By evening, the sky had turned a dusky yellow, and the summer breeze carried a hint of coolness.
On the outskirts of Hare Sora City, a tall, beautiful girl and a strapping, strikingly gallant young man stood hand in hand in an open space.
"Let the starry road to the distant shore open here..."
Taking a slip of paper engraved with a Red Mask design from the pocket of her white shirt, stretched full across her chest, Herta murmured softly.
"Hum..."
A scarlet arc flashed, and a passage resembling a swirling black hole appeared, wisps of red mist churning within.
"Let's go, Herta..."
"Yes! Let's go home!"
Their fingers tightly interlaced, the gallant young man and the graceful, beautiful girl walked side by side into the vortex before them.
An instant later, the spatial passage vanished. Dusk in Hare Sora City remained tranquil and beautiful, but two travelers from another world were gone.
Their consciousness stretched endlessly, reality plunging into an endless river of darkness, before light appeared again a moment later.
Lin Feng slowly opened his eyes, and a familiar scene came into view.
The enormous hemispherical machine hummed, a triangular prismatic emblem floating in a gravity field that radiated cyan-blue light.
He was in Herta's mysterious office, where the Simulated Universe machine was kept.
Herta's lovely figure was no longer beside him, and Lin Feng could not help finding it a little strange.
"Ding, ding, ding..."
"Beep, beep, beep..."
Looking toward the somewhat strange sounds, he saw an exquisite Herta Puppet with waterfall-like flaxen hair in a corner by the Simulated Universe machine, her cute, smiling face showing three parts anticipation and seven parts confusion.
Her slender fingers tapped rapidly across the touchscreen terminal, as though she were inspecting and debugging something.
The Herta Puppet had no permission