The subsequent jump through space-time didn't cause much of a stir, but the one after that dropped the two of them into a pitch-black stretch of starry sky.
After identifying the approximate era through the celestial tracks, Evenheiler frowned slightly.
It was currently 3952 AD, the year of his birth, but the location where they had landed was far from the Capital Star.
"The point where we landed traced a line in space. It has a slight curvature, but the target direction should be..." Evenheiler looked back toward the distance. "...the Origin Star System."
Lei Ting nodded in agreement but said nothing.
"What’s wrong?" Evenheiler asked. He was prepared to hear a stiff, formal response.
"It’s a bit of a pity," Lei Ting said. "I thought I’d be able to see you as a child too... Honestly, isn’t this a bit unfair?"
Evenheiler raised an eyebrow. He felt a mix of surprise and joy—at the hint of a familiar flavor revealed in those words.
"I think you can take off the blindfold now," he suggested tentatively.
Lei Ting was silent for a moment before saying, "...No."
Evenheiler’s heart sank. He asked softly, "Why?"
"It’s cooler this way," Lei Ting said.
"..."
"...Huh?"
Evenheiler froze on the spot.
"I said, it’s cooler this way. Don’t you think?" Lei Ting asked back with total seriousness.
Then, maintaining that deadpan expression, he brushed past the stunned Evenheiler and flew through the starry sky toward a distant planet.
As they drew closer, he realized that the planet was actually the 'Third Planet of the New Solar System,' but an earlier version of it.
"The New Solar System in 3952 AD..." said Evenheiler, who had caught up. "...My parents and Essengard—it seems they took a trip here once. I saw it when I was looking through the family travel records."
As he spoke, he kept his eyes on Lei Ting, looking happy yet somewhat incredulous.
"Family travel records..."
Lei Ting thought to himself, once again sensing Evenheiler’s past obsession with the idea of traveling alone through the stars.
"Let’s go take a look," he said. "I can sense Espers fighting. At least A-rank."
"This person’s way of utilizing energy is significantly different from standard Federation education... they’re an outsider."
An outside A-rank Esper engaged in combat on a fringe planet?
Evenheiler was surprised. He didn't have time to ponder whether Lei Ting’s rapid change in temperament was reliable or not before following him down.
They landed on the planet's surface. The landscape was similar to how it would be decades later, yet different. The natural scenery was familiar, but the man-made structures were not.
The side of the planet directly facing them was an ocean, but Evenheiler vaguely remembered that when he was planning his trip... no, even further back, at the time of Lei Ting’s birth, this place was actually a desert.
This made his expression turn serious.
Following the direction of his perception, Lei Ting led him into the sea, quickly finding the target location.
There was a vortex hidden on the seabed. Suspended and fixed at its center was a shuttle-shaped building, with a projected advertisement outside displaying the words 'Vortex Tide.'
The building itself had a strange form, and its outer shell was a peculiar blend of blue crystal and metal. Lei Ting felt a flicker of vigilance because of this, but after sensing it, he found that there was no energy within the crystal; only basic chemical elements existed.
He silently cautioned himself not to think of Kaligan every time he saw blue crystals. Even if there were survivors of Kaligan who had lived to this day, they wouldn't be so destitute as to run an underwater hotel on this planet.
But... 'the seabed.'
Lei Ting knew better than anyone that decades later, the Third Planet of the New Solar System would have vast stretches of desert. The largest of them, and the only desert basin, was located exactly here.
He hadn't looked closely at the details of Evenheiler’s travel plans back then. Regarding the information mentioned about the 'Third Planet of the New Solar System,' he hadn't even opened it out of his sheer familiarity with the planet.
But... something was definitely fishy here.
Lei Ting sensed everything around him, frowning in thought. Then he said to Evenheiler, "I sense Essengard’s presence. Your parents might be here too."
"..." Evenheiler opened his mouth, his speech uncharacteristically faltering at the start.
His expression changed rapidly. Strange feelings of longing, guilt, and loathing flashed by, but before he could make a choice, an anomaly occurred.
If, in the era following this, Evenheiler or Lei Ting had carefully consulted the records of the Third Planet of the New Solar System, they would have seen that on a certain day in 3952 AD, an explosion occurred at an underwater hotel named 'Vortex Tide.'
Force fields collapsed, lives were lost, and bodies and architectural structures turned to sand, crumbling silently. Tens of thousands of tons of seawater poured in, the heavy pressure crushing everything...
But the descent of a silver-white starlight was faster than anything. It swept several unconscious but still living people out of the collapsing ruins.
