Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 1932: Restrictions

Larissa remained in the storage room for a long while, her hands covering her face as she tried and failed to hold back the grief that had built inside her throughout the vision.

Ning stood beside her without speaking. There may have been words that could have helped her at the moment, but if there were any, Ning didn’t know them.

Larissa had just watched her father die, and the answer she sought wasn’t something she had found. This was a difficult time for her, and no words from Ning could make that easier.

The only thing he could do was remain beside her until she was ready to speak.

It took several minutes before Larissa finally lowered her hands.

Her eyes had grown red, and she quickly wiped away the tears remaining on her cheeks before turning away from Ning, perhaps embarrassed that he had seen her lose control.

Ning pretended not to notice.

"What do you plan to do next?" he asked.

Larissa breathed in deeply and looked around the storage room, her eyes settling on the place where the shelves had stood in the past.

"I don’t know. Maybe I can try again at a later date and see if I can figure something out."

"What about following those two who killed your father?" Ning asked. "Let’s see where they lead us. Maybe that will give us an answer. If you keep the vision going, we can catch them."

Larissa shook her head almost immediately.

"I can’t do that."

"Why not?"

"My power doesn’t last very long," she said. "What we just watched already pushed it close to its limit. Following them through the city would take far longer than I could maintain the vision."

Ning had noticed that Larissa had grown increasingly tired while they watched the past, but he had assumed most of that exhaustion came from the emotions involved.

Apparently, the ability itself required a significant amount of effort.

"It is also based on location," Larissa continued. "I can only see the past that happened close to where I’m standing. If they leave the range of my power, the vision won’t follow them."

"So we move outside after them."

"That would still be nearly impossible," Larissa said. "I can’t pinpoint an exact moment whenever I want. I have to reverse through the images and use context clues to find the right time. Finding two random men outside out of thousands of nights would be difficult. I could try, but then I would have to keep doing it at every short distance since the range isn’t high."

Ning thought back to how she had activated her ability.

The past had not appeared as a list of dates she could simply choose from. Events had flashed backward before them, sometimes too quickly to understand, and Larissa had needed to recognize the police investigation before carefully moving to the moments preceding it.

Inside this room, there had been enough context.

She remembered the layout of the study, knew when her father had died, and could recognize the people who had investigated the scene.

Outside, there would be nothing to separate that night from the hundreds of other nights that had passed through the same street.

"The farther we go from the house, the harder it will be to find the correct moment," Larissa said. "Even if I knew which path they took, I would have to search through years of people walking along the same road and somehow stop on the exact few seconds when those men passed."

Ning slowly nodded.

Her power was impressive, but it was not as unrestricted as he had initially believed.

She could see events that had happened in a location, but only if she possessed enough information to find them.

Following someone through the past would require her to stop at every street, reverse through fifteen years of history, locate the correct moment, watch which direction the killers went, and repeat the same process at the next location.

She would exhaust herself before reaching the end of the block.

"Then the journal is our best option," Ning said.

Larissa looked toward him.

"We saw the page your father was reading. There was a photograph of a man and some writing beneath it. We can revisit that moment as many times as necessary until we find something."

"I could barely see the words," Larissa said.

"Neither could I," Ning answered. "But we don’t have to read everything at once. We can focus on one section each time. Maybe move the vision forward or backward until we find something. Maybe your father talks out loud at some point. We’re not going to find the answer right away. This is an investigation, after all. You should know better than anyone how arduous a task this is."

Larissa thought for a moment.

Ning wasn’t wrong. If she just tried a couple of times, they could get to it.

They simply needed time to study it.

"We can also watch him turn the pages before the killers arrive," Ning said. "There might be something else in the journal that helps us identify who he was investigating."

Larissa nodded slowly.

It was the best plan they had.

Her father had said that he knew who the killers’ leader was and that he was close to ruining all of them. The evidence required to support that claim had to be somewhere inside the journal or among the documents the men had taken.

If they could recover even part of that information through the vision, they might finally learn who had killed him.

"I think that’s a great plan," she said.

Ning nodded. "Do you have the energy to do it again?" he asked.

Larissa hesitated before nodding. "Probably not for too long, but we can revisit the past again."

She held out her hand for Ning to hold on to. As Ning grabbed her hand, the room shifted back to the study on that particular night. Larissa pulled the vision back a short while earlier, reaching a section where the room was empty. Fast-forwarding a little, her father entered the room, looked through some newspapers, and then pulled out the journal.

Ning and Larissa both closed in, taking a look at what was inside.