When Raine opened his eyes, the black-gold crystal covering the right half of his body pulsed faintly in rhythm with his breathing. He flexed his fingers and found that at the seam where flesh met crystal, delicate violet-gold lines coiled like veins of living metal—the lingering imprint of Ravenna's alchemical energy. His last memory was of the energy cocoon shattering; after that, only endless darkness.
"You're awake?" Ravenna's voice came from above him. She leaned against the charred stump of what once was the Mother Tree, her mechanical left eye dulled and her right eye bloodshot. "Gamma says your energy cycle will need at least another—hey!"
Raine suddenly rolled and knocked her flat. Almost at the same instant, three shadowed arrows struck where they had just been lying, their shafts trailing ominous purple-black mist.
"Enemy attack!" roared Elondir from the far side of the camp. The surviving elven archers scrambled into defensive formation, but their emerald-tipped arrows twisted mid-flight as though caught in invisible currents, falling uselessly to the ground.
Raine's mechanical eye snapped into combat mode. At the edge of the scorched plain, twelve warped figures emerged—creatures that looked like dark elves, shadow wolves, and corrupted vines grotesquely spliced together. Amethyst-like tumors bulged at their joints, and the leader bore a gear-shaped organ embedded in its forehead, screeching with metallic friction.
"Umbravores…" whispered Nyssaea, her staff glimmering faint green. "But how could they appear inside a purified zone?"
Gamma's silver-blue eye projected a scanning hologram. "Not natural spawns! They've been alchemically modified!" The image revealed tiny mechanical cores pulsing inside each creature's chest, engraved with the six-pointed sigil of the Holy Alliance.
"Damn rusted bastards never stay down," Ironbeard growled, his steam hammer venting scalding white mist.
The first wave struck with startling speed. The creatures dissolved into vapor, flowing across the ground like living shadows. Raine instinctively lashed out with Frostwhisper—but the blade's black-green fire sputtered violently. His crystalline arm overloaded, pain ripping through him until he dropped to one knee.
"Energy backlash!" Gamma shrieked, hurling three silver-blue capsules. "Don't use Dragonscourge Slash!"
The capsules burst into shimmering barriers, barely deflecting the shadows. Ravenna dragged Raine to his feet, violet-gold wristblades slashing a complex alchemical diagram into the air. "Hermes' Web!" A lattice of pink-violet energy spread, trapping three of the Umbravores and forcing them back into solid form.
Elondir seized the opening, loosing an Emerald Spiral Arrow. The arrow split into hundreds of needles mid-flight, piercing directly into the amethyst joints. A chorus of shattering crystal echoed as the beasts shrieked, their warped bodies unraveling.
"The joints are their weak point!" the old elf bellowed.
Raine gritted his teeth and shifted tactics. Abandoning the unstable dragon power, he reached instead for the Seed of Life mark glowing at his chest. Emerald light coiled down his left arm into thorn-like patterns. With a slam of his palm to the ground—Life Pulse!
From the ashen soil erupted black-gold brambles, spiking through two Umbravores and tearing them apart.
But the taste of victory had barely surfaced when chaos erupted. The bodies of the slain Umbravores suddenly burst open, the purple-black mist forming small whirlpools. Raine's mechanical eye caught flickering runes within the vapor—it was the Memory Siphon curse! Before he could warn anyone, the three closest elven warriors clutched their heads and collapsed, silver motes of light seeping from their eyes, ears, noses, and mouths.
"Don't look directly at the mist!" Ravenna shouted, throwing a toxin-infused dagger that shattered one of the vortices, but more deadly spirals were forming.
Ironbeard led the dwarf demolition team in hurling Groundfire Grenades, the intense flames temporarily curbing the spread of the mist. Gamma seized the moment to activate a device, surrounding the survivors with a silver-blue force field. "I've redirected the residual energy from the Aurora Tower! But it'll only hold for five minutes!"
