"Not... real...?"
Emilia murmured blankly.
"That's right."
Fang Li affirmed it.
He was not lying just to cheer Emilia up.
Fang Li truly believed it.
Because when Echidna had pulled him into her dream, she had explicitly said that the Forbidden Library she used as the setting for their conversation had been randomly recreated based on Fang Li's memories.
If that was the case, then the trial at the tomb probably worked on the same principle.
It used the memories of the person undergoing the trial as a basis to recreate their past, forcing the participant to confront it and arrive at some kind of answer.
That was likely how the first trial was structured.
But...
"But you said that you'd already forgotten that past, and that your memories of it were extremely hazy. Then how could your past have been recreated from your memories?"
Fang Li analyzed the matter with composure.
"Did it dig it out from the depths of your heart? Probably not, right?"
Memories were inherently vague things.
People sometimes forgot unnecessary memories, but that did not mean necessary ones could not be forgotten.
People sometimes etched important memories into their hearts, yet they could still choose to gradually let them fade away.
Since Index possessed perfect memory recall and had been hunted by English Puritanism over memory-related issues, having had her memories erased several times, Fang Li knew quite a bit about human memory.
In short, Fang Li believed that Echidna's process of recreating the past was not entirely complete.
Take the Forbidden Library, for example. If it had truly been extracted and recreated from Fang Li's memories, then it could not possibly have been that realistic.
After all, Fang Li might remember the Forbidden Library's appearance, layout, and furnishings, but he would never remember exactly