Otto's Five-Hundred-Year Cultivation of Kiana: The Truth-She Was Not an Enemy, but a Key Forged from Kallen's Bloodline

"So what he wanted was not merely a key." Zhou Weiqing's voice was as cold as a frozen well. "He wanted a living person, someone with attachments in her heart, then to twist all of that person's emotions into the shape of a keyhole. Only then could he insert the key into the World Gate and turn it toward the World Line he wanted."

"In other words, this Herrscher had to genuinely care about something," Chang Gongwei said slowly. "But if you had something you cared about, how could you willingly let someone use you as a key? So what Otto had to do was find that 'care' and turn it into reins. Whoever you cared about, he would seize. The more humanity you had, the easier you were for him to control."

"That's too vicious." Bei Bei gritted his teeth, his voice low and muffled. "He even schemes against other people's humanity. If you were a living person, he would turn you into a key; if you were cold-blooded and heartless, he would not even want you. He had to find someone who could truly love, then personally forge that sincerity into a keyhole. That was ten thousand times crueler than murder."

"That's why he waited," Huo Yuhao said. "A Herrscher did not appear whenever he wanted one. He spent five hundred years waiting for exactly the right person. Someone who had the potential to become a key, yet whose humanity had not been completely destroyed by the world."

In the image, Otto walked over to a blank data screen and lightly swiped a finger across it. A young girl's face appeared. She had silver hair, eyes like half-melted moonlight, and a smile so clean it was almost excessive. Otto gazed at that face, and an extraordinarily complex tenderness