Free Web NovelMargaret never expected it.
A simple, fundamental Tarot cross spread.
An entry-level The Way Back ritual used only for roughly measuring a Wayfarer's frequency.
It had caused Pavela's power to spiral out of control to this extent.
She hadn't even managed to flip over the last Tarot card.
Her fingertips had just touched the edge of the face-down card when a violent wave of energy erupted from the silver-haired girl opposite her.
Without any warning.
It was as if someone had buried a bomb beneath a calm lake and detonated it at the most unexpected moment.
Margaret's body was thrown back by the shockwave.
She adjusted her posture in mid-air, her military boots carving a long mark into a hard surface before she landed steadily.
Then she looked up.
And then she froze.
She was no longer in that underground classroom.
Wind and snow.
An overwhelming blizzard.
Accompanied by the sounds of gunfire and explosions.
Accompanied by the roar of mechs.
Margaret's pupils contracted sharply.
She immediately realized what had happened.
A void realm.
Pavela's power had triggered the arrival of a void realm.
This was a phenomenon she had only seen three times in the past twenty years.
The first time was on the northern border.
A Wayfarer of the Path of the Moon had lost control on a full moon night.
The entire battlefield was shrouded in silver mist, and soldiers on both sides fell into their deepest fears—some saw deceased loved ones, some saw enemies they had killed, and some saw memories they least wanted to face.
That void realm lasted for three whole hours.
When the mist dissipated, one-third of the people on the battlefield had gone insane.
The second time was six years ago.
She had witnessed a sequence VI Destroyer lose control.
That time...
She didn't want to recall that time.
Half a town.
Over three thousand lives.
Including the Destroyer's own wife and two children.
The third time...
The third time was herself.
During that campaign that changed the trajectory of her life.
But that was another story.
A void realm is a special space created when the power of The Way Back directly influences reality.
Under normal circumstances, a Wayfarer's connection to the primordial sea is one-way.
They draw power from that invisible ocean of consciousness and transform it into abilities in reality.
This process has clear boundaries, a controllable range, and predictable results.
It's like drawing water from a well with a bucket; you can only take as much as the bucket can hold, you won't bring the entire well to the surface.
But in extreme situations—
When the Wayfarer's mental state fluctuates violently.
When the erosion of The Way Back breaks through a certain critical point.
When the connection between the Wayfarer and the primordial sea becomes too tight.
That boundary is broken.
The power of The Way Back is no longer just being "used" by the Wayfarer, but begins to actively "infiltrate" reality.
The black water of the primordial sea backflows into reality, creating a special area in the real world dominated by the laws of The Way Back.
In a void realm, normal physical laws are distorted.
In a void realm, the essence of The Way Back manifests in a concrete form.
In a void realm, those "things" wandering on the edge of the primordial sea gain a passage into reality.
And once a void realm descends, no one, including the Wayfarer who triggered it, can simply "retract" it.
Margaret took a deep breath, cold air filling her lungs and bringing a sharp sting.
The only good news was that she wasn't completely unprepared.
That underground classroom was itself a special area.
It was not just a place for teaching, but a closed space she had personally set up, an artificial, controllable micro-void realm.
Specifically designed to isolate the impact of the power of The Way Back on the outside world.
Theoretically, no matter what happened in the classroom, it wouldn't affect the academy outside.
But in this situation...
She looked around, her dark green eyes narrowing in the # Nоvеlight # wind and snow.
The scale of this void realm was far larger than she had expected.
Not the size of a classroom.
Not the size of a building.
But... an entire battlefield.
The form of a void realm usually depends on the mental state of the trigger—it presents the scene that person remembers most deeply, or their mental "anchor."
A Wayfarer of the Path of the Moon creates a world of mist and illusions.
A Wayfarer of the Path of the Chariot creates a furnace of steel and flames.
And a Wayfarer of the Path of the Tower...
Margaret had originally expected to see ruins.
To see collapsed buildings.
To see the cycle of destruction and rebirth.
But she hadn't expected this girl's "mental anchor" to be such a battlefield.
...
Well, Pavela hadn't expected it either.
But what she expected even less was—
That she could actually return to this moment.
Excruciating pain.
A tearing, excruciating pain coming from her spine.
It felt as if someone had shoved a red-hot iron rod directly into her spinal cord and stirred it around.
