Yekase had slipped into the class to audit, to take the pulse of the State University in the City of Ivalice, not to wear a lamb’s mask and pounce like a tiger. The room’s mood had beat like a drum, so she’d answered seriously, then, once the teacher clocked who she was, she bolted like a startled cat rather than keep jamming the lesson.

As she left, she thought she heard applause, a wave breaking behind her back; too mortifying, so she pretended the surf was just wind.

She decided to check the library, like a bird angling toward a quieter branch.

The City of Ivalice’s state library was called the Mount Essanda Library, named for the mountain range nearby, its stone ribs belonging to the whole city-state rather than the university.

Its crown jewel was a one-stop machinist pipeline, from turning screws to building a Gundam, a factory line of knowledge humming like gears. Yekase didn’t need that; she stood at the desk, got a card like drawing a key from a well, then slipped into the History and Ancient Alchemy stacks, rows of trunks in a paper forest.

The Greenfield School—first among heresies per the Church—had its name stuffed into dusty corners like a moth afraid of fire. Would an independent city-state keep their stories and texts, tucked like contraband under floorboards?

She pulled a book titled City of Sin, the edgy name flashing like neon in fog. The flap said it was a popular history on independent city-states, broad roads and mile markers she did want.

Three such city-states still stood in Europe:

“Ugliness”: the City of Magecraft, Mysidia.

“Materialism”: the Machinist City, Ivalice.

“Atheism”: the Silver City, Labyrinth City.

They pricked a flat map like three campfires, and the book marveled that they formed an equilateral triangle, calling it the sign of some triangular force, as if the land wore a talisman.

It added that Ivalice and Labyrinth both came from German and Italian; in English their sounds shifted like rivers changing beds, so Labyrinth City could be written “Labrilis,” matching Ivalice’s back half like a rhyme.

Yekase’s first thought was that Labyrinth City had been named after Labyrinth City’s mistress, neat as a seal. But the book insisted the term predated her; the Silver Princess had borrowed the name like wearing an old crown.

So what? There wasn’t a fourth city ending in “-dia” anyway; the pattern seemed complete, a square missing a corner. She flipped the page, and the book started storytelling, saying if you used Labyrinth and Ivalice as axes and mapped Mysidia across, you’d land near Austria and find a city-state lost in history’s dark: Arcadia. Four cities formed the so-called Radiant Quadrilateral, like four stars drawing a box in the night.

It felt like those late-2000s MMO players tracing ley lines on maps for Old Gods, kids with chalk drawing pentagrams; at least theirs was a five-pointed star and looked more legit than this triangle.

Also—didn’t you just swear by the mystical triangle? If one of the points didn’t exist, how did that charm hold? The logic folded on itself like paper in the rain.

…Huh?

She turned a page and hit a full panorama of Mysidia.

The World Tree rose like a pillar holding up the sky, its roots knuckled deep into earth and its branches shingling the heavens so thick you couldn’t see a clean patch of blue; the scale warped your gaze, a giant’s arm in a child’s frame. Mysidia was built at the trunk’s heart, ringed by those sprawling limbs like a city inside a colossal lantern.

This city-state sat on the World Tree, like a nest high in a god’s crown.

The altitude had to be tens of kilometers, a stairway into air, pure Western-fantasy romance painted in clouds.

And beneath those roots—visible from orbit like veins on a planet—if Sandryon had taught correctly and if Yekase remembered right, lay the modern magical base Newton established, a titanic alchemical array called the Mag Hub, the axis of a machine buried in bedrock.

How lovely—a terrestrial megastructure, a mountain turned engine.

She put the book down like setting a cup on still water, then hunted Greenfield again, eyes tracking shadows. At the deepest corner shelf, she found one.

Its title was The Book of the Light Chariot, a name that gleamed like a blade in velvet.

She opened the first page, the way one lifts a lid on a box of dawn.

What you’re seeing now is the Greenfield School’s thousand-year research into the essence of magic.

The words were handwritten, ink like dried riverlines.

A thousand years… which matched the persecution recorded in the Daozang of Cloudlong City, timelines like two threads knotting. A faint wave of sorcery breathed from the book, a gentle ward preserving paper like frost on pine; and its circuitry wasn’t modern magic or Ancient Alchemy, but something more primal—runes carved like bone in earth.

“Baseplate,” she read the rune-name, abstract as mist over a lake.

All signs pointed the same way, north as a needle.

Five hundred years before Sandryon, the Greenfield School had already begun studying runes and drafting the prototype of Ancient Alchemy; what a span, like a bridge arcing over centuries.

Yekase checked her breath, which had quickened like a bird’s, and read on.

This research has been designated the highest blasphemy by the Church; you, reading now, will be condemned, a moth seen by the torch.

But since you opened these notes, you’re our kind, another ember from the same fire.

We will kill God with science. The universe is simple, beautiful, and unified, leaving no room for a creator, like a lake with no island.

Even if ideal-driven things truly exist, we must use science to explain them and find the laws by which they move, gears meshing under silk.

