In the early hours of the morning, a storm swept across the snowy plains, whipping the accumulated white snow into the sky.
[Power output rising: [%] — [%]]
Kiana, sprinting across the snowfield, let out a muffled grunt. Her rapidly advancing figure faltered for a moment before accelerating once more.
She had been running like this for over ten hours, her face already showing signs of fatigue and weariness.
The side effects of the Spirit Awakening Key were obvious. When the wearer activated its second rated power output, the core's power would break the [%] limit, soaring directly above 0.1%.
At this point, the Key of Evolution would unlock parts of the body's genetic locks, allowing for a powerful burst fueled by overdrafting the body's reserves.
The only problem was—the Honkai energy within the core couldn't fully cover the consumption required for this burst, and the cost of [Evolution] itself was enormous.
Even if the human body only needed to pay a small fraction of it, it was still an astronomical figure.
This self-borne cost ratio was equivalent to the Spirit Awakening Key's activation power. The higher the power output, the greater the toll on the user's body.
Currently, the 1% operating power was already making Kiana feel pangs of hunger.
Fortunately, Kiana usually ate quite a lot. Although she didn't store much fat, her internal energy reserves were relatively ample.
This was also why Otto had originally stipulated that only Kiana and Kallen Kaslana could use the Spirit Awakening Key. Anyone else attempting to use it would be instantly drained dry.
Besides the less immediately visible drawbacks like hunger and energy depletion, another side effect made its presence felt far too strongly.
Cells couldn't instantly provide the energy needed for [Evolution]. Thus, they resorted to overdrafting, dissolving existing organelles within the cell—nuclei, mitochondria, etc.—converting them into enough energy to fuel the evolution.
This meant that as soon as the Spirit Awakening Key was activated, the user's cells began to age rapidly, die, and then regenerate to replace the lost ones...
This resulted in intense pain throughout the user's body once the power output increased significantly.
That was why Kiana had grunted earlier. However, it wasn't entirely a bad thing... at least she didn't have to worry about falling asleep mid-run, right?
Kiana's gaze remained fixed on the tracks. She had followed them all the way back, constantly muttering that sentence under her breath.
She didn't know exactly where she needed to go, but she knew she just had to keep running along the tracks...
Keep running... she would find him eventually...
...
This was a world of pure white... allowing no speck of dirt to exist.
White mist enveloped everything here. Mournful whispers drifted continuously from the distance, reaching the ears of everyone within.
Kiana didn't know when she had stumbled into this place. By the time she realized it, the surrounding white mist had already embraced her.
The dense fog in the air made it somewhat difficult for Kiana, who had stopped to catch her breath, to breathe. She waved her hand impatiently, trying to disperse the mist in front of her and widen her field of vision.
"Why is the fog so thick here..." Kiana complained, shaking her head.
The mist condensed on the surface of the Spirit Awakening Key, as well as on Kiana's hair and exposed skin.
Kiana lifted her arm; a thin white film had already formed on it. A slightly larger movement would cause it to coalesce into droplets of water.
For some reason, Kiana instinctively felt uncomfortable with these droplets, as if she strongly wished to avoid this situation.
"So strange..." Kiana pondered for a moment, then came back to her senses and began to slowly feel her way through the white mist. "Keep going, keep going... I forgot..."
"Someone..."
...
Dawn broke...
After the long night, the long-awaited sunlight finally descended upon this pure white land, beginning to disperse the mist.
Although the sunlight wouldn't last long before setting again, it at least provided a brief window of time without mist cover.
In the center of the gradually dissipating white mist, in the small square before the great stone, the "person" who had been kneeling there for an unknown amount of time suddenly showed an extremely subtle tremor.
Eyelashes laden with tiny water droplets quivered. A single condensed drop slid from the corner of his eye, tracing a path down his mist-covered face, growing larger as it went, before falling from his chin into the palm of his hand.
The distant whispers no longer echoed in his ears. Instead, a female voice, muttering incessantly, faintly reached him.
Very young... very familiar... yet very strange...
...also very annoying...
The endlessly repeated sentence grew closer, the thick mist unable to block the sound.
Gradually, he opened his eyes a sliver, letting the dislodged water droplets slide down his face. Amidst the greyish-white surroundings, he lifted his head, accurately pinpointing the direction the voice came from.
His stiff body made soft crack sounds as it moved. Muscles unused for so long protested the sudden movement, yet simultaneously anticipated a return to full activity.
And the [Hope] within him, dormant for so long, suddenly sprouted anew at this moment.
The mist around him instantly scattered, revealing an empty space, only to be filled again by encroaching mist from all directions.
"Phew..." On the other side, Kiana finally sighed in relief as she watched the mist recede. She had never hated the color white as much as she did today.
White was everywhere. White above, white ahead, white to the sides, and still white when she looked down... Uh, this white was a bit different...
She hopped anxiously in place a couple of times, shaking off a small puddle of condensed mist from her body. She quickly flicked her hands and her two pigtails behind her before continuing forward.
And still, the ground before her was white.
Kiana's mouth twitched. She kept moving.
The empty white village held no sign of life, nor emitted any sound, like a place of death.
A large section of the narrow, rough cement road had inexplicably collapsed, forming a concave depression in the center, as if something incredibly heavy had smashed into the middle, pulverizing it.
Kiana swallowed hard.
It had to be said, a place like this was truly creepy... dilapidated, old, and deserted, looking just like a ghost village...
Could the person she was looking for be in a place like this?
Maybe it's only normal to find him in such a bizarre place... If it weren't bizarre, how could that situation have happened?
Just as Kiana decided to conduct a thorough search here, her peripheral vision suddenly caught a fleeting glimpse of fire.