"Hah… hah…"

The moment Ashe broke free from the Golden Zone, he collapsed to his knees on the grass and gasped for air.

He watched as his withered arm slowly regained its healthy color. His ragged, bellows-like breathing steadied, and the fog in his mind lifted, as if rust had been scraped clean from a long-neglected machine. Relief poured through him, the kind that only came after narrowly escaping death.

Only now did he realize that the simple ability to focus, to sustain a single coherent thought, was itself a form of happiness. When the soul aged, thinking became a luxury. The mind turned sluggish, like a computer caught in perpetual lag. Forget running tasks, just trying to summon a mental task manager to sort through his own thoughts would freeze it entirely. After experiencing...