In Lionfang, Ludger sees the pattern the System won’t let him ignore: trouble never stops coming. So he does what no sensible kid should, he starts building something meant to outlast panic.

The Lionsguard guild begins as a hard, practical answer to chaos. Not a tavern guild chasing glory, but an organization that feeds, houses, and trains its people. Word spreads. Coin follows. The guild grows—contract by contract, stone by stone, into the closest thing the frontier has to stability.

Then a letter arrives that can’t be ignored.

A major guild, older, richer, and powerful enough to make lords listen, invites the Lionsguard to a joint expedition: an ocean labyrinth, drowned beneath water and crawling with ancient threats. The kind of job that can elevate a rising guild into legend… or erase it in a week.

Ludger knows what an ocean campaign really means: logistics, supply lines, and a way to move men and materials fast. A bridge project becomes non-negotiable, and there’s only one person he trusts to help him pull off something that ambitious.

Gaius Stonefist. His mentor. A shameless drunkard. A terrifying earth mage. A former guildmaster who taught Ludger the real secret of earth magic: not brute force, but anchoring, endurance, and choosing the exact moment the ground becomes a weapon.

So Ludger goes looking... And finds nothing.

No tavern. No trail. No familiar mess of empty bottles and angry landlords. Just silence, shrugs, and the uncomfortable kind of “no one knows” that feels rehearsed. Gaius didn’t wander off.

He vanished.

Now Ludger’s rise hits its first real fracture: a prestigious expedition calling his guild to the sea… and a missing mentor who might be bleeding out in some ditch, imprisoned somewhere inconvenient, or swallowed by something that knows exactly how valuable an earth mage can be.

If the Lionsguard is going to step onto the world stage, Ludger can’t afford to lose one of the men who taught him how to hold the line.

So before he builds bridges to the ocean, he has to dive into the underbelly of the empire, following whispers, breaking teeth, and reading the ground like a map, because this job isn’t a contract.

It’s personal.

And if Gaius Stonefist is still alive, Ludger is going to find him…

Even if he has to tear the whole region apart, one layer of earth at a time.