Quickly making sense of her situation, Natasha sighed and silently moved the visit to the Taixu Martial Arts School a little higher up her priority list.
Like Himeko, the moment she saw Heliopolis Life Sciences Pharmaceutical, she realized its special significance to her. For Natasha, nowhere else in Sapphire City was more special than Heliopolis. She had never even taken a mission in this city.
Extrapolating from her own experience, Natasha easily deduced that the others had also appeared in places that held special meaning for them.
This conclusion, ironically, was harder for Fu Hua to reach. For her, the Taixu Martial Arts School was "home," a place where her presence was completely normal.
For her to appear at the Taixu Martial Arts School was an ordinary, even expected, and inevitable event.
Was there any need to ponder the inevitable? It wasn't like the others had set up homes in Sapphire City.
So, even if Fu Hua had considered that the others might have also appeared here, she couldn't figure out where Natasha and Kallen might be.
But the first thought for everyone else—except Kallen—was to find Fu Hua at the Taixu Martial Arts School.
After placing the Taixu Martial Arts School at the top of her list, Natasha chose the same course of action as Himeko.
After briefly handling the matters at hand and issuing some commands to the terminal here, Natasha deleted the contact information for Vakh that she had just entered.
Carrying only a few simple supplies, she set off toward the Taixu Martial Arts School.
—
Ana Schariac felt she must be terribly unlucky.
The Great Eruption had left a deep impression on everyone. Even though many had lived in a daze before Fire Moth's arrival, they remembered every single day after the Eruption with crystal clarity.
No one forgot how they survived, nor what they did to stay alive.
And everyone was fortunate that Fire Moth had arrived early—so early that the world had not yet descended into cannibalism.
The afterglow of civilization still restrained everyone's reason and morality. Those who were already dark-hearted sewer rats had completely shed their dignity the moment the Great Eruption struck.
Those who would do anything to live didn't even have the courage to face the Honkai. Their only chance of survival was the ephemeral thing called luck.
Unfortunately, luck was always just a self-consolation for the wicked. Fools whose minds were so feeble they could only think in terms of "conspiracies" didn't even have the ability to grasp luck.
All they could do was categorize everything they couldn't understand as an "infallible conspiracy" they firmly believed in, and then use it to judge others, living in constant fear.
But none of this seemed to have anything to do with Ana. She didn't know how she had survived until now, let alone why the world had developed so differently from her memories.
Her memory seemed to have cut off six months ago. The last scene was a white monster, like a divine creation, charging toward her.
At that time, she had subconsciously shielded a passerby, foolishly hoping to do something with her Schariac power.
What could she possibly do? She wasn't Lady Cecilia, nor did she have super-equipment custom-made by Future City. As a mere mortal, she should have been casually crushed by that absurd monster.
No, wait, the fact that I even stood up is the most absurd part, isn't it?
As the least talented child of her generation in the Schariac family, how could she stand up to a monster that looked so invincible?
Ugh... I must have been scared out of my mind.
Or perhaps it was because she admired Lady Cecilia so much that she was fantasizing about being just like her, standing up to save everyone in a moment of crisis.
She must have run away in fear back then, and then... the body's self-preservation mechanism, yes, that's it. It must have blurred her memory of running away.
Which is why she woke up, for no apparent reason, six months later, on a wooden sailing ship that could fly through the sky.
Huh?
Something's not right with this picture.
Why was a wooden ship like this flying in the sky? Why did a flying ship still need sails to steer? And why was she on such a ship?
Have I, Ana Schariac, finally been isekai'd to a fantasy world of magic and wonder?
That can't be right!
Wait, why is a woman who looks exactly like Lady Cecilia walking in?!
That's even more not right!!
The moment she saw Cecilia, Ana completely dismissed the possibility of being transported to another world. After all, meeting someone you know in another world was something that could only happen in dreams.
So what was the deal with this ship floating in the sky? Had the world finally gone so crazy that she couldn't understand it anymore?
Feeling as if the whole world had abandoned her after just a single nap, Ana didn't even register what Cecilia was saying. She only remembered Cecilia taking care of her and saying something about how "hard she had worked."
Wait, what had she worked hard on?
Why did Lady Cecilia sound as if she had just done something incredible, completed a very difficult mission?
It was as if she had just defeated some great Honkai Demon King...
Huh? What did she mean, the reason they won this battle was thanks to her final move?
Was I in a battle just now? Me? Fighting alongside Lady Cecilia?
Ana felt she must really be dreaming. How else could something so ridiculous happen?
However, reality told her she was not dreaming.
When she got off Noah's Ark, Ana was still in a daze, trying to find the discrepancy between dream and reality to prove to herself that this was all a dream, that the world wasn't this magical.
And so she stumbled into Fire Moth, saw everyone looking at her with reverence, yet being kept at arm's length by her.
In that moment, Ana suddenly felt that dreams weren't so bad after all. Wasn't this what she wanted?
The recognition of others, a status comparable to Lady Cecilia...
Ana was no god suspended in the clouds, looking down on the masses. On the contrary, her desires were so mundane that they were out of place in the entire Schariac family.
All she wanted was to catch up to those before her, to her ancestors, to Lady Cecilia. She just wanted others to acknowledge her more, instead of being disappointed and sighing at her mediocre talent.
But after a brief moment of daze, Ana, pulling herself out of her elation, suddenly became terrified.
Virtue not matching position... Was her ability truly a match for everyone's earnest admiration and expectation?
