Dorothy drifted down on a Levitation Spell, Lu Yao rode a wing like a swallows’ glide, and they touched down beside Yekase.

“This…?!”

Shock hit her like ice water. Her breath snagged; her mind went blank.

From the lip of the crater, the city had looked like bones picked clean, a carcass stripped by time. Yet standing on Arcadia’s streets, the four of them saw the impossible.

…People.

Crowds in white, similarly cut robes moved as if nothing had happened, pouring through Arcadia’s ruined lanes in everyday rhythms.

Commuters pressed forward, vendors hawked, kids tussled, elders chatted curbside. A city’s pulse, noise and warmth, beating again inside a husk.

Sight and sound offered no seams, no flicker to prove they were only projections. Infinite Force Perception shivered under a vast sorcery field cocooning the city, its readings scrambled and flow unreadable.

Were these residents truly images?

What had been mere visuals in the sky became full-bodied in the streets. Yekase reached out to halt a passerby. The woman with a reed basket actually stopped and looked at her.

“Do you need something?”

She… she had self-awareness?!

And her speech pinged the translator and came through clean.

“Hello. What is this place?” Lu Yao jumped in.

The woman eyed their out-of-place gear. “Arcadia, of course. Are you travelers?”

Yekase snapped back to herself and hurried to answer. “Yes—uh, what year is it?”

“1450 A.D.”

She frowned at the question, puzzled by such basics, then took in their foreign faces. Realization settled like dawn. “You came to Arcadia from far away and wandered the wilds too long. You’ve even lost track of the year? Poor things. Here—two mandarins. Share them.”

She plucked two round, glossy fruits from her basket, pressed one into Yekase’s hand and one into Lu Yao’s, then jerked her chin toward Dorothy and the uneasy Harrison behind them.

“Thank you, ma’am!” Yekase flashed a smile.

“Sweet talker. Have fun!”

She waved and walked on.

All four turned instinctively, watching her go. Ahead of her, a broken wall blocked the lane. As a “resident” of this city, what would she do?

She—

Stepped onto the crushed bricks and crossed without hesitation.

She didn’t pass through; she placed her feet. She knew the rubble was there, yet treated it as if it were part of the city’s ordinary fixtures, a familiar roughness, not a barrier.

“They…” Dorothy pressed close to Yekase, voice low and taut. “Are they souls bound here?”

Harrison’s face drained of color. “My people… went through this…”

He sucked in a sharp breath, then spun and bolted.

“Hey?! This is Shadow Realm War turf—don’t go off alone!” Dorothy shouted at his back.

Yekase said nothing. She tightened her grip on the mandarin and took off after him.

He was going somewhere anyone could guess—if the residents “lived” here, then the house marked Jones, somewhere in this city, should be “home.”

Going home is a primal gravity. Some lose that pull for a hundred reasons. Harrison was not among them—his hollow childhood had made him self-reliant fast, but it also buried that unpolished desire in his soul like bedrock.

Live like that, and… it’s not tragedy, but when your eyes close, regret will whisper.

“Explain,” Lu Yao matched Yekase’s flank, voice clipped.

“This city annihilated itself with an entire vanguard of exogenous entities centuries ago, hiding Earth’s coordinates for a few hundred more years. He’s the last bloodline of Arcadia, a war orphan they hurled through a controllable wormhole at the final hour, using a black hole engine—also called the Silver Star Engine.”

“…Got it.”

Oh, right—Lu Yao’s an orphan too. Sister aside, she’s basically a real-life Batman.

Someone who never tasted mother or father’s love—a certain Second Princess of France—belongs to the camp that lost this desire. Out of sync with these sudden kindred souls, she shed her initial nerves; curiosity seized the high ground. She jogged and peered around.

“An ancient civilization with tech far beyond ours—so it really existed!”

“Yeah. If the Shadow Realm War wasn’t lurking here, I’d be out window-shopping.” Yekase’s voice held a rueful smile.

Lu Yao and Dorothy had missed the Seek-the-Mist incident, knew nothing of Arcadia’s layout, and fell into follow mode. Yekase, supposed to lead, was no help—her faint, chronic sense-of-direction curse rose like fog. Identical stone houses flanked both sides, copy-paste neat. Roads stretched like mirrored rivers. Harrison’s silhouette slipped ahead, agile, so near, yet always out of reach.

