Power of Runes

[Amelia POV]

Amelia slowly opened her eyes, only to find herself standing somewhere completely different from the room where she had fallen asleep.

The sky above her was clear, the cold wind and dark clouds from outside her window were nowhere to be seen, while before her stretched the familiar grounds of the Eden Realm Academy, filled with thousands upon thousands of students moving through its enormous pathways.

Amelia immediately understood what she was seeing.

A possible future.

She had fallen asleep while searching for a future that could provide Melissia with a way out of her current predicament, which meant that somewhere within everything she was about to witness, there should be something connected to the answer she was looking for.

But why would I appear at the Academy? Is the answer that I am searching for present in the Academy itself?

She thought to herself as her gaze moved across her surroundings while the dream continued forward.

In her dreams, Amelia had no freedom of her own. She could only see what she was being shown, nor could she move on her own, leaving her with no choice but to remain there, floating in the sky.

Thousands of newly admitted students were entering through one of the Academy’s enormous teleportation plazas, following their teachers as they were slowly divided into different groups and led deeper into the Academy, while older students moved around them without paying much attention to another batch of newcomers.

At first, Amelia didn’t notice anything strange.

Academy students...? Will there be someone entering with enough influence to help Melissia? Maybe a prodigy from some Supreme Clan? But that’s unlikely... They don’t send their children to the Academy, after all...

The dream showed her every person clearly enough, with their appearances, movements, and even the faint traces of Fate surrounding their lives being shown to her, which was, once again, a very normal sight for Amelia.

That was... until her gaze passed over one particular area.

Amelia froze.

Among the countless students walking together was something that simply wasn’t there.

’It’ possessed the shape and space of a person, and Amelia could clearly see the students moving around that empty place as though someone was walking among them, yet whenever she tried to look at the person occupying that space, there was absolutely nothing for her to see.

There was no face she couldn’t recognize, no body hidden beneath darkness, and not even a blurry figure that her ability was struggling to reveal.

There was simply a human-sized blank within the future itself.

Amelia immediately focused her power upon that empty space, but the harder she tried to see what should have been there, the stranger the vision became, because Fate wasn’t hiding that person from her.

Fate had nothing to show her in the first place.

What...?

Amelia’s attention completely shifted away from everything else as she watched the blank figure move alongside the other students, its existence obvious only because the world around it continued reacting to someone she herself couldn’t perceive.

Then a thought suddenly popped in her mind.

Ash...?

He was the only person Amelia had ever encountered whose existence could cause Fate itself to become unreliable around her, but even then, something about this felt different.

She couldn’t tell whether the person before her was Ash.

She couldn’t even tell whether she was looking at a man, woman, human, or something else entirely.

All she knew was that while searching for a future capable of helping Melissia, Fate had brought her attention to the Eden Realm Academy...

And somewhere among its newest students walked a person that Fate itself could not see.

But there was one thing Amelia was absolutely certain about.

This was the first time she had ever seen something like this.

I’m sure Ash has never appeared in any of the dreams I’ve seen before. No matter how much the future changed because of him, he himself was never there... but this is different.

Amelia had long since grown accustomed to that strange gap in her abilities. Whenever Ash became involved in something she had already seen, the future would simply change without ever showing her what had caused that change, leaving her with an outcome different from the one she saw but no vision of the person responsible for it.

What she was witnessing now was completely different.

The human-shaped blank continued moving among the newly admitted students as naturally as everyone else, surrounded by people Amelia could see perfectly clearly, yet the space occupied by that single person remained completely empty to her perception.

What Amelia didn’t know was that neither her ability nor Fate itself had encountered this exact situation before.

Ash had never been connected to Fate, which was why he had never appeared within Amelia’s dreams, and the same naturally applied to the clones created from his body. No matter how clearly Amelia saw a future influenced by them, Fate had nothing to show her when it came to Ash himself.

This time, however, the clone wasn’t Ash.

Eva was possessing it.