Did she really have the ability to live up to everyone's expectations?
The terrified Ana didn't know if she could do it. She subconsciously felt she couldn't.
She had no memory of "success." She didn't know why she was so highly regarded, where this strong expectation came from, or what she had gone through to stand beside Lady Cecilia.
She was like a woodcutter who had wandered into the mountains and was awestruck by the immortals' game of chess. But it was the immortals who were playing; the axe handle had rotted away. She was still the same old her.
It was the world around her that had changed. She hadn't changed at all, not even her memories.
The terrified Ana finally found her "residence" after leaving the ship and awkwardly learned some basic information about "this world" from the Spark.
It seemed she really had traveled through time!
But it wasn't the world that had changed, it was time. She had traveled directly from six months ago to the present, skipping all the intermediate steps.
Or rather, she had amnesia. She had been hit in the head during the battle Lady Cecilia mentioned and had forgotten all her memories of the past six months.
Yes, that makes sense! It must have been a brutal battle to cause amnesia. Probably only Lady Cecilia could protect herself in a fight of that intensity. I'm still too...
What did they mean, Lady Cecilia's daughter, that Kiana, kicked the seabed to pieces?
What did they mean, Lady Cecilia's second daughter froze the boundless ocean with a wave of her hand?
She must still be dreaming, right? Why else would such terrifying things be happening?
Wait, what did they mean, this battle wasn't between Lady Cecilia's two daughters, but the two of them teaming up against someone else?
And they still didn't win, and it was her who delivered the final blow?
Ana's eyes were about to pop out. She looked at the unknown maid who was sharing the information and really wanted to say, "Can you please not include me in your bragging?"
Who was she? What right did she have to be on a battlefield where gods were fighting? Let alone be the deciding factor?
Seriously, don't include me in your bragging. I'm afraid that god who even Lady Cecilia's two daughters couldn't defeat together will come and beat me to a pulp.
...
Wait, where did Lady Cecilia get a second daughter?!
Siegfried, you bastard, how dare you betray Lady Cecilia?! And you even made Lady Cecilia adopt this child as her second daughter?!
The child is innocent, but you, Siegfried, must...
Oh, adopted. Never mind then.
In short, Ana felt that every part of the world had become something she couldn't understand. She was like a remnant of a bygone era who had stumbled into the celestial court and was dazedly assigned to a special squad under the command of Senior Kallen.
Wow, so Senior Kallen is here too?
Ana, who had been forced to accept a plethora of new information like "apocalypse," "Honkai," "Divine Keys," and "Herrschers" in a single day, felt like her brain was about to explode. She dazedly followed Kallen into the Sapphire Pearl.
And when she woke up, she found a... somewhat down-on-his-luck young man standing beside her?
His gray hair didn't look dyed, because the premature white streaks mixed in were very obvious and rather unsightly.
His face was actually quite handsome, but it was completely ruined by his expression, to the point that he lacked the youthful vitality unique to teenagers and instead resembled an old man in his twenties.
The kind of feeling where everything about him was old except his body.
Ana and this young man stared at each other. The room they were in was probably a standard hotel room. The door was closed, which meant she had more or less appeared in this room out of thin air.
The young man looked like he had been startled awake, because his already old-looking hair was now standing on end as if he had just left an exploding laboratory.
Ironically, this explosive hairstyle gave the young man some much-needed youthful energy.
A true old man would rarely have such strong, stiff hair.
And the young man also had that unique dazed look of someone who had just woken up, looking even more confused than she was about suddenly appearing here.
One on the bed, one on the floor, the two of them stared at each other for a full minute before the young man came back to his senses.
"Who are you?" The young man's voice was very calm, with a faint sense of listlessness.
Ana was silent for a long time. After careful consideration, she gave her real name, "Ana Schariac."
The young man's lifeless eyes widened slightly.
So she is a foreigner. But Schariac... is that name for real?
"You're from the Schariac family?" Chen Tianwu asked, feeling his heart tremble.
He thought the highest-ranking person he would ever meet in his life would be his university professor. He never expected to see a member of the Schariac family suddenly appear in his room.
As a new-age university student in the Chinese mainland, he was not as ignorant as those who couldn't even get into a university, let alone a good one.
Even just due to the requirements of his academy and courses, his internet surfing volume and the websites he visited were far superior to that of a normal person. The knowledge he dabbled in would make most people sigh in admiration.
So he knew about the "great families" of the world, knew their histories, and knew their positions.
He wasn't like some internet trolls who only knew the name Rothschild and couldn't even name a few noble surnames, let alone distinguish between capitalist nobility and bloodline nobility.
As expected of a great world family, a member of Cecilia Schariac's clan. Even her entrance was so...
Criminal.
Did she know that she had already violated a law in the Chinese mainland called "trespassing"?
Er... although this was a hotel, it was still wrong to intrude into someone's private space.
But she was from the Schariac family... Chen Tianwu didn't doubt that if he called the police, they would take this trespassing "outlaw" away within ten minutes.
But he doubted if he could withstand the lawsuit this lady would file against him afterwards.
Great families... Only those who truly understood knew how massive they were.
Not in terms of money, and certainly not in terms of power. On the contrary, these families were staunch defenders of the bottom line of the law. Disregarding the law was something only the nouveau riche would do.
And the biggest difference between an established family and the nouveau riche was that the latter could be "New Dealed" at any time. They were essentially fattened pigs, the government's little piggy banks that were allowed to develop freely.