“Father, Leon Padt invited us to the manor to enjoy tea together,” Eton read through the letter. Doubt filled his eyes.
The old man wearing white beard was also stunned by the invitation a little, but he recovered soon and chuckled. “It looks like this family will live yet another night.”
Eton hesitated. He knew father did not intend to assault the Padt Manor for now, so he followed with a smile. “The man’s smart enough. Why the sudden change of mind though?”
The old man smiled again and pointed at the wooden box. “Because of this, perhaps.”
The color of night gradually went away, the Padt Manor did not face a bloody night. The sun rose again and covered every inch of land within the manor with its warmth, as usual.
No one in the manor knew that they just barely escaped a terrible fate.
In the early morning, Angor brought several maids to the tea garden to pick the freshest leaves. It was an unforgiving winter outside when everything would freeze solid, but the tea garden sheltered by the greenhouse which was improved by Jon was still as warm as it was in the spring.
To prepare for the “tea party” this evening, Angor ordered the maids to collect lots of Morning Dew leaves. Part of them would be used to brew tea for the evening, the rest of them would be handed to Mana who would stir-fry the leaves. Only tea leaves that were “killed”—kneaded in high temperature—could retain their original fragrance for a long time. Angor planned to give these preserved leaves to Count Eton as gift.
Seeing how the maids had brought the leaves for de-enzyming, Angor could finally entrust the job to them. He then returned to the yard of the stilt house.
Jon was sitting on the balcony of the second floor, bathing in the warm sunlight, which was quite scarce during the winter. He was even humming a tune.
Angor walked up, took the salve from the mute servant, and began rubbing it onto Jon’s body. Jon only glanced at him without saying anything. Jon already explained the cause for his wilting limbs, and Angor probably didn’t believe it. No matter, Jon would just enjoy this act of respect from his pupil. He wouldn’t be doing this for long anyway. Jon didn’t even know whether he could make it past the Month of Freezing Earth.
Jon welcomed the gentle wind blowing against him with a smile, while humming his nameless melody.
Sad. Yet free.
More importantly, remembrance.
“If I can travel back to Earth… Even if for just a second before I have to die, I’d accept it.” Jon never really understood why people would revert to their origins until just now.
Sorrow was written all over Angor’s face. But he did not know how to comfort his teacher. To part with someone was always the most hurtful experience, not to mention to part with someone a world away.
The moment of tranquility did not last long. Jon suddenly pointed to a transparent, crystalline object which had been half-buried in a flower pot on the balcony. “Can you pass that to me?”
With an “Um-hm”, Angor went there and dug up the object out of the wet dirt, rubbed it clean with his handkerchief before giving it to Jon.
The object had an oval shape, like a glazed sphere when observed from afar.
Jon held the “glazed sphere” in his hand and watched for a long time. His expression changed from resentment, to sorrow, then to a bitter smile.
“I dropped this in the forest three years ago, and it somehow ended up inside my flower pot,” Jon shook his head. “Maybe this is fate?”
Hearing his teacher speaking to himself, Angor blushed and stuttered, “I brought it back. You always appreciated it, sometimes you even cried over it, so I believed this was from your family. When I saw you throwing it away in the forest, I thought you no longer wanted to remember someone. Then I picked it up and hid it here, so you can still find it in case you change your mind.”
Jon was left speechless for a while, then he muttered again, albeit in a voice only he could hear this time, “Or perhaps… the fate lies with you?”
After staying silent for a moment longer, Jon looked at Angor. “The glazed sphere wasn’t from my family, though it could be considered something from Earth. I don’t know about its exact origin.
“Let me tell you a story about the sphere.”
…
As Jon slowly revealed his story, more and more shock climbed onto Angor’s face.
He thought it was only a sphere with some memorable meaning behind it, not something with such an amazing backstory!
The story started 20 years ago, when Jon was still back on Earth. He was a scientist, born in the land of China. To work on a grand and mysterious project, he accepted an invitation and brought his wife and daughter to Long Island in New York, USA. It was a secret research project which lasted longer than a decade.
The research project was called the Montauk Project.
It was a famous space physics project back on Earth. Jon was born in the middle of the 23rd century. The project commenced two centuries ago by then, and was cast aside several times with a total of 50 years devoted into it. Jon participated in the sixth commencement.
The project was formerly the “Philadelphia Experiment” in the year of 1942, when radar was just invented. To render their warships undetectable by radar beams, the American military carried out the experiment on the destroyer escort, USS Eldridge. There was an omni-directional antenna on the main mast and two energy coils on the deck, all of which were powered by a generator on the ship. Abnormality arose at the beginning of the experiment, and worse disasters came about during the second and third attempt. The generator went out of control. Eldridge disappeared from everyone’s sight and instantly reappeared somewhere 7,000 kilometers away. The Philadelphia Experiment was forced to shut down in the end, but people had discovered a side-product: Long-Distance Teleportation.
In simple words, the Montauk Project was a physics research subject focusing on traveling through space.
At first, the research of the Montauk Project were all limited by the concepts of the Philadelphia Experiment, and did not yield much progress, until the beginning of the 23rd century when an alien object sowed great excitement into the hearts of all scientists.
The alien object fell into the southwest region of the Sahara Desert in Africa, right in the middle of the famous “Eye of the Sahara”.
The object attracted the attention of every country and region. As a small nation in Africa, Mauritania couldn’t even hope to compete for the object against the others. In the end, the object went to Long Island in New York, USA, while being researched by several nations including China, Britain, France, Japan, Russia and so on. People named it the “Alien Eye”.
During the research, scientists found out that the Alien Eye possessed energy readings that contradicted most existing physical coefficients. If triggered by high-energy radiation of a certain wavelength, the Alien Eye could even teleport objects within a small area.
Because of this newly discovered teleportation method, the scientists commenced the Montauk Project for the sixth time.
Jon was only an ordinary researcher during the project. His job was to keep a record of the effect on plants, inflicted by the wave frequencies generated by the Alien Eye.
One day, Jon brought several sealed saplings into the heavily protected Alien Eye research zone to record samples, as usual.
Nothing was out of the ordinary at first. Most plants withered and died under the waves released by the Alien Eye, except for one single tea seedling brought from China.
As Jon held the seedling and activated his Parasitic Chip to begin recording, something went wrong with either the control panel or some other component, no one knew. Several flashes of high-energy beams hit the Alien Eye spot on, followed by drastic changes in the laboratory.
Space collapsed, and darkness emerged. The Alien Eye emitted a terrifying aura, covering everything within the lab in an instant. The next second, before Jon could realize what was going on, he was swallowed into the darkness, with the seedling still in his hand.
Breaking past several dimensional barriers, Jon landed in this world, with the Alien Eye by his side and countless wounds upon his body.
He was then saved by old Viscount Padt.
The Alien Eye on the other hand, lost its magic and became a most ordinary object – a glazed sphere.