Nyssaea knelt by the Mother Tree's broken roots, hands pressed against a sprouting shoot. "They're hunting the Watchers' memories… the Council wants to locate other sealing points!"
Raine suddenly felt a sharp pain in his right eye. His gear-shaped pupil spasmed uncontrollably as his vision forced into a wide-area scanning mode—he saw it! Three hundred meters behind the Umbravore horde, buried under scorched earth, lay a hemispherical mechanical device, collecting memory motes through the swirling purple-black mist.
"A control terminal!" he shouted, pointing. "We have to destroy it!"
Ravenna's mechanical eye locked onto the target. "Cover me!" In a blur of violet-gold afterimages, she lunged in an impossible, physics-defying angle. When two Umbravores lunged at her, she ran vertically up a steam wall crafted by the dwarves, crossing her wrist blades in a Venomous Cross Kiss—neurotoxin refined from Abyss Vipers instantly paralyzed the monsters' motor nerves.
Raine tried to follow and assist, but his right leg crystal spasmed violently. Pain wracking him, he sank to one knee and saw at least twenty Umbravores gathering outside Gamma's protective field. Worse, ash-like fluffs began drifting from the sky; the moment they touched exposed skin, a burning sensation spread.
"Corruption Spores!" Nyssaea raised a jade barrier. "The Mother Tree's roots are warning us!"
Elondir's arrows suddenly shifted upward. "What is that?!"
From the clouds emerged massive bone wings—not dragon wings, but corrupted-crystal replicas. On the back of the creature, with a wingspan over thirty meters, stood a figure clad in Holy Alliance bishop's robes. When the hood was pulled back, the face revealed was Silverbranch—though a counterfeit version.
"An impostor," Gamma's mechanical eye flashed frantically. "But energy signature similarity is 87%!"
The fake Silverbranch raised a scepter inlaid with violet crystals, firing twelve beams of light, each hitting the resonant nodes of the protective shield. Gamma spat blood as cracks spiderwebbed across the silver-blue barrier.
"Gamma!" Raine forced himself to stand, jade vines from his left hand entwining the faltering shield. At that moment, the comm crystal carried Ravenna's scream—she had reached the control terminal, but the ground suddenly collapsed. Six new Umbravores burst from beneath the earth, mechanical heads of the Alliance bishop sprouting from their backs, chanting twisted prayers in unison.
"Memory Torrent!" the fake Silverbranch's scepter pointed directly at Raine.
The world suddenly lost its color. Raine felt something icy pierce his temple, and his mechanical right eye flashed a warning red light. He saw countless fragments of memories being forcibly extracted—Alfred's smile, the snowy nights at the Aurora Tower, Ravenna's violet-gold tattoo beneath her collarbone…
"No… it's… impossible!" he roared, driving the Frosttongue Sword into the ground. Black-green flames erupted from the blade in a circular shockwave, temporarily pushing back the Memory Siphon. But the cost was that the crystals on the right side of his body developed cracks, and jade energy was leaking frantically from the gaps.
In the distance came a thunderous explosion. Ravenna had finally detonated the control terminal, and the purple-black mist began to churn chaotically. The fake Silverbranch let out a synthesized electronic scream, and the bone-winged creature dove down, its crystalline claws aiming straight for Raine's head!
At the critical moment, a sprout on the Mother Tree's broken roots suddenly burst with intense light. Black-gold veins spread along the ley lines like lightning, forming a wall of thorns before Raine. The bone-winged monster collided with the thorns, and the ley line energy of the entire Elven Forest ruins resonated, triggering a small-scale elemental tidal surge!
"Raine!" Ravenna's shout was drowned by the storm of energy.
The world spun wildly. Raine's last conscious image was of Gamma trying to reach him, then he plunged into an endless freefall. It felt as if he had fallen into the depths of the ley lines, carried by a jade-colored torrent toward an unknown distance…
...
