The darkness in the depths of consciousness was like sticky mire.
In this place without any concept of time or space, a crimson feather, its edges glinting gold, drifted silently down.
The moment the feather touched the darkness, ripple after ripple spread out like waves of water, washing away all the chaos around it.
Mist rose up from underfoot, and bluestone steps stretched all the way to an ancient pine at the cliff's edge.
At the cliff's edge stood a stone table and two stone stools, and from the coarse porcelain teacups on the table, white vapor was curling up.
Kiana's eyelashes trembled faintly, and she abruptly opened her eyes.
What met her eyes was a churning sea of clouds.
She looked around somewhat dazedly, until her gaze fell on the figure seated across the stone table.
That person wore a set of red-and-white training clothes, long hair tied carelessly behind the head with a red cord.
Though it wasn't the most familiar appearance from the depths of her memory, it was the very figure she had seen at the last moment before she lost control in Arc City.
At that time, to fight the Herrscher of the Void that had cornered her into a desperate plight, she had used nearly all her strength—
Fu Hua.
Not that little antique from the Inch Heart Dojo, but the one who had pushed her into the abyss.
In her hands she held that still-steaming teacup.
Kiana's body tensed in an instant, her shoulders rising up uncontrollably.
She stared at that incredibly familiar face, and the confusion deep in her eyes was instantly replaced by cold hardness. She instinctively retreated half a step, her heel knocking against the bluestone with a dull thud.
"Why would you appear here?"
Kiana's voice was very hoarse, as though she hadn't drunk water in a long time, every word forced out from between her teeth.
"You... have you been inside my body all along?"
Seated on the stone stool, Fenghuang set down her teacup, her fingertips leaving the warm porcelain.
She raised her head, her gaze crossing the rising vapor, calmly watching this girl before her who was covered all over in barbs.
"Yes. I followed you, came to this world together with you."
Fenghuang spoke at an unhurried pace, no fluctuation of emotion discernible.
"Before, you kept resisting me, sealing your consciousness completely, so I could never find a chance to communicate with you."
Fenghuang paused, her gaze turning to the sea of clouds beyond the cliff.
"But today, I have finally found the chance. I want to have a proper talk with you."
"What do I have to talk about with you?"
Kiana's voice suddenly rose sharply.
"You used to be the Squad Monitor I respected most, but you betrayed me... dragged me back to that place."
Kiana's chest heaved violently as she glared fixedly into Fenghuang's eyes.
"Now you suddenly appear before me—do you want me to forgive you?"
The mountain wind blew through the ancient pine, making a rustling sound.
Fenghuang did not answer right away.
She watched a few pine needles drift onto the stone table, then raised her hand and gently brushed them away.
She could have said that, in this world, she had been helping Su Yu conceal his identity all along; could have said how she had taught Su Yu the Tai Xu Sword Qi in order to protect her; could even have said that she herself was now just a wage worker living under someone else's roof.
But this was her principle.
Using such tactics—akin to claiming credit—to morally blackmail someone was not something Fenghuang would do.
And yet....
A man who never said more than a few proper words a day suddenly flashed through Fenghuang's mind.
That guy called Su Yu always seemed to have a way of solving the trickiest problems from the most unexpected angles.
The roundabout approach was indeed, at times, more effective than going at things head-on.
Fenghuang withdrew her gaze, her hands folded atop her knees.
"Your mental strength is nearly exhausted in the Sea of Quanta."
Fenghuang ignored Kiana's interrogation and instead threw out a completely unrelated topic.
"As the price, the current you can no longer contend with the Herrscher of the Void on the level of consciousness."
All the sarcasm and fury Kiana had prepared stuck fast in her throat.
She froze for a moment, her brows knitting tightly.
"Do you know what that means?" Fenghuang continued.
"What does it mean?" Kiana instinctively pressed.
"It means your body has already been occupied by the Herrscher of the Void." Fenghuang's tone was even, as if stating the most ordinary little matter. "You can close your eyes and feel it. The current you is in the deepest part of this body—and the one active on the outside is Sirin."
Kiana's face changed in an instant.
She didn't need to close her eyes at all.
