On the drive home, the car fell completely silent. Rinjani cried quietly the entire way, while Denis kept his focus on the road, his jaw clenched. In the front passenger seat, Debi occasionally glanced at Liana through the rearview mirror, her eyes filled with questions and worry.
When they got home, Liana immediately locked herself in her room. She placed the container holding the flowers on her desk. Miraculously, the moment they touched the water from the sacred lake, the petals of the Goddesslight flower, which had been slightly wilted, bloomed in breathtaking beauty. Its sharp, fragrant scent once again filled Liana's room, bringing her an extraordinary sense of calm.
However, a few moments after the flower's scent spread through the room, Liana's head suddenly began to spin violently. The effects of the Goddesslight flower were taking hold. Its pungent aroma seemed to penetrate her subconscious, cracking the walls of amnesia that had kept her past locked away all this time.
Thump!
Liana's heart pounded as a fleeting image suddenly flashed through her mind. It wasn't a memory from her life as 'Liana,' but a memory from a life utterly foreign to her.
In the brief flash of memory, she saw herself running across a vast meadow beneath a night sky filled with two moons. She wore a long, shimmering white dress. Behind her, she heard the sound of deeply familiar laughter.
"Wait for me, Lianka! Don't run so fast!" a young man's voice called out.
Liana jolted and clutched her throbbing head. "That voice... that's Razel's voice," she muttered, breathing heavily. This time, the name 'Lianka' no longer sounded unfamiliar to her. A profound longing suddenly surged through her chest.
But that longing abruptly transformed into unbearable pain, as though something icy and razor-sharp had struck her chest. The flower's magic dragged her memories even farther back, toward a dark memory that had remained tightly sealed at the bottom of her soul.
The beautiful sky over Ether Valley suddenly turned blood-red. Dark creatures surrounded the crystal palace. Amid the chaos, a gigantic black shadow—one of the most powerful creatures of darkness—stood before her.
Liana remembered the overwhelming terror she felt as the creature's claws pierced her chest. She remembered her vision slowly growing dark, while in the distance, Razel's hysterical cries as he called her name rang out, utterly heartbreaking.
Lianka's soul died that night.
But it didn't end there. Other fragments of memory spun rapidly through Liana's head like a broken tape. After her tragic death in Ether Valley, her soul was not immediately reborn as a human on Earth. For hundreds of years, she remained trapped in a painful cycle of reincarnation. Dozens of times, her soul tried to rise again; dozens of times, she was born in other dimensions; and dozens of times, she nearly died because of curses or pursuit by dark creatures.
Until finally, after waiting hundreds of years and enduring dozens of exhausting deaths, her soul managed to escape and reincarnate in the human world as a girl named Liana.
Before she could even mourn that bitter reality, the temperature in her room suddenly plunged, cold enough to pierce her bones. A powerful wind blew from nowhere, making her curtains billow wildly.
Scratch... scratch...
A sound like sharp claws scraping against something came from outside the window of her second-floor room. Liana froze. When she turned toward the window, a pair of enormous, glowing red eyes stared hungrily at her from behind the glass. Just as the paranormal expert had said, the energy from Ether Valley had lured them there. The dark creatures had found her soul again.