On the plaza before the Central Tower of Morning Star City, Lazar stared blankly at the deep blue ocean beneath the Floating City, at the various fish occasionally leaping from the surface, the Mermaids singing moving songs, and the orange-red sun just nearing the horizon.
Had he not lost the relevant function, he felt that he might already have shed tears... Even so, some of his Exosuit equipment had begun to "overheat," forcing him to draw a little water from his tank to cool himself down.
Ordinarily, he would never have been so extravagant. He would only enter hibernation and let his parts cool on their own. After all, water was scarce in Morning Star City; a cubic meter of it cost as much as thirty standard units of energy.
But at this moment, he had no such concerns. On one hand, he could not bear to look away; on the other, he could clearly sense that the seawater below contained none of that extreme Fallen, filthy, mysterious power...
It was an endless expanse of clean, unpolluted water, inexhaustible and abundant, with no need for concern.
Feeling emotions he had not experienced in a long time, every Exosuit component in Lazar's body could not help entering an overloaded state.
At that moment, it was as if he had returned to the first time he saw Morning Star City illuminate the dark earth with a faint glimmer of its own light.
He and his parents had once merely been ordinary residents of a city-state on the verge of destruction, living hopeless lives with no future... Until the day Morning Star City arrived, allowing him to see the "light." It was the will of the Mechanical Emperor that gave him a purpose in life for the first time—to pursue the World of