The moment Fenghuang laid the fact bare, that emptiness of being utterly severed from the outside world surged in like a tide.
Panic instantly replaced anger.
She could bear not caring about being locked in the depths of consciousness, but she could not bear not caring about what was happening outside.
"If Sirin controls my body... what about Su Yu?" Kiana suddenly rushed to the stone table, both hands bracing against the cold bluestone surface, her eyes full of terror. "What if she uses my appearance to attack Su Yu? Su Yu doesn't know it's her!"
Fenghuang watched Kiana, anxious as an ant on a hot pan, and said nothing—only picked up the teacup and gently blew at the floating tea leaves.
Just as expected.
Su Yu's whole set of "language arts" was terrifyingly effective.
As long as the topic was steered toward that man, this girl covered in spikes would instantly drop all her defenses.
Worry breeds chaos—how could she possibly spare a thought for betrayal and hatred now, with her whole mind left holding nothing but worry for that man.
"Say something already!" Kiana anxiously slapped the table.
"No need to be so anxious."
Fenghuang set down the cup with a faint clink.
"This weakness is fair to both of you. In the short term, she has no power to do any harm. In fact... she's even much weaker than usual right now."
Kiana let out a slight breath of relief, her tensed shoulders sagging a little.
"But this weakness is not permanent."
Fenghuang's words took a turn, her gaze becoming exceedingly sharp.
"Her recovery speed far outstrips yours. If your mental strength cannot return to its peak before she recovers her power, then control of this body will, I'm afraid, truly and completely change hands."
Fenghuang stared into Kiana's eyes, her tone weighing a few degrees heavier.
"And by then, Su Yu would truly be in danger."
That sentence was like a heavy hammer, smashing fiercely into Kiana's fatal weak point.
"Since you say so, you must have a way to solve it, right?!" Kiana could no longer care about anything else, staring fixedly at Fenghuang, her eyes even carrying a trace of pleading.
Looking at this girl before her on the verge of tears, Fenghuang let out a long sigh deep in her heart.
In truth, the situation was far better than she had described—Sirin had indeed briefly occupied Kiana's body, but she could not erase Kiana's consciousness at all.
In the Sea of Quanta, Kiana's will had, for the first time in any true sense, overpowered Sirin, seizing the greater part of the Herrscher of the Void's Authority in a head-on confrontation.
But Fenghuang's words were not false either—it was true that Kiana and Sirin were both weakened at once, and the struggle against the Herrscher was a long tug-of-war. If Kiana could not recover quickly, then the Authority she had wrested away would gradually slide back toward Sirin once more.
She had merely changed the wording, laying before Kiana the most likely direction the development could take.
And now it seemed this rhetoric was unexpectedly effective.
It seemed Su Yu had not lied—her former self had been too bound by the rules, and that approach had actually only kept her from getting close to Kiana, making the other only detest and distance herself all the more.
Perhaps—she really ought to seek some pointers from Su Yu in the future as well.
Though she thought this in her heart, Fenghuang's face still wore the stern, rigid air of a grandmaster.
She rose to her feet, hands clasped behind her back, and looked toward the distant sea of clouds.
"The only way is, during this stretch of time, to study the Tai Xu Sword Qi under me."
Fenghuang turned around, her gaze blazing.
"The Tai Xu Sword Heart can reshape your mental barrier. Not only can it help you quickly recover your depleted mental strength, it can even let you go a step further—gaining the complete upper hand in future confrontations with the Herrscher of the Void."
The wind at the cliff's edge grew a bit stronger, setting Fenghuang's robe hem flapping.
"That way, you'll be able to protect Su Yu all the better."
That last sentence was light and airy, yet it pierced precisely through Kiana's final line of psychological defense.
"When do we start?"
Without any hesitation, without the slightest wavering.
Kiana straightened her body, her head of white hair flying in the wind, her gaze terrifyingly firm.
The sea of clouds of the Tai Xu Illusory Realm still rolled quietly on.
A trace of barely perceptible admiration flickered through Fenghuang's eyes.
