Yekase and Ivaris traveled light, their things sealed in teleport crates like neat coffins; check-in flew by, and in yukata, they followed steam like pale banners.

Ivaris gathered her silver hair into a nape bun, moonlight coiled; her neck showed like porcelain, and a rough collar gaped, sketching a collarbone in soft shadow.

She tied Yekase’s hair too, quick as a sparrow’s peck; Yekase’s balance felt skewed, like a tilted bowl, and she eyed a corner to draw Dawn of Eden.

She’d slice the long hair clean as a falling reed, then let it grow back whenever, like spring grass after frost.

“If other girls are soaking, you know what to do, right?” Ivaris asked, voice cool as evening water.

This place felt high-end, like lacquered wood and quiet rules; the springs demanded bodies that could weather volcano breath, so no one ordinary would drift here.

The owner had offered a disguise charm, like a veil over the moon; the hint was plain as sunlight through clouds.

“I know. I’ll chat them up and fish for intel,” Yekase said, testing the water with a toe of mischief.

“…It means eyes front, hands off,” Ivaris snapped, thunder behind silk.

She seized Yekase’s head and palmed her eyes, fingers prying like stubborn shells.

“Ow, ow, ow!”

“That trick where you blind yourself for a bit. Use it,” she said, sharp as a fan’s edge.

“I refuse!”

“Why?”

“Because I want to look at you.”

“…,” the steam held its breath.

Fingers loosened, like rain easing off a tile roof.

Ivaris turned aside, touched an already neat collar, a crane smoothing its own feathers. “When did you learn to wheedle? You’re impossible.”

Yekase pressed in. “Oh? You’re shy? A Saturn Warrior, shy?”

“I’m just happy you’re growing up,” she said, a small smile like dawn on frost.

They found a dark curtain marked [Women’s Bath], ink on night; the changing room lay empty as a quiet grove.

They slipped off their yukata and moved toward the wooden door, steam billowing like a white tide.

“Where did that Nomai story pause?” Ivaris plucked a wet towel from a basket by the door, folded it twice, and crowned her head with a cool cloud.

“At the station by the Eye of the Universe, and the line ‘was here,’” Yekase said, memory a pebble dropped in deep water.

“Oh, right,” Ivaris murmured.

She set another towel on Yekase’s head, a twin cloud afloat.

“Aren’t these to keep you from overheating? What’s the point up top?” Yekase sniffed the sulfur air, eggy and old-earth, then let it go.

“When in Rome,” Ivaris said, like a bell grazing wind.

Yekase dipped a foot. The heat bit like a fox, then softened like bread steam. Too easy, like a bath. She throttled her evolution down, and the water burned bright again.

She sank in with a long sigh, a willow untying its knots.

“Finally—stillness. So, what happened to the Nomai?”

“Every member of their civilization lined up like pilgrims and jumped from the station into the Eye. They vanished without a ripple.”

“And then?” Yekase asked, voice a leaf skimming a pond.

A drink case waited by the stones, lid open like a friendly mouth; no lock, no prices. Yekase took a kiwifruit juice without guilt.

She sipped. Sour lightning ran through her.

“Then a Hash insectoid astronaut visited their station, right on time—forty million years later, like a clock across an abyss,” Ivaris said.

“Hash have fishbowl heads, the true body floating inside; below, a body of replaceable parts, like a gecko’s tail you pop off.”

“He cracked the Nomai’s secret. The universe was about to go dark, a final sunset,” she went on, rain on bronze.

“Their lemming march gambled on the Eye. If even one succeeded, they could ride time’s river and observe the future.”

“Did they?” another voice asked, clear as a bell under fog.

They realized someone else shared the water. Mist blurred her features; her voice carried a soft distortion, like glass between lips and ear.

She must’ve used the identity-hiding charm, a paper veil on a lantern. No halo hovered above, so she wasn’t staff—just another guest of the house.

Yekase glanced, eyes brushing her skin like dragonflies over a stream. Firm and smooth, it held faint pale scars, old moons scattered thin.

Strange. If bodies aren’t masked, one unique tattoo could break the spell. Anonymity felt like sand through fingers.

The guest nodded. “Pardon me. Your story caught me. If you mind, I’ll step away,” she said, voice polite as a folding fan.

“It’s fine,” Yekase waved, water rippling like rings in rice wine.

Ivaris continued. “The universe met total death and a new dawn—shedding an old skin for ours.”

“The Hash astronaut witnessed it all. My father and I watched him at the Causal Horizon, a thin line like a blade’s edge.”

“What were humans doing then?” Yekase asked, a small wind against still reeds.

“You already know,” Ivaris answered with a smile, a lantern wink.

“Ah!” The spark leaped. Solar-3? Not ruined parallels, but an echo from the last aeon, a footprint baked in old clay.

“The Hash astronaut dissolved in the blast that remade the cosmos. In chaos newborn, the first observer arrived.”

