Awakening

The sudden truth left Duncan standing in the corridor in a daze for a moment, conflicting feelings of this is fucking absurd and this absurdity somehow makes perfect fucking sense tumbling around in his mind for quite a while. Only then did he suppress the flood of complaints in his stomach and turn his attention back to the "screen" embedded in the wall.

After watching it for a moment, his expression gradually turned thoughtful.

The "world collision" brought about by the Great Annihilation had reshaped everything, and New Hope was no exception. Part of it had become this "Alice Manor" floating in Subspace. Yet here, after using the navigation key to open "another version" of Alice Manor, a "screen" had appeared at the end of its corridor—and that screen had even revealed the true nature of the so-called "mistress's bedroom"...

In other words, within the Alice Manor opened by the navigation key, part of its structure had been "restored," or rather, "recreated" in its original form.

Lost in thought, Duncan raised his head and looked toward the exit on the other side of the corridor.

What did that garden look like now? And what about the doll sleeping within it?

He left the second floor of the manor, descended the stairs along the route he remembered, passed through the narrow corridor beside the main hall, and walked past rooms that had once always whispered to themselves but were now filled only with deathly silence, heading toward the garden.

Along the way, he stopped again, his attention caught by a door in the corridor.

Many identical doors lined this corridor, but one of them had changed—it glimmered with a silvery metallic sheen, pale blue luminous stripes ran around its edges, and it was set into the classical-style wall like the hatch