If that man called Su Yu were standing here at this moment, he would probably clutch his forehead and helplessly sigh—"I say, old Squad Monitor, you've completely learned all the wrong tricks."
Although the chief culprit who taught the old Squad Monitor those bad tricks was none other than himself.
Fenghuang wasted no more words and began the lesson directly.
"Set the horse stance—feet shoulder-width apart, knees braced outward, center of gravity sunk down."
Kiana gritted her teeth and squatted down according to the instruction.
Her thigh muscles began to ache and swell within seconds; this body, wrung dry in the Sea of Quanta, was far weaker than she had imagined.
Fenghuang walked to her side, extended two fingers, and precisely pressed them against Kiana's lower back.
Kiana's spine snapped straight, her whole body lurching forward half a step.
"Don't move." Fenghuang withdrew her hand. "Your waist has collapsed. Draw the position of the mingmen back."
Kiana readjusted her posture without looking at Fenghuang.
Her gaze was fixed dead on the bluestone slab beneath her feet.
Fenghuang paid no mind to her attitude and continued correcting her.
"Breathe. Inhale, sinking it to the dantian; exhale, sending it to the four limbs."
"The foundation of the Tai Xu Sword Heart lies in the gathering of mental strength. Your mental strength right now is like a loose heap of sand; you must first twist it into a single rope."
Kiana closed her eyes and adjusted her breathing according to Fenghuang's guidance.
The first attempt, nothing happened.
The second time, the place of the dantian faintly held a trace of warmth.
The third time, that warmth began to flow along the meridians—weak, but indeed moving.
Fenghuang's brow lifted slightly.
Too fast.
The speed with which Kiana entered the cultivation state far exceeded Fenghuang's expectations.
But, upon careful thought, Fenghuang understood.
In that world ravaged by Honkai, Kiana's mental strength had long been caught in the double pincer of the Herrscher of the Void's erosion and her own self-consumption—like an iron billet crushed over and over, riddled with a thousand holes, yet with a density and toughness far surpassing the ordinary.
And in this peaceful world, Su Yu's seemingly trivial everyday things—steaming hot meals, a hand held in the dead of night, that line "with you here, I have the strength of a hundred men"—and all that warmth and light.
It was like a long annealing process, mending the cracks in that iron billet bit by bit.
The current Kiana's foundation of mental strength was far more solid than during the berserk period in Arc City.
And precisely because of this, in cultivating the Tai Xu Sword Qi she could achieve twice the result with half the effort.
Fenghuang did not speak this discovery aloud; she merely quickened the pace of the lesson.
"Rise. Left foot steps forward half a pace, right palm thrusts out from the waist—force issuing from the soles, traveling through the waist, threading the arm, ending at the heel of the palm."
Kiana opened her eyes and thrust out a palm.
The airflow stirred up by the palm-wind shoved the teacup on the stone table two inches.
"Again."
Another palm.
The teacup slid to the table's edge.
"Again."
The third palm.
The teacup was overturned by the palm-wind, rolling to the ground with a crisp clattering sound.
Kiana gasped heavily for breath, fine beads of sweat seeping from her forehead.
Her legs were trembling, but something that refused to be extinguished burned in her eyes.
Fenghuang walked over, bent down to pick up the teacup, and set it back on the stone table.
"Rest five minutes."
Kiana did not sit down, but held the horse stance, both hands braced on her knees.
Sweat dripped from her chin onto the bluestone slab.
She stared at those wet stains, the thoughts in her mind beginning to surge uncontrollably.
When Fenghuang had corrected her posture just now, her technique had been crisp and decisive, every touch landing just right.
No superfluous movements, no deliberate tenderness, yet not the slightest bit perfunctory either.
This was exactly the same as it had been back in Arc City.
Back then Fenghuang had been just like this—silently staying at her side, hauling her back when she was about to be devoured by Sirin, shouldering the pressure for her at the very brink of her mental collapse.
If Fenghuang really was Otto's person, why do all this?
Handing her over to Otto, turning her into the Herrscher of the Void, indirectly causing Teacher Himeko's death—this was fact.
But after that, Fenghuang had remained inside her consciousness all along, helping her suppress Sirin.
