After concluding her first brief, four-year, just-a-taste journey to another world, Yvette’s true body slowly opened her eyes in the Land of Endings. Looking at the still-familiar interior of the RV, she couldn’t help feeling a bit wistful.

Since her transmigration, she had lived for about seven hundred years, yet the auroral belts she had personally witnessed numbered only five. Calling them “once in a century” was an optimistic take.

Fortunately, Moga, like her two senior brothers, was of a long-lived race. There would be no lifespan issue, and the chance of meeting again was still high—so long as nothing unexpected happened.

With that in mind, Yvette woke the RV’s AI, and the harvesting tour of the Jadeite Continent set out once more.

Because she was more thorough than last time, this run across the Jadeite Continent took her nearly twenty years to complete, but the aberrant mana she harvested was far greater—topping 300,000 outright. Counting what she had reaped on the Blacktide Continent, her aberrant mana total had already broken the 900,000 mark.

At the same time, throughout those twenty years she never stopped analyzing the relics of the Origin Civilization, and from that ocean of files and images

she uncovered many secrets previously unknown.

For example, the true reason the “Silent War” between the Corporate Alliance and Global International ended turned out to be that the eight megacorps possessed a genuine world-ending weapon.

They had developed a technology that counteracted the “runic siphon effect” and made it into a super-bomb called the “World-Ender.” If delivered to the star-core zone five thousand kilometers down, it could rupture the “Origin Space” formed of ultra–high-density mana—effectively robbing the entire planet of its gravity. The result needs no elaboration: stellar gravity alone would tear the Origin Star apart.

Later, under Global International’s compromise and a secretly signed peace accord, the few existing World-Ender bombs were all destroyed. But the anti-siphon magic tech was retained, became the core of the Rift Group’s anti-gravity engine, and ultimately gave rise to history’s first anti-gravity aerospace carrier—though that’s all later. Within the timeframe of the Dream Fog, none of it had happened yet.

Worth noting, not long after the anti-gravity engine debuted, the Rift Group’s other grand promise—the “space gate” technology—also succeeded. Build one colossal gate at each of two locations, align their spatial coordinates via meticulous operations and complex instrumentation, and you could leap space itself, fundamentally changing long-distance travel.

But the cost was massive, and tolls alone made for weak monetization. The tech was immature, too, plagued by endless minor issues. Thus, in the Fireseed Base’s historical records, it never left the lab—not to the very end.

Even so, Yvette found it fascinating, especially the potential space-magic behind it.

Unfortunately, the Continuity Council never obtained the Rift Group’s space-magic tech. She searched that vast archive for a long time without success, learning only that when commercial deployment was slated in the future, the provisional name of the giant space-gate device seemed to be “Rainbow Bridge.”

Rainbow—rainbow. Yvette immediately thought of the aurora and felt the two had much in common.

Of course, the Rainbow Bridge was a high-investment, cutting-edge device that required building a “bridge” at both endpoints to use it—very different from auroras, a rare natural phenomenon that refreshes freely across the globe.

Still, “rainbow” as a name suggests a riot of color, which does align with the auroral belts’ gorgeous hues. Was that because

both were rooted in space magic?

Could the birth of auroral belts actually be a kind of elemental pollution within the domain of space magic?

In this way, the discovery of the Rainbow Bridge led Yvette toward a reasonable explanation for the auroral belts and the Remnant Abyss.

As is well known, excessive use of a single-element magic alters the distribution of runes in space until elemental pollution arises. On the small side, it causes “thermal radiation” in magitech lines and equipment, requiring heat sinks; on the large,

it can occasionally trigger elemental storms—polar blizzards or super-hurricanes on the plains.

If the Rainbow Bridge were truly deployed later and became the norm for the Origin Civilization, replacing aircraft for travel, then with high-frequency use it would inevitably reshape spatial structure and produce an alternative kind of elemental pollution.

In that case, wouldn’t auroras be perfectly natural?

The only puzzle for Yvette was that, by her prior understanding, on the Radiant Continent the history of auroras and the Remnant Abyss was far older.

If this was elemental pollution, then the other world must have suffered such a massive-scale contamination several millennia ago—cause unknown.

If she had the chance in the future, she planned to look into the history of the Blight Demons on the Radiant Continent to see when those aberrants first appeared—was it within the last thousand years? If the timeline matched, then the whole chain of cause and effect would make sense.

After finishing the harvest on the Jadeite Continent, with some way to go before her next evolution, Yvette hesitated over her next destination.

Silvermirror Continent was the birthplace of the Mechanical Kingdom; out of caution regarding the God of Machines, she set it aside. Naturally, her gaze turned seaward.

