Kiana nodded, her expression grave. "The class monitor mentioned that they knew each other."
Bronya's mind raced as she pieced together the clues.
"The Eleventh Herrscher, the Divine Key of the Tenth, MANTIS..."
"If these terms are all real, they point to only one thing-memories left over from the previous era!"
Kiana sucked in a sharp breath.
After the shock came an overwhelming heartache.
"Could it be... she isn't just a guardian of the present?"
"Has the class monitor been fighting Honkai hand to hand since the old era?"
"Why won't she say anything? Why insist on bearing everything alone?"
As they peeled back layer after layer, they discovered that they had never truly understood Fu Hua.
The deeper they delved, the more unfamiliar and staggering it all seemed.
A lonely vigil spanning fifty thousand years.
Even when the sheer volume of memories battered her consciousness to the brink of collapse, forcing her to strip away the excess and scatter it.
She still lived.
With a different face and a different identity, she still walked among mortals.
In different guises, she continued that endless battle to protect them.
A thought suddenly struck Bronya, and she ventured a guess.
"Kiana... is it possible that even she has forgotten these fragments?"
A deathly silence fell at those words.
Then an even deeper ache rose in their throats.
Fu Hua...
You have suffered so much.
Lin Zhaoyu withdrew her gaze.
She stared at the two of them, her eyes full of scrutiny.
"Just now... what did you see?"
Kiana paused before speaking.
"Chi Yuan's past."
"Days from long ago."
Lin Zhaoyu's brows knitted slightly.
Questions followed one after another.
"What did she look like? Where in Shenzhou was she? What was distinctive about her clothing?"
Kiana pressed her lips together.
Some things could