The pod’s metal frame creaks softly.

Echa can feel a faint, warm smoke drifting over her bare skin. Her eyes dart frantically around the sterile space, searching for anything familiar, but Oshna has already vanished from the room.

It all feels too fast. Too many unanswered questions are colliding in her mind, leaving a vast emptiness that desperately needs to be filled.

Echa turns her head sharply to the side. Her heart skips a beat—the Orynite Crystal is completely gone from her shoulder. Her hand instinctively drifts over the smooth, unmarked skin, her green eyes staring down at her own body in disbelief.

“I see why she kept staring at me now,” she mutters bluntly, letting out a frustrated groan.

Pressing her palms against the edge of the pod, Echa swings her legs over and drops onto the metallic floor with a heavy thud. The material beneath her boots—or rather, her bare feet—is clearly hyper-advanced technology, but it all glows with that same faint, oppressive white light.

“Before things get any weirder, I need to get out of here.”

She begins to roam the perimeter of the laboratory, examining the strange console arrays. Near the edge of the room, she spots her clothes. Her grey dress is clamped firmly in the mechanical teeth of a strange machine with a rusted, robotic face—an apparatus that looks as if it has been dead for years, cobbled together from discarded scraps.

Gripping the edge of the fabric, she yanks it hard to free it from the machine's grasp.

“Don’t go stealing a lady's clothes,”

she mutters under her breath. On impulse, she throws a sharp punch directly into the robot's metallic face—only for a searing spike of heat to shock her knuckles.

“Ouch! Why the hell are you so hot?!”

Echa cradles her hand against her chest, hissing in annoyance as she vigorously rubs her fingers to shake off the sting.

“It was just a cloth dryer.”

The voice comes from directly behind her. It belongs to a little girl.

Startled, Echa swirls around on her heel, her eyes widening as she tries to spot the intruder. Standing in the dimming light of the lab is a young girl. Her form looks faint, slightly translucent against the white environment—like she is physically there, but not entirely real. She simply stands there, smiling softly at Echa.

Blushing furiously, Echa hastily scrambles to hold the dress up, shielding herself from view in pure embarrassment.

“How... how long have you been standing there?”

The little girl doesn’t react to her embarrassment. Without a word, she simply turns on her heel and glides out through the automatic laboratory door.

“Wait! Let me—”

“Typical me to hope what I chase would ever give me answers. They never do.”

Shaking off the chill, she frantically rushes to pull her clothes back on. It takes a chaotic minute and a half of tugging and adjusting before she is finally decent. Taking a sharp breath, she approaches the exit and forces open the very door the little girl had just used.

Outside, it is pitch black.

Not a single photon of light penetrates the corridor. It is an absolute, suffocating void. Echa immediately recoils, stepping backward into the safety of the white lab, staring out at the dark in sheer disbelief.

“Nope... it’s way too eerie to go that way,” she says bluntly.

Her grey coat flutters softly as she paces back and forth. Her eyes drift nervously between the blinding white walls and the pitch-black hallway. Swirling a stray strand of hair away from her face, she desperately tries to calculate where a real exit could possibly be.

Defeated for a moment, Echa lets her head fall forward. Her fingers softly grip the frame of the door lock system. Her dark blue hair tumbles over her face, obscuring her vision as her green eyes well up, on the absolute verge of holding back hot tears.

“Fheshas… I should have listened to you,” Echa’s voice cracks, completely broken by the weight of the isolation. Without even looking, she blindly slaps her palm against the door control panel.

Suddenly, a violent gust of wind rushes out from the mechanism, catching her hair and sending it flying backward. Blinding, golden light floods the room, piercing through her tear-filled eyes.

Echa lifts her chin, her green eyes widening in pure shock as her tears are instantly whipped away by the sudden gale. The warm, radiant heat of a real sun hits her face. Her throat tightens, her voice completely locked, unable to utter a single syllable.

Stretching out before her is not a graveyard, and not a void.

It is a massive, sprawling civilization. Towering, hyper-advanced machines hum with life, and the streets below are teeming with thousands of people moving through the light.