Jon's Past

"Father, Leon Pat has invited us to Pat Manor tomorrow evening for tea." After reading the invitation, a flicker of puzzlement passed through Eaton's eyes.

The white-bearded old man was also stunned by the invitation for a moment. Before long, he chuckled softly. "It seems this family is not fated to perish tonight."

Eaton paused, knowing that his father no longer intended for him to slaughter the manor that night. He smiled as well. "They do know how to read the wind, but I wonder why he changed his mind?"

The white-bearded old man smiled and pointed at the wooden box. "Perhaps it is because of this wooden box."

The night gradually receded. The bloody night never descended upon Pat Manor, and the next day's sun still warmly shone over every inch of the estate.

.

No one knew that they had escaped a deadly calamity. This naturally included Angel.

Early in the morning, Angel brought several maids to the tea garden to pick the freshest tea leaves. Though it was the frozen depths of winter outside, Jon's greenhouse improvements had left the tea garden as warm as spring.

For that evening's tea gathering, Angel instructed the maids to pick a great deal of Morning Dew After Rain tea. One portion would be brewed that night, while another was given to Mana to pan-fire the tea. Only by kneading and "killing" the leaves at high temperatures could their original flavor and fragrance be preserved for a long time. He intended to give the processed tea to Count Eaton as a parting gift.

Only after seeing the tea leaves enter the fixation stage did Angel leave the tea garden at ease and return to the small stilt-house courtyard.

Jon sat on the second-floor balcony, basking in the rare winter sunshine. So comfortable was he that he even hummed a little tune.

Angel walked over, took the medicinal ointment from the mute servant, and began applying it to his mentor. Jon glanced at him but said nothing. Even though he had explained the reason for his withered limbs to Angel yesterday, the boy did not seem to believe him. Jon did not mind. He would just consider it his disciple fulfilling his filial duty... After all, he did not have much time left to enjoy his disciple's devotion. Perhaps he would not even make it through the Month of Frozen Earth?

Jon smiled into the wind, humming an unknown melody.

It was a little sorrowful, and a little free-spirited.

More than anything, it was filled with endless longing.

"If I could return to Earth, I would be willing even if I died the very next moment." Jon had never understood the saying that fallen leaves return to their roots, but now he did.

Worry filled Angel's eyes. He did not know what he could say at such a time to comfort his mentor. Parting was the most painful thing of all—especially when two worlds lay between them.

The quiet did not last long before Jon suddenly pointed to a translucent crystal protruding halfway from a flowerpot on the balcony. "Could you bring that to me?"

Angel gave a soft "Mm," dug the translucent crystal out of the waterlogged soil, wiped it clean with a handkerchief, and handed it to Jon.

The transparent crystal was oval-shaped. From a distance, it looked like a glass bead.

Holding the "glass bead," Jon stared at it for a long, long time. His expression shifted from resentment to sorrow, then to a bitter smile.

"Three years ago, I threw it away in the forest. I never thought it would turn up in a flowerpot." Jon shook his head. "Perhaps this is fate?"

Watching his mentor mutter to himself, Angel's face reddened. After a long while, he hesitantly mumbled, "I picked it back up... I used to see you playing with it often, and you would often cry whenever you looked at it. I guessed it might have belonged to one of your family members. That day, when I saw you throw it into the woods, I thought you did not want things to make you miss them; later, I picked it up and buried it in the flowerpot, thinking that if you ever regretted it, it might still come in handy."

Jon froze for a moment, then murmured to himself in a voice only he could hear, "Perhaps it was destined to be with you?"

After a while, Jon looked at Angel. "This glass bead did not belong to any of my family. But... it can be considered something from Earth, I suppose? I do not know where it came from either."

"Let me tell you a story—the story of this glass bead."

As Jon spoke in an unhurried manner, the surprise in Angel's eyes deepened.

He had thought it was merely a glass bead with sentimental value, but he never imagined that its origins would be so extraordinary!

The story began twenty years ago. Back when Jon was still on Earth, he had been a scientific researcher. Born in Huaxia, he was later invited to Long Island, New York, in the United States with his wife and daughter because of a mysterious global research topic, where they conducted a secret study that lasted more than a decade.

The subject of that research was called the Montauk Project.

The Montauk Project was a renowned topic in Earth's spatial physics. Jon had been born in the middle of the twenty-third century, and the Montauk Project had already been launched two centuries before his birth. It had been shelved several times, with its total research time exceeding fifty years. The Montauk Project Jon participated in was its sixth launch.

The predecessor of the Montauk Project was the Philadelphia Experiment of 1942. Radar had only just been invented at the time, and in order to give warships invisibility against radar waves, the American military conducted experiments aboard the destroyer USS Eldridge. An omnidirectional antenna was installed on the warship's main mast, while two energy coils were placed on the deck and powered by the ship's generators. An anomaly occurred as soon as the experiment began. Even greater catastrophes took place during the second and third experiments: the generators spun wildly, completely out of control. In the end, the USS Eldridge vanished from everyone's sight and instantly shifted to a location seven thousand kilometers away. The Philadelphia Experiment was forced to halt, but one of its byproducts was the discovery that objects could teleport across vast distances.

Put simply, the Montauk Project was actually a physics project dedicated to researching spatial traversal.

At first, the Montauk Project's research direction remained inseparable from the Philadelphia Experiment, but unfortunately, it made no progress. That was until the beginning of the twenty-third century, when an object from beyond the heavens excited every scientist!

This object from beyond the heavens had fallen in the southwestern Sahara Desert of Mauritania, Africa, right at the center of the famous Eye of the Sahara.

The object attracted the attention of every nation. Mauritania, being a small African country, could not contend with the world powers. In the end, the object remained on Long Island, New York, in the United States. Huaxia, Britain, France, Japan, Russia, and many other countries took part in the research, and it was named the "Outer Eye."

During the research, scientists discovered that the Outer Eye possessed energy fluctuations that defied most known physical constants. When it was initially stimulated with high-energy rays of a certain frequency band, the Outer Eye even displayed the miraculous ability to transport objects across short distances.

It was precisely because the scientists had witnessed this spatial transmission ability that they launched the sixth Montauk Project.

Jon had actually been only an ordinary researcher in the Montauk Project, tasked with recording the effects that the wave frequencies produced by the Outer Eye had on plants.

One day, as usual, Jon brought several sealed plant seedlings into the heavily secured Outer Eye area to record and collect samples.

At first, everything was normal. Most of the plants withered and died under the fluctuations released by the Outer Eye. Only one tea seedling brought from Huaxia survived.

Just as Jon held the tea seedling and activated its parasitic chip to begin recording, no one knew whether there had been an error with the console or something else, but several more high-energy rays struck the Outer Eye. Immediately afterward, a drastic change occurred in the laboratory.

Space collapsed, darkness erupted, and the terrifying aura released by the Outer Eye instantly shrouded everything within the laboratory. Before Jon could react, he was swallowed by the darkness with the tea seedling still in his hand.

Along with the Outer Eye, he passed through layer upon layer of barriers and arrived in this world, covered in wounds.

Later, Jon was saved by Viscount Old Pat.

Later, the Outer Eye no longer displayed any miraculous properties, transforming into an utterly ordinary... glass bead.