Through exchanges with high-tier aberrants, she had learned that although the three continents had no monarchs, the four Ocean Monarchs had already arisen long ago.

After much thought, she decided to make a circuit of the shallow seas off the Blacktide and Jadeite continents—the continental shelf region. The average depth there is under two hundred meters, and its scope is considerable; the Jadeite shelf alone covers nearly a quarter of an ocean.

That way, even if she clashed with an aberrant monarch of the seas, she could still retreat in time.

Yes—so far, Yvette still wasn’t sure she could take on an aberrant monarch.

In this stretch, her total mana had broken 12,000, her aberrant mana had reached 900,000, and she had added many utility abilities. But in raw stats, offense and defense hadn’t risen dramatically; it was her endurance that had skyrocketed—she excelled at wars of attrition.

She didn’t know what hidden power an aberrant monarch might hold, only that it would be many times stronger than a sixth-tier commander. Add in that they could rally an entire ocean’s aberrant legions to besiege her, and even if she replenished aberrant mana by devouring amid the fight, the net result would be a steady drain.

In short, she saw no need to risk contact with an aberrant monarch. A sweep along the continental shelf to harvest would be enough; anything more could wait until after her next evolution.

Yvette’s ocean journey lasted about ten years and ended in disappointment: she came away with just under 50,000 aberrant mana—pitifully little.

In the first two years she sensed nothing odd, only sighed at how sparse the aberrant clusters were at sea. Low-tier aberrants were spread evenly everywhere, unlike the ruined cities on land, which naturally formed clear nesting points around high-tier aberrants—perfect for striking straight at the heart.

But by the fifth year, after she finally nabbed a fifth-stage aberrant lord, something felt off.

These high-tier aberrants somehow knew in advance that a mysterious girl would be “driving by” on the sea surface—and ordered him to clear out in time!

Only this lord was a bit muddleheaded and took a wrong turn, letting Yvette run into him and beat a key tidbit out of him.

It was obvious then: the scarcity of big aberrant strongholds and resources at sea wasn’t the issue. A high-tier aberrant had learned about her and was remotely directing subordinates to avoid her, tanking her returns—worse than the Jadeite Continent, never mind the Blacktide Continent, which is twice as large.

So who was issuing the orders?

The answer seemed clear. Just as she didn’t want to provoke aberrant monarchs, the Ocean Monarchs were paying close attention to her: wherever she went, the local subordinates were told to withdraw ahead of time, so she found no big harvests anywhere.

Unwilling to concede, Yvette, feeling targeted by the Ocean Monarchs, lingered another five years in the shallows and even tried some disguise magic to hide her movements.

But the sea is their home turf; every fish might be an eye. With returns so low, she finally gave up on harvesting the oceans and, with no better option, returned once more to the Blacktide Continent.

It wasn’t that she meant to fish Blacktide dry—but she truly felt her next evolution was near. Once she began, it would be at least another century, more than enough time for Blacktide’s aberrant ecology to recover.

In sum: one more round on Blacktide.

Time flew; another twenty years passed, and Yvette’s harvesting tour at last drew to a close.

Over those two decades, she single-handedly de-escalated the modes of warfare among the aberrant powers across the entire Blacktide Continent.

In the old aberrant ecology, when the thirty-plus commander-level forces on Blacktide clashed, it meant bloodbaths with million-strong armies, rivers of blood turning whole war zones a deep purplish red.

Now it was different. No one could field armies anymore. When conflicts arose, high-tier aberrants sparred one-on-one, pulling their punches—much like the duels between generals before the lines in the Three Kingdoms era. Not bloody, not brutal—remarkably civil.

Abella was delighted. She had sacrificed half her troops and had been heartsore about it—grumbling inwardly and cooking up mental scenes to vent her displeasure while outwardly pretending not to care, as if serving her master were the greatest honor.

But when she realized the master had wiped out eighty to ninety percent of the other powers, she suddenly saw she had become Blacktide’s biggest force. She hurried to seize cities and expand, declaring war on every neighboring commander power at once.

Yvette felt she was being too greedy and would only force the others to ally against her. But considering Abella likely had her own strategic calculus, Yvette mentioned it once and didn’t press the point. In short—good luck.

Thus, after roughly seventy years, the harvesting tour finally ended. Yvette returned once more to Ish Island to prepare for a long sleep.

Not wanting to waste time, she created more Skull A1s, expanded the herb fields, and built small plants to reclaim and refine metals—so she could quickly secure quality materials for future magitech builds.

After a year setting all this in order, she went to the manor’s center, took her familiar spot, and transformed herself into a gray cocoon, sinking within.

She had a hunch this long sleep would take a bit longer than the last two.