Chapter 6: Jon's Past

“Father, Leonpat has invited us to the manor for tea tomorrow evening.” After reading the invitation, Eaton’s eyes flashed with confusion.

The white-bearded old man was also stunned by the invitation for a moment, but soon began to chuckle softly: “It seems that this family is not destined to meet their end tonight.”

Eaton paused, realizing that his father no longer intended for him to go and slaughter the manor tonight, so he also smiled and said: “One could say they know how to read the situation, though I wonder why he changed his mind?”

The white-bearded old man smiled and pointed to the wooden box: “Perhaps, it is because of this wooden box.”

The night gradually faded away. The bloody evening did not descend upon the Pat Manor, and the next day’s sun continued to shine warmly on every inch of the estate.

No one knew that they had escaped a murderous calamity. This naturally included Angel.

Early in the morning, Angel brought several maids to the tea garden to pick the freshest tea leaves. Although it was the dead of winter where everything was frozen in the outside world, the tea garden remained as warm as spring thanks to Jon’s greenhouse improvements.

For the tea party that evening, Angel instructed the maids to pick plenty of tea leaves covered in the morning dew after the rain. A portion would be used for brewing tea that night, while the rest would be handed over to Mana for stir-frying. Only by using high heat to knead and ‘kill’ the green of the leaves could the tea retain its original fresh fragrance for a long time. He intended to give the stir-fried tea as a gift to Count Eaton.

Seeing that the tea leaves had entered the fixation stage, Angel left the tea garden with peace of mind and returned to the stilt house courtyard.

Jon was sitting on the second-floor balcony, basking in the rare warm winter sun, humming a little tune contentedly.

Angel walked up, took the ointment from the mute servant, and began to apply it to his mentor. Jon glanced at him but didn’t say a word. Even though he had explained the reason for his atrophied limbs to Angel yesterday, the boy didn’t seem to believe him much. Jon didn’t mind; he would just treat it as his apprentice fulfilling his filial duty... After all, there wasn’t much time left for him to enjoy his apprentice’s devotion. Perhaps he wouldn’t even make it through the Month of Frozen Earth?

Jon hummed a nameless tune, smiling as he faced the wind.

It was a little sorrowful, and a little carefree.

But more than anything, it was filled with endless longing.

“If I could return to Earth, I would be content even if I died the very next moment.” Jon hadn’t understood the concept of ‘falling leaves returning to their roots’ before, but he understood it now.

Angel’s eyes were filled with melancholy. He didn’t know what to say to comfort his mentor at this moment; ‘parting’ was the most painful thing, especially when it spanned the distance between two worlds.

The quiet time did not last long. Jon suddenly pointed to a transparent crystal half-exposed in a flowerpot on the balcony and said: “Can you help me get that?”

Angel replied with an “En,” dug the transparent crystal out of the damp soil, wiped it clean with a handkerchief, and handed it to Jon.

The transparent crystal was oval-shaped, looking like a glass bead from a distance.

Jon held the ‘glass bead’ and stared at it for a very, very long time. His expression shifted between resentment, sadness, and a bitter smile.

“I threw it away in the forest three years ago; I didn’t expect it to appear in the flowerpot.” Jon shook his head. “Perhaps this is fate?”

Angel watched his mentor talking to himself, his face flushing. After a long while, he hesitantly mumbled: “I was the one who picked it up... I used to see you playing with it often, and you would often cry while looking at it, so I guessed it might be something belonging to your family. That day, I saw you throw it into the woods and thought you didn’t want to be reminded of the past by the object; later, I picked it up and buried it in the flowerpot, thinking it might come in handy if you ever regretted it.”

Jon was stunned for a moment, then muttered to himself in a voice only he could hear: “Perhaps, it has a connection with you?”

After a while, Jon looked at Angel: “This glass bead is not something that belonged to my family. But... it could be considered something from Earth, right? I don’t know its origins either.”

“Let me tell you a story, a story about the glass bead.”

...

As Jon spoke, the look in Angel’s eyes grew increasingly astonished.

He had thought this was just a glass bead with commemorative significance, but he never expected its origin to be so miraculous!

The story began twenty years ago. When Jon was still on Earth, he was a scientific researcher born in China. Later, due to a worldwide mysterious project, he was invited with his wife and daughter to Long Island, New York, in the United States, to conduct a secret study that lasted over a decade.

The subject of this research was called: The Montauk Project.

The Montauk Project was a famous subject in space physics on Earth. Jon was born in the mid-23rd century, and the project had already begun two centuries before his birth. It had been shelved several times, with research spanning over 50 years. The Montauk Project that Jon participated in was its sixth iteration.

The predecessor of the Montauk Project was the Philadelphia Experiment of 1942. At the time, radar had just been invented, and the U.S. military conducted experiments on the destroyer USS Eldridge to gain the ability to make warships invisible to radar waves. The ship’s main mast was equipped with an omnidirectional antenna, and two energy coils were placed on the deck, powered by the ship’s generators. Anomalies occurred as soon as the experiment began. The second and third experiments resulted in even greater catastrophes; the generators ran wildly and completely out of control, and in the end, the USS Eldridge vanished from sight, instantly teleporting to a location seven thousand kilometers away. The Philadelphia Experiment was forced to a halt, and its byproduct was the discovery of long-distance instantaneous teleportation of objects.

In short, the Montauk Project was essentially a physics project studying space-time travel.

Initially, the research direction of the Montauk Project could not escape the shadow of the Philadelphia Experiment, but unfortunately, there was no progress. It wasn’t until the early 23rd century that an extraterrestrial object excited all the scientists!

This extraterrestrial object crashed in the southwestern Sahara Desert in Mauritania, Africa, right in the middle of the famous Eye of the Sahara.

This object attracted the attention of various countries. As a small African nation, Mauritania could not compete with the world’s major powers. In the end, the object remained on Long Island, New York, and was studied by China, the UK, France, Japan, Russia, and other countries. It was named the “Eye of the Heavens.”

During the research process, scientists discovered that the Eye of the Heavens possessed energy fluctuations that defied most known physical coefficients. When initially stimulated by high-energy rays of certain wavelengths, the Eye of the Heavens even demonstrated the miraculous effect of teleporting objects over short distances.

It was precisely because scientists witnessed this spatial teleportation capability that the sixth Montauk Project was launched.

In the Montauk Project, Jon was actually just an ordinary researcher, recording the effects of the wave frequencies generated by the Eye of the Heavens on plants.

One day, as usual, Jon brought several sealed plant seedlings to the heavily guarded Eye of the Heavens area to record samples.

At first, everything was normal. Most of the plants withered and died under the fluctuations released by the Eye of the Heavens, except for one tea seedling brought from China, which survived.

Just as Jon was holding the tea seedling and activating the parasitic chip to record data, no one knew if the console had malfunctioned or what happened, but several more high-energy rays struck the Eye of the Heavens, and a massive change occurred in the laboratory.

Space collapsed, darkness surged, and the terrifying aura released by the Eye of the Heavens instantly shrouded everything within the laboratory’s range. The next second, before Jon could even react, he was swallowed into the darkness while still holding the tea seedling.

Following the Eye of the Heavens, he crossed through layers of barriers and arrived, full of wounds, in this current world.

Later, Jon was saved by the old Viscount Pat.

Later, the Eye of the Heavens lost all its miraculous properties and transformed into an ordinary... glass bead.

[The information about the Montauk Project in this chapter is excerpted from Baidu]

(End of chapter)