Lei Ting glanced at them—a teenage Essengard, a handsome blonde man, and a white-haired woman who was slightly taller than the man. The three of them wore the same style of clothing, clearly having come together.
Besides them, there were a few scattered others, including guests of different races or clearly from different cultural zones, as well as staff members in uniform.
Afterward, another figure slowly rose from the sandy ruins.
It was a mass of violent sand, clearly the culprit behind all this.
The matter it had crushed into sand—or rather, a type of quartz crystal—swirled around it. For the moment, it made no move, as if wary of Evenheiler’s starlight.
Evenheiler did not react to it. He simply scanned the people beside him with his gaze, which finally fixed on the blonde man’s face.
"...Ctreern Corn..." he murmured the name, his voice inevitably undergoing a slight, unpleasant change.
Ctreern Corn, the former head of Corn Pharmaceuticals, Evenheiler Corn’s father—the man who had caused the first half of his life to be filled with pain and oppression from the very beginning.
Exploitation, manipulation, mental control, drug modification... simply put, when it came to matters involving Evenheiler, Ctreern belonged to the type of person who resolutely refused to act like a human being.
Even though those events were long past and Evenheiler had long since let go of the past and stopped dwelling on it daily, such an unexpected encounter still left him with a less-than-pleasant expression.
But even so, he didn't harbor the slightest thought of harming these people; he just looked much more conflicted.
"Take them and leave." Lei Ting floated forward, his eyes narrowing slightly as he spoke with a brief, regal air. "In case our stay here is too short, they need to leave first."
Whether it was a powerful burst of energy or a prolonged period of subtle energy activity, it would trigger the universe's self-repair and mending, leading to a new transfer.
The best way to solve this problem was to 'kill the enemy easily in one go.' However, in their weakened state, Evenheiler, who could simulate 'stillness,' was more suited to protecting the victims as they surfaced. As for the task of 'killing the enemy'...
...That was one of the tasks Lei Ting was best at.
The other was 'fighting, and then winning.'
The silver-white stardust swept the people upward, disappearing before long. The sand-based Esper, unable to find anyone to strike, seemed to sense something was wrong or felt agitated—it churned its 'body' in the sea, and as brownish-yellow energy surged, the sand seemed to increase out of thin air.
No, it was converting other substances in the sea... and in the process of conversion, the missing elements would be filled by the energy it continuously expended.
[The sea level is rising.] Evenheiler’s calm voice sounded in Lei Ting’s ear. [It seems the desert basin was formed because of this... a massive amount of sand deposited on the seabed, enough to form a desert, but not yet enough to fill this hole.]
[However, its remaining life force shouldn't be enough for it to cause such a large disturbance, Lei Ting. Did you underperform?]
Lei Ting’s expression remained unchanged. He casually raised a hand, catching a whirling, scattered beam of brownish-yellow energy in his palm. His figure abruptly manifested within the seawater, and the sand-based Esper’s overwhelming deluge of sand surged forward—
[Are you referring to the 'Commander' suddenly dropping from the sky and smashing a black hole onto my head?] he asked back, then answered: [Probability too low, will not be considered.]
"..." Evenheiler stopped responding to Lei Ting. He clenched his fist, starting to feel that this guy was becoming truly punchable now that he showed signs of recovery.
But soon, he lowered his hand and let out a non-existent sigh. A cloud of brilliant stardust energy was exhaled by him, turning into a sky full of starlight that sprinkled onto the sunlit beach.
Beside him, a person slowly woke up.
It was the person he least wanted to see: Ctreern Corn.
Evenheiler frowned.
Although the interaction of energy could help others see the time travelers, he didn't want to have any communication with his biological father at all. Therefore, he quickly knocked out his father—who wasn't that old yet—without even letting the man see his silhouette.
But at the same time, he froze, his expression gradually twisting until it reached the level of a pupillary earthquake.
"Ugh..." On the other side, the white-haired woman also began to wake up.
She had a pair of terrifying eyes with deep black sclera and crimson irises, and the irises themselves were a strange concentric double-pupil style, with the inner ring lighter in color than the outer ring.
This left Evenheiler horrified. As the woman quickly rushed to Ctreern’s side to check his condition, he stumbled back two steps, beginning to doubt if he had seen wrongly, or if this woman simply wasn't his mother...
...No, wait.
She’s an Alpha, he thought. Even with a pair of eyes inscribed with the words 'Soul's Depths' or 'Abyssal Demon,' she was indeed an Alpha...
In the void, his gaze slowly moved, landing once again on his 'father's' face.
So, the lifeform he had just sensed, residing in Ctreern Corn’s abdomen... the one about to be born...
Was it... not... a... delusion... then???
***
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