Real World, Station 13.

Though the scene on the rooftop, with Caroline giving Tendo a gift, was sweet, and their little interaction quite endearing, the dimension viewers couldn’t smile. In fact, they felt like crying.

Everyone knew that both Caroline’s early gift and Tendo’s half-joking, half-serious final photo were the only remaining ‘warmth’ in the first season of Stardust Prequel: Embers.

Because starting tomorrow, Tendo and his companions would leave the Deep Blue metropolis and return to the Embers base. Judging from Tendo’s previous ‘reminiscences,’ the plot of Stardust Season 1, once they returned to the base, would no longer be as warm and sweet. Instead, it would be filled with the brutality of blood and fire, and the sorrow of life and death.

‘Deceased husband’s photo, wife chasing necklace—no, Stardust production team, can you be any more deliberate?!’

‘Brothers, fix bayonets! I think this production team is tired of living; we must teach them a lesson!’

‘The sugarcoating is gone; all that’s left are the cannonballs.’

‘Knives in hand, follow me, brothers, let’s fight the production team!’

To vent their sadness and unease about Stardust’s future plot, the dimension viewers immediately turned their aggression towards the Stardust production team. After all, the characters in the anime were ‘virtual,’ but the production team in reality was real!

As the dimension viewers showered the Stardust production team with ‘sweet’ words, the anime entered a silent mode with only background music and character visuals.

The first scene showed Tendo and his companions’ last days of school life. After their final class, Tendo and the others left the place, likely never to return, under the reluctant gazes of their classmates.

The setting sun dyed the school gate orange. Tendo pushed up his sunglasses and smiled, waving at the departing students behind him. Outside the school gate, Tendo and Caroline, who was beside him, were illuminated by the setting sun, their shadows stretching long. This shadow extended to Isabel’s feet inside the school gate and froze on Isabel’s hesitant expression and the scene of Tendo and the others walking out. This symbolized the complete end of Tendo and his companions’ Triran campus life.

The second scene was in the meeting room of the Tianhai Group. Yun Meng, who had been absent for a long time, finally reappeared. She wore a rabbit mask and stood with Coral Knight behind Dorian, silently observing the other major shareholders in the meeting hall. Faced with the terrifying pressure brought by the two Second-Tier Star Envoys, most of the shareholders present agreed to Dorian’s resolution. Only a small number of shareholders, led by bohard, were still hesitant and hadn’t rushed to vote. But as bohard also cast a ‘yes’ vote, the entire meeting hall became Dorian’s exclusive domain.

At the end of the scene, Dorian kept bohard back. After an unknown conversation, bohard left alone, leaving Dorian standing by the floor-to-ceiling window of the group building, overlooking the dazzling neon lights of the entire Deep Blue metropolis. A moment later, Dorian picked up a cigar from the table, lit it, and put it in his mouth. Amidst the swirling smoke, Dorian’s face became increasingly blurred, but his eyes grew firmer. At this moment, he was like a captain standing in the captain’s cabin, gazing at a terrifying storm in the distance.

As the cigar burned out, Dorian extinguished it completely and walked out of the meeting hall without looking back. This seemed to imply that he would lead the large ship named ‘Tianhai’ bravely through the fierce storm ahead, to welcome the bright dawn after the storm.

The third scene showed individual shots of Tendo and the others in their villa at night. Unlike the relatively soothing background music of the previous two scenes, the music here suddenly turned melancholic, clearly hinting at something from the production team.

First to appear was the protagonist, Chen Kong, in his room. He was slowly packing his luggage: the Triran Junior High school badge, school uniform, beach swimsuit and volleyball… secret farewell gifts from classmates—homemade cookies, signed CDs, even girls’ hair ties. Chen Kong packed very slowly, as if he didn’t want to put these things into his luggage. Although his initial experience at Triran Junior High wasn’t pleasant, everything changed drastically with Tendo’s arrival that afternoon.

In the brightly lit room, Chen Kong looked at his packed luggage, which he had delayed for so long, with a complicated expression. Although he had only spent a short month at Triran Junior High, this month of campus life was the happiest time he had experienced since the great cataclysm. If he could, he would want to stay here forever and never go back. Ordinary high school life, ordinary entrance exams, ordinary…

Star Origin, to him, was never a miracle; rather, it was more like a curse. If this world didn’t have Star Origin, perhaps his life would have been better. However, as soon as this dangerous thought emerged, Chen Kong quickly shook his head, instantly expelling it from his mind, as if afraid of being influenced by it. But often, once something appears in one’s heart, it takes root like a seed in the soil of the soul. And at a specific time, it will break through the soil and sprout. Because it is not a vague, impractical fantasy, but the only ‘answer’ buried deep within one’s heart.

