Vivian looked up at Hao Ren. This time, the look in her eyes was finally no longer that of someone facing a stranger.
Hao Ren knew his guess had been right: the key medium that awakened Vivian was none other than the key to their home.
That meant the only place in the past tens of thousands of years where she could truly live in peace, sheltered from the elements.
The key was so significant to her that even after she had fallen into the whirlpool of memories and time and space had become disordered, she had still manifested it and carried it with her. The weathering and erosion on the key must have been caused by the distortion of time and space. This also showed that Vivian had not truly been completely unresponsive before falling into the whirlpool of memories. She had probably had an extremely brief window in which to react, allowing her to leave behind a key that could make her "wake up." In that sole opportunity, she had chosen to clutch the key to home tightly.
"You fell asleep." Hao Ren looked into Vivian's eyes. Although they had been "separated" for less than two days, he now felt as if they had not seen each other for years. "Then all your Evil Spirits resonated with one another. That resonance caused the historical information in your soul to spill out, contaminating the real world..."
The howling wind and snow outside the hunter's cabin gradually ceased. The storm that had seemed ready to swallow heaven and earth had finally fallen silent, as if, after the master of this spacetime awakened, some turbulent and unstable force had followed it in fading away and hiding once more in the profound darkness. Inside the quiet cabin, Hao Ren was laying out