Hearing Bernadette's question, Cyril nodded uncertainly:
"It should... be possible."
As soon as he finished speaking, thick turquoise vines as wide as bowls suddenly descended from the ceiling, covering the surrounding area like a torrential downpour.
They twisted and intertwined, swiftly forming a turquoise forest that rose layer upon layer, its top completely out of sight.
Bernadette's gentle voice sounded from ahead. "Are you ready?"
Without waiting for Cyril to nod, she casually reached into the air before her and gave it a light tug. The turquoise vines around them quickly writhed, pulling the distance between them much farther apart.
Then she folded her hands over her chest and bent slightly at the waist.
Silently, white illusory feathers appeared behind her, densely overlapping and gathering into a pair of enormous white phantom wings that slowly spread open.
As those wings slowly unfurled, Bernadette's body cracked like porcelain falling to the ground, countless large and small fractures spreading across her until she looked utterly fragmented.
From the gaps in her body, darkness that seemed to have absorbed all light spread outward, and one pair after another of cold, indifferent eyes without eyelashes grew from it.
At the other end of the turquoise forest, over a hundred meters away, starlight surged in Cyril's eyes as he quietly watched the scene, seemingly lost in a trance.
In his eyes, the darkness on Bernadette's body was not a color, but the void left behind after all information had been gathered and absorbed. Those cold, indifferent eyes were some manifestation in reality of the knowledge she possessed.
As he watched, part of that knowledge seemed to come alive, rushing toward his mind like floodwaters bursting through a dam.
He saw the story of the Ugly Duckling becoming a white swan, a hundred ways to cook