A Flash Energy Ascender, and a civilian kept the gap!

What was this—home-field buff? Away-game debuff?

Shame pricked Yekase for an instant, then she argued herself calm. Harrison had no combat power, sure—but he lived as an explorer in the wilds, and he’s gifted at running. His legs were trained.

And the three of them? A 28-year-old turret, a 15-year-old sorcerer, and a 17-year-old desk jockey… light-boned girls, all of them.

Not catching up is normal.

Besides, she knew he just wanted to see home. They chased out of principle, protecting the weak. If they lost him, that’d be his choice. They simply chose not to chase.

She stacked ten excuses along the way, and her heart leveled out. The lanes opened onto that memorable little square.

Mysidia’s Krasus Platform had been built from this exact image. Now the original stood before them, stone and shadow.

“…Huh?”

A strange thought pricked Yekase. Her pace eased.

“Teacher, what’s wrong?” Dorothy asked.

“It happens. Early-onset senility. Ignore her,” Lu Yao deadpanned.

Harrison reached his goal and stepped into a house by the road. Lu Yao tugged Dorothy, leaving Yekase standing stupefied, and rushed in pursuit.

Yekase had no room for them now. Her mind spun hard, rewinding through the first time in Arcadia.

Unless a Longlifer born in Arcadia refused to let her homeland vanish and secretly preserved its scene—settling for even a fragment, a corner of echo, centuries later.

Alicia Alicia was Arcadian. She designed the Krasus Platform to memorialize the homeland she couldn’t return to. That theory had felt tight. But with exogenous entities added, cracks split the logic.

The Exogens’ Reverse Meme worked all too well. Yekase knew that poison firsthand; after a dose, your mind shouldn’t retain architectural impressions of the city.

Then there were two possibilities.

One: Alicia Alicia really was Arcadian, and she had a way to bypass Reverse Memes, keeping her memories whole.

Yekase’s method preserved fragments that Reverse Memes couldn’t erase, breadcrumbs to trigger recall on demand. The Greenfield school had several researchers each study a slice, record their findings, and let successors reassemble the whole. Both approaches disassemble and scatter information to survive.

But the square’s design language… that data was so concrete, so visual. Yekase couldn’t even imagine how to record it in her style. She shelved this possibility for now.

Two: Alicia had nothing to do with Arcadia. She was joyriding above the world, passed over the Arctic, saw the ruins, liked the look, and copied them. That tragic lineage they’d imagined—just Yekase and Ivaris spinning a dramatic yarn.

Ridiculous, almost farcical.

Instinct balked at that half-baked option. She didn’t want to be just a sentimental fool who wrote a grand past for someone who didn’t ask for it, gossiping like a schoolgirl. But truth often arrives dull and unreasonable.

“Sigh… This city’s got a Greek vibe. Maybe one of these columns says ‘Know yourself.’”

She tossed the melancholy to the wind, blaming the mood of the moment, and let it go.

Lu Yao and Dorothy had already planted themselves at Harrison’s door, fierce as cats before a mouse hole, drawing whispers from nearby residents. Yekase watched, tasting the sweet relief of not doing everything herself.

Once she’d rented a tiny apartment and ground through 996. Now she had allies, a student, research partners—maybe even the beginnings of a faction.

Expand the Ambition Divine Ship with space compression tech and make it the main base? Exactly the secret-base vibe Ling Yi used to dream about. But bringing outsiders to the island—would that disturb Mom’s peace? Ask her when they’re back…

Yekase took the mandarin the lady had given her. Her thumb pressed and split the peel. A couple drops of gold-yellow juice beaded up. She licked the wet from her fingers; her tongue lit with tart-sweet bloom.

A fruit from over five hundred years ago.

By rights, only a mirage, yet it delivered real, bright sweetness to her brain.

Steeped in that impossible feeling, Yekase strolled forward—

—Rumble-rumble-rumble!!

In her view, in Dorothy’s, in Lu Yao’s, the small house Harrison hadn’t exited yet thundered and fell, stone shedding like a landslide.