Noah also knew what Leon was usually like, but faced with this slightly abnormal version of him, Noah was not surprised.
She snorted softly through her nose, then lowered her head and said seriously, "I just feel... afraid."
Upon hearing this, Leon was slightly stunned.
It was an unexpected answer.
"Afraid... of what?"
"We used to have a very happy family, right?"
Noah spoke softly, "I also used to respond passionately to your love for me. Do you know, as the daughter of you, Leon Casmodeous, I've always been proud."
"I know my father is strong, the kind of strength that is one of a kind in this world."
"I'm proud to have a father like you."
"The same goes for Mom. To be your daughter is the luckiest thing for me."
"But... all of that turned into bubbles with that disaster."
"What I cared about, what I treasured, what raised me, what loved me deeply... along with my passionate love, were all buried twenty years ago."
"I thought as long as you came back, everything would be solved."
Noah buried her mouth and nose into the crook of her arm, her fingers tightly gripping her own arm,
"But that wasn't the case."
"Instead, I became more afraid of the day this all comes to an end."
"What if we fail, and you leave me again, leave Luna and Little Light? What are we supposed to do? What about Mom?"
"I do love you, love you deeply, but I don't dare to love you like I did when I was little, without hesitation."
She slowly lifted her little head from her arm and looked at her father beside her with tearful eyes.
At that moment, Noah's face, with faint scars, seemed to overlap with her childhood self in Leon's eyes.
Her voice choked, but every word was clear,
"Because I'm afraid of losing you, twice."
The strongest girl has the most fragile heart.
What Noah considers always runs deeper than what Leon imagined.
Looking back at his daughter, Leon slowly reached out and gently placed his hand on Noah's shoulder.
After confirming she had no intention of brushing him away, Leon slowly pulled her into his arms, letting her lean on his shoulder.
"I'm sorry, Noah, it was my departure that caused all this, making you and Mom suffer so much."
"I don't want to make any lofty promises in front of you, because truly no one can predict how this will end."
"But Noah, please believe me, for you sisters and for Mom... I can do anything."
Leaning on her father's shoulder, Noah wiped her tears and said in a low voice, "People who talk big... are gonna have their tails rot."
Leon blinked and glanced at his empty backside, "That's kinda hard for Dad. Even if I wanted my tail to rot, I didn't grow that thing..."
Noah burst into laughter through her tears, sat up, sniffled twice, then clenched her fist and held it out toward Leon, "Then let's do it like this."
Looking at Noah's slightly clenched fist, Leon immediately understood.
When she was little, Leon used this gesture to make promises to her.
"Alright."
Leon nodded and held out his hand.
The father and daughter lightly bumped fists, just like they did back then.
"But before you save the world, I still won't call you Dad."
Noah's stubbornness showed, and this was very much like her stiff-mouthed parents.
"Ah... why?"
"What do you mean why, this is the Melkvei family's ancestral stubbornness, you got a problem?"
Leon chuckled, "I do, of course I do."
Besides being stubborn, the mother dragons of the Melkvei family, from old to young, were all very good at handling General Leon.
———
After having a heart-to-heart with Noah, Leon finally felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest.
In the days that followed, Leon focused on storing magic power and cultivating the Nine Gates Hell.
With Aurora's guidance, Leon's speed in practicing Nine Gates Hell improved significantly.
But the situation with storing magic power remained the same as before. The dragon mark and some unknown "thing" inside his body were splitting the power 80/20, and the storage speed was painfully slow.
To this day, Leon still hadn't figured out what exactly was going on with his body.
He asked Aurora if she had any ideas.
The youngest daughter expressed regret. Her field of study and focus was mainly on magic circles, and she wasn't very skilled in things like human anatomy.
There was no choice. Leon could only go back to his old method. Accumulating little by little, storing magic power slowly into the dragon mark.
The four family members stayed in this hidden underground space, guarding Rossweise, cultivating, and waiting for Aurora to complete her research.
———
[Three Months Later]
Aurora decided to conduct the first test of the reverse magic circle.
Everyone gathered in Rossweise's crystal chamber. Aurora activated the circle on the ground.
Within the formation, the various runes were intricate and chaotic. Any professor or scholar specializing in formations would be stunned by the complexity.