In Chen Xing’s room, unlike Chen Kong’s melancholy next door, Chen Xing was sitting cross-legged on the floor, cultivating her Star Energy with a blank expression. However, something seemed amiss with Chen Xing at this moment. Her expression lacked its usual focus and seriousness, and her tightly furrowed brows clearly indicated worry, making her seem quite distracted.

A moment later, unable to enter a state of cultivation, she decided to stop and walked over to her desk. On the desk lay a half-open, exquisitely crafted gift box. Inside the box was a pair of sunglasses she had carefully chosen. Chen Xing gazed at the sunglasses for a moment, then, as if thinking of something, she picked them up and walked to a nearby trash can, intending to throw them away. But as the sunglasses were raised, and the trash can was within reach, Chen Xing’s hand suddenly froze in mid-air. She turned her head, gazing at her own wavering reflection in the lenses of the sunglasses.

Finally, Chen Xing sighed silently, then placed the sunglasses back into the gift box and roughly shoved it into her suitcase. Her movements seemed crude, as if she were disposing of stolen goods, but in reality, she placed the box in the very center of her clothes, clearly subconsciously worried about the contents being crushed.

After all that, Chen Xing sat down at her desk and stared out the window at the unique underwater nightscape of the Deep Blue metropolis. After an unknown amount of time, her gaze changed. The initial confusion had vanished, replaced by an unprecedented resolve. If she gave up at the slightest setback, Chen Xing would have died in the great cataclysm years ago and wouldn’t be alive today. Therefore, no matter how difficult the road ahead, no matter how many thorns there might be, she would continue forward without hesitation. Even if she saw no light of ‘hope’ on this path, it was still better than not having the courage to even embark on it.

Giving up? The word ‘give up’ was not in Chen Xing’s dictionary. However, despite her resolve, Chen Xing oddly interrupted her long-standing daily cultivation today, and, by the desk in the night, uncharacteristically found herself lost in thought.

In Caroline’s room, in the dead of night, Caroline lay flat on her bed, continuously scrolling through her phone’s photo album. There were photos of their group at the harbor when they first arrived in Deep Blue, the small dolphin scared by Tendo at the sunken ship restaurant, herself startled by fireworks at the jellyfish amusement park…

Looking at these photos, Caroline’s rational AI brain was quickly influenced by these emotional memories. She soon forgot everything, becoming hopelessly immersed. While this made her less rational than other AI, it also gave her more ‘human’ happiness than other AI. And all of this was brought to her by Tendo.

It was important to remember that for a long time, as an AI, she didn’t know what happiness or sadness was. Her life at the base then consisted of only two things: learning, and in her dreams, performing data analysis to continue learning. Although this period of life was incredibly dull, she didn’t feel anything was wrong with it. Because at that time, there were no other peers at the base besides her. So she neither knew nor could she know what the lives of other peers were like. She simply deduced, based on simple, rational sample analysis, that those peers should be just like her, spending every day in continuous, dull learning.

This situation continued until that person appeared. Although he was two years younger than her and had never been exposed to any Star Energy knowledge before, this guy seemed to be born to break all conventions. Not only did he learn all the knowledge that had taken her several years to master in just one week, but he also caught up with her achievements in Star Energy in less than half a month. Seeing this, as an AI known for her rationality, her first reaction wasn’t to compete with him. Instead, she wanted to understand him, learn from him, and even surpass him. Therefore, she actively sought him out and began to seriously do what he told her.

The first time she gave up night studies to walk by the sea outside the base. The first time she jumped into the sea and personally touched the small dolphins near the island. The first time she asked Instructor Yun Meng to buy her a cute dolphin plushie from outside. Although her overall score in the Stardust Project decreased after doing this for half a month, she suddenly experienced many things she had never felt before—a feeling called ‘happiness,’ a feeling called ‘freedom.’ And these things were like Pandora’s Box, once opened, they could no longer be closed, firmly occupying her mind and impossible to eradicate.

Slowly, her brain’s database, which had only stored knowledge related to Star Energy, suddenly gained many things unrelated to Star Energy in just half a month. And these things would always appear late at night when she wanted to perform data analysis, preventing her from ‘learning’ as focused as before. Soon, her abnormality was noticed by the Doctor. Then, the Doctor, also an AI, immediately made a decision that seemed very rational to her: he would clear all the useless human emotions from her mind that only interfered with her.

But at that moment, that person appeared again. Not only did he tell her that those human emotions were never useless, but he also successfully convinced the Doctor, whom she considered the most unconvinceable person in the world. And from then on, she suddenly had one more thing to learn: how to be a ‘person.’

All of this was taught to her by that guy named ‘Tendo Simei.’ The Doctor had told her that Tendo would surely change the world in the future, so she must be Tendo’s tool and wholeheartedly assist him. She had no complaints about this and was doing her best. But what the Doctor didn’t know was that her reason for doing so was never because she wanted to change the world with Tendo so much. It was because Tendo… was her world.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep