It was an early spring morning. The sky was a dull gray, low leaden clouds hanging as a sparse drizzle fell.

Feeling the cool raindrops on her cheek, Yvette slowly opened her eyes and sat up. The white chrysalis that had wrapped her was gone, and Soulbrain’s timer confirmed that this long sleep had lasted another hundred-plus years.

Compared to the daze after her last great slumber, she adapted much faster this time. She patted off the grass and stood up at once.

Then, with a faint, hopeful flutter in her chest, she didn’t check her changes first. She went straight inside, pushing the door open to see whether anyone was waiting for her.

The room was empty—no one at all—and there were no traces that anyone had been here recently.

She couldn’t help pursing her lips in disappointment, then decided it was only natural—she hadn’t left any sea-crossing craft outside, after all.

What exactly was I expecting on my own… She chided herself in silence.

She sat on the sofa and had one of the AI skeletons bring in firewood and light it. Warmth quickly spread through the room; rain pattered against the windows, and a tranquil hush filled the air.

After she lounged on the sofa for a while, Yvette began, guided by the intuitive knowledge rising in her mind, to examine the gains and changes from this long sleep.

First was the ordinary growth of her mana core—now a full 12,000 points, an amount already edging into the extravagant.

She didn’t know what conditions were like on the Radiant Continent, but she figured that even in a high-magic world, she’d count as a formidable archmage there.

Next, she turned her attention to her aberration abilities and checked for changes.

First was the look of the Ashen Touch. The tendrils were darker than before, and Yvette couldn’t help wondering: one more evolution and would they turn pure black—like Lianna’s shadow-touch?

Compared to before, the Ashen Touch’s strength had grown again, but the main changes lay in two areas.

The first was a new ability to devour spirit bodies and temporarily convert them to refill her own mental stamina—solving the Ashen Touch’s former problem of being ineffective against wraiths.

The second was that she could now let an Ashen Touch detach and exist independently while its senses stayed linked to her—in plain terms, a tentacular, one-of-a-kind avatar that could act as a conduit for all her abilities: use Mimicry to shape an eyeball to scout the surroundings, or launch attacks directly.

More crucially, Yvette discovered that this tendril link worked completely differently from necromancy. Previously—whether commanding the dead or summoning and operating mutated magic plants with natural magic—she effectively needed a strand of mental power tethering her to the summon, which imposed range limits.

The Ashen Touch’s sensory link, however, did not rely on a mental tether!

Which meant there was a very real chance that even if she sent this tendril-avatar to the ends of the earth—or hurled it into deep space—she could maintain the link and see through its eyes.

That raised a question: could she throw it into the Remnant Abyss and onto the far-side Radiant Continent?

Wouldn’t that make it her proxy in the human world—even if it was only a single tendril?

Of course, lovely as the idea was, reality had a hard check at the foundation: aberration mana.

First, the consumption was huge. Even routine movement steadily burned aberration mana. If she used it for remote combat, the aberration mana costs would be several times her body’s.

Put simply, the “mana efficiency” tanked—badly.

Second, once the physical link to her body was cut, control range was unlimited, but aberration mana could no longer be supplied in real time.

Therefore, when fabricating such a tendril-avatar, she had to pre-load its “body” with a set amount of aberration mana to sustain it. Once the fuel ran out, it would naturally vanish.

After she’d mapped out the new ability’s traits, strengths, and shortcomings, Yvette decided to name it “Detached Touch,” with its primary role serving as her eyes and beacon, roaming freely in the world.

In fact, given the Detached Touch’s awful mana efficiency, using it purely as a combat clone was a terrible deal.

But Yvette had her way around it.

She planned to build a few shuttlecraft purpose-designed for the Detached Touch and house tendrils inside them.

Then, by producing several sets of tendrils-plus-shuttlecraft and pairing them with self-sustaining power systems, she could seed them across the Lands of Termination.

That way, if an aurora appeared again, the odds of detecting it would be far higher. The nearest tendril could slip through and scout the Radiant Continent for her.

As for her body, she had no plans to leave for now. After copying the Fireseed Base’s colossal archive, she needed time to digest the parts that could directly boost her strength.

Beyond that, she still meant to harvest another “crop” on Blacktide and Jadeite—so she wouldn’t be considering a physical journey for the time being.

Absorbing new knowledge while sketching blueprints for a special shuttlecraft for the Detached Touch, Yvette spent nearly three more years on the island without noticing.

In that time, she hand-built ten shuttlecraft, each equipped with a Detached Touch loaded with 5,000 points of aberration mana.

That was a full 50,000 points of aberration mana outlaid—undeniably a hefty investment for Yvette, whose total pool was down to just 260,000.

She had no choice. Auroras were rare low-probability events—she needed a wide net. Realistically, only one tendril might get the chance to cross to another world. The rest of the aberration mana could still be recovered; she just didn’t know how much would be left.

As for why not make more—too many free-roaming tendrils would be a bear to monitor one by one, even for the “old man in the security booth”! Make too many and she’d work herself to death. Was she supposed to keep up her studies or not?

And so, after finishing these ten shuttlecraft carrying the Detached Touch, Yvette finally exhaled. She could leave Ish Island.

She could digest the civilizational legacy on the move. Next, she planned to sweep Blacktide and Jadeite for another round of aberration mana—and, while she was at it, check in on Abella after a century apart to see how she’d changed.