Iluna nestled against Shade by the fire, and being close to him made the eighteen-year-old girl feel very secure. It also made her a little happier:
"Shade, all of that is only everyone's speculation, but this is the only thing we can do here.
Exploring this castle, most of which is submerged underwater, is not easy either. Our progress has been slow. So far, we have only inspected the third, fourth, and fifth floors above the water, and then found these."
While the wolf girl distributed food and clean drinking water to everyone, Shade examined what the four girls had found so far. They were not stone slabs engraved with important clues or miraculous props, but four rectangular stone tablets the size of letter paper.
Although the four stone tablets were made of slightly different materials, they felt very similar to the touch. Their white-ash-gray color easily brought to mind the glowing Ashes drifting down from the sky.
"Come to think of it, do those Ashes pose any environmental hazard?"
Shade suddenly asked. The wolf girl, who had just wiped an apple on her skirt and was about to take a bite, hurriedly pulled the red apple away from her mouth. Her ears perked up slightly as she looked at Shade's face in the firelight:
"Miss Wilde said that although those Ashes have physical form, they are essentially a spacetime phenomenon."
The Green Dragon girl, who was elegantly using the pots and utensils Shade had brought to prepare a meal, nodded:
"I have never encountered such a strange space. I have only heard Teacher mention similar situations before. This place is not merely temporally chaotic; its own disordered flow of time is accelerating the decay and collapse of everything within it.
Put simply, those Ashes represent the collapse of time.