Finally, the core laboratory escorted the child back to the sanatorium.
As an important subject for study, the child would have to live under strict monitoring for a long period of time, but it also meant that the child would receive prioritized security and welfare benefits from the organization.
The best news for the couple was, of course, the fact that for three whole months, the child remained awake!
No signs of falling unconscious!
The couple excitedly opened the door.
The room was surrounded by pristine white walls, with surveillance cameras embedded in all corners of the room.
Unlike these cold and inorganic elements, the rest of the room was filled with colorful childish decorations, such as a flat screen playing cartoons on the wall, a shelf filled with storybooks and stuffed toys, a small desk with coloring materials, various dolls and stuffed toys, and a yellow star-patterned bed covers.
Hearing the sound of the door opening, a child looked up from a picture book, and a pair of large, electric blue eyes met them.
The hair that was shaved over two months ago had grown a little longer.
However, the child’s face was gaunt and expressionless, and her limbs were very thin.
“You’re really awake!
Good, good,” the woman choked, overwhelmed by relief and joy.
It was her first time being a parent, she did not know what else to say and could only repeatedly exclaim ‘good’.
The man was relatively more stable, but his relieved eyes betrayed his emotional turmoil.
“Good girl, how are you feeling?
Are you uncomfortable anywhere?”
This finally seemed to wake his wife up.
“Right, you just arrived today from the clinical trials.
You must have been exhausted.
Have you already eaten dinner?”
The child reclining on the bed remained silent, quietly looking at them.
After waiting for a response but getting nothing, the expectant couple slowly became disappointed.
Perhaps, were they too enthusiastic?
Did they scare the child?
How could they forget, the child probably did not even know their identities yet.
Just as the couple was trying to think of ways to break the ice, the door opened again, and a man with a low ponytail wearing a white lab coat entered with a tablet and a pen.
“I knew it, you just came here without notifying me first.
I was waiting for you two in the office,” the man complained.
He was both a core researcher sent from the headquarters and also the doctor assigned to monitor the child’s condition.
Relieved by the man’s arrival, the couple turned and greeted him, “Dr.
Smith, thank you for taking care of our child.”
Dr.
Smith lazily waved his hand.
“I know you two are excited, so I’ll spare you this time.” He walked directly to the quiet child on the bed.
“Hey, little girl, do you know these people?”
The child was still silent.
Dr.
Smith shrugged his shoulders and made a note on the tablet.
“No changes, the kid still doesn’t speak.”
Then he raised his hands and raised an eyebrow at the child, saying one word.
“Follow.”
The child blinked her large eyes, nodded, and slowly raised both of her arms.
Very slow, as if her arms were heavy, before stopping and lowering them down.
At this point, her small face was already flushed and she slumped on the pillows as if exhausted.
The couple who were watching on the sidelines became alarmed.
They were both highly intelligent individuals.
From the behavior of the child, they finally noticed something.
“Dr.
Smith, what is going on?”
With his head bowed as he wrote on the tablet, Dr.
Smith replied: “As you can see, she’s weak as a newborn fawn… no, let me take that back, she’s weaker than a newborn fawn.
That action just now was the best she can do at the moment.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” the man shook his head.
“Our child has been in a coma for years, it’s only normal that her muscles and tendons are weak.
You know what I mean.
Why does it seem like she doesn’t understand us at all?”
The woman also had a solemn face as she gazed at the child.
“Not only that, she also seemed unable to speak, am I correct?”
Initially, they thought that they had both acted too enthusiastically and ended up scaring the child to silence, but obviously, something was inherently wrong.
The child clearly had trouble communicating.
Dr.
Smith finally sighed.
He turned his head and told the couple, “It’s a bit more complicated than that.
I don’t think this is a good place to talk, come with me to my office.”
…
After all the strangers left the room, the child finally tore her gaze away from the door and turned her attention back to the picture book on her lap.
The page had a picture of a man in armor and holding a sword while sitting on a white horse, heading to a tall building in the distance.
On top of the building, a winged monster coiled around the towers.
Her little brows furrowed.
A small hand landed on the image of a man in armor holding a sword.
Player.
The small hand moved to the strange winged monster.
Monster.
These two elements were clearly common in the ruined world after the Sword of Damocles appeared, or rather–
After the Tower of Babel appeared, she mentally corrected herself.
