[Amelia POV]
If she had been powerful enough, she would have done everything she could to help Melissia find a way out of her current situation.
Unfortunately...
She wasn’t.
"Me... only an Early Saint Rank... Even if I wanted to help, there isn’t anything I can do... not with how slowly I’m growing..."
Among everyone she knew from the academy, she was by far the weakest, and there was a reason for that.
Her powers were deeply connected to Fate itself, making her cultivation far more difficult than ordinary cultivators.
Although she didn’t suffer from the same limitations Arthur, her grandfather, had once carried, the Fate of the Universe itself had been shattered, and that alone had greatly slowed her growth.
A broken Fate could never return to the way it once was.
It could only slowly adapt to the countless changes brought upon the Universe, rebuilding its own order over time. Unfortunately, ten years was nowhere near enough for such a change to take place.
There aren’t many people from Starlight Academy that I still know personally...
Melissia... Grace... Ray... They’re the only ones who have truly become powerful. Elysia, Ethan, Lyra, and Irvin never survived the Catastrophe, while those who did survive either lacked the talent or the strength to reach those heights.
Even if there were others capable of helping, she had no connection with them and couldn’t simply ask them for assistance.
"I could ask Ash for help..."
She quietly muttered before shaking her head.
"...But I’d rather not get involved with him at all. Just remembering how I treated him when we were children is embarrassing enough."
Back then, she had been immature and childish, something she now understood all too well. Thinking back to those memories made her instinctively made her blush in embarrassment, yet after a few seconds, a quiet chuckle escaped her lips.
"In a way... those were good times too."
Her smile slowly faded as she turned back toward the rain outside the window.
"Nowadays... everything just feels so empty. I don’t have a goal, and there’s nothing I truly look forward to anymore. It feels like life is simply moving forward... while I’m just going along with it."
In truth, it wasn’t that nothing interesting ever happened around her.
She had simply lost interest in everything.
Even the things she had once enjoyed no longer brought her any excitement, making every passing day feel no different from the last.
Should I use my powers to see if there’s a way out of Melissia’s current predicament?
Although she hadn’t become as powerful as the others, her abilities had continued to grow over years in a quite diverse way.
She could now deliberately search for a specific future, or at the very least, one of the many possible futures that could eventually unfold.
Even so, she rarely used that power.
There was simply nothing worth looking into.
"May be though....if I can repay her kindness... even a little... then that’ll be enough."
Amelia stepped away from the window, her full figure finally coming into view. The past ten years had quietly changed her, giving her a calm and mature appearance that perfectly matched the peaceful aura surrounding her.
She looked to be in her mid-twenties. Long black hair flowed gracefully down her back in soft waves, framing a delicate face with flawless, porcelain-white skin.
Her deep blue eyes carried a quiet gentleness, yet beneath that calmness lay a faint loneliness that never seemed to disappear.
She wasn’t the kind of beauty that overwhelmed others at first glance.
Instead, the longer someone looked at her, the harder it became to look away and the urge to protect her became stronger and stronger.
Walking over to her bed, Amelia slowly sat down before lying back against the soft mattress. She closed her eyes, took a slow breath, and quietly activated her power.
**
[Eva POV]
Nothing but endless white filled Eva’s vision.
The light had engulfed the entire Inner Universe, making it impossible to see anything around her. Even with the vision she possessed, there was nothing she could make out through the overwhelming brightness.
Was the evolution successful...?
Eva wasn’t sure.
After all, she hadn’t used any catalyst for the evolution. This had only been an experiment to see whether the World Tree could evolve on its own.
Unexpectedly...
It had worked on the very first attempt.
The white light continued shining for nearly half an hour before it finally began to fade, allowing the surroundings to gradually come back into view.
The source of that light was exactly where she expected.
The tiny World Tree.
It hadn’t finished evolving yet. Instead, the little plant remained wrapped in a cocoon of pure white light, quietly continuing its transformation.
It really worked...
A faint smile appeared on Eva’s face.
The scene before her felt strangely familiar. The tiny World Tree, wrapped inside a glowing cocoon as it slowly evolved, reminded her of countless evolution scenes from the anime Ash used to watch in his previous world.
Curious, she immediately inspected it.
════════ < ANALYSIS > ════════
Name: Unknown
Status: Undergoing Evolution
Evolution Progress: Unknown
Remaining Time: Unknown
══════════════════════════════
"...I certainly wasn’t expecting this."
Eva muttered as she stared at the information before her.
It had been a long time since one of Ash’s abilities had failed to provide proper information.
Either the Tree of Origin is simply too high-ranked... or our understanding of the Runes still isn’t enough to analyze something like this.....yet.
Either way, there was nothing she could do but wait.
"That’s a shame... I was hoping it would finish instantly."
As that thought crossed her mind, another one suddenly followed.
"Speaking of evolution... my little brother should be close to finishing his as well."
At the current moment, Snow was staying with Saskia.
Although Snow was still a child, she wasn’t like a normal human child who needed someone watching over her every moment. She was already powerful and intelligent in her own right, and unlike Ash, Eric, or Eva, she walked a completely different path, Path of Dreams.
Because of the nature of her abilities, living among intelligent races was the best way for her to continue growing.
That was why they had entrusted her to Saskia.
In the City of Light, Saskia had more than enough influence to ensure Snow was well taken care of. After all, she belonged to a wealthy family.
Countless servants looked after Snow’s daily needs, and if anything unexpected happened, she could always contact them.
A few more days passed inside the Soul Space, although only a short amount of time had passed in the outside world.
"Looks like it’s time."
Eva murmured as she looked at the black cocoon, where small cracks had already begun to spread across its surface.
The sight was all too familiar to her, yet despite that, she couldn’t help but feel a little excited.
Unlike the white cocoon and white light that always accompanied the Evolution process, Eric’s case was completely different.
A black cocoon had formed around him, while an equally dark light enveloped everything around it.
This change hadn’t happened instantly, though. At the beginning, the cocoon had been white as well, but over time it had gradually transformed into the black cocoon before her.
With how busy Ash and I have been, it’s only natural that we overlooked something like this...
She had a few guesses as to why this had happened, but she wasn’t more than fifty percent confident in any of them.
CRACK!!
Eva didn’t have time to think any further as the cocoon finally shattered, bursting apart while black light scattered in every direction and gradually revealed the breathtaking figure hidden within.
Eric still possessed the body of a unicorn, yet everything about him had changed.
His body had grown noticeably larger and far more graceful, with every muscle and every curve appearing flawlessly proportioned, making him look majestic beyond words while still retaining the unmistakable form of a unicorn.
His fur was no longer white.
Instead, it had become a deep midnight-black coat that constantly reflected countless shifting colors beneath the surrounding light, creating the illusion that an entire galaxy had been woven into every strand of fur covering his body.
The familiar rainbow-colored mane had disappeared completely.
In its place flowed silver-black, flame-like hair that drifted freely through the air without the slightest breeze, continuously dissolving into countless tiny particles before silently reforming again as though caught within an endless cycle.
Even his horn had undergone a complete transformation.
The elegant spiraling horn had become completely smooth, its color changing into a deep obsidian black that shimmered with faint silver streaks flowing beneath its surface like liquid starlight, while its very presence carried an indescribable sense of mystery.
His rainbow-colored eyes had vanished as well.
In their place remained a pair of pitch-black eyes where countless tiny stars quietly drifted through endless darkness, making it feel as though anyone looking into them wasn’t staring into a pair of eyes at all, but into an endless universe that had existed since the beginning of time.
The peaceful aura that had always surrounded Eric no longer existed, and in its place remained only an indescribable emptiness that neither radiated pressure nor divine power, yet somehow made his very existence feel detached from the world itself.
Seeing Eric’s completely transformed appearance, Eva could do nothing but stare in stunned silence.
...Is that still a unicorn...?
**