Not a metaphor.
It was literal.
Because those metal probes were indeed currently inserted into her spine.
Pavela.
No, at this moment she was still that Pavel Ivanovich Sokolov.
She opened her eyes.
This was the first moment she opened her eyes as Pavel.
The first moment of her transmigration.
The first moment she arrived in this world.
She saw a scene she could never forget in her memory.
First, there was white.
White everywhere.
The entire world was swallowed by a blizzard.
Through the cracked and frost-covered observation window of the mech cockpit, she saw hell.
Not a hell of flames.
It was a hell of ice and snow.
The sky was lead-gray, the thick clouds hanging so low it felt as if one could touch them, and countless snowflakes poured down from that gloomy expanse, like some kind of ceaseless curse.
The earth was white, snow covering everything, blurring all outlines into chaos.
The wind screamed, and the swirling snow particles cut through the field of vision like knives.
Next were the sporadic patches of black and red.
The color of wreckage.
The color of blood.
Mech wreckage was scattered across the snowfield like broken scrap metal thrown away at will.
There were Usar's guardian-v types, thug-iv types, as well as Victoriana's knight mechs.
Their twisted shells were half-buried in the snow; some were still steaming, melting the surrounding snow into circles of dirty puddles, while others had completely cooled, turning into silent tombstones on the snowfield, gradually being buried by the wind and snow.
Corpses.
Corpses everywhere.
Some still maintained a complete human shape, curled up in craters or lying beside wreckage, covered in a thin layer of white snow, like a shabby shroud.
Some had been torn to pieces by artillery fire, leaving only some unrecognizable... parts, which looked particularly jarring against the white background.
Some had been frozen into ice sculptures, maintaining their posture from the last moment of their lives, like some kind of bizarre statues.
A hand reached out from the snow.
Just a hand. freёwebnovel.com
The five fingers were splayed, as if asking for help from the sky, or as if trying to grab something.
The part below the wrist was buried in snow stained red with blood, and that red was being covered bit by bit by newly falling snowflakes, soon to disappear completely.
One couldn't see where the body was.
Perhaps there was no body left at all.
In the distance, a massive silhouette could be vaguely seen moving in the wind and snow.
A Victoriana mech was hunting down fleeing Usar soldiers.
The mech's movements were elegant and composed, each step carrying a rhythm almost like a dance, appearing and disappearing in the blizzard like a ghost from a nightmare.
With a light swing of the steam longsword in its hand, several figures struggling to run in the snow fell like harvested wheat.
No screams.
The wind and snow were too loud; one couldn't hear the screams.
One could only see those small black figures fall, then be swallowed by the white.
The mech didn't even stop, continuing to walk forward, disappearing into the depths of the blizzard, looking for the next batch of prey.
Further away, artillery fire was still roaring.
Orange-red flashes of fire rose and fell in the vast white world, like some kind of morbid fireworks display, each flash briefly illuminating the snowflakes dancing in the sky.
Each flash meant more death.
Each roar was the end of someone's life.
Pavela's mech, that broken "thug-iv type", was half-kneeling in a crater, its outer armor covered in a layer of ice and snow, making it look like a tomb about to be forgotten.
The cockpit was filled with the smell of engine oil, sweat, and blood mixed together, and the cold air seeped in through the cracks in the armor, turning her breath into white mist.
Various alarms blared one after another, red warning lights flashed frantically, and more than half of the readings on the dashboard showed dangerous values.
Left arm hydraulic system failure.
Right leg drive unit overheating.
Armor integrity 37 percent.
Ammunition remaining 12 percent.
Pilot vital signs... abnormal.
She looked down at her hands.
Not her hands.
They were Pavel's hands.
A pair of thin, scarred hands, with knuckles so slender they didn't look like those of someone who could pilot a mech, now gripping the control stick tightly, the knuckles turning white from the exertion and the cold.
These were a young girl's hands.
Yet they were registered under a male name called Pavel Ivanovich Sokolov.
This was the first moment she arrived in this world.
This was the first scene she saw upon opening her eyes as Pavel Ivanovich Sokolov, Private of The 404th Independent Mech Punitive Battalion, ID 404-631.
Hell.
A white, cold hell swallowed by a blizzard.
And now, she was back again.
