A decent scene transition

The children looked at one another. For the first time, a crack quietly opened in hearts long sealed in ice, and a faint hope slowly took root.

The entire hall was so quiet that only the faint crackle of firewood in the hearth could be heard. The children exchanged uneasy glances, none of them speaking first. To them, "Father," a title filled with warmth, felt unfamiliar and unsettling.

Arlecchino did not hurry them. She stood quietly in the firelight, the flames lending a soft outline to her Harbinger's cloak. The sharp edge her crimson eyes showed the outside world had faded, leaving only a somber tenderness. She herself had crawled out of this inferno and knew these wounds would not vanish in an instant merely because of a few words.

The first to act was a frail little girl huddled at the very back of the crowd. The rules announced earlier had chipped away a corner of her long-standing numbness. Mustering all her courage, she let her tiny, trembling voice drift timidly into the silent hall. "F-Father."

That call was like the first new shoot breaking through frozen ground.

Then a second and a third faint call followed, uneven and filled with restraint and unease, slowly gathering together.

"Father."

"Father."

The calls rising one after another were not loud, and even carried apprehension that was difficult to hide, yet they dispelled the cold oppression that had lingered in the hall for years.

"There is no need to be afraid." Her voice grew gentler still. "From now on, the fire in this House of the Hearth will warm you, rather than serve as shackles that burn you. Live and grow here without fear. I will protect every one of you."

The thick doors shut out the howling wind and snow. For the first time, the dancing firelight inside truly embraced all the scarred children of the House of the Hearth.

After leaving the children in the hall with their tumultuous thoughts, Arlecchino passed through the corridor toward the office deep within the House of the Hearth that had once belonged to Crucabena. The moment she pushed open the wooden door, a heavy, cold stillness washed over her. The furnishings remained as they had been: cold, solid-wood bookcases lined the walls, and layers of paper files covered the desk. Traces of the former administrator's indifference and severity lingered everywhere.

She closed the door behind her, shutting out the hall's warmth and the children's faint sounds, then slowly approached the broad desk. A thick stack of children's files sat neatly in a desk cabinet. Each recorded a child's background, constitution, elemental compatibility, and scores from previous trials. The text noted only worth, strengths, and weaknesses, without a trace of human warmth. Beside records marked unsatisfactory, there were even cold instructions for disposal.

Arlecchino brushed her fingertips over the yellowed pages and read through them one by one. Behind each row of cold data on the paper was a life forcibly stripped of childhood. In the past, Crucabena had selected the strong through battles to the death, treating children as weapons to be honed and worn down. From beginning to end, this collection of files was nothing more than an inventory of weapons.

Arlecchino lowered her gaze to those jarring words, a flicker of coldness passing through her eyes.

She raised a hand and gathered the entire heavy stack of files. Tiny flames instantly climbed the pages from her fingertips, and fierce fire swiftly engulfed the whole stack.

Those cruel scores, cold selections, and records of trials that ended only in life or death blackened, curled, and dissolved inch by inch beneath the flames, gradually burning into drifting ash that scattered on the wind.

She took up a pen and lowered her gaze, setting its tip against a sheet of pure white paper on the desk. Her strokes were gentle but solemn. It was time to rewrite the rules and the course of the children's growth.

Scratch, scratch.

The pen made faint scratching sounds against the paper. His expression focused, Xingsu methodically wrote out the entire process of his trip to Avidya Forest to treat Collei that day, omitting not even the changes he had felt as the black mist inside him was slowly purified.

Holding a quill between his fingers, the boy bent his head and carefully listed the information he had organized on the page. As he cross-referenced the records on Eleazar he had just discussed with Tighnari, he meticulously noted the characteristics of Memoria erosion and a comparison of the two treatment methods.

Something else had caught Xingsu's attention: his conversation with Tighnari that day had mentioned that information in Sumeru still largely had to be conveyed by people.

Xingsu had once read about the transmission of information in a Kshahrewar book.

Transmitting information required four elements in total: a sender, the information itself, a transmission medium, and a receiver.

For information to be transmitted quickly and conveniently, the most important element was the transmission medium.

Writing information on paper and having people carry it back and forth was still far too inefficient.

Then was there a device that could transmit information quickly?

Yes.

Xingsu turned to look at the device on the desk that he had been ignoring all along-the Akasha Terminal.

He had seen how Alhaitham consistently refused to wear the Akasha. He always insisted on consulting original ancient texts and organizing his knowledge through his own reasoning, deeply disdaining the Akasha's method of forcibly imparting knowledge and restricting individual thought.

Tighnari was the same. Stationed in Avidya Forest to study Eleazar and the rainforest's ecology, he personally recorded and organized all his observational notes and pharmacological experiment data. He never used the Akasha to retrieve ready-made material, trusting only the actual conclusions he reached through field investigations.

On top of that, Nahida had specifically and solemnly warned him that, while the Akasha could allow someone to acquire knowledge quickly, endlessly receiving a uniform stream of information could very easily cause them to lose the ability to think independently and make judgments.

With all these factors combined, even with the Akasha right at hand, he had naturally set it aside. Over time, he had completely forgotten the item's existence.

Yet as Xingsu studied all kinds of knowledge, his amazement at the Akasha Terminal could not help but grow.

Even just the small wearable terminal before him required electronic circuitry and microelectronic fabrication techniques to produce its hardware, relying on radio-frequency communication to establish a long-distance connection to the central data repository within the Akasha.

For the time being, the part that read human thoughts could be attributed to the God of Wisdom's power.

As for finding knowledge in the database after a request was entered, that depended on programming to build a database and search functions to locate data that met the user's needs.

Importing all the manuscripts, experimental records, ancient texts, and historical materials accumulated by the Sumeru Akademiya's six Darshans over hundreds and thousands of years into the Akasha system was no small undertaking either.

Mathematics, electrical engineering, computer science, mechanics, neurology, materials science... countless abstruse and difficult fields intertwined and merged to become the Akasha, which ordinary people could use at will to retrieve vast amounts of information with a single thought.

From a technological standpoint, calling the Akasha Terminal the crystallization of all Sumeru's wisdom was no exaggeration.

But could such a precise, complex, and enormous system really have only one function-acquiring knowledge?

Xingsu always had the feeling that the Akasha Terminal was the brilliant jewel at the very pinnacle of the skyscraper that was Sumeru, while the floors beneath that top floor were empty inside.