Five Thousand Years of Honkai's Power Couldn't Match Otto's Five Hundred Years of "Self-Study"?

In the image, Otto's hand finally touched the edge of the projection. There was no blinding flash, no sound of a world collapsing. Only the faintest ripple spread from his fingertip, like a tiny pebble falling into a void deeper than the sea.

"He went in," Huo Yuhao said.

"He didn't go in," Gu Yuena corrected softly. "He merged with it. He filled a World Line on the outermost edge of that projection with himself. The Tree won't remember him, and neither will the sea. He'll become a name that never existed in that World Line. And in that World Line, Kallen will open her eyes again."

"Who will she see first?" Xiao Xiao's voice was hoarse from crying.

"The light of the human world," Gu Yuena said. "She'll see herself from five hundred years ago, still alive and not yet having met Otto. She'll see the old alley, the church, and the people she wanted to protect. She won't see Otto. He'll have become the shadow beneath her feet. Lighter than air. Thinner than life."

"That's quieter than any death," Xue Ye said slowly. "A man turned himself into a beam of light in a young woman's world, then vanished inside it. What he left her in the end wasn't love or hatred, but a world without him. Perhaps that's the heaviest and lightest form an obsession can take."

"He spent his life calculating, only to reduce himself to zero," Huo Yuhao said. "But that zero gave someone else an entire future. By his own reckoning, he lost. Yet Kallen gained a sky that had never been stained with blood. She'll never know someone spent five hundred years wiping it clean."

"What about the Imaginary Tree?" Tai Tan asked in a rumbling voice. "It just watched? A mortal traded