"Ivette."
"Ivette."
"Ivette!"
Li You sensed someone speaking beside him in an unfamiliar language, yet somehow, he seemed able to understand it.
He opened his eyes and found himself lying on a bed. A slightly hazy figure stood in the doorway, looking at her. "Mm, you're finally awake. How did you sleep last night? Was the bed comfortable?"
"...Me?" Li You looked at the somewhat blurry, translucent figure before him and saw that she was an unfamiliar woman in a white lab coat.
"Yes. Who else would be in this room?" the woman asked with a smile.
"Mm... it was comfortable..." As Li You spoke, he looked around. The room's layout felt familiar. Although the fluorescent vines were gone, it was exactly like the room where he had awakened on the ninth underground level. Combined with the phantom speaking to him, the answer was practically obvious.
He had returned to the past in the form of a hallucination or dream!
Was it because of the mist on the tenth underground level?
He had fallen asleep in the mist and somehow connected with this underwater facility's past?
It didn't sound very scientific, but that was the only conclusion he could draw!
"I'm glad it was comfortable," the woman said. "It'll be breakfast soon. Hurry and change, then get ready to wash up."
"Oh, okay..." Li You obediently nodded like an ordinary little girl. He had answered in Chinese, while the hazy woman had spoken an unfamiliar language from another world, yet they could understand one another perfectly. That was undoubtedly further proof that this was a dream.
Once she saw Li You get out of bed, the woman left. He went to the doorway and peeked around for a while, soon hearing her talking with other children outside the neighboring room. That roughly confirmed her identity. She was either a dorm supervisor or a teacher...
So this was actually a boarding school?
Perhaps because it was a dream, everyone was slightly translucent and hazy, like NPCs in a game. It did not make Li You feel particularly nervous.
He found a blue children's uniform, underwear, shoes, and socks in the room's cabinet. Then, in the half-length mirror on the inside of the cabinet door, he saw a little girl with long silver hair and dark red eyes silently staring back at him.
The girl's features were delicate and beautiful, her body slender. Dressed in children's clothes utterly at odds with her temperament, she looked like a beauty stepped out of a painting. Slowly, she gave Li You a faint smile. It looked a little awkward, but also heartbreakingly endearing.
After facing off with the little girl in the mirror for over ten seconds, Li You stopped his awkward smile and looked at the silver-haired, red-eyed girl, whose expression had likewise returned to normal. So this was what he looked like now?
She was too beautiful. He had not reacted at first and thought he had seen a ghost... And how should he put it? Although he was very dissatisfied about ending up in the wrong gender, at least the original owner was not unattractive. It was not completely unacceptable...
Forget it. This was not the time to think about such trivial matters!
Shaking his head, Li You changed clothes and left the room. He followed the group of children to wash up, eat breakfast, and finally arrive at a small classroom to wait for morning lessons.
During roll call at morning lessons, Li You finally learned his own—or rather, the original owner's—full name.
"Ivette Lochvia."
"Present."
She raised her hand and told herself, From now on, I am Ivette Lochvia.
After roll call, the first class was language. They were taught an otherworldly language called Black Tide Language, but the teaching method was unusual—all the children had to enter a computer room, lie in specially made metal chairs, put on helmet-like devices, and follow a guidance program to study on their own in a virtual world.
Since she had no idea when the dream would end, Ivette studied especially seriously. She was also astonished by the world's head-mounted equipment. It was practically the virtual reality found only in science fiction novels.
However, to prevent students from getting distracted, the teaching mode imposed restrictions on access permissions and locked most functions. Ivette, who wanted to look up other information, gained little from it. She only learned that it was a Head-mounted Vision Terminal produced by a company called Gravity Group, along with matching educational software, and that it used an unfamiliar technology called Rune Array.
"Rune... Array?"
Turning the term over in her mind, Ivette guessed that this world's technological path might be rather different from what she had imagined.
After class and before lunch, all the children had to undergo a medical examination. The medical room was right next door to the classroom.
While waiting in line, Ivette gathered some definite information by asking the other children.
"You mean this isn't a school?" Ivette asked in surprise.
"You didn't know?" The speaker was a little girl standing in front of her, likewise a translucent phantom. "This is the Mount Ish Black Tower Research Center... Didn't you come here because you have a genetic disease?"
"A genetic disease? What's that?"
"I don't know. Before sending me here, Grandpa Director said I had this disease. It would flare up after I grew up, so I had to come here for long-term treatment," the little girl said.
"Grandpa Director is?"
"The director of the orphanage I used to live in."
"Oh..."
Soon, after asking around in several places, Ivette finally pieced together a relatively clear picture of the situation—
This was a research center belonging to the giant pharmaceutical corporation Black Tower Pharmaceuticals. Because it had been built in the dark waters below, it was also often called the Abyss Base.
In response to the government's call to provide free welfare medical examinations for children from many orphanages, they had discovered that quite a few orphans suffered from a particular genetic defect. To research and overcome these rare incurable diseases, the company had reached agreements with various orphanages and brought the sick children here for long-term observation and treatment.
The lake outside was an enormous crater lake, while the entire Abyss Base had been built atop the dormant volcano known as Mount Ish. According to the staff here, Mount Ish's last eruption had occurred tens of thousands of years ago. The magma chamber beneath it had completely solidified, so there was no risk of another eruption.
But what had happened afterward, leaving everyone here dead, monsters everywhere outside, and only the original owner seemingly still alive within...
Scenes from countless classic works flashed through Ivette's mind.
Could they have been researching some terrifying biological weapon here, using orphanage children as test subjects? Then the virus leaked, contaminating the entire base along with the crater lake outside?
Was the reason no one from the outside world had come to clean up the aftermath or collect the bodies that the virus was still spreading, making everyone too afraid to approach?
Then what about the original owner?
Perhaps the original owner had awakened unharmed in the base not because of transmigration, but because she had mutated and become the only one capable of adapting to the virus?
Or perhaps she was directly the virus's host?
All right, that was getting far too wild. This was not Resident Evil or Prototype... Ivette stopped letting her imagination run rampant and entered the examination room in turn with the other children.
The medical examination was not complicated, and there was no need to lift her clothes. She only had to stand on a testing device for a while and have some blood drawn.
After leaving the room, Ivette saw the woman standing guard at the door and said, "Dr. Tabitha, may I ask you a question?"
Tabitha was the woman responsible for waking her up that morning, then taking them to the computer room for class. She seemed to have originally been a researcher here before being temporarily assigned as the children's caretaker. Her full name was Tebesa Clovelan.
Upon hearing Ivette's question, she replied gently, "Of course. What would you like to ask, Ivette?"
"What are runes?" Ivette asked.
"Oh, that." Tabitha said, "They are the foundation of magical research and the cornerstone of human civilization. Put simply, they are like tiny points. When combined, they become you, me, all kinds of matter, all kinds of magical elements, and everything in the universe."
"...Magic?!"
"Yes, magic. You should not find that word unfamiliar, right? From what I've seen, many children nowadays want to become great mages when they grow up."
"Can I learn magic now?" Ivette hurriedly asked.
"Now? Don't rush. Learn your language lessons first. Once you're old enough, you'll naturally encounter courses like Rune Compilation. Though by then, you might not even like it," Tabitha said with a smile.