"Well," He Ao shrugged, smiling at Reed. "Now it's your turn to be the target of a strategy."
Reed looked at He Ao somewhat helplessly, but he still reached out and gave Finn a hug.
He was still very happy that Finn remembered him.
Without Finn's help, he and He Ao would never have figured out the Orphanage's rules so quickly and found the path into the Inner Space.
According to "Loren," Finn had even helped "Loren" in the end.
And that help had been almost entirely without expectation of anything in return.
Soon, the two of them let go of each other.
Reed looked at He Ao in confusion. "Wouldn't this Space Reset erase memories?"
"It would." He Ao nodded gently and looked at Finn. "But there are ways to avoid having your memories erased."
"I'm the Orphanage's Vice Dean now." Finn smiled and shook his head. "A Vice Dean's memories won't be erased by the reset."
"Then you already knew..." Reed paused slightly.
"Yeah." Finn smiled. "This is just a Different Dimension Space. The real me died long ago. The moment I became Vice Dean, I knew that."
He watched the astonished Reed and smiled. "I'm still sad, of course, but people can't live forever in the sorrow of the past. You have to look ahead, right?"
He smiled. "In a sense, I've also gained Eternal Life. I just can't run around anymore."
He shrugged. "But when I was alive, I couldn't run around while I was in the Orphanage either."
Reed slowly recovered from his shock. "You're the Vice Dean, then the dean is..."
Finn turned to look at He Ao.
"It's me," He Ao said slowly. "After the old 'dean' died, I became the new dean. That's also one of this Orphanage's rules."
Actually, he hadn't