The stinging cold of water in his nose jolted Raine awake. He found himself floating in a rushing river, the crystals on his right side glowing with an eerie light under the sun. On both banks were unfamiliar coniferous forests, and smoke rose in the distance—there was a human settlement.
"Cough… cough…!" he struggled to swim to the shore, only to find his left arm powerless. The Life Seed mark dimmed, as if temporarily sealed by some force.
The river's current suddenly accelerated. The roar of a waterfall appeared ahead! Gritting his teeth, Raine activated his draconic bloodline; the black-gold crystals faintly glowed. In the last second before falling, he grabbed a protruding tree root on the cliff, painfully climbing to the shore.
Exhausted, he lay on the rocks, noticing the sky held unfamiliar twin moons—beside the silver moon floated a small crimson companion moon, something never recorded in astronomical records. Strangely, when he tried to recall the details before the fall, only vague fragments appeared: purple-black mist, the bone-winged creature's scream, Ravenna reaching out her hand…
"My name… my name is…" he pressed his temple, horrified to realize even basic personal information was vanishing. "Rai…ne?"
His right eye's gear pupil focused automatically, displaying a body status assessment: [Memory Cortex Damage 41%] [Life Seed Dormant] [Draconic Bloodline Unstable]… the last line highlighted: [Foreign Memory Lock Detected, Key Required to Unlock].
From a distance came barking. Three figures in animal pelts appeared atop the riverbank, wielding spears inlaid with violet crystals—not elves, not dwarves, but a humanoid race Raine had never seen. Their skin was a sickly gray-blue, and their eyes were pure crystalline.
"Another sacrifice," the lead crystal-eyed man grinned, revealing shark-like teeth. "A gift for the Crimson Moon Lord."
Raine instinctively reached for the Frosttongue Sword, only to find the scabbard empty. The men were closing in, the crystals on their spears glowing, a paralytic magic forming.
Just as Raine prepared to forcibly awaken his draconic bloodline, a feathered arrow shot through the wrist of the leader! More arrows followed from the forest, forcing the crystal-eyed men to retreat.
"Go back to your mines, Deep Divers!" a clear female voice called from the treetops. A petite figure swung down on vines, landing lightly in front of Raine in deerhide boots. She wore a strange bird-beaked mask, her leather armor stained with alchemical residues.
The crystal-eyed men let out frustrated growls but could only withdraw in the face of precise archery. The bird-beaked girl crouched, examining Raine's crystalline right arm through the mask: "Wow, that's quite a unique injury."
Raine opened his mouth but couldn't form a complete sentence. Memory fragments churned in his mind like sand slipping through fingers.
The girl tilted her head, observing him for a few seconds, then clapped her hands: "Amnesia, huh? I'm Merry, an apprentice pharmacist from Ashfall Town." She pointed toward the smoke in the distance. "Can you walk? We need to get back before nightfall—the corrupted mist at night loves to devour pretty fools like you."
Raine nodded blankly. As Merry helped him to stand, he noticed a strange mark on the back of her neck—like a feather made of violet-gold and black-green energy, subtly similar to Ravenna's tattoo.
The coniferous forest rustled behind them, as if countless eyes were watching. Raine didn't know what awaited him in this remote town, but the combat analysis module in his right eye had already marked three red dots—something was tracking them in sync from two hundred meters away.
Merry seemed to sense the abnormality as well. She quietly sprinkled some kind of alchemical powder over their footprints and whispered, "Don't look back, just keep moving. There are people in the town who'll be interested in you… especially that old madman who keeps muttering about the 'Gear Moon.'"
Raine's crystalline fingers twitched involuntarily. Deep in the chaos of his memories, one image suddenly became clear—a vision of Ravenna plunging the violet-gold dagger into the back of his heart. But this time, in the vision, her lips moved, as if repeating a word… a word that might be a key…
The crimson companion moon silently climbed into the sky, stretching their shadows long and long across the ground.