... drip, drip.

Water falling into a shallow basin, tiny echoes like glass beads.

Warmth creeps back into her frozen limbs; her mind rises like dawn over frost.

The smell of soil and dust rushes in, a dry storm filling her nose.

She’s facedown on a cold floor, smooth as river stone. Not the Millennium Bug’s lounge, not open space, but… rough stone bricks everywhere, seams packed with dirt and wild grass like green stitches.

...

She opens her eyes, slow as a shutter lifting.

“Huh?”

An orphanage fills her view, plain as a faded postcard.

Low brick bungalows, a cramped square, a well, a fence, and the old gate guard’s Phoenix-brand bicycle gleaming like an old rooster’s comb.

Lu Yao and her sister grew up here—an ordinary county orphanage near Twin Towers City.

Why am I back?

She remembers they let R2D2 swallow the Millennium Bug. So this must be the Wandering Whale’s belly. But you can’t jump hundreds of light-years and land on Earth. So… an illusion, a mirage on still water?

Whatever. First things first—find the ship, link up with Yekase—

“Morning, Beast King Silver.”

“—Who?!”

Lu Yao springs sideways like a cat, back against the side-wall, Glock already in her hand like a black fang.

A figure steps out through the orphanage gate.

She looks around ten, in a lace-trimmed, lavish dress. Gold embroidery blooms at her chest like sunlight, making her look born noble. But unlike a normal dress, the skirt is slit to the waist on both sides, safety shorts underneath, adding a runner’s edge.

Most striking of all, she carries a shield wider than her body across her back, and a classic knight’s longsword rides her hip like a sleeping serpent.

First impression—Magical Girl, a star with a blade.

But “Magical Girl” is a title with weight, a roll of martyrs. You don’t throw that word like confetti.

Lu Yao doesn’t relax. She lowers the Glock a hair, a spear dipping before spring.

The stranger stands on the orphanage steps, lifts her skirt sides, and gives a perfect curtsey, smiling like a lantern lit at dusk.

“My name is Lalabel—”

“Welcome to the Differentially Closed Universe.”

...

Who?

Lalabel—that’s a Magical Girl’s name. Why here, like a poppy in winter?

“You must have plenty of questions. Don’t worry, I’ll lay them out one by one—because there’s something you need to do, and only you can do it.”

“Where is this place?” Lu Yao asks, letting the current pull her boat.

“This is the border where the three-dimensional universe weaves into the Causal Horizon, threads crossing and bleeding through. I gave it a commemorative name: the Differentially Closed Universe.”

“...Not the Wandering Whale’s belly?”

Lalabel comes down the steps, stops before Lu Yao. She’s short; up close she has to tilt her face like a violet seeking sun.

Lu Yao’s gun sinks further, like a mast lowered for a bridge.

“There are many entrances, and they all flow here like rivers into a delta. This is a stopover on the ordinary route to the Causal Horizon—not everyone can open a passage with Flash Energy. If you walk the ordinary path toward the higher-dimensional ‘Hyper-Body,’ you need a higher-dimensional tool.”

So the tool… is a whale’s belly, a doorway in flesh?

Lu Yao remembers Yekase talking about the Causal Horizon, a tier beyond reality, the ‘Hyper-Body.’ In there, time becomes a parameter, a ruler marking past and future, but you can’t shuttle freely back to the three-dimensional world.

“The key is the Radiant Cube,” Lalabel says, like lifting a lamp in fog.

“What?”

She heard that name not long ago—an echo down a stairwell. Oh, right. The little Wandering Whale’s snack.

Lu Yao pulls a lump of antimatter water from her pocket, cold as midnight on steel.

It sits inside a special container: two nested cubes, large and small, their eight corresponding corners braced by diagonal rods like scaffolding around a captured star.

“This… is the key?”

“Which is why only you could do it,” Lalabel says, eyes half-mooned, like a lock waiting for its one key. “Where spacetime’s fabric thins, subspace forms easily—like inside a Wandering Whale. If the 3D universe is a sandglass-shaped light cone, subspace is a bubble clinging to its outer skin, a mapping from the past universe onto the present. But bubbles aren’t enough. This Radiant Cube steps in and unlocks the barrier.”

Lu Yao listens, mind fogging like breath on glass.

She was never built to study Infinite Power; numbers never sang to her. Her Omega Ray looks slick only because she’s used it forever—practice turning into instinct.

She bows her head a moment, like a sparrow pecking seed. Then she looks back up.

“So you’re saying the Wandering Whale’s belly links to a Cosmic Bubble. And because I’m carrying a Radiant Cube, I got chosen and walked onto the world’s outer side.”

“That’s roughly it,” Lalabel says, tidy as a folded map.

That’s enough! A nail driven flush. Why the extra smoke before fire? She’s not Yekase; first principles don’t stir her tea.

