Chapter 111: VOL 2 Chapter 56: Congratulations.
Floating with the help of the staff, Erik entered the palace and made his way through all kinds of places, such as a labyrinthine library, a room where the floors moved, extreme areas with lava or ice tombs, and other strange locations filled with all sorts of trials. The star-haired boy ignored them completely, activating the corresponding functions of the staff to overcome them with extreme ease while collecting spherical crystals of different colors in each spot.
"What are those things you're picking up, Erik?" Ebonique asked curiously as she looked at a pale blue crystal in Erik's hand. He answered in a calm tone while storing it in his storage ring.
"Well, they're actually Chantinolite crystals. They're used to create things like the crystal tablet that connects to the Sentinel Probes or the university student ID cards, but I'm collecting them because they were part of the conditions to activate certain functions of the staff, so they'll probably be needed later on."
"I see..."
Ebonique nodded with equal parts understanding and curiosity, enjoying this little adventure like a child—an experience so simple and straightforward yet overwhelmingly wonderful and refreshing, something she'd never been able to enjoy in her incomparably long life, and therefore a happiness she had been unable to understand in the past.
After being at the top of the food chain for so long, worshiped and feared wherever she went, the world had lost all its color before she even realized it; everything turned into a dull gray, and the days went by without her even noticing. She simply repeated her eternal routine of sleeping for several decades, centuries, or even millennia, only to wake up and either sit in her cold, lonely palace or meet with other eternals even more bored than she was.
After so much time, even one of her greatest hobbies—collecting treasures—had stopped being interesting. In the end, one of her few moments of amusement was sitting in her garden and drinking rare teas. But in the midst of that tedious monotony, there was a hint of color coming from a certain crazy blue phoenix who wasted her time with weak mortals.
Among the eternal spirits, Ignis was incredibly strange, debasing herself by posing as a mere ancestral spirit to while away her time with mortals—something beyond what other spirits at her level could understand. Yet oddly enough, she was the only one of them who could smile sincerely, radiating genuine happiness, unlike the silly, feigned smiles that everyone else wore.
That smile was precisely what drew Ebonique in because it was the only spark of color in her gray world—something that fascinated and, at the same time, intrigued her. How could that foolish spirit smile like that? But as much as she tried, she could never understand the reason for that happiness, until now, which inevitably brought to mind the words of that silly phoenix.
{It's just that you don't understand the beauty of the mortal world, but I think you'll begin to understand it little by little alongside young Erik.}
(Who would have thought? In the end, you were right, Ignis. The mortal world truly is something incredibly beautiful and full of color, something I could only understand by being at Erik's side. Honestly, following you that day was the best decision I could have made, fufufu.)