A Boy and His Dog

Huai Shi was dumbfounded.

A boundary marker could shatter? Was the signal bad here, with no base station to connect to? No way—he'd already finished crafting the Hearthstone, and now it was telling him he'd disconnected?

But that shouldn't have been possible.

As a precious relic, something like a boundary marker had to guarantee its own safety. Even if it failed to activate, it shouldn't shatter apart. Otherwise, the chaotic ritual would trigger unforeseeable consequences.

But where were those unforeseeable consequences now?

Even if there were no unforeseeable consequences, there should at least have been a Source Matter leak—the nineteen common dissipation phenomena that occurred when a fixed miracle lost its restraints.

Huai Shi hadn't seen a single one.

It was as though after the teleportation pigeon flew off, everything inside had flapped its wings and flown away with it.

Or there was only one explanation...

This thing had been broken from the beginning!

In an instant, Huai Shi understood.

That old bastard Garland, neither man nor woman—could he have never intended to let Huai Shi return in the first place?

But why? What was he after? What good would Huai Shi's death do him? If he hated having Huai Shi around that much, why hadn't he just...

At that point, Huai Shi's train of thought suddenly stalled.

A vague suspicion surfaced in his heart.

Could it be that from the very beginning... those meteor showers and attacks had been Garland's dirty work?

If Garland could sense the location of Huai Shi's beacon from so far away and send aid, then why couldn't he use it to unleash a meteor shower attack? Besides, even his rescue hadn't quite managed to rescue him...

Trust only needed an instant to collapse, especially when it had never existed in the first place!

And