But why did it appear in this peaceful era of Earth where the cataclysm had not even happened?
The pair of large electric blue eyes strayed to the unfamiliar words in the book.
Recalling the strange language of the people from earlier, she wondered.
If only I knew these words.
Maybe these unintelligible words contain some information as to why.
The language here was vastly different from what she knew.
She was sure that she had not heard of this language in her previous life.
Perhaps, she simply did not have the chance to hear it.
Maybe the original native speakers had perished during the disasters, or the language belonged to a different country far from where she was.
In her previous life, because of the increasingly unstable magnetic force of the planet since the Tower of Babel appeared, any electronic or radiowave equipment no longer worked.
People had no way of communicating to other people in another distant place.
Even production of necessities and weapons no longer used machinery.
The survivors could only scavenge through the ruins and salvage some hot weapons they could find, but since the hot weapons required sophisticated machinery to produce, they became a consumable resource and rare to find in her generation.
People mostly reverted to blacksmithing cold weapons.
She herself relied on her knives and arrows to hunt and survive.
Still, because they were unwilling to let the knowledge from the old world disappear, the elders in each base kept passing on the knowledge they learned from their parents or grandparents, including books or any written materials they could salvage, to the younger generation.
Bases also held classes for the more privileged children who could afford to pay, offering various courses about hunting, fighting techniques, monster characteristics, and knowledge from the old world.
From the time the apocalypse started until the Player cleared the Tower, it had only been over a hundred years.
That was why stories about the old world had still remained clear and pretty detailed through word of mouth, and a few groups of people were still quite literate.
The literate ones were naturally part of the powerful forces in the base with many resources in their hands.
Someone like her, a struggling nomad who had no connection to the network of power in any base, naturally did not have the privilege to attend classes.
Yet she was literate and knew some information about the old world, all thanks to the madwoman who took her in and the tattered books they managed to salvage.
She once called the madwoman ‘mother’ when she was little out of envy of other children who had parents, but was scolded heavily instead.
The madwoman never told anyone her name, so everyone simply called her ‘the madwoman’.
Her madwoman seemed to dislike showing affection, her entire childhood was spent in spartan training and random lectures.
Teacher… Her eyes unconsciously softened as she remembered her mentor.
She recalled her mentor’s lectures about the old world.
The monsters only appeared some time after the asteroid fell.
A series of catastrophic disasters followed one after another due to the impact of the asteroid–earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, acid rain, and zombification due to the influx of viruses from all kinds of sources.
When all of these passed, what was left was a desolate planet with only ruins and spatial fissures appearing randomly in the air where monsters poured out endlessly until the spatial fissure closed on its own.
From the initial rare appearances, the spatial fissures appeared more and more frequently, until they became a common struggle in the desolate era.
How ironic, the rest of us the survivors never realized that there was an even bigger spectacle taking place elsewhere.
The little girl on the bed pursed her lips while thinking.
That game or whatever it is.
I wonder just how many people finally realized in the end that the apocalypse was caused by a game made by the gods.
That f*cking asteroid is really a Tower.
She herself had nothing to do with the tower.
She did not even know of its existence.
And she was pretty sure that the rest of the world also were not aware of this Tower of Babel nor of the existence of players, at least not on the bases she and her mentor traveled through.
As if all of them did not deserve to know this.
She was nothing but an ignorant passerby, unaware of the core of the plot, like a mob character in a story that was not even worth mentioning.
Yet she found herself being swept unexpectedly into it.
Although she was in a coma for a long time, her intellect had not degraded to a child, she retained her memories and thoughts from her past life.
From the brief glimpse she saw and heard just before the stars turned backwards, she could vaguely guess why she arrived here.
It had something to do with the blue pendant and the so-called ‘first clear reward’ given to the Player who cleared the Tower.
During that brief moment, she had vaguely heard the man’s wish.
To turn back time.
To return Earth to how it once was.
And so, time must have turned back.
Now was the peaceful era.
The pendant was part of that fragmented orb on top of the tower, and she was a lucky passerby who happened to get hold of an anchor that brought her soul back to the past.
She looked down on her current small body, so thin like a skeleton.
Why did I wake up in this child’s body?
Am I the only one who returned?
What about the Player who cleared the Tower?
Also…
What was this thing floating around?
Her gaze shifted, curiously observing the strange symbols floating on the upper left corner of her vision.