In a narrow, forgettable alley, Yekase and Ivaris found a stone door taller than a person, standing like a lone monolith sprouting from a dry riverbed.

Marble blocks built its body; two pillars bore sword-resting figures, their polish calm as still water, their faces so lifelike they seemed ready to breathe.

It looked like a fragment torn from some high-class classical hall, a swan feather in the gutter, gleaming where no sunlight should linger.

Why was it bald and abandoned, sticking up in an alley like a tree trunk in winter?

“Ah—this is where I manifest,” Ivaris slapped her thigh, voice light as a pebble skipping a pond. “We looped around and somehow circled right back.”

Yekase blinked, her thoughts scattering like sparrows. “Uh… you ‘manifest’ how, exactly? Do you just—poof—pop out of thin air? You miss me a lot. If you’re always watching me, why not appear at my side?”

“Yeah, I just go poof,” Ivaris said, casual as smoke. “As for landing, that’s hard to control. I have to eyeball the coordinates, then describe them out loud to my dad. He can’t speak back, can’t confirm if we locked on. Dropping nearby is already lucky.”

“No dark gate? No warp twist? No gravity well—no special effects?”

“None. Or maybe they end before I touch down.” Ivaris shrugged, circling the door like a cat testing a stream. She lifted one foot into the frame, then drew it back. Nothing stirred, not even dust.

It felt like a decorative piece ripped from a mansion and left to weather like a stray stone in the rain.

“…Weird.”

“Soville City’s old. Someone owning a door like this isn’t that odd, maybe,” Yekase said, but her voice rippled with doubt like wind over reeds.

No, it wasn’t normal at all. If a weirdo built such a delicate door, wouldn’t they keep it at home? Who carves water-smooth marble, then drags it out to rot?

The door refused them like a shut eyelid. There was no point wrestling a rock.

Yekase aimed to trust her feet and old conference maps, to follow gut and street-grain to that fateful town square, to see if chance would carry Jiang Bailu to her.

She turned to leave the alley’s mouth.

Ivaris reached out a hand, palm open like a shell with no pearl.

Yekase looked at the empty palm, then at Ivaris’s face, lost like a leaf in fog. “What are you doing?”

“Minus one point.”

“I just got docked?!”

“Hold hands, hold hands! Aren’t you afraid we’ll drift apart while walking, like boats in different currents?”

“Oh—I get it. Two meanings, right? A loyalty test for couples?”

“No,” Ivaris cut her off, firm as a bell on a cold morning. “Even if people drift, hearts don’t split.”

The air went chalk-dry, brittle as frost on glass.

Yekase glanced around, helpless as a fish out of water.

Ivaris caught Yekase’s left hand. She slid between the fingers, invading each gap like warm river water, lacing them until it was ten against ten.

“Listen. Couples should hold hands like this.”

“Uh… okay…”

Couple sounded blush-hot. At the age meant for spring nights and open suns, they had given everything to a war for life and death, huddling together for warmth because neither wanted to die without ever loving.

In those absurd days, more absurd than that reason itself, they never even had a clean memory of holding hands.

Parting came like lightning. Naturally, there was no time to break up, no way to end anything neat.

So now, this was only a coin placed on the altar of the past.

Hand in hand, they left the alley like two shadows merging into one.

“Love requires balance,” Ivaris said, voice steady as a pine trunk in wind. “Those two girls, they only adore you. They chase your back. Especially the one in the lab coat—she’s terminal.”

“I know.” Yekase’s tone was a low lantern by a window.

“In their eyes, you aren’t you. You’re a perfect avatar, and a time polished by memory like a stone smoothed by a river.”

“I understand.”

“Love born that way is warped to the core. It can’t bear sweet fruit of mutual understanding or mutual salvation.”

“I get it.”

“Then why do you still—”

“Because even if I never meant to, it was my will that bent their lives this way,” Yekase said, voice calm as snowfall. “It will keep bending them forever. So I owe them.”

“Even if they demand from you, shape you, take from you—”

“So what?” Yekase raised her free hand. Sparks of Flash Energy jumped at her fingertip like fireflies, as if she were testing whether the mist still obeyed Infinite Power.

“Time will wear admiration and love down to almost-nothings,” she said. “After we weather it all, we’ll still stand together. That includes you. That’s enough for me.”

Ivaris watched Yekase’s profile, quiet as a mountain ridge at dusk.

Time had changed this person. It turned her into a stranger Ivaris knew and didn’t know. Seeing from afar felt like a cloud. Hearing her say it felt like rain.

“You’ve become a true Longlifer.”

“I have been one for a long time.”

And what was wrong with that?

