Chapter 191: A Forgotten Past
Hearing Evan’s words, the girl looked at him for a moment, her expression calm as she studied him before finally speaking.
"Hmm... you’re acting weird. You sure you didn’t hit your head or something?"
She was no longer sitting against the tree. She had already walked over and was now standing much closer to him before crouching down, looking him straight in the eyes.
"I’m not acting wei-"
Evan, still sitting on the ground, found himself at a complete loss for where to look with her standing this close.
She was tall, well above average, only a little shorter than him if they stood side by side, but not by much. Her white shirt covered everything, yet from this angle it couldn’t help but reveal a glimpse of her neckline.
It wasn’t particularly revealing, just an ordinary neckline, but her proportions were anything but modest, making the outline beneath the fabric impossible to completely hide, no matter how much the shirt tried.
’Get a grip, Evan. This isn’t the time to get distracted by that,’ he told himself, forcing his focus back to the situation at hand.
She must have caught the flicker of unease on his face, because she looked at him with even more confusion than before.
"Yep. Definitely weird," she said, flicking him on the forehead with two fingers before straightening back up.
Evan felt the flick, it was nowhere near strong enough to actually hurt him, his body was far too durable for something so trivial, and yet the irritation of it landed anyway.
He reached up to rub the spot, but the instant his hand moved, his mind lurched, as if the ground beneath his thoughts had suddenly given way.
Before he could even register what was happening, a flood of memories tore through him. Not foreign ones, quite the opposite. They were achingly familiar, old memories buried so deep they’d been all but forgotten.
Pieces of his life came rushing back, pieces from before his reincarnation, from before he’d died in this world, or at least before what he’d always believed had been his death.
’This... how did I forget all of this?’ he thought, even as his mind kept sorting through the resurfacing memories at a staggering pace.
The whole thing took less than a second, the same second in which he’d been flicked on the forehead.
When he’d reincarnated, the last thing he remembered from his old life was starving to death on the frozen pavement of some alley in NY. He’d always believed that was the moment he died.
He didn’t believe that anymore. New memories were surfacing now, memories of how he hadn’t died there after all. He’d been saved.
’But how?’ That was the question that rose the instant he finished processing it all.
He could sense there was more, but he couldn’t reach it, couldn’t access those memories properly, same as he couldn’t recall how he’d ended up here, in this place, in this moment.
Just as he was on the verge of sinking further into his own thoughts, he noticed a hand extended toward him.
It was the girl’s. She was watching him again with that same carefree look from before.
He stared at the hand, confused, clearly unsure what she wanted from him, something she picked up on immediately, judging by the tired look that crossed her face.
"What? Get up, come on. It’s almost time," she said, only confusing him further.
"Time for what?" he asked, taking her hand and pulling himself to his feet.
At his question, she looked at him again with that same weary expression, as if she genuinely didn’t know how to respond to something so obvious.
"For what? The entrance exam, obviously. You kept asking me to sign you up for it. Don’t tell me you’re backing out now."
’Exam?’
Evan felt even more lost.
The more questions he asked, the more questions seemed to appear.
In the end, he decided to simply go with the flow and see where all of this led.
As far as he could tell, this was a dream, after all, the world he’d known, at least the one he remembered from before his reincarnation, no longer existed.
Countless cycles had reshaped it into the world where he had eventually reincarnated.
So finding himself here, like this, was undeniably strange. He wasn’t sure why this dream, if that’s what it was, had taken this shape, but with no idea how to wake himself up, he decided to simply let it play out.
Partly because he had no better option.
But also because he had a feeling that, by following the course of events here, he might finally regain access to the rest of his memories, the ones he couldn’t seem to reach, yet could somehow feel were still there, waiting to be unlocked.
With that thought in mind, he allowed the girl walking ahead to lead the way.
From the moment he’d first seen her, he’d unconsciously compared her to Seraphine.
Perhaps it really was her.
A much younger version of her.
He couldn’t help but wonder whether that, too, was simply a creation of his own mind...
Ecco lo sviluppo in inglese, continuando dal punto in cui ci eravamo fermati:
Or whether it had something to do with the memories that had just resurfaced.
***
[Abyss - Lost City of the Dead]
The City, dark as ever, stretched out beneath its eternal gloom.
This was the outskirts, not too different in appearance from the rest of the city, save for one detail: at the edges, where the streets gave way to open ground, a thick, violet-black mist wrapped around the entire perimeter like an impassable wall.
Beyond that veil, nothing could be seen.
But something, at that very moment, was happening right there, a scene unusual for this dark, silent place, one that a certain being was watching with no small amount of interest.
On the roof of one of the houses at the edge of the outskirts, a feminine figure stood tall and graceful in her bearing, arms crossed, long blonde hair falling past her shoulders, a face of striking, almost divine beauty, and two emerald eyes tracking the sight of five desperate silhouettes sprinting frantically along the outskirts below.
"Well, now this is an unexpected sight," she said, her voice calm, almost melodic.
It was Seraphine.