This too was fact.
Put together, these two things made no sense no matter how you looked at them.
Kiana's gaze drew away from the ground and fell on the distant cliff's edge where the sea of clouds churned.
She thought of that convenience store.
Under the deep-night fluorescent lights, Fu Hua, wearing a blue apron, stood behind the cash register, fingers swiftly scanning the product barcodes.
That young grandmaster of the Tai Xu Sect, peerless in the supreme arts and unmatched in the present age, yet willingly working night shifts at a convenience store in order to keep up the dojo's signboard left behind by his father.
Fu Hua and Fenghuang were not the same person.
But they were Counterparts.
The same face, the same reticence, the same... shouldering something on their backs and refusing to let go even unto death.
Kiana thought of Su Yu again.
That man always said the most earnest things in the most improper way.
He had said that running away solved no problem at all.
He had said that she had to face Teacher Himeko's death head-on.
He had said that she had to face her own powerlessness head-on.
Then...
Kiana slowly straightened her body and reassumed the horse stance.
Her thighs were still trembling, but her breathing had calmed a great deal.
She lifted her head and looked toward Fenghuang, who stood beside the stone table with her back to her, tidying the tea set.
"Squad Monitor."
Fenghuang's hands paused, but she did not turn around.
"Can you tell me why you betrayed me?"
The wind at the cliff's edge poured into the branches of the ancient pine, drawing out a low, keening hum.
Kiana's voice was not loud, nor was her pace fast.
Utterly different from the hostility-laden interrogation from before—this time, her tone held no anger, no accusation, only a kind of heaviness at last let out from her chest.
"I'm not trying to hold you accountable." Kiana added, her gaze resting on Fenghuang's back. "I just want to hear the reason you did it."
The fingers holding the teacup tightened a little.
She slowly turned around, and across the stone table, met Kiana's eyes.
The sea of clouds churned beneath their feet, lifting the whole of Mount Taixu up into a vast expanse of pale white.
The red-framed glasses on the bridge of Fenghuang's nose were blown slightly askew by the wind; she raised a hand to straighten them, then gently set the teacup back on the tabletop.
Porcelain met stone with a very faint "ding."
Fenghuang did not speak right away.
She looked at the white-haired girl across from her, holding the horse stance with sweat beads still hanging on her forehead, her gaze lingering long on those heterochromatic blue-and-gold eyes.
In those eyes there was no hatred, no interrogation, only a very quiet, earnest waiting for an answer.
This was utterly different from a few months ago.
A few months ago, upon the ruins of Arc City, what those eyes had held was fear, self-loathing, and a fragility that could crumble at any moment.
And now, they had steadied.
As if someone had, in a very clumsy but very patient way, wiped clean bit by bit the dust that veiled them.
It was Su Yu.
Fenghuang silently recited the name in her heart.
He had indeed accomplished what she could not.
"You've already met everyone of the Golden Courtyard, haven't you?"
Fenghuang spoke, but the words she said left Kiana stunned.
"Kevin, Elysia, Griseo... in Su Yu's world, you've met them all."
Kiana frowned, not understanding why Fenghuang had suddenly brought up these people.
"Squad Monitor, what exactly are you trying to say?"
Fenghuang turned around, facing the churning sea of clouds beyond the cliff. The wind poured up from the valley, stirring the long hair tied behind her head.
"The world we're from—its human civilization has already gone through one tear-down and rebuilding."
Kiana opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
"I come from fifty thousand years ago." Fenghuang spoke very slowly, as though reading from an old ledger whose edges had been worn smooth by time. "The age you call the previous civilization. Kevin, Elysia, Griseo... I and they once belonged to the same organization: the Flame-Chasing Moths. We were warriors fused with the genes of Honkai Beasts."
The ancient pine at the cliff's edge had its branches bent low under the wind, creaking and groaning.
Kiana stood rooted in place, her brain spinning at high speed.
"You mean... Kevin and the others have Counterparts in our world too? And from that civilization fifty thousand years ago, the one that's already perished?" Her voice involuntarily rose half an octave. "Squad Monitor, are you a... survivor of that civilization?"
