[Scene: Regression of the Self — The Rebirth Within Caelus]
The moment Oliver signed, the golden light enveloped him not with force but with a warm, consuming stillness. It was not heat—it was memory. It flooded his senses like a tide, drawing him into a tranquil state so pure that it broke all weight from his mind.
He saw a white sky stretching beyond forever, not clouded nor blue—just soft, endless white like a sheet of paper before a story is written.
He drifted through blue oceans, not swimming but existing inside the currents. Shoals of silver fish danced in harmony past him, glittering like living wind chimes. His body felt light. Time no longer mattered. He stayed there, suspended, for what could have been minutes or millennia, the only sensation a serenity so absolute it brought a tear to his closed eyes.
When the warmth finally receded, the dream dissolved.
And Oliver stood again—back in the Celestial North Palace.
Except... something was off.
Everything was now larger. The paper stacks taller, the Tortoises seeming massive, towering. The starry ceiling, once majestic, now loomed like the sky of a god.
Oliver blinked. His hands looked... small.
He turned toward the Celestial Mirror, a flawless silver oval levitating in the center of an arc of tortoise statues.
And what he saw made his breath catch.
A child stared back. Wide brown eyes, soft cheeks, round frame—a six-year-old version of himself. His limbs were pudgy with baby fat, and when he opened his mouth in shock, he could feel it—his baby teeth, freshly formed, barely settled. One felt loose. He instinctively wiggled it with his tongue.
> "W-what... what happened to me?" Oliver asked, his voice now higher, tinged with innocence and panic. "I-I'm a kid? I'm a kid again?!"
The Black Tortoise, ever calm, turned his enormous head toward him, the golden light still faintly lingering in the air like mist.
> "You are still you, Oliver. But this world... it must be entered anew."
> "Why?" Oliver said, confused, his tiny fists clenching. "Why make me... this again? I was already grown—I went through everything!"
The great tortoise's eyes shimmered, galaxies within them barely contained.
> "Because you lacked the experience needed to walk forward as you were. Too burdened. Too dulled. This world—Caelus—does not simply offer escape. It offers reconstruction. And to reconstruct... you must return to the foundation."
Oliver stared at his reflection, tears stinging his eyes—not out of sadness but out of helpless awe.
> "But my teeth... they're different," he mumbled, poking the loose one again.
> "Yes," Black Tortoise answered gently. "Your biology remains Earthlike, but you are now shaped by Caelus's rules. Here, children of your kind do not lose teeth as in your world. Yours, however, still may. A uniqueness, perhaps—a sign of your in-between nature."
Oliver looked down at his small feet, then up again.
> "So I start over."
> "Yes," said the Black Tortoise. "But you do not begin from nothing. You carry memory. You carry pain. And that... is wisdom's seed."
Oliver wiped at his eyes with a sleeve now two sizes too big.
> "Okay... I'll try," he whispered.
A quiet hush fell over the palace. The golden light faded. And the celestial winds blew softly, like a lullaby to a new life.
The child who had once lost hope
now stood in a new world,
ready—
not to escape...
but to grow.
---------
Within the towering serenity of the Celestial North Palace, surrounded by tortoise scribes and celestial gardeners humming in rhythm with the cosmos, the Black Tortoise extended his ancient claw. Resting in it was a golden relic—a bracelet, ornately engraved with divine spirals and mythical calligraphy, polished like sunlight captured in metal. At its center sat a colorless stone, shimmering not with light, but with potential—as if it reflected things not seen, not heard... but thought.
> "This," the Black Tortoise began, his voice as slow and eternal as the stars, "is a Contact Relic. It does not call across space, or time. It calls across thought itself. It can reach... concepts."
Oliver blinked, small hands reaching up as the relic was placed within his palms. It was cool to the touch, surprisingly heavy. He turned it, watching the colorless gem ripple like still water stirred only by memory.
> "But," the Tortoise continued, "do not use it freely. It is not complete. There is... power, yes—but it is untamed. Still forming. Your soul, Oliver, is not trapped in body, nor floating in some distant spirit realm. It exists in neither nor. It is abstract—like silence, or regret, or a promise never fulfilled."
Oliver looked up with wide brown eyes, the weight of the object seeming to echo inside him. His small fingers clutched it tighter. It felt alive.
> "Only this relic," the Black Tortoise said with gravity, "can allow one to touch the abstract. To truly grip what cannot be seen. When the time is right... you will know."
Oliver nodded slowly, awed and unsure, but a faint spark of curiosity dancing behind his youthful weariness.
As he stood in that moment, the oversized green jacket—the one gifted unexpectedly from Evan—hung awkwardly from his shoulder. It no longer fit his smaller frame. Before he could say anything, the Black Tortoise lifted a claw.
The jacket and the golden relic shimmered with glyphs, and in a blink, both vanished in a flicker of divine storage magic.
> "Sealed," Black Tortoise said. "Held safe in your Inventory. You may summon them when the time aligns."
Oliver looked down at himself: all he wore now was a white-and-black sweater—soft and stitched with simple loops, the kind he might have worn on a forgotten winter morning—and a pair of black shorts ending at his knees. His brown hair had grown slightly longer, brushing past his ears, curling faintly at the ends.
He raised his small hands again, staring at his fingers, then his reflection once more in a polished marble panel beside the relic altar.
> "I… forgot I used to look like this," he said quietly. "I don't even remember this version of me. It feels… like someone else."
The Black Tortoise looked down at him, his celestial eyes glowing with an ageless calm.
> "Perhaps it was," he said. "But now... that someone has a second chance."
And high above, the stars of Caelus glittered gently—silent witnesses to the unfolding of a soul once lost, now beginning again.