“In the endless dark, a first fire bloomed. The super class of Infinite Power was born again,” Ivaris said, ember to flame.

“…,” Yekase’s chest tightened, a string pulled taut.

Me? Could it be me?

She didn’t say it. Another soul was here, a third ripple on the pool. The answer glowed like a coal anyway.

“What about the Nomai?” she asked, voice cupped like a hand around a candle.

“Who knows? They fell out of the light cone,” Ivaris said, snow swallowing footprints.

Steam curled. Silence breathed.

Ivaris left the words hanging like a paper charm. Yekase drifted, dazed by the idea of taking part in the universe’s turning, mind walking the Causal Horizon like a narrow ridge.

She weighed the link between the Horizon and a four-dimensional super-body, thoughts a kite tugging at its string.

The anonymous guest sighed, deep and warm, like tea fog meeting winter air. “Bodies die. The will to explore stitches two species across forty million years. A fine story.”

“An oscillating universe, then…” Yekase’s thought rang like a tuning fork.

Wait. If Sol-3 is the old world’s afterimage, what of other Cosmic Bubbles?

I once thought, Our universe is an open system, she remembered, a window cracked to night.

But how does it touch the outside? Is the outside a void carrying countless bubbles, or worlds linked like pearls? She hadn’t dug in; there was no spade for that soil.

Now it looked like a wave without end, a sinuous spectrum, crest and trough like breathing.

Then where does Infinite Power draw its fire?

From the wreckage of dead worlds?

The crest holds the total. The climb releases the last era’s compressed power, brick by brick. At the peak, the hoard runs dry; the universe falls inward, night swallowing dawn.

So Infinite Power binds tight to Cosmic Bubbles, a thread through shells of foam.

“In that case, let me tell a story,” the guest said, her voice a lamp lit in fog.

She’d taken Ivaris’s tale as sci-fi. Good. No pesky whys and hows.

“Long ago, in Huaxia, there were dragons,” she began, words coiling like incense. “Long serpents with horns and claws. They called wind and rain, swallowed cloud and breathed mist.”

“In ages slow as growing stone, they split into two clans. One crowned a Yellow Dragon king. One crowned a Black Dragon king.”

“Eastern dragons…” Yekase breathed, a page turning itself.

The last time she’d heard of them felt like rain on a half-remembered festival. In truth, no hard facts. So thorough their vanishing, scholars argued not whether, but when the end came.

Most extinctions fit an era, a window between storms. Some nail down to a year, even a day. Eastern dragons? Dates scatter from before Xia to Spring and Autumn, stars flung wide.

Why? Huaxia revered dragons. People boasted of meetings and bloodlines, weaving myth into ledger. Truth took on painted sleeves.

So modern minds only say: gone before the Common Era. Three centuries have held no sighting. Ask how and when, and the air stays blank as uninked silk.

“The Yellow Dragon, friendly with beasts and birds, won with human aid,” the guest went on, voice weathered as river stones.

“They forged a prison-ark from dark ironwood, black as deep water, and exiled the Black clan to the stars.”

“Then ‘Yellow’ became ‘Gold.’ The Gold Dragon guarded mankind’s royal house, a banner in the sky.”

Her tone carried age like moss. Next to Ivaris’s obvious tall tale, it rang like bronze.

Ivaris saw Yekase’s look and knew she was being roasted in silence. Under the surface, she split the water and smacked Yekase’s butt, a playful blade in a warm sea.

It was very soft, springy as new mochi.

Even underwater, the rebound thumped her palm, like the body pushed her hand away, addictive as a forbidden sweet.

“…Wow,” Ivaris whispered, a low ember.

The guest took it for praise of the tale and let it pass. Yekase, though, burned red. If Ling Yi or Jiang Bailu had done it, shame wouldn’t sting like chili in milk.

She didn’t want to break the story’s flow, a stringed zither mid-song.

So she sat down, pinning Ivaris’s restless hand under her, a queen on a captured pawn. She smiled and asked, honey over steel:

“And then? If the Gold Dragon sided with humans, how did it fade from the world?”

Tradition said betrayal, a hunt of scales and fire. But Slavs had played that tune already, and tropes wore thin like old rope.

The guest cupped water and poured it over her shoulder, silver falling on jade. “Because the Gold Dragon saw this: dragons locked Huaxia’s growth in a golden cage.”

“…Huh?”

“Dragon lives are too long,” she said, a chime in dusk. “What is recent to a dragon becomes a few lines in a book to humans.”

“So humans lost their fire. They relied on dragons in every corner, like vines leaning on an old wall. Society stalled.”

“Watching this, the Gold Dragon rose like a comet chasing its own shadow—the Black clan it once cast out—and led dragonkind to the stars.”

“After that came what you know as Spring and Autumn. Thought, tech, and learning flowered like a thousand gardens,” she finished, petals in steam.

She smiled, a fox in tall grass. “Humans are hard work, aren’t they?”