The next day, Yekase and Ling Yi flew home with Dorothy, like swallows finding their eaves at dusk.
Dorothy said she’d been sent over when France and Ivalice established ties—called a symbol of peace, but everyone knew she was a bargaining chip, a blossom pinned to a ledger.
Luckily, France’s Royal Mage Corps was strong as iron in winter, so the City of Ivalice didn’t press for a marriage alliance on top of it, and she could live fairly free, as long as most days were spent within the walls.
Not long after, her talent for Infinite Power research surfaced like a vein of ore under frost; Simmons Rosenberg adopted her, and she jumped straight into Ivalice State University.
As for Ain, she couldn’t let her little sister drift alone on that sea; she came to Ivalice to watch over her. The king had only just passed fifty, so her crown-princess years would run long, and he agreed to her going abroad to study, like a tether paid out with care.
Hearing all that, Yekase finally understood Alice’s true design: as the second princess, Dorothy could return from Ivalice for a few days without raising waves, and a maid automaton vouched for by a Grand Alchemist drew no eyes either. It was a key slipped into Yekase’s palm, a quiet right to pass palace gates like breeze through bamboo.
No calls from Jiang Bailu; no news from Huaxia. A week, two weeks drifted by like light rain. The Flash Energy course moved steadily, tides to the moon; she took students into the lab, days packed and bright. May of 2022 slid into its latter half like a shadow leaning long.
That night, shameless as a cat at a fish stall, Yekase showed up again at Alice’s place in Mysidia.
“What do you want?” Alice braced the door like a bar of iron and refused her entry.
“Hey now, I just handled that rail-cannon mess,” Yekase said, smile thin as paper. “If I hadn’t stepped in, Dorothy’s life would’ve hung by a thread. Without her as our inside line, taking the Golden Apple gets tougher. It’s all connected.”
“So?”
“Teach me something new.”
“Leave.”
—bang.
The door slammed and almost clipped Yekase’s nose. The night air felt like cold water on hot brick.
“So stingy.”
She pouted. Coming all this way to do nothing would be a loss, like leaving a table with untouched wine. She decided to go find the bar street, a river of neon in any true city.
There had to be one, right? What city didn’t have a bar street?
—click.
The door opened behind her, a hinge whispering like a blade drawn.
Yekase turned, delight flaring like a match. “Knew it. Call you ‘teacher’ once and you—”
Alice tossed a bundle of scrolls. Yekase grabbed them, words still on her lips, and the door banged shut again, a guillotine with no hesitation.
Prickly outside, soft inside. A cactus with honey in the heart.
Yekase could handle even Lu Yao, frosty-proud for half a year and soft only on rare thawing days. Alice was easy by comparison; the face stayed cold as a pond in shade, but her gifts never stinted, a spring under stone.
Lessons on Runic Words, and four Greater Runes of the Inverted Tree—monopoly-grade secrets, lantern-bright and rare as phoenix feathers.
So what was this batch?
She carefully unrolled the scrolls, like lifting a lid off a sleeping kiln.
Inside lay a forest of equations and graphs.
“...”
She rolled it back up, slow as a turtle withdrawing into shell.
Huh?
What was this? Did Ancient Alchemists also cram higher math?
She pictured her old master or Alice with a gold-etched feather pen, proving number theory on vellum under lamplight. The image sat oddly, like snow on a plum blossom in June.
Then she remembered: her master browsed the net and gamed in the Witch Workshop, tides of boredom in a long life driving him to study whatever shore caught the eye. Picking up math wasn’t strange at all, just another stone skipped across time.
She unrolled the scroll again. The numbers seemed to wriggle on the parchment, worms in rain-slick soil, shifting into unnameable marks that traced patterns like frost on glass.
Theoretical physics... modern theoretical physics?!
By last century, modern theory had fallen into the quagmire of quantum, a swamp of lights and shadows. Infinite Power rose like a rogue wave, unexplained by the old craft, and progress stalled.
In the 21st century, some tried to stuff Infinite Power whole into their models. The equations swelled into hydras—ugly, cumbersome—and more physicists lost heart, leaves dropping in late autumn.
Gravity already sat apart like a hermit. Add Infinite Power, and you had a three-kingdom world. Why talk unification at all?
But Yekase wasn’t one to bow to that wind. Before unifying basic forces and Infinite Power together, she’d unify Infinite Power first, a river braided before it reached the sea.
If one human life wasn’t enough, she’d spend a Longlifer’s. That was her mission, her dream, and her last, stubborn romance, a lantern kept lit in storm.
She was an amateur at theoretical physics, a traveler at the edge of a forest. Yet Alice’s scrolls fixed a certain rune into the text; the formulas and symbols twisted with a hidden cadence, like birds wheeling into a flock, drilling straight into her mind and refusing to leave.
In that whirl of signs, she stood frozen in the middle of Mysidia’s street, a rock in a stream. Someone bumped her shoulder, and she didn’t stir.
Only when the storm of meaning calmed did breath return to her chest.
A wrongness glimmered, a grit in the eye.
In the calculations, even at micro scales where classical mechanics failed, Alice didn’t use quantum theory. She patched the gaps with runes and bonds of Alchemy, silver thread through a torn banner.
