Time rewound slightly, to when Rest and the others had finished their day and gone to sleep.
Inside one of the frontier development team's tents, a single girl was crouching on the ground.
"Haa… haa… haa…"
The girl gasped for breath, clutching tightly at the carpet spread beneath her.
There was no one else in the tent.
Inside a tent just as large as the one where Rest and the others were sleeping, the girl trembled all alone, her small body shaking.
"I… I can't… take this anymore…"
The girl writhed in agony, whispering weakly between labored breaths.
A trail of nosebleed ran down her doll-like, perfectly sculpted face, staining the carpet a deep crimson.
She appeared to be suffering greatly, gasping and moaning… yet the expression flickering across her face was one of pure ecstasy.
"…Rest… Clover… they're real… Rest… is real…!"
The one lying prostrate in a state of overwhelming rapture, nosebleed and all, was Urla Lavender.
She was the young lady of House Lavender, the great power of the eastern frontier.
Urla had greeted Rest, then returned to the tent assigned to her… but the moment she sent her subordinates away and stepped inside, she had collapsed to the ground, overcome with anguish.
"He's… al-alive… Rest Clover… is alive in this world… just like me…!"
The reason for Urla's state of ecstasy… if expressed in modern Japanese terms, it could be called an "overdose on one's favorite."
Long before they had ever met, Urla had harbored intense feelings toward Rest.
That emotion, which went far beyond mere romantic love, was that of an "oshi" — a blend of admiration, longing, and worship, spiced with just a single pinch of madness.
The reason Urla, daughter of a frontier noble family, had been sent to this land was a command from her grandfather.
The purpose was to appeal to the powerful people in the capital about the danger of the neighboring Gaiselle Empire and stoke their will to fight.
However, that primary objective had already been lost from within Urla.
Urla's personal reason for coming to this place... was to meet Rest.
"S-something... a thousand times... prettier...!"
Urla had come to meet Rest of her own volition, but... the Rest she actually came face to face with was far more wonderful than the one she had seen through the crystal ball.
Urla's eyes, with both hands planted on the carpet, flickered with iridescent colors.
Those eyes, known as "Fairy Eyes," were inherited from her mother, a fortune-teller, and possessed the ability to perceive things beyond this world.
The sight of Rest as seen through the Fairy Eyes... for Urla, it was something that blew away her entire worldview up to that point.
A spring of mana that welled up without end.
Branches of possibility that spread so far they seemed to blanket the sky.
It was so overwhelmingly magnificent, a grand sight that words could never adequately capture.
To compare it... it was like looking down on the Grand Canyon from the sky, gazing up at Niagara Falls from below, being surrounded by enormous ancient Jōmon cedars, seeing the morning sun from an Alpine summit... as if witnessing the creation of the world and the birth of stars.
A sight of overwhelming power, one that overturned everything she had ever believed in from the ground up.
"Hahh..."
Having witnessed that miraculous sight with her own eyes, Urla rolled back and forth across the carpet.
If she hadn't strictly ordered that "no one enter," the servants of House Lavender would surely have burst in upon hearing the disturbance.
"Rest... Rest... Rest... Rest...!"
Urla repeated a single man's name like a broken toy.
From a young age, Urla had received an elite education solely so she could be of use in the fight against the Gaiselle Empire—the hereditary enemy of House Lavender.
She was supposed to have been raised to kill her emotions, suppress her own will, and move like a puppet doing exactly as her grandfather commanded.
And yet, upon encountering the extraordinary existence that was Rest, Urla found that an inner self had ignited within her, as though someone had blown the flame of life back into her heart.
The puppet girl who had claimed a will of her own... what would Urla Lavender's transformation bring to Rest?
For now, no one knew.