Seeing the admiration shining in Shuanghua’s eyes, Yvette had to fight to keep a straight face, stopping the corners of her mouth from curling up too visibly.
Being worshiped by your own grand-disciple was only natural for a Grandmaster. Nothing to be smug about, she told herself.
She was just casually happy. Very casual. Mm, casual.
Right after that, thinking of sothing else, her mood dipped again. She sighed and said, “Looks like we’re not going to get anything out of today.”
Shuanghua had been quietly focused on the hand Yvette was using to hold her own, hesitating over whether she should let go now that the path had appeared. Hearing what Yvette said, she blinked, then finally registered what Grandmaster was talking about.
Inside the frost-mist barrier lay the ruins of the War of Divine Judgnt. On the surface, it should have ant there was so unspeakable secret within, hence the need for a barrier jointly laid down by a True God for protection. But now, with “protection” more likely being a trap set for Tertia, didn’t that imply that the ruins of the War of Divine Judgnt inside actually didn’t hold anything important?
Which, of course, was only to be expected. After a war between gods, there was no way the True Gods wouldn’t clean up the battlefield, no way they wouldn’t take any aningful, valuable spoils back to their divine realms.
This wasn’t an open-world ga. Why would they deliberately leave so exploration rewards sitting on the map just for you?
Even so, the realization still filled Shuanghua with crushing disappointnt, like the last flicker of hope had been pinched out.
She stared blankly ahead, her long white lashes lowered, like a doll that had lost all its vitality.
Yvette led her forward through the cotton-candy-like white tunnel until the light at the end gradually swelled, revealing yet another gray-white world of ice and snow.
There were none of the towering architectural ruins one might expect from a battlefield of gods, no crisscrossing streets—there weren’t even any large chunks of ice or rock. Underfoot was glass-smooth ice, and beneath the ice was an even layer of powder, like ultracold snow sand.
Countless layers of ice and gravel evenly covered everything, forming a monotonous, almost flat plain that stretched off to a distant horizon where it rged with the cold mist overhead, leaving nothing but emptiness and desolation between heaven and earth.
In the silence, Yvette extended her ntal power downward, delving through the ice into the depths of the sand sea until she found so slightly larger fragnts.
These fragnts weren’t made of ordinary materials. So were alloys, so were frozen organic matter. In a very small number of special particles, Yvette even found the nearly obliterated traces of nano-scale mana circuits—so worn they were almost unrecognizable, yet partially preserved by the ice.
It was obvious that, in the distant past—very likely ten thousand years ago—this had once been a city of an Ultra-ancient Civilization. Given how remote the location was, it might also have been so kind of large-scale base or industrial zone.
But now, everything had been reduced to powder. Even the marks of ti had been covered over by an even more thorough annihilation.
Yvette glanced at Shuanghua. The white-haired girl had already shaken off her initial dazed despair and was now quietly observing their surroundings, her mood still heavy.
Yvette said, “Even if we haven’t found any clues, that doesn’t prove Rosalyn is definitely dead.”
Shuanghua could hear that Grandmaster was trying to comfort her, and forced out a stiff smile. “You’re right.”
It was the first ti Yvette had seen Shuanghua smile. Even though it was forced, it was still beautiful, like a plum blossom blooming after the rain.
She nodded and withdrew her gaze, checking the ground as she walked. After another ten-plus minutes, she simply lifted off, flying with Shuanghua over this gray-and-white world of ice and gravel while constantly probing for secrets below with her ntal power.
Unfortunately, the battlefield cleanup done by the True Gods was, as expected, impeccable. Even with all the bizarre thods Yvette now had at her disposal, piecing a city that had been turned into powder back together was asking too much—she didn’t have any way to control ti.
After traversing the entire ruin of the War of Divine Judgnt and making a full circuit, then returning to the entrance of the frost-mist barrier, neither Yvette nor Shuanghua had managed to extract any useful information from the endless sea of sand beneath the ice.
Seeing the frustration on Shuanghua’s face, Yvette said, “It’s not like we got nothing at all. Do you rember that legend about the depths of the Snowfields? The one that says the entrance to Eden’s Garden is hidden here.”
