"Yvette."
"Yvette."
"Yvette!"
Leo felt someone speaking beside him in a strange language, yet he seemed to understand.
He opened his eyes to find himself lying on a bed. At the door of the room stood a somewhat blurry figure, watching him and saying, "Hmm, you're finally awake. How did you sleep last night? Is the bed comfortable?"
"...Me?" Leo looked at the somewhat hazy and transparent figure and realized it was an unfamiliar woman in a white coat.
"Yes, who else would be in this room?" the woman said with a smile.
"Um... comfortable..." Leo replied as he looked around, the room's layout seemed familiar. Though the fluorescent vines were gone, it looked just like the room where he had awakened on level nine. Coupled with the figure conversing with him, the answer seemed to be emerging.
He had returned to the past in the form of an illusion or dream!
Was it because of the mist on layer negative ten?
Did he fall asleep in the fog and connect with the history of this underwater facility?
It sounded a bit unscientific, but it seemed like the only conclusion he could draw!
"Good to hear it's comfortable," the woman said. "It will be breakfast time soon, so hurry up and change your clothes and get ready to wash up."
"Oh, okay..." Leo nodded obediently like an ordinary little girl. He responded in Chinese while the hazy woman spoke in an unfamiliar language of another world, yet they understood each other, which undoubtedly was another piece of evidence for the dream theory.
Seeing Leo get out of bed, the woman left. He peeked out the door, and soon heard her talking with other children from the adjacent room. This gave him a rough idea of her identity; she was either a dormitory manager or a teacher…
So this was actually a closed school?
Perhaps because of the dream state, everyone appeared slightly transparent and hazy, much like NPCs in a game, which didn't evoke too much anxiety in Leo.
He found a blue children's uniform along with undergarments and socks in the wardrobe, then looked into the half-length mirror on the inner side of the wardrobe, where he saw a little girl with silver hair and dark red eyes quietly gazing back at him.
The girl's features were exquisite and beautiful, her figure delicate, dressed in attire entirely mismatched with her demeanor, as if she had stepped out of a painting. Slowly, she flashed a slight smile at Leo, one that seemed a bit shy yet incredibly endearing.
After a brief moment of staring at the girl in the mirror, Leo put away his awkward smile and watched as the silver-haired, red-eyed girl in the reflection returned to an expression of calm, thinking, So this is what I look like now?
She was so beautiful that he couldn't react immediately; he thought he had seen a ghost… Moreover, despite his dissatisfaction with being in the wrong gender, at least the original owner wasn't unattractive, so he could accept it…
Forget it; this wasn't the time to dwell on such trivial matters!
Shaking his head, Leo got dressed and left the room, joining the children to wash up and have breakfast, eventually arriving in a small classroom, waiting for the morning class to start.
During roll call in the morning class, Leo finally learned his, or rather the original owner's, full name.
"Yvette Loxivia."
"Present."
Raising her hand, she told herself that from this moment on, she was Yvette Loxivia.
...
After roll call, the first class was a language class, teaching an otherworldly language named "Black Tide." However, the teaching method was quite unique—all the children had to enter a machine room, lie on specially designed metal chairs, wear a helmet-like device, and then self-learn in a virtual world through a guiding program.
As she couldn't determine when the dream would end, Yvette focused intently on her studies, astonished by the headgear, which seemed like something out of a science fiction novel.
However, the teaching model had restrictions on usage permissions to prevent distractions among students, locking most functions. This left Yvette, who wanted to access additional information, with little to show for her efforts. All she knew was that it was a "head-mounted visual terminal" produced by a company called "Gravity Group," along with associated educational software, utilizing a strange technology called "Rune Group."
"Rune... Group?"
Mulling over this term, Yvette speculated that the technological landscape of this world might differ significantly from what she imagined.
After the class, before lunch, all the children had to undergo a medical examination, with the infirmary located in the adjoining room.
During the queue, by asking other children, Yvette obtained some concrete information.
"So, you're saying this isn't a school?" Yvette asked in surprise.
"Don't you know?" replied a little girl in front of her, also a translucent figure. "This is the 'Ish Mountain Black Tower Research Center'... Didn't you come here because you have a genetic disease?"
"Genetic disease? What's that?"
"I don't know. Before bringing me here, the old man who runs the facility said I had this disease, and it would manifest when I grew up, so I had to come here for long-term treatment," the little girl explained.
"The old man who runs the facility?"
"The director of the orphanage I was in before."
"Oh... oh..."
Soon, after various inquiries, Yvette managed to piece together a relatively clear model of the situation here—
This was a research center affiliated with the super pharmaceutical company "Black Tower Pharmaceuticals," often referred to as the "Abyss Base" due to its construction underwater.
In response to government calls for providing free wellness checks for many orphanages, they discovered that a number of orphans suffered from a particularly rare genetic defect. To research and overcome these incurable diseases, the company collaborated with various orphanages, bringing the afflicted children here for long-term observation and treatment.
The lake outside was a massive caldera lake, and the entire Abyss Base was constructed on top of this extinct volcano known as "Ish Mountain." According to the staff here, the last eruption of Ish Mountain occurred tens of thousands of years ago, and the magma chamber below had long since solidified, posing no risk of eruption.
But what on earth happened to lead to the deaths of everyone here, while the outside was filled with monsters, leaving only the original owner seemingly alive...
Images of many classic works flashed through Yvette's mind.
Could it be that they were researching some terrifying biological weapon here, using the children from the orphanage as test subjects, and then a virus leaked, contaminating the entire base along with the outside caldera lake?
The reason no one came from the outside to clean up or retrieve bodies might also be due to the virus, leaving no one daring to enter?
And what about the original owner?
The fact that the original owner woke up unscathed in the base might not be because of a time travel effect, but because she underwent mutation, becoming the only one able to adapt to the virus?
Or perhaps she was even the original host of the virus?
Well, this was going a bit too far; this wasn't a biohazard or a massacre of innocence... Yvette stopped her wild thoughts and followed the other children into the examination room one by one.
The examination process was not complicated; there was no need to undress, just stand on a testing device for a while and have some blood drawn.
After leaving the room and seeing the woman guarding the door, Yvette said, "Doctor Tabitha, may I ask you a question?"
Tabitha was the lady who had woken her up in the morning and then took them to the machine room for class. She seemed to originally be a researcher here, temporarily reassigned to be the caretaker for the children, with the full name Tabitha Cloverlane.
Upon hearing Yvette's question, she said gently, "Sure, what question do you have, Yvette?"
"What are runes?" Yvette asked.
"Oh, that," Tabitha replied. "They are the foundation for magical research and the cornerstone of human civilization. Simply put, they are like small points that, when combined, become you, me, various materials, magical elements, and everything in the universe."
"...Magic?!"
"Yeah, magic. You shouldn't be unfamiliar with that term. I see many children nowadays wishing to become great magicians when they grow up."
"Can I start learning magic right now?" Yvette hurriedly asked.
"Right now? Don't rush; first, focus on your language studies. When you reach the appropriate age, you'll naturally encounter courses like rune compilation and such, but by then, you may not even like it," Tabitha said with a smile.