This time's traversal was random, with no clear target, and the sensation of crossing over felt different.
Before, Yusei would just feel a blur before his eyes, a brief moment of disorientation, and when his senses returned, he'd be in another world.
This time was different. Dizziness was the least of it, and the most terrifying part was the feeling of being whacked hard on the back of the head, which left him speechless.
'So, this was what it meant to traverse as an 'ordinary person'? Even the treatment during the crossing was downgraded to a budget version?'
But although he complained, he endured it.
The dizziness in the back of his head gradually faded. When he finally had the chance to notice his surroundings, he was shocked to find that everything around him had turned into a vast, white world.
Everything around was white, as if he were in a room with white walls on all sides. No sense of distance, no sense of space.
Yusei was puzzled. He was just about to take a step forward to carefully examine this place when he was stunned to discover that he was... gone.
That wasn't quite accurate. It wasn't that his legs were gone, but that he had lost his physical body, becoming an ethereal, intangible soul.
The soul was still visible… blue, translucent, wearing the same clothes as before, no different.
Yusei was dumbfounded, and took a good look while to process this.
Fortunately, he remembered the System and realized this was what the System meant by making him traverse 'ordinarily'.
So that was it. In a purely soul state, he indeed lost all those strange abilities. The Rinnegan, Authorities… all were stripped away.
Even the swordsmanship inherent to his physical body was gone.
Yusei felt like crying but had no tears. He was truly starting with a blank slate now.
However, Yusei wasn't one to sit around waiting for death. Sitting idle was, of course, impossible. Even in soul form, he felt he could move.
After a moment's thought, he moved forward to see what this vast white world was all about.
Just as he moved forward, it was as if he had triggered some mechanism. A blue glowing hole appeared, and a powerful suction force engulfed his entire being.
Yusei was sucked in without any ability to resist, and the blue glowing hole immediately vanished.
On the Hill of Camlann, strewn with corpses and dismembered limbs, a girl in a courtly long dress sat on a clean, large rock.
This was an ancient battlefield. The aura of slaughter filled the air. As far as the eye could see, there were dead bodies and earth stained red with rivers of blood. It was strange that a golden-haired girl was sitting here.
But it was also peculiar. Although the girl's clothes were clean, her golden hair was unkempt and very messy. Moreover, the gold seemed dull and lusterless, clearly unwashed for a long time.
Most notably, there were some bloodstains on it, long dried and congealed into clots, sticking to strands of her golden hair.
Despite the dried bloodstains and dirty traces on her face and head, the clothes on her body were clean, which was very odd.
The girl just sat there, on the clean rock, her gaze vacant, like a statue, staring blankly ahead at who knows what.
If not for the slight rise and fall of her chest proving she was breathing, one might think she was already dead.
Suddenly-
A blue glowing hole appeared in the sky above, and a figure tumbled out.
From a height of a thousand meters in the sky, Yusei suddenly appeared and began falling towards the ground.
Yusei, suddenly finding himself mid-air, panicked slightly but quickly regained his composure. He discovered his arms seemed to have returned to normal, no longer in a soul state. He instinctively tried to manipulate repulsion, but then remembered he seemed to have lost all his abilities.
At this point, he was genuinely scared, 'Falling from this height, wouldn't I be smashed into a pulp? I was truly in a mortal body now, so how could it withstand such a fall?'
And so, Yusei plummeted headfirst towards the ground.
In his desperation, Yusei could only close his eyes, adjust his position to avoid landing on his head as much as possible, and see if there was any hope of survival.
Even though it was a thousand-meter fall, it felt as if some transparent, soft membrane buffered the impact.
At a position ten meters from the ground, his speed suddenly decreased drastically. It slowed down but he continued to fall. And the landing spot seemed to be right on that dazed, doll-like girl.
Thud!
Yusei accurately crashed right into the golden-haired girl. The girl's dazed state seemed to have been ingrained into her bodily reactions.
When Yusei was ten meters away from her, she had actually noticed, even subconsciously tilting her head up slightly. But her body made no movement, and coupled with the close distance, she simply didn't react in time. This resulted in Yusei crashing directly into her.
With the girl below acting as a cushion, Yusei and the girl tumbled several times before landing on a small, relatively clear patch of ground beside the battlefield. This place felt somewhat cleaner.
Although there were still some dried red bloodstains, it was much better.
Feeling the soreness and numbness throughout his body, Yusei knew this seemed to be his own body, just far too fragile.
The physical toughness of a Campione was gone. Although disappointed, he had expected this.
Yusei instinctively pressed his hand down beside him to push himself up and sit. But as his palm pressed down, he froze.
'Soft... and warm...'
Yusei looked at his right hand and found a girl lying beneath him. The place his hand was pressing was naturally where her heart would be.
Looking at the equally dazed girl, her face still stained with blood, her gaze slowly turning towards him, Yusei, for some reason, blurted out:
"A bit small."
Within the vast white space, ethereal and without physical substance, as if nothing existed… this was the place Yusei had been before.
Just then, a slightly childish female voice suddenly rang out.
"Sister, it seems a soul not belonging to this planet has entered the Throne of Heroes."
"I sensed it too. It seems to have barged into King Arthur's area now. How should we handle it? Should we just kick it out of the Throne?"
"Alright, let's just-" The first childish female voice hadn't even finished speaking when it was as if someone had grabbed her by the throat, preventing her from continuing.
After a good while, her voice sounded again.
"Don't kick it out. Isn't the humans' Holy Grail War about to begin? Let it participate in the war alongside King Arthur."