Shuanghua asked, “Did you find sothing?”
“Not a discovery—more about the site itself,” Yvette said. “This sea of sand used to be a ruin of an Ultra-ancient Civilization. But why did the War of Divine Judgnt have to happen here? Who chose this place—the Witch of Finality, or the gods? Before it beca a sea of sand, was there sothing here, from ten thousand years ago, that had a crucial connection to the War of Divine Judgnt or to the advent of Finality?”
Shuanghua looked at her, thoughtful, but she quickly shook her head and said, “Grandmaster, I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. But I don’t think Rosalyn and the Witch of Finality necessarily fell together. Since this is the entrance to Eden’s Garden, maybe what actually happened is that the two of them went to Eden’s Garden together,” Yvette said.
She actually had more guesses, but they weren’t confird—and weren’t suitable to tell Shuanghua.
She wondered: if the tilines of the two worlds really were ssed up, then for this sand sea that the True Gods had wiped clean to have been chosen as the battlefield for the War of Divine Judgnt—was it because there really was such a thing as an “entrance to Eden’s Garden” here?
Perhaps it was so piece of technology from an Ultra-ancient Civilization—so kind of spaceti device that had caused the tiline dislocation between the two sides, maybe even sothing tied to the Remnant Abyss.
And after the War of Divine Judgnt ended, had that spaceti device been claid by one of the True Gods? Or had it been destroyed in the fight as well? If it had been destroyed, did similar devices still exist elsewhere in other Ultra-ancient Ruins?
It all sounded like daydreaming—but if it really involved ti, even crossing worlds, that would be wonderful, she thought.
Just like in so many stories about ti jumps in film and literature—so long as you found that perfect worldline, everything would work out in the end.
And what she needed to do was believe that such a possibility existed.
You could probably call this trip a failure in practical terms, but at least one knot in her heart had been loosened. Yvette and Shuanghua went back through the cotton-like frost-mist corridor toward the outside world.
“Grandmaster, now that you’ve taken control of the barrier, won’t the True Gods notice?” Shuanghua asked, still a bit worried as she looked at the surrounding mist.
“After modifying so of the barrier’s underlying runes, it’ll keep sending out normal data. As long as the True Gods don’t actively inspect it while we’re in here, they won’t notice,” Yvette said lightly. “Of course, even if they happen to peek in, with here, they still won’t be able to see the truth.”
“Grandmaster, you’re amazing,” Shuanghua said sincerely.
Yvette smiled.
Before she’d actually seen the frost-mist barrier, she’d spun out all sorts of conjectures about it, guessing that it might be so special divine art—sothing where brute forcing or rune hacking would both end up with the sa result: being stared at by the True Gods. In other words, she had already ntally prepared herself for a run-in with them. Worst case, she’d grab Shuanghua and run.
But after examining it properly, she’d been surprised to discover that although the frost-mist barrier did contain a few unknown divine-arts and faith-magic rune modules, its frawork was still a ga-scale rune group of about a million units that she could understand.
The True Gods had only rebooted this ga-scale array and added a few “plugin modules” at the rune-compilation level, then repurposed it. And the quality of the work was on the rough side.
From that, she could more or less confirm three things.
First, the frost-mist barrier was not created by the True Gods. It was, with very high probability, a legacy of an Ultra-ancient Civilization. The True Gods had simply restarted this ga-scale array and modified it for their own use.
Second, the True Gods did understand a bit of rune-compilation tech—but not much. Technically, never mind comparing them to her; even in the Origin Civilization, they’d probably have been just mid-tier rune compilers.
Third, the rune-compilation thod used in this barrier was clearly different from the one Yvette used, the one that ca from the Origin Civilization.
Since all logic ultimately converged, Yvette couldn’t tell which system had co first. The only thing she could be sure of was that the Ultra-ancient Civilization was not the Origin Civilization—or at least, not the Origin Civilization she knew.
She didn’t know why, and couldn’t be bothered to guess.
In any case, all mysteries would be answered soday in the future, when she stord the Ancestral Holy Spirit’s divine kingdom and rescued Dugrabi.
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