The fairy then gave a bolster to the hypothesis Noah had just come up with.

[You didn’t die in the first place. Just like you, the owner of that body has gone somewhere. For a while, your soul wandered outside your body, and then it was swept away by something and fell into this world. Now, you’re in the body in which the owner has gone somewhere, too.]

Noah was rendered silent.

[You know, if a person had indeed met his end, he would have lost all his reason, lost his memory, and he would have been sucked into the world of the souls.]

The fairy spoke like a living person, twirling around Noah. It was then that Noah reached a conclusion.

[Although the bond is weak, seeing that you are still alive… That means the owner of that body isn’t completely dead either. Huh, in the first place, you must have been a good enough match to assimilate this much.]

“The soul of the living and the body of the living.” Noah’s face paled as she mused on the fairy’s words. There were two main implications of what the creature said: perhaps Noah’s body remained undead, and Eleonora’s soul… It might be existing somewhere still.

If, as the fairy implied, Eleonora hadn’t been murdered by someone, but for some reason, her soul was out of its body for quite a time, which allowed Noah to enter that empty shell, then the chance for Noah to return to her original body was not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility.

So, the moment I possessed the body of Eleonora, it wasn’t exactly like a dead body, and… Eleonora, at that instant, had been sitting in front of a dinner table with her eyes closed as if she were asleep. On second thought, it was too hasty and thoughtless to assume it was a corpse.

Furthermore, there was one more thing she ought to ponder about. What Eleonora had working at the time with her partner, Adrian, was the magic of human cloning, which breathed a soul into machines modeled after humans.Noah shuddered at a gruesome realization. It could not be the mere murder of Eleonora, but an entirely different story, where Adrian might have had tampered with her soul. In other words, just as Park Noah was alive even though her soul was separated from its body, Eleonora might still be existing somewhere in a different shell. Noah managed to speak despite her faint heart, “First of all, my body, can I come back?”

[Well, we’re gonna have to hurry. Before the medium that came to this place disappears.]

At the fairy’s words, Noah’s mind drifted to the novel she had read before her death. Then, the fairies soared high into the air.

[Follow me for now. Because every weird phenomenon that happens here are related to the cradle.]

“Cradle…”

The fairies began to take the lead over Kyle’s head, and Noah trailed after them. Soon, she found a dark, shrouded exit at the end of the slope.[There’s only a little bit left. You’ll find out when you see it. What the cradle means.]

She hastened her steps without further thought. Her pace was becoming more urgent every second. The wind blew from the upper exit. The railway on the ground was exactly directed towards the exit. As the exit neared, Noah was greeted with an almost pitch-black sky. Underneath it, there was a small child standing still, looking at the scene.

With her breathing ragged, Noah climbed the steep slope and finally stood in front of the exit. Her body was about to collapse from exhaustion, but someone rushed to her side, supporting her. Noah held Kyle’s arm desperately and raised her head. And for the third time since she arrived at Noviscosha, Noah was captivated, once again, by nature’s undisguised glory.

The night sky, glittering with millions of stars, unfolded before her eyes. A month and a half ago, she beheld the same sky with Muell on the train as they headed to Battuanu. At a time when it seemed like a comet swimming in a distant universe, a conversation with the young dragon crossed her mind without notice.

“It’s similar to what I saw in the egg. There’s something like that in the human world.”

“Really? Then, there must be your world among those stars. My world must be out there somewhere.”

Loss for words, Noah slowly lowered her gaze. The place they set foot on was the middle of the huge valley surrounded by the mountains of Maobiana. Under the valley, they could see a clear river that was connected to the lake they had passed earlier, and at the top of the steep cliff, there was a huge pit that was incomparable to the small passage they currently stood atop.

Muell lifted his small hand, pointing at the crater, and said, “That’s the cradle.” Then, his finger shifted on a protruding rock where a horde of yellow fairies surrounded a large cocoon, and there was a narrow path through it.

“That’s the prison where the thieves of the Mane ore were locked up.” The boy shook his hand lightly, and the fairies scattered in all directions at once.

“And over there,” Muell’s hand pointed to the last night sky strewn with countless bright stars, “are doors to other worlds.”