While Lu Yao’s guard eases, Lalabel simply takes her hand—like a sister tugging you home—and leads her into the orphanage.

“We’re close to the Causal Horizon, so things get a little idealistic; thoughts float like kites. But we aren’t there yet, so reality still tugs like an anchor rope...”

“...”

“We’re wedged between pure concepts and the image-world, a dreamlike middle belt. What makes you you reflects here like a mirror lake, and shapes this space.”

“What makes… me.”

Half led, half dragged, Lu Yao moves down the corridor. Damp air rolls into her nose like moss breath. Marble tiles press underfoot, cool as moonlight. Through doors on both sides, dorms and classrooms sit exactly as her long-ago memory, crisp as old film.

Here, she and her sister leaned together like saplings and grew.

Here, as a child worker, she took blows no child should, winter wind against thin coats.

Here, she began to crave heroes, to yearn for them, to become one—a lighthouse lit in storm.

Mostly sorrow and pain, yet some days glittered like coins in sunlight. All of it mixed in one crucible and forged Lu Yao.

“I think I get it… so what do you need me to do?” Lu Yao asks, pieces clicking like gears.

A self-styled Magical Girl in a place like this looks shady, yet that shield and sword aren’t props; they feel hammered by thunder.

“In my case, it’s weird. I ran out of energy and died once, then landed here. Basically a stray spirit, a leaf caught in a slow canal.”

She says “died” as lightly as feather talk.

“Not long ago, all the other Magical Girls’ traces vanished like smoke. Thanks to Ika, they should’ve gone back to the real world. I’m dead, so I wander here forever, a moth around an unlit lamp. I peek at the mirages from unlucky travelers who stray in. It’s not boring. Last time, someone imagined an expo hall full of cosplayers with barely any fabric and, uh, giant headlights. A total speechless moment. Guys, who even relates?”

“...”

Lalabel pauses, looks back with a smile like sunlight off a blade.

“I know you, Silver of the Beast King Squadron. In the East Sea interception campaign, you were a huge help.”

“...Thanks,” Lu Yao says, bowing her voice like a head.

So that’s recognition—a medal pinned with a glance.

They fought in the same era, no clear senior or junior, two stars rising together. Lu Yao feels that rare fellowship of heroes—something Yekase never gives her.

“That’s why I want to ask you—take the last person out of here, ferry a soul across the river.”

They pass the long corridor, push a door that opens like a gate of fog, and step into the rear yard.

Staff territory, off-limits to kids; Lu Yao’s memories go thin as tissue, and everything blurs like fogged glass.

“Do you know Ika? Dr Ika, Magical Girl Icarus.”

“Uh...”

Know? More than know—history tied like a knot in rope.

“I’d say… yeah, we’ve met,” Lu Yao says, wincing like biting ice.

The deeper they walk, the thinner her memories, and the world goes abstract—lifelike mirage melts into warped shapes smeared like crayon, then into bare line art, then even the lines fade.

Only hazy color blocks remain, impressionist clouds bleeding at the edges.

“Where are we going?” she asks, feet moving through paint.

“Almost there,” Lalabel says, hush before dawn.

At last, she stops before a pure-white mecha.

Not truly “pure-white”—just “unpainted.” The difference matters like bone versus ivory. Look close; you can see paper grain.

The mecha looks extruded straight from a child’s stick-figure drawing. Lines are rough and bent; the two legs aren’t even the same thickness. A pair of indescribable triangular wings jut from its back like folded kites. Its sheer size scrubs away laughter and leaves a strange gravitas, a mountain wearing a child’s chalk marks. Its egg-shaped head, as if Da Vinci sketched it off-center, droops forward. One knee rests on the ground, unmoving. The left arm hangs slack. The right runs along the kneeling leg to the floor, silent as a marble statue.

Lu Yao studies its outline, eyes raking like a comb, but no name rises from memory.

“This mecha is…?”

“Humanity’s final weapon, later one of the Triune Machine Gods—Thunderbolt Zeus. Do you know who designed its look?”

Lalabel doesn’t answer the question. She keeps her eyes on the hand-drawn mecha and shifts the topic like a bird changing wind.

“Back then, the engineering team’s lead was…”

“Liu Qizhou, senior engineer at the Huaxia Institute of Infinite Power.”

“He didn’t design the exterior?”

“He did the circuitry, sure. Not the shell.”

“Then I’m not sure...” Lu Yao says, a shrug in the rain.

“The first design for Zeus came from a robot doodle Liu Qizhou’s seven-year-old son drew on their home wall. By the time of the One-Year War, the boy had grown, but they never repainted; the doodle stayed, stubborn as a stain.”

Why drop that pebble now… The circle widens in her mind.

Ah—could it be—

“This mecha is the wall’s ‘original.’ Professor Liu Qizhou… turned his son’s fantasy into reality.”

Lalabel lifts her gaze to the doodle-mecha’s head, face solemn like a candle in a quiet shrine.