And she actually made it hold. Except for the quantum domains with no Infinite Power signature—she dodged them and declared quantum theory pure nonsense—she gave answers to everything else, her own bridge over black water.
What was this? Crank science? A cottage made of fog?
Yekase reread those “forced connections,” hunting for cracks like a mason tapping stone. Not one gap showed.
Worldview. The worldview needed—
No. If something exists, it’s material. No matter how unbelievable, no matter how it slaps old science in the face—that only means science isn’t finished yet, like a map missing its edges.
Cold washed over her like a pail dumped from a height. Late May, and she shivered as if a north wind found her bones.
The Super school and the Real school stood on opposite cliffs. The tool to bridge them... the Ouroboros path was right.
It had been veiled all along, hidden under layer after layer of Reverse Meme fog. Even if she broke through once by accident, she’d never think to keep digging, the thought snuffed like a wick under wet fingers.
Even that abnormal “can’t form the thought” had been blurred by Reverse Meme contamination, a smudge on a lens.
This stacked reverse cognition was an anti–Infinite Power effect—the very way the Void Realm was built, a castle of absence on a foundation of less-than-zero.
“Celestial Speech—Flight.”
Before the insight faded like ink in rain, she had to bring this theory to Bailu and the professors at the state university. Oh—Bailu was in the Labyrinth City now. Then she’d go there first.
Decision made, Yekase cranked her speed to the limit. She turned into a red streak and tore toward the Silver City above the Vatican, a comet with purpose.
Arianna received her—the green one, the one without a catchphrase. Her gaze was cool water in a glass.
She thought for a breath, then said, “Miss Jiang Bailu left the Silver City a couple of days ago. She hasn’t returned.”
“Huh? Where’d she go?”
“Don’t know.”
...
Jiang Bailu? (No concern.)
Yekase frowned. Where could Jiang Bailu have run off to? A few days ago she was on the phone with Ling Yi, cooking up bad ideas. She wouldn’t be fleeing guilt, would she?
She followed Arianna into the Silver City, to the guest room Bailu had borrowed. Arianna stood at the door and let Yekase see for herself, a sentinel at a quiet gate.
It was a standard room, a little over ten square meters, like a clean shell. Not much better than the Sidonia Dragon Fortress, but enough. Bedding folded neat as tofu blocks; desk and shelves tidied, like water smoothed by wind. She hadn’t left in a panic.
“What’s this...”
Yekase picked up a stack of newspapers on the desk, paper rough under her fingers like bark.
Human papers in a city of monsters felt odd, like a lotus in snow. But modern monsters weren’t medieval man-eaters; they had their own cities, their own circles, and under the Silver’s shelter they held their heads high—a new-age, independent monster. Reading human papers was no stranger than rain on slate.
The front page was about the Lovestruck. The date sat frozen at May 15, a fly in amber.
“Kengan—Fist-Pact Tournament: South Germany’s Zhong Meng Ganla beats Poland 3–0... Multiple universities add Flash Energy courses... The Lovestruck partially disintegrates over the Channel; UK investigators announce interim findings... ‘Eye of Earth’ receives an electromagnetic signal from deep space; experts urge no reply...”
Today was May 21. If Bailu read this on the 15th, then she hadn’t left by then. She wouldn’t have left too late either, or there’d be a newer paper. So—around the 16th or 17th.
Yekase had no clear idea yet, her mind a chessboard with no first move. Like a detective game, she turned to the door. “Before she left, did she ask you anything? Or mention something she wanted to investigate?”
“Hmm...” Arianna thought for a beat, eyes narrowed like a cat’s in sun. “She said she wanted to get something back. Thinking about it now, her face was a bit scary.”
“You’re a monster, right?”
“Scary even to monsters.”
Wait. You got spooked by someone who only just switched to vampire? What kind of face was that?
She’d learned nothing, and the fog only thickened, like a path winding into mist. It started to feel like Jiang Bailu had been hit by some mind-warping curse. Yekase’s thoughts raced, her fingers flipping pages on instinct, paper whispering like reeds.
Until—she turned to a certain page.
“...?!”
Fingerprints. Fingerprints. Fingerprints.
Fingerprints. Fingerprints. Fingerprints.
Fingerprints. Fingerprints. Fingerprints.
Two sprawling pages, the whole spread smudged edge to edge with pressed, frantic prints, no gaps left at all—
No, there was a gap.
Lost-and-found notice.
Lost near Soville City: my dog, “Adam.”
Male, 7 years old. Golden retriever. Green collar with a branch pattern. Responds to his name when called.
Please help bring him back. Generous reward.
A photo of a dog sat below, tail mid-wag in frozen time.
It looked like an ordinary golden retriever, a sunlit dog with a friendly face.
Jiang Bailu had kneaded the entire spread into a mess, yet left this pet notice untouched, a small island in a storm. Why?
Saw “generous reward” and decided to make some side money?
“Soville City... huh...”
Yekase lifted her head. Her gaze slipped through the guest room window and reached toward the distant Central European hills, a line of sleeping beasts under cloud.
