The so-called stars of this world were certainly not the same sort of stars within Ovid’s world. It was not material, something man can touch, more akin to points in space that emitted the purest mana. The sun had also once been one such star, a small place within the blanket over the world that gave off a faint, warm light. But millions of years ago, that certainly spot gradually grew brighter, before coming to dominate the sky for much of a day.

From that point on, a day was split into night and day.

The old sky where the countless stars strewn among the fabric of the celestials like tiny fireflies became the night.

The time when that single star dominated all the sky, drowning out all the other stars became the day.

Countless years have passed, and the emergence of the sun every day becomes a fact accepted by all people of the world - just like how no one would question why there was a candy shop at the end of their alley, or why the sky was blue.

Because of this, no one knew that today, the sun was shining the tiniest bit brighter.

After an unknown amount of time, the warm ray of sunlight finally landed. It landed perfectly onto the body of Ovid. Immediately, Ovid was struck to the ground, his body shaken to the point where he vomited out blood.

The blood blossomed into tiny flowers and then disappeared into the soil. The next moment, it quietly and quickly evaporated into a pale red mist, and then rapidly purified into the invisible empty by a certain, intangible power.

The tiny blossoms disappeared one after another. Before long, it came to that person coughing out the blood, directly into Ovid’s body!

The intangible raging fire, the insensible high temperature, and the invisible flaming breath seemed to be able to burn all things in this world. Compared to Tanin, it was like a firefly to a raging inferno.

The blood on Ovid’s body quickly evaporated and disappeared, while his clothes were not ruffled in the slightest.

His forearm exposed outside of his clothes and his face began to turn red rapidly. The hair on his forehead quickly withered, and the nails of his hand holding onto the sword became dry and crisp due to the swift loss of water.

A lost blade of grass was blown up during Ovid’s battle with Margrethe landed at the back of Ovid’s free hand. A small bird, perhaps finding refuge in Ovid’s height, landed on his shoulder, and then soon flew off.

It was still alive, but the next moment, Ovid might seriously be burned to death by the mysterious light emitted from the sun.

At that moment, a shadow softly covered Ovid’s body, as if it was a blanket someone placed on him. Under the darkness, the green grass was instantly frozen into ice and then shattered into countless pieces.

The darkness released an absolute chill akin to the coldness of space, slowly, it infiltrated into Ovid’s heart, meeting the darkness seeping through the countless rift that appeared on its surface. A moment later, the redness of his face and arms from the barrage of light faded and returned to white. The hair on his forehead quickly turned smooth and healthy, and the nails clutching onto the sword’s hilt regained their lustre.

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Julia far away in the palace seemed to have discerned something. Her dignified eyes that had been calm for thousands of years gave a glance in the direction of the shadow.

An instant later, her mouth opened, forming a single syllable.

Almost at the same time, the fissures within Ovid’s heart expanded rapidly!

---

Ovid’s feeble legs were no longer able to support him, and in the next moment, he lost his balance and flopped onto the ground.

His sight had become blurred and his mind intangible. He did not even notice his legs had given out, and his face was now contacting the ground.

“If you die here, I will be disappointed.”

A voice rang out through his head, sounding somewhat weak.

Yet to Ovid, it was like the loudest of bells. To the little remaining sense that remained in his mind, it was the most authoritative of commands, a deep instinct that he could not disobey.

The voice told him not to die. Therefore, he immediately lifted himself up and began to run wildly.

By some fortunate, or perhaps by fate, he was running Northwards, toward the Great Dividing Range.

---

Ovid was running beneath the sun, or more accurately, fleeing from the light. Not even bothering to remove the bloodied soil that had accumulated on his chin, he clenched onto the sword in his hand that would hit against his side now and then. As time passed, the light in his eyes grew dimmer and his eyebrows furrowed deeper.

By now, the trees and mountains that he would usually see so clearly had become distorted, gradually fading out of his consciousness. His breathing became weaker, and what little air that was squeezed out from his lungs was as cold as a glacier; while the breath he desperately sucked in was as hot as magma. His footsteps become uneven and unsteady, it was often caught by the protruding roots of a tree or trapped in a ditch. His mind became messier and messier, and he gradually forgot even his name.

Only that single sentence in his mind urged him to run. The obsession he has with that person was so strong… that it could support his seriously injured and weak body through mountains and rivers, carrying him thousands of miles.

The chilling northern winds were already blowing, but Ovid has yet to realise he reached the Northern parts of the empire. The overgrown grass brushed past Ovid’s stola, which now had a faint smell of blood mixed together with some unknown scent that Ovid was familiar with.

The distance between Juliana and the Great Dividing Range was over a thousand miles, yet now the cold soil had suddenly turned into a road of unending hellfire. Ovid, even in his absence of mind, could feel his sole becoming burned through when each step was taken. Those agonizing flames would instantly spread to his flesh and blood and then penetrated into his bones, an extremely painful experience.

Every step he took would turn his feet into muddy flesh that would rapidly regrow under the shadow. Yet he was still running.

When he reached the foot of the first mountain in the Great Dividing Range, his body suddenly began stiff, and he painfully grasped his chest!

He felt as though an invisible arrow flew through the sky and broke through his flesh and organs, directly piercing through his heart and nailing him to the ground!

The suffering from the intense rays of light was negligible to the pain coming from his chest - the kind of pain that tore and destroyed all things it touched.

Ovid frowned bitterly, showing far more expression than he ever had. The mountains before him had turned into nothingness, a world separated from reality. He found that within his vision were countless illusions - true, false, material and the immaterial blended into one, creating a phantom world among which Ovid was in the centre of.

Suddenly, his ears heard someone gently speaking.

He turned his head around with the last remnants of his strength and tightly clenched the hilt with his bloodied hand, but he could not see anyone. What he saw was the weird, distorted and empty world surrounding him.

His face was as pale as snow. He looked around blankly, subconsciously trying to find the place where that voice had come.

The great evergreen trees that seemed to melt into the ground were speaking in an ancient and unfamiliar language; the snowy mountains sinking beneath the earth were whispering in the bitterly cold wind some incoherent words impossible for a person to make out. The green grass surrounding him was echoing in unison some sound that resembled the primordial resonance of space.

The soil beneath his foot, the sky above him, the chilling wind, the peaks and valleys - the entire world, were all speaking.

Ovid was long intolerant of noise, and now, lonely and helpless, he was standing in the middle of some unknown place listening to incomprehensible sounds coming from all directions of the world.

He loosened the clunch on the sword, dropping it onto the ground to cover his ears with his gory hands, but could not stop all sorts of pitches from penetrating through his palm, then through his ears and finally resounding loudly through his mind.

Ovid slowly knelt down onto the freezing cold soil and then fell down.

The sword was beside him in a dirty puddle.

The blood dripping from his body; before they could bloom on the ground, would turn into a thin mist.

The blood was his heart blood.

Through his heart was another world.