"Father, Lord Elias Varen invited us to the manor tomorrow night for tea," Earl Alaric said, a hint of confusion in his eyes after reading the invitation.
The white-bearded old man was momentarily taken aback by the invitation before chuckling softly. "It seems this family isn't fated to perish tonight."
Alaric paused, relieved that his father was no longer planning to attack the manor, and smiled. "They're quite sensible, but I wonder why he changed his mind?"
The old man smiled and pointed to the wooden box. "Perhaps, it's because of this wooden box."
The night passed without incident, and the bloody evening did not descend upon the Varen Manor. The next day, the sun still shone warmly on every inch of the grounds. No one knew that they had escaped a massacre. This naturally included Dorian.
Early in the morning, Dorian brought several maids to the tea garden to pick the freshest tea leaves. Although the season was cold winter, the tea garden was still as warm as spring thanks to Calder's greenhouse improvements.
For the tea party in the evening, Dorian instructed the maids to pick a lot of tea leaves with morning dew. Some would be used for brewing tea in the evening, and the rest would be handed over to Corina for stir-frying. Only by using high heat to "kill" the leaves could they retain their original aroma for a long time. He planned to give the stir-fried tea leaves to Earl Alaric as a gift.
Seeing that the tea leaves had entered the kill-green stage, Dorian left the tea garden with peace of mind and returned to the stilt house courtyard.
Calder was sitting on the balcony on the second floor, basking in the rare warm winter sun, humming a cheerful tune.
Dorian stepped forward, took the ointment from the mute servant's hand, and began to apply it to his mentor's body. Calder glanced at him but didn't say anything. Although he had explained the reason for his limb atrophy to Dorian yesterday, his disciple didn't seem to believe it. Calder didn't mind and just took it as his disciple being filial. After all, the time he could enjoy his disciple's filial piety was running out. Perhaps he wouldn't even make it through the Winter Soil Month.
Calder smiled and faced the wind, humming a melancholic and free tune. More than that, it was endless longing.
"If I could return to Earth, I'd be willing to die the next moment." Calder used to not understand the sentiment of returning to one's roots, but now he did.
Dorian's eyes filled with sorrow. He didn't know what to say to comfort his mentor. "Parting" was the most painful thing, especially when the distance was between two worlds.
The quiet time didn't last long before Calder suddenly pointed to a half-exposed transparent crystal in a flowerpot on the balcony and said, "Can you help me get it?"
Dorian nodded in acknowledgment, took the transparent crystal out of the damp soil, wiped it clean with a handkerchief, and handed it to Calder. This transparent crystal was oval-shaped and looked like a glass bead from a distance.
Calder held the "glass bead" and looked at it for a long, long time. His expression was sometimes angry, sometimes sad, and sometimes wry.
"I abandoned it in the forest three years ago, but I didn't expect it to appear in this flowerpot." Calder shook his head. "Perhaps this is fate?"
Dorian watched his mentor talking to himself, his face turning red. After a long while, he hesitated and stammered, "I picked this up... I used to see you playing with it and crying when you looked at it. I guessed it might be something from your family. That day, I saw you throw it into the forest, thinking you didn't want to be reminded of the past. Later, I picked it up and buried it in the flowerpot, thinking that if you regretted it one day, it might come in handy."
Calder was stunned, then murmured in a voice only he could hear, "Perhaps, it is fated to be with you?"
After a while, Calder looked at Dorian. "This glass bead isn't something from my family. But... it can be considered something from Earth, right? I don't know its origin either. Let me tell you a story, a story about this glass bead."
As Calder narrated, the look of surprise in Dorian's eyes grew stronger. He had thought it was just a glass bead with sentimental value, but he never expected its origin to be so magical.
It all started twenty years ago when Calder was still on Earth. He was a researcher born in China. Later, because of a world-class mysterious project, he brought his wife and daughter to Long Island, New York, in the United States, to conduct a secret study that lasted for more than ten years.
The subject of this research was called The Montauk Project.
The Montauk Project is a famous topic in space physics on Earth. Calder was born in the mid-23rd century. The project had already begun two centuries before his birth, had been shelved several times, and had been in development for over fifty years. The Montauk Project that Calder participated in was the sixth launch.
The predecessor of the Montauk Project was the Philadelphia Experiment in 1942. At that time, radar had just been invented. To make warships invisible to radar waves, the US military conducted experiments on the destroyer Eldridge. The ship's main mast was equipped with an omnidirectional antenna, and two energy coils were placed on the deck, powered by the ship's generator. At the beginning of the experiment, anomalies occurred. The second and third experiments caused even greater disasters. The generator ran frantically and completely out of control.
The Eldridge then disappeared and was instantly teleported 7,000 kilometers away. The Philadelphia Experiment was forced to stop, but its byproduct was the discovery of long-distance object teleportation.
In short, the Montauk Project was a physical study of space travel. In the beginning, its research direction was tied to the Philadelphia Experiment, but unfortunately, there was no progress. This changed in the early 23rd century when an extraterrestrial object excited all the scientists.
The object fell in the southwestern Sahara Desert in Mauritania, Africa, right in the middle of the famous Eye of the Sahara. This object attracted the attention of countries worldwide. As a small African country, Mauritania couldn't compete with the major world powers, and in the end, the object was moved to Long Island, New York, where countries like China, Britain, France, Japan, and Russia participated in the research. It was named the "Eye of the Extraterrestrial."
During the research, scientists discovered that the Eye of the Extraterrestrial had energy fluctuations that violated most known physical laws. When stimulated with high-energy rays, it had the magical effect of teleporting objects within a small range. It was this spatial teleportation effect that led to the sixth launch of the Montauk Project.
Calder was just an ordinary researcher on the project, tasked with recording the impact of the wave frequency generated by the Eye of the Extraterrestrial on plants. One day, as usual, he brought several sealed plant seedlings to the heavily protected area for recording and sampling. Everything was normal at first. Most of the plants withered and died under the fluctuations, except for a tea seedling brought from China that survived.
Just as Calder was holding the tea seedling and activating his internal biomechanism to record, the console malfunctioned. Several high-energy rays hit the Eye of the Extraterrestrial, and a huge change occurred in the lab. Space collapsed, darkness was born, and the terrifying aura from the object instantly covered everything in the laboratory. The next second, before Calder could react, he was swallowed into the darkness with the tea seedling still in his hand.
Along with the Eye of the Extraterrestrial, he was sent across many barriers and landed in the current world, scarred all over. Later, Calder was rescued by Lord Marcus Varen. The Eye of the Extraterrestrial had lost all its magical power and transformed into an extremely ordinary... glass bead.