIVE]

> RESTORE POTION

> Effect: Fully reverses degenerative afflictions of the body — disease, curses, and ongoing magical decay — restoring the afflicted to their healthiest natural state. One dose. Permanent.

Milo went very still.

Curses. Ongoing magical decay. He thought of a hand turning slowly to glass, one knuckle at a time. He thought of a suppressant draught that only ever bought weeks, never years, and a promise he’d made himself never to oversell hope even to the one person who deserved it most. He thought, with a sudden, violent surge of something too large and too fragile to properly hold onto, that he was currently kneeling in a cave holding the single most valuable object he had ever touched in his entire life — and it was sitting in the wrong world.

The realization landed a half-second later, cold and total, wiping the joy clean off his face.

I can’t take this with me.

Every hard lesson this whole cursed, layered journey had taught him said as much. His own body’s baseline stats belonged to whichever vessel he currently wore. His skills, his class-bonuses, the things that lived in his soul rather than his hands — those carried across, the same way Professor’s points would apparently follow him home whenever he finally left this world behind. But an object, a physical, tangible thing sitting in his physical, borrowed palm — that had never once shown any sign of surviving the trip between layers. He’d left an entire fortune of Frostroot behind when a cell door locked. He’d left Kira’s own half-brewed hope behind more times than he wanted to count. A potion, however mythic, was still a thing, and things didn’t cross the seams between worlds. Only knowledge did.

He nearly threw it at the cavern wall out of sheer, frustrated grief.

Then, underneath the grief, something older and more stubborn stirred — the same reflex that had gotten him through a cell with no handle, a King’s throne room, a Vault that stripped his own ego bare and demanded he build himself back up from nothing.

Unless the storage itself belongs to the soul, not the body.

He’d read the shape of it once, buried somewhere in the thousand books he’d devoured inside the Vault — a rare, half-mythical skill, whispered about more than actually documented, that let its owner tuck objects away into a private, personal subspace tied directly to the self rather than to any single hand or body. Inventory. If knowledge and class-bonuses could survive the crossing because they belonged to him and not to Loof’s borrowed flesh, then perhaps — perhaps — anything stored inside a soul-bound space might survive it too.

It was a theory. It was, if he was honest with himself, mostly hope wearing a scholar’s careful coat. He didn’t care. He was already moving before he’d finished thinking it all the way through, potion clutched tight in one fist, ribs screaming the entire ride back.

---

Osmund laughed so hard he nearly dropped his own cup of wine.

"An Inventory skill," he repeated, wiping one eye, still grinning, still not entirely convinced Milo wasn’t making an elaborate joke at his own expense. "Loof, I have spent two decades trading in rare and impossible things, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard that particular skill mentioned as anything more than a sailor’s tall tale. It’s the kind of thing men claim to have seen once, in a tavern, from a friend of a friend who swears it’s true."

"I need it," Milo said, and something in his voice must have carried more weight than the words alone deserved, because Osmund’s laughter faded, replaced by the careful, considering stillness of a man recalculating a request he’d initially dismissed too quickly.

"Why," Osmund said, quieter now, "does this matter enough to make you look like that."

Milo set the small, humming vial down on the desk between them.

"Because I finally have something that could actually save my sister," he said, "and it’s trapped in the wrong world, and the only way I know to carry it home is a skill nobody believes actually exists."

Osmund studied the potion for a long moment, and something in his face shifted — the tired, careful merchant giving way, briefly, to the same man who had once told Milo about a wine glass left untouched in the center of a ruined room.

"There is a story," he said, slowly, like he were dragging it up from somewhere he hadn’t visited in years. "Sailors tell it in the roughest ports, the ones that don’t bother pretending to respect the Crown’s laws. A pirate captain — old now, if the stories are even half-true, and stories about pirates rarely undersell themselves — who’s rumored to carry an entire hoard, ships’ worth of plunder, gold and cargo and stolen cannons, all of it simply gone the moment she wants it gone, and returned whole the instant she wants it back."

"Her name," Milo said.

"They call her the Hollow Tide," Osmund said, "and they do not tell that story fondly, Loof. Every account I’ve ever heard agrees on exactly one thing about her character — she is a cold, patient killer who has never once shown a shred of mercy to anyone foolish enough to go looking for her uninvited. Navy captains who’ve hunted her don’t come home. Rival pirates who’ve challenged her don’t come home either. I would very much like you to hear that and reconsider."

"I heard it," Milo said. "I’m still going."

Osmund closed his eyes briefly, the specific, long-suffering patience of a man who had already known, before he’d finished the warning, exactly how little good it was going to do.

"Of course you are," he said. "Fine. If you insist on sailing directly into the one part of this world even I am properly frightened of, I’ll help you do it properly instead of watching you drown doing it badly." He reached for a fresh sheet of parchment, already thinking out loud in the specific, brisk way he did every genuinely difficult trade he’d ever closed. "I can get you a ship. A good one, seaworthy, fast. But it will need to stop looking like anything I own the moment it leaves harbor."

"Why."

"Because the Hollow Tide doesn’t deal with merchants, or lords, or anyone flying a flag that answers to a Crown," Osmund said. "She respects exactly one thing in this entire world, as far as any story I’ve ever heard agrees — another free captain, sailing under their own colors, answering to nobody but the sea itself. Walk up to her waving a merchant’s papers, and she’ll sink you before you’ve finished introducing yourself. Walk up to her as a pirate in your own right, and you might, might, earn thirty seconds of her actual attention."

"Then I’ll be a pirate," Milo said, simply, the decision arriving the way every real decision eventually did for him — not all at once, but in exactly the order it needed to.

"You understand what that means," Osmund said, setting the quill down, his expression sobering fully now. "A ship flying no Crown’s colors is a ship every navy in these waters is entitled to hunt on sight. Other pirates won’t welcome you either, not at first — a new, uncrowned captain claiming a piece of open water is a threat to every established territory out there, and free men have never once been kind to competition. You’ll have the whole sea against you, Loof, not just one dangerous woman at the end of it."

"I know," Milo said. "I don’t care."

Osmund looked at him for a long moment — really looked, the way he had that very first night by the fire — and something in his face finally, fully surrendered to the plan.

"Alright," he said, and the ghost of his earlier grin crept back in, tired but genuine. "Alright. I’ll have the ship refitted properly — stripped of anything that says my name ever touched it, rigged the way a real free captain would rig her." He paused, and the grin sharpened, mischief finally winning out over worry entirely. "Which raises the one question I suspect you haven’t thought about at all yet."

"What’s that."

"Every captain worth the title flies her own colors," Osmund said, leaning back, entirely too pleased with himself. "So tell me, Loof — since apparently you’re doing this properly — what in the world do you want your Jolly Roger to look like?"

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