After all, this was the result of Aurora's ten years of research, and what she aimed to reverse wasn't just ordinary magic.
It was the key that could change everything.
Aurora walked to the front of the circle and waved her hand to activate it.
Light instantly lit up, and the formation slowly responded.
The three people beside her also became nervous.
Whether Aurora succeeded or not determined the future of their entire family.
The light emitted by the formation grew increasingly dazzling, and the whole secret room began to shake.
Leon instinctively raised his arm to shield Noah and Luna behind him, "Little Light, everything alright?"
Aurora, with her back to them, waved her hand, "No problem."
Upon hearing this, Leon frowned slightly.
Her tone was off.
It didn't sound like the excitement of approaching success. Instead...
The next second, the light from the formation vanished like a snapped string, dispersing instantly, gone without a trace.
The secret room returned to calm.
The formation on the ground looked like it had been burned, leaving behind charred traces.
Aurora slowly lowered her hand. After a brief silence, she said softly,
"Failed," A very short summary, but her tone couldn't hide the frustration.
Ten years of devoted research, and still she hadn't succeeded.
For someone who had aspired to be a scholar since childhood, this was undoubtedly a blow.
More importantly, there were less than three months left since the day their mother fell into a coma.
If they couldn't complete the reverse magic and send Leon back to the past before then, their mother's final fate would remain unchanged.
No one wanted to accept such an ending.
But cold, hard failure stabbed deeply into Aurora's heart like a knife.
"Little Light—", Luna opened her mouth, wanting to comfort her little sister, "It's, it's okay, it was just a test."
However, Aurora didn't respond.
Her shoulders sank bit by bit, that invisible burden seemingly about to crush her.
After a moment of silence, Leon stepped forward and stood beside Aurora, lowering his head with her to look at the remnants of the formation on the ground.
"What caused the failure?"
Her pink pupils trembled, and her voice quivered along with them, "I, I don't know."
Leon looked at his youngest daughter. Her face was full of the words "panic."
At that moment, Leon understood, what she feared most wasn't failure, but the inability to save this family.
"Little Light, have you heard this saying before?"
"With great power comes great responsibility."
Leon said, "My master taught me with that line for a long time. Later I realized, actually, this sentence works in reverse too."
Aurora blinked her eyes, slowly lifted her disappointed little head, and looked at her dad.
"The more responsibility you bear, the greater your ability."
"Everyone believes you can do it, that's why they entrusted this matter to you."
"But don't treat responsibility as chains that bind you. Do you remember what Noah once told Mom, to accept oneself?"
"Accepting yourself is important, and so is accepting failure."
"If someone can't even bear failure, then they're not worthy of success."
Leon reached out and gently placed his hand on his daughter's shoulder.
Her shoulders, which had just been crushed by the invisible weight of discouragement and frustration, now felt a strong sense of reassurance when her father's warm hand landed on them.
"Try to kick those thoughts about the consequences of failure out of your little head. Little Light, you've researched this reverse magic for ten years. Believe in yourself. You can do it."
Mom once said, the most charming thing about Dad was that he always gave her the most solid feeling.
As if as long as he was there, she had endless courage.
Back then, Aurora didn't understand what kind of power that was.
But now, at this very moment, she seemed to get it.
The pink pupils under her glasses became calm and sharp again.
She furrowed her brows, turned her head, and looked back at the extinguished formation on the ground.
After a long observation, Aurora slowly said, "The fact that the formation emitted light just now proves it could be activated, at least there were no problems in the first stage."
"The problem must lie in the subsequent stages."
"To complete a formation, there are four stages in total:"
"Activation, Operation, Sustaining, and Termination."
"We just stopped at the Operation stage. In most formations, to ensure proper operation, enough power is required."
"I knew this, so I prepared plenty of energy crystals in advance, but they didn't seem to work."
As she spoke, Aurora walked over to several of the energy crystals, picked up a few, and examined them carefully.
"The energy inside these hasn't decreased, meaning these crystals didn't participate in the operation of the formation."
"But why... I've tested these crystals in many reverse magic experiments. In every kind they worked, except for this space-reversal magic related to Ravi."
"If in the Operation stage the formation doesn't get enough power, then in the Sustaining stage that follows, we'll also fail."
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