Unlike Ash, Eva was still connected to the Grand Fate, although that connection had remained hidden because of the bond between her Soul and Ash.

Her Fate still existed, but the body she was currently controlling belonged entirely to someone who stood outside Fate, creating a strange contradiction that Amelia’s ability had never encountered before.

Her strengthened abilities only made that contradiction more apparent.

Ten years ago, Amelia’s power hadn’t been strong enough to perceive Ash even when his Fate was already hidden from her, but after an entire decade of growth, her ability had become powerful enough to at least recognize that something occupied the place where Fate showed her nothing.

Under normal circumstances, perhaps she might have been able to see even more.

However, the body Eva was controlling was still Ash’s clone, and that alone prevented Amelia’s ability from reaching any further, leaving behind nothing more than a human-shaped blank moving through an otherwise perfectly visible future.

Amelia naturally knew none of this.

All she knew was that, for the first time in her life, her dreams were showing her something that should have been impossible for her to see, and even more importantly, this strange existence had appeared while she was searching for a possible way to help Melissia.

Looks like I know what my dream is trying to tell me...

The meaning seemed obvious enough to Amelia. She had entered the dream while searching for a possible way to help Melissia, and among the thousands of people she had seen, her attention had been drawn toward the one existence that appeared as nothing more than a blank space within Fate.

That person was somehow connected to the answer she was searching for.

Just as Amelia tried to focus on the blank figure once again, hoping to see where it would go or what would happen next, the surroundings suddenly began dissolving around her as the Academy, the students, and everything else within the dream faded away.

Her eyes slowly opened.

For several seconds, Amelia remained lying on her bed without moving, her slightly unfocused gaze resting upon the dark ceiling above as her mind gradually returned from the dream.

The room was almost completely dark now, with only a faint light entering through the window, while the silence outside made it obvious that several hours had passed since she had fallen asleep.

"It’s already the middle of the night..."

Amelia slowly sat up on the bed and rubbed her forehead, expecting the usual headache that followed her dreams, although her thoughts were far more occupied by what she had just witnessed.

That strange blank figure remained clear within her memories.

She couldn’t remember a face because there had been no face to remember, nor could she recall any features that might help identify the person.

New students...

Amelia suddenly paused as she remembered a particular detail.

The people surrounding the blank figure hadn’t been ordinary students going about their day, but the newly admitted students entering the Academy together.

"When are the new students supposed to arrive...?"

She frowned slightly while thinking through the Academy schedule, and it didn’t take long before the answer surfaced in her mind.

"Four days from now..."

Amelia became quiet again as she realized just how close the future she had witnessed actually was.

Normally, her dreams could show her events much further into the future without giving her any clear idea of when they would happen, but this time she already knew exactly where she needed to be and when she needed to be there.

All she had to do was wait.

I don’t know who you are, what you have to do with Melissia, or why I can’t see you... but if my dream showed you when I specifically searched for a way to help her, then there has to be a reason.

The thought only made her more curious, although Amelia knew there was little point in thinking about it throughout the night when the answer would arrive at the Academy itself in just four days.

"Four days, huh..."

She quietly looked toward the window, where the darkness outside had long since swallowed the view that had occupied her attention before she fell asleep.

"I suppose I can wait that long."

The following four days passed normally, although Amelia found herself thinking about the dream far more often than she expected.

She continued teaching her students, preparing lessons, reading through research papers, and following the same routine she had grown accustomed to over the past year, yet every now and then her thoughts would return to that blank figure.

She considered using her ability again, but eventually decided against it.

The first dream had already given her enough information to find the person, and with the future always capable of changing, repeatedly looking into it would accomplish little when she could simply wait for the day to arrive.

As the days passed, that curiosity only became harder to ignore.

Then, on the morning of the fourth day, Amelia woke earlier than usual and remained lying beneath the covers for a few moments before remembering what day it was.

Her eyes immediately opened.

"...Today’s the day."

The new students would finally arrive at the Eden Realm Academy.

**

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