On the Horizon, Ivaris had watched Yekase with the others. Whether by Philosopher’s Stone, by Mind Energy ascension, or by birth as Longlifers—human, monster, or half-dragon—their souls lingered on one cliff like birds sharing a branch through a hundred seasons.

They would walk there, too, step by patient step.

“So you’re telling me,” Ivaris said, smile sharp as a cat’s eye, “you’ve got evidence the Crystal Witch and crew once threw a ‘silver party’?”

“Their relationship map must have devolved into a battle royale ages ago!” Yekase yelped. “Even I can see that! Even me! And you missed it in your monitoring?”

“I missed it. Their concepts sit wrapped in wondrous runic crystal blocks. I can’t peek at probabilities. I can’t touch causality. Smells like Sandryon’s craft.”

“You can armor a concept…?”

So that was it. Sandryon struggled on the front line and was middling in the lab, yet everyone bowed to her. Perhaps her true strength lay here. Only her mentor, and the near-equal Alicia Alicia, dared call her an old immortal. Everyone else begged her to shield their projections on the Horizon.

To link roads. To meddle with higher layers. To sever cause and effect. That was the Crystal Witch’s hidden card.

Yekase pulled two lollipops from a space clip. Ivaris nabbed the strawberry-milk one, its swirled pink and white echoing the cherry glow of her Nightlight Torch.

“So sweet. You can’t taste sugar on the Horizon.”

“Then eat more now.”

“Noted. Feeding me is plus one, but also minus one.”

“Where’s the minus?”

“You should’ve said, ‘you’re sweeter.’”

“That’s so corny.”

“Corny is good.”

“Fine. You’re sweeter.”

“Timing’s off. Saying it now is worse than not saying it. Minus one.”

“You’re exhausting!”

They laughed, wind through chimes. Ivaris gripped the wrapper with her teeth, ripped it free like peeling bark, and spat it aside.

Yekase drew breath to scold her for littering.

A short, razor-quick laser swept across, like a blade of dawn. The plastic wrapper turned to a curl of white smoke and vanished into the fog.

Ivaris popped the candy into her mouth, words rolling over sugar. “Right. Let me tell you a story.”

“What’s the story?”

“When I’m bored—like when you’re asleep—I can’t watch your sleeping face all night. That’s too… creepy. So I point at some random star and see what concepts and histories it holds.”

Peeping tom, Yekase thought, heart knocking like a guilty drum. You stared for nine years—ten now—and you’re hung up on whether watching me sleep is creepy?

“I’ve seen the thunderclouds of Venus, the garlands of Saturn. The flares on Alpha Centauri look like threads that can’t untangle. Near the Galactic Center, there’s a Y Gate, tucked into a black hole’s disk. Seven chained black holes hang around it. A swarm of nanobots resists gravity, pacing the rim like a gray storm.”

“You’re an Infinite Power researcher. You should see places like that. I saw them all.”

“You ever see aliens?” Yekase asked.

“I lost count. But most of them hit the Great Filter at this point in time. Only weathered buildings remain, blurred grooves, and liquid water to prove they were here. Seeing them feels like looking up at a star at night and learning the star died millions of years ago. It’s… strange. Even after so long on the Horizon, I’m still a three-dimensional creature.”

“If you turned into some oracle babbling past and future, I wouldn’t know how to handle you.”

Yekase unwrapped her watermelon lollipop, clamped it in her mouth, flashed the wrapper at Ivaris, then flicked it forward like a leaf on wind.

A long, lightning-quick beam skimmed her nose by a hair. The wrapper became ash midair.

“…”

“Littering. No public spirit. Minus one.”

Ivaris grinned and brushed Yekase’s nose with a thumb, as if confirming a victory.

“I saw a civilization that called itself the Nomai,” she said. “They were born on the crown of Laniakea. They spent 280,000 years walking from their homeworld to the Eye of the Universe. They left a station there, and a recording.”

“What did it say?”

‘The journey you’re on—we walked it forty million years ago!’

“So they were bragging?! Super confident about their lead!”

“The universe is cruel,” Ivaris said, soft as a knife in silk. “There’s no United Nations out there. You don’t even need to declare species slavery.”

“Wow. Suddenly I don’t feel like exploring…”

Weariness seeped through Yekase like rain through cloth. She steadied herself on the wall, trying to shore up her heart like a dam against a flood.

Her hand brushed a sheet of paper.

She peeled it off. It was a missing-person notice, stark as a crow on snow.

Missing Person

Joseph

Lost near Soville City.

Male, 33. Dark skin. Black hair, black eyes. Scars on the backs of both hands.

Please help bring him home. Generous reward.