He blinked like a gull startled off the surf. Seeing Qihe, the creepy guy, and the rest, Ouyang hadn’t expected to bump into them again.

To the creepy guy’s crew, Ouyang was a riddle wrapped in stone walls. Anyone who owned a castle in Miracle City wasn’t simple. They knew he was strong, and that was all.

“Right, you’re with the First Cult, yeah?” Ouyang noticed the insignia stitched on their coats, clear as shells on wet sand. “There’s a stud over there flaunting his harem to feel superior. Go deal with that guy.”

He meant Morris. The man still left a trace in his mind like an old footprint in tide-packed sand. Long ago, when Morris first came to the “Source” world to play, he ran into Ouyang. Back then, he had his fiancée Belle on his arm in a city where Ouyang and Xian crossed his path. It was also when Morris met Jiangxue, a girl who’d slipped here from another world.

A soft ache rose, and Ouyang shook his head. So many things vanish in a blink, like foam blown off a wave.

While he was lost in it, the creepy guy’s bunch got hauled off by the lab coats from the First Cult to put Morris the “stud” on trial. Ouyang wandered the beach, feet sinking in warm grains, eyes on the blue sky and bright, slow clouds. Then—then someone smacked him down with a lesson.

“Littering is wrong!”

Short white hair fluttered in the sea breeze like frost-laced grass. Pointed, signature ears twitched once. A white priest’s robe hung on her like freshly fallen snow.

White Elf.

In the “Source” world she was an endangered miracle, the only one under the sky. Long ago, the White Queen and the Night King did what they did, and the White Elf clan dwindled until only Anatasya remained.

Yeah, Ouyang had jumped at Glenza’s roar. His hand jerked, and the sunglasses he tossed clonked Anatasya, the White Elf, on the head like a pebble skipping wrong.

He flushed, heat rising like sun off wet rock. “Ahem… misunderstanding, total misunderstanding…” He grasped for a topic the way a swimmer grabs driftwood. “So… Anya, long time no see. What’ve you been up to lately? I invited you to castle dinners before, but you never came.”

Anatasya was exactly as he remembered, a snow-bright figure untouched by years. That year, those stories… yet in the sifted light of memory, two vital faces were missing.

Irina and Kooson were gone.

She looked at Ouyang, her eyes as pure as new snow, no speck of dust within. He tried to steer the talk, and she answered with the steadiness of winter light. “Because you never invited me yourself…”

You never invited me yourself.

The words carried weight like a bell in mist. And they were true. Ouyang always sent the rabbit to invite people. He was lazy by nature; if he could lie down, he wouldn’t sit. That was an exaggeration, sure, but the drift of it was real.

He hadn’t visited many old friends in ages—Jielinka, the Kingdom Knights’ Angsester, and the rest. Even Aupu and Lingwen—if nothing major happened, he rarely dropped by.

“Sorry…” The word fell out, thin as a leaf. He had other choices; a slick talker could spin excuses, promise the moon, and lead her around like reeds in a current.

He could say something like, I didn’t invite you in person, but I’ve always kept you in my heart. He couldn’t say that. To others, it would be a joke. To Anatasya, it would land like truth.

“No need to apologize…” Her snow-clear eyes blinked once. “I will attend the Final Feast. Even if you never invite me.”

Anyone else would be baffled. Ouyang knew what she meant. The White Elf, the race closest to the river of time—some scholars on the Other Shore once guessed that, in the oldest past, the White Elves guarded that river. They stood outside time, beyond years, watching the endless current flow.

Often, Ouyang found himself forgetting Anatasya by reflex, not because she didn’t matter, but because she was swathed in the power of years. Back then he hadn’t yet played the Hymn of the World, so that power brushed him like a cold tide, and he forgot her without knowing it. Only after he played the hymn did it ease.

Maybe because she can peer into the river of time, Anatasya’s favorite hobby is divination.

She’s one of the world’s finest seers. She even opened a fortune parlor. But most people pass it by as if a fog hid the door. Only a few “fated ones” ever receive her reading.

So her parlor turned into a legend. They say, outside of time, in the corridors of fate, an elf paces and sees through the tracks of our lives.

And everyone she reads for can never find the parlor again, no matter how they search. Thus, a myth.

If she’s this versed in time, she must’ve seen something in the river. That’s why she’s come for this so-called Final Feast.

“You…” Ouyang let out a helpless smile, tired as dusk light on the sea. “Looks like your grasp of time’s no joke. You can see things already.” With others he might slick his tongue and lie—whether kindly or cruelly—but with this White Elf he couldn’t.

For a breath, the elf before him overlapped with someone from long ago—a figure dancing in snowfall, the only one in the world, brighter than any white flake.

If the deep of the Aether Sea holds another world, then how are that “he” and “she” now?

“Forget it. Since you’re here, enjoy yourself these days.” He waved at the horizon where gulls stitched white lines. “The gathering starts tomorrow. I came early. When everyone arrives, it’ll be lively.”

A sandy ball came arcing from the distance while his mood was still dim as a cloud. Smack. At the last instant, he raised a hand and blocked the incoming “weapon.”

“Huh, what’s wrong? Don’t stop on my account. Keep cuddling your White Elf over there.” A girl in a floral dress strolled toward him, the brim of a straw hat shadowing her face, twin black ponytails swaying like ribbons in the sea wind.

For a heartbeat, Ouyang froze, not faking it, but struck still like driftwood in surf.

“You… you came…”

Only after a long moment did he manage a sentence, bland as lukewarm water.

“Yup. If I didn’t, someone’s harem would be bursting at the seams.”

Jiling’s eyes curved with a smile that wasn’t quite a smile as she looked at Ouyang, and weighed Anatasya as if testing a blade’s edge. Under that glance, Anatasya’s pupils tightened like ice cracking. She ducked behind Ouyang, small hands pinching his hem.

“Don’t scare her…” Feeling the tremor against his back, Ouyang sighed. Jiling wasn’t ready to let it go. “What? You defending her now? I haven’t even done anything. When did I scare her? You’re such a soft-hearted player…”

Ouyang almost spat blood, temper flashing like lightning over the sea. This girl’s venomous tongue was infamous. Back in the orphanage, he’d tasted it often.

“Nonsense. When did I have a bursting harem? When did I get ‘soft’ with everyone?” He wanted to shout, I’m being framed here. Right now Xi was his wife in name. Count Jiling, his childhood friend, and that made two. If you stretched it to include Anatasya, that was three, tops.

Look at Morris, with dozens of girls orbiting him like moons. That’s a harem. And hasn’t he, Ouyang, already had enough blood on his hands, women dead by his doing direct or indirect? The type who goes weak at the knees at any skirt, can’t take another step, then stumbles into a “fated” meet-cute—entangled with everyone from silver-haired dowagers to wide-eyed ingénues—that’s what you call promiscuous.

He didn’t argue, though. He never beat her in a spat. Not once, from childhood on.

Every time, Jiling would stand there, enjoying his mortified face, laughing until she clutched her stomach. Today was no different. Seeing his livid expression, she burst out laughing on the spot.

That familiar gesture, that familiar laughter—it all felt like yesterday.