This is Greenfield’s creed.

Believe in science.

Doubt science.

Inherit science.

Overthrow science.

The universe must be simple, unified, and beautiful. We must approach truth—and closer than anyone, a climber’s hand above the last hold.

“Approach truth… closer than anyone.”

The persecuted founder, Fa’ai Greenfield, who hid his name like a candle cupped in wind; the exiled scholar who crossed continents and died far from home; the long line of “heretics”—they all threw themselves toward that sentence like waves toward rock.

From that came runes, Ancient Alchemy, and later modern magic and modern alchemy, rivers braiding into a sea.

And across a thousand years they passed the tool to unify all Infinite Power into Yekase’s hands, like a torch passed in the dark.

For a heartbeat she saw an old man, backlit, watching her from a doorway of light, saying nothing. More figures gathered behind him, old and young, men and women, faces blurred like lanterns in fog, all quietly watching the successor who had pushed in.

…Which raised a simple question—where were the Greenfield heirs now?

She’d met Fa’ai himself in her second loop; the prior “generation” was a bard scraping meals like a sparrow in winter, and the next was a naive girl just stepping onto the road, neither looking like a bearer of a school’s mantle.

With Ancient Alchemy waning, and Runic Words led by Alicia Alicia, who wasn’t even a member, a bleak verdict edged in like frost.

The line had snapped.

The Book of the Light Chariot sitting in the Machinist City’s library might be proof enough, a relic washed ashore.

Yekase decided to read every word with both hands, cradling it like a bowl of hot tea, and walked toward the desk to check it out.

She turned—and the library’s corridor was gone like a wick snuffed.

The world had become two crushing cliffs, walls of stone squeezing the breath from her chest, and a massive, old gate loomed before her like a mountain’s heart.

Up above stretched an endless blue, clear as poured water.

Behind lay a drop so deep it swallowed light, a cliff falling to the world’s floor.

…

“…What the—?”

Where was this? Where was the library’s warm lamplight?

She’d only stepped back half a pace, like a dancer adjusting her foot, and the sky had changed; there wasn’t even a ripple of teleportation, no spelltrace, just the world turned inside out like a glove. What power did that?

The gate radiated a wordless tug, a tide pulling her to push it, like a game’s start screen blooming in the dark.

She tested all three directions and hit stone each time, palms on cold walls; no quest markers, no hidden path, just the door ahead—so, open or not?

It was too eerie, a fox’s laugh in a quiet grove.

A sudden scene change, a sudden door, and that door all but whispering “come inside”—no way she should just walk through, right?

But there was no other road; she could fly, sure, but she didn’t even know what sky she was under, a compass with no north.

Yekase steadied herself, breath like a held string, and studied the door.

It looked bronze-forged, skin dark as river-wet metal, covered edge to edge with reliefs. On the right panel were birds, beasts, demons and devils, a zoo from a fever dream; on the left, humans in all postures and costumes, even coats that looked chillingly modern.

But the art style was Huaxia antiquity, brush and chisel singing old songs.

Which made it stranger, a crane in a steel city.

From modern Europe’s City of Ivalice to ancient Huaxia in a blink? Maybe this was a hidden cave estate left by some old immortal, a pocket world like a peach blossom spring.

Old immortal…

Come to think of it, there really was one slot left for an “old immortal,” an empty seat at a table in her mind.

She cleared her throat, voice a pebble tossed into a well: “Sorry to intrude—anyone there?”

Silence pooled like shade.

No answer, so she went to push.

She set her hands on the bronze, face flushing like dawn, and shoved; the gate didn’t budge, a mountain ignoring the wind.

It was someone else’s door; melting it open with Flash Energy would be rude. She tried once more to be sure, then stepped back two paces, breath cooling.

Right then, small-seal characters bloomed on the right panel like ink rising through paper.

Of prodigies, brute force, and spirits—the Master spoke not.

The left panel stayed blank, an eye unblinking.

So… a couplet?

Arms folded, she idly brushed her soft lips with a fingertip, thinking, a reed bending to current.

The right panel’s beasts and demons matched “uncanny and spirits,” so the lower line should pair with the left’s human crowd, a mirror held to faces.

Human-related, parallel, four words, and a trailing phrase to answer—like two oars pulling in rhythm.

But from ancient to now, how do four words hold all people, four pebbles damming a river?

She wasn’t a humanities student; reading small seal was already stretching like standing on tiptoe. She had no bright idea yet; her hand slid into her transfer chest and fished around like under a couch.

Her fingers touched a small, square, hard thing…

The hypnosis MP3 she hadn’t used in ages, a black pebble in her palm.

It could play Flash Energy–etched tracks that swayed crowds like wind in wheat. She’d shelved it as her straight-up combat strength grew.

It could steer emotions like a rudder: joy, anger, sorrow, fear…

Yekase looked up at the words hanging in air like lanterns.

“The common feelings of humankind?”

Soundlessly, like a lake breaking ice, the bronze gate opened before her.