True Form of the Imaginary Tree: Who's Tickling My Feet? Oh, Just a Mortal Named Otto

"He'll become a speck of dirt beneath the Tree's roots," Huo Yuhao said, "or a grain of sand beside the Sea of Quantum. No one will remember him again. He chose this himself. The day he left that Old Photograph by his bed, he'd already decided. He wasn't trying to come back. He was trying to disappear."

"So there really is an ending colder than death," Hai Long murmured.

"Not colder," Gu Yuena said softly. "Heavier. So heavy that even the Imaginary Tree and the Sea of Quantum became the backdrop to his obsession. A mortal drew the sources of two worlds behind him, just to send one girl home. Across all World Lines, this may be the maddest and quietest page of all."

The Light Screen slowly dimmed. The Tree and the sea were like two eyes closing, hiding countless universes in darkness once more.

Yet everyone remained seated, motionless. They had suddenly realized that their own world might be nothing more than a leaf on that Tree. And there, beneath that leaf, they had watched an obsession from another world burn itself away.

"Will we fall into that sea too?" Xiao Xiao suddenly asked.

"Yes," Tang San said. "But new leaves will grow where we once stood. That's what the Tree means. Not that anyone lasts forever, but that existence itself goes on."

"Then did Otto help Kallen grow again?"

"He made himself the soil for her," Tang San said softly. "So she'll grow up untouched by any of it."

On the screen, the boundless Imaginary Tree before Otto began to change.

It still shone, still brought countless worlds into being and let them perish, but its light suddenly had an edge. For the first time, everyone saw that the "Tree" had no roots, no complete trunk. It