The truth was, it was quite astonishing. Once he entertained an apparently absurd hypothesis, everything suddenly made sense.
What had crossed through time was not the town on the outskirts, nor even the entire world, but Lairding itself.
So it wasn't some grand curse that blanketed almost everything. The special power had only affected one city.
By comparison, this was clearly a far simpler explanation.
Nightmares, the bottom of the lake, the secret chamber.
Under the gazes of the Fallen Star race's four leaders, Fu Qian took out an object and opened it.
It was a damaged pocket watch, with strange writing engraved inside its back cover.
Fu Qian remembered every word. His experiences this time—as a worm, with an extradimensional escort—flashed through his mind.
The painting that had appeared in the art gallery...
The strict and exalted laws...
The sudden fog from the sky...
The nightmares of all kinds...
The caught-off-guard cults...
And even the peculiar pocket watch that seemed to be called "she"...
All along the way, under the ruthless demands of pursuing maximum efficiency, the "burning" of every faction and individual had seemingly succeeded in paving the road to the truth.
When he had first arrived in this world, his judgment had been that the truth of the World Within the Painting was being concealed, and that the world the cults inhabited had the nature of a nightmare.
One reason was that the Witch had once told him this was a despairing apocalypse.
A place like Lairding clearly didn't fit.
Yet as he later drove the various factions to their limits, searching for evidence to support his theory, more and more signs had pointed in the opposite direction: the place before him really was a sanctuary blessed by the gods, a paradise secluded from the world.
The