That night.
Or rather, it was nighttime over in Shenzhou.
Other places might've been at different hours.
Morning, noon, afternoon, or even the dead of night—it didn't matter! The whole world was buzzing!
Even as the sky-screen faded away, unhurried and calm, many people still lingered, reluctant to disperse.
They stayed right there!
Still gathered together!
Online and offline, everyone was chattering about what had just happened, full of fervor and excitement.
Now, originally~This recap was about Acheron, touching on the secrets of Aeons and Paths, even the transition of Aeons from the old era to the new—a quintessential example, you could say.
It should've sparked plenty of discussion and research. Maybe even lasting for days, with no end in sight…
But!
Just those final words from Miss Yuzu alone were enough to firmly fix everyone's attention right here.
Imagining, debating.
Fantasizing…
Call it what you will!
Compared to the real chance to experience the world of the future, almost as if they were living it themselves, everything else seemed trivial.
[The Young Lady's Birthday Celebration! What's Your Take?]
[Bold Prediction! It's Not Just a Spectacle for the Stellar Alliance—It's a Cosmic Event!]
Official news, all sorts of reports.
And every kind of self-media outlet, big and small, jumped on the bandwagon too.
You had your clickbait titles, and your down-to-earth pragmatic ones.
But no matter what! Just like every time the sky-screen revealed something, there it was—a shining, unmissable trend. If you didn't seize it, you'd have to be a real fool!
And nobody wanted that. This time was no exception!
If you talked about the Young Lady, or the birthday festival, I was clicking right in.
Not that nobody mentioned Miss Acheron, the Aeon of Nihility, or even Aeons, Paths, and Emanators—along with all sorts of other intel.
But if you compared the traffic numbers and data, well, it just couldn't compete.
The top ten trending topics were all the same: #BirthdayCelebration, #TheYoungLady, #TheWorld60000YearsFromNow, and so on…
It was settled.
Elysia had promised to come over and sleep while cuddling with Kiana.
But, well. She ended up playing on her phone next to Kiana until daybreak.
So what was Kiana herself doing all this time?
Heh~
A certain Young Lady was also not asleep.JPG
How utterly helpless she must've felt~
"Look, look~ Kiana! They're discussing your age…"
"Oh…"
"Do you think, with all that fanfare in the future, it might be like… a tenth anniversary? Or a hundredth? Or a thousandth? Or even ten-thousandth? Something along those lines?"
"I don't know…"
At the Fire Moth headquarters.
Kiana's aunts, uncles, and elders back home were also deep in discussion. A holographic video conference started up just like that.
They were just that spontaneous.
"If only we could confirm exactly which anniversary it is…"
"Then we could figure out exactly when that future point in time is."
Even so.
When you got down to it, it was pretty much useless.
Because many scholars believed that, based on the worldview theory of the Imaginary Tree's infinite leaves, it was easy to conclude that their present had already veered way off course. If that future was truly their own future, it would've already been affected.
If it hadn't been affected, there were only two possibilities.
First: Their present had changed.
The worldline had forked at a turning point.
So their era and the one shown in the sky-screen videos would naturally be two different branches.
Evolving into parallel worlds.
The other possibility was that the two worlds were originally parallel from the start—twin timelines, like two sides of a coin.
Sure, without the sky-screen revelations, their world might've inevitably moved along the same trajectory as that future world in the videos, ending up exactly the same, no different at all.
But!
Since the sky-screen had exposed it all, even parallel timelines would diverge even more drastically.
If you thought about it that way…
Maybe it wasn't that the sky-screen was broadcasting videos from the distant future for people in the past to see.
But that both sides were parallel. They were just the relative future, and their own side was the relative past.
It was like a connection had been established between the two.
And what they saw was a projection within the same dimension.
But even that theory was debunked by many.
"There's only one Young Lady, right?! Even in the whole Tree-Sea system, isn't she one of a kind?!"
"I refuse to believe there could be another like her."
"Exactly!"
"Take that Honkai Impact 3rd current civilization—isn't that another possible future for us? But over there, we don't see any Young Lady."
"Our Young Lady is one of a kind!"
So, in the end, the first theory was still more convincing.
But no matter what!
Even if the future recap videos kept playing on the sky-screen, and they didn't have the same shock value or impact as they did at the beginning, they still held plenty of value sometimes.
There were still plenty of people dedicated to studying them.
Some universities even started developing related majors, planning to enroll students next semester.
And believe it or not, the admission scores were pretty high.
People were flocking to them!
There were quite a few categories—sociology had a sub-field, finance, technology, historical research, and so on. They all saw some movement.
Rumors had been circulating for a while now.
It was just more obvious these days.
Kiana had heard from her mom and the others that Fire Moth, and even high-level families worldwide, were pushing for all kinds of research focused on Kiana.
As long as your research was about Kiana, you passed. Money wasn't an issue—what mattered was the sentiment.
Alright then! Truth be told, it was just another political maneuver.
A way to continually maintain Kiana's prestige and boost her influence.
Even if she herself didn't need it, the family elders felt that, since they finally had such an outstanding daughter, they ought to show her off properly.
You know, flaunt her a bit?
If your kid made it big, you'd do the same!
As for Kiana, she could only say she understood the reasoning, but still couldn't quite relate.
But whenever she went out, she usually had perception filters or something similar active, so she didn't have to worry about any trouble. She just let them do their thing.
The funny part was, the most enthusiastic one in all this was actually Miss Eden.
As a world-renowned singer, and famously the Young Lady's wife, her every move seemed to symbolize the Young Lady herself.
She openly participated in all sorts of promotional work related to the Young Lady.
Sometimes she even dragged Elysia along with her.
That just made the related public initiatives skyrocket even more. And nobody dared try any funny business behind the scenes.
That would be a one-way ticket to a grave with no burial site!
--+--
T/N: While I am an inexperienced Translator, I have a Patreon! While it may seem empty as of now, webnovel will get 3 Chapters Every Day, and advanced chapters will be uploaded on Patreon.
20+ advanced chaps on my patreon.
[email protected]/AspenTL
If you guys wanna check it out.