That crying was simply too miserable. Even Iluna could not help glancing at him, thinking of how she would turn eighteen in just a few hours. Her parents had died in the attack of the Blood of Mercury long ago, and she had never returned to her hometown after leaving it then.
As she recalled her parents and relatives from the past, she normally would not have missed them too deeply. Yet after hearing that elderly man's tearful account, her eyes could not help reddening.
"I'm going to be eighteen too."
She felt Shade take her hand. Though she knew they could not relax yet, she still could not help asking,
"Is growing up really that hard?"
"Life becomes hardest when there is no one older than you left to cry to."
Shade said. Iluna tried hard to hold back her tears as she looked with Shade at the Edwards Family before them—the nineteen people aside from the Diviner and the third generation Firstborn.
More than two hundred years had passed since the Seer Association traitor settled in Green Lake Town. The Edwards Family, which had multiplied through six generations, had finally gathered here. Their tangled family history and each person's different life experiences had ultimately led them all back here at this moment.
Their battle had ended, but tonight's battle was only beginning. Once everyone stopped moving, the wreckage held aloft by the branches began shaking violently again.
The tree, which had been growing slowly, suddenly shot upward by at least twenty meters. Just as everyone on the wreckage feared they would fall from the sky in the next second, the giant tree's growth came to a complete stop.
The late-spring night wind howled through the high sky. The increasingly distinct Three Moons and the stars illuminated the twenty-one