Fenghuang nodded.
Kiana drew a deep breath. Though she had long vaguely sensed that Fu Hua's origins were no small matter, the notion of a Fusion Warrior from fifty thousand years ago still lay far beyond her imagination.
"But Squad Monitor, you... having lived so long," Kiana paused, "you must have paid some price, right?"
Fenghuang did not turn around. Her gaze fell on some unseen place deep within the sea of clouds.
"After I activated Yu Ducheng and bound myself to you, my memory began to recover. And then I discovered something."
She paused for two seconds.
"My former self had completely forgotten Elysia. Forgotten all the companions of the previous civilization."
Kiana's breath skipped a beat.
"To survive through the long ages, to carry on the mission of fighting the Honkai, I had to erase my own memory once every so often."
When Fenghuang said these words, her tone was no different from when she had just been correcting Kiana's horse stance.
But Kiana understood.
Fifty thousand years.
How many sunrises and sunsets was that, how many times watching the people at her side grow old, die, be forgotten?
It wasn't that Fenghuang had no companions, no people who had fought shoulder to shoulder with her.
But all those people had been buried beneath the dust of time, and the cruelest part of all was that she had even had to wipe away the memories of them with her own hands in order to keep walking forward.
Kiana's chest seized with a sudden ache.
She thought of that convenience store.
The deep-night fluorescent lights washed everything in a ghastly pale, and Fu Hua, wearing a blue apron, stood behind the cash register, fingers swiftly sweeping the barcode scanner across the goods.
The young grandmaster of the Tai Xu Sect, peerless in the supreme arts and unmatched in the present age, working night shifts at a convenience store to keep up the dojo's signboard left behind by his father.
Fu Hua and Fenghuang were not the same person.
But they were Counterparts.
The same face, the same silence. The same shouldering of everything upon their backs, the same keeping of their mouths sealed tight, the same never pouring out their troubles to anyone.
Neither of them was made of wood.
They had only hidden away the places that hurt.
"Later my power kept draining away, until in the end I couldn't even protect Shenzhou any longer." Fenghuang's voice carried over from the cliff's edge, shaved thin by the wind. "So I made a deal with someone. Otto Apocalypse."
Kiana's fist tightened.
"He used Schicksal's power to help me protect Shenzhou, but in return I had to carry out tasks for him. Among them—monitoring your situation, and, whenever you grew unstable, bringing you back to Schicksal."
Fenghuang at last turned around, looking at Kiana across the stone table.
"At the time, I thought Otto truly had a way to save you."
Her tone was still very flat, but Kiana noticed that the hand Fenghuang braced on the edge of the stone table—its fingertips pressed down with force, gouging a faint white mark into the rough stone.
"I did not know he would force the Herrscher of the Void within your body to revive. Did not know he meant to use Theresa and the others' lives to provoke you, to manufacture a Herrscher that humanity could control."
Kiana said nothing.
At last she understood.
Fenghuang was not Otto's lapdog.
She was a person driven to a dead end, who, with no choice left, had grasped the one thing that looked like a life-saving straw.
And that straw had been a venomous serpent.
"And then?" Kiana spoke up, her voice somewhat rasping. "Why did you activate that whatever-rated-power and bind it to me?"
Fenghuang looked at her and answered without hesitation.
"I was killed by Otto."
The wind at the cliff's edge suddenly stopped.
The churning of the sea of clouds, too, seemed to freeze for an instant.
"What?"
"At the time, I wanted to go and stop you—you, whose body had been seized by the Herrscher of the Void. I traded blows with her, and in the end I was no match." Fenghuang's gaze was as calm as a pool of dead water. "Otto didn't want me throwing his plan into disorder; seizing the moment of my weakness, he pulled the trigger on me with the Mimetic Heavenly Fire Sacred Judgment."
Kiana's nails dug into her palms.
Her jaw was clenched dead tight, the veins at her temples throbbing. Something scalding surged up from her stomach, burning past her esophagus, past her throat, all the way to behind her eye sockets.
Otto.
First exploiting Fenghuang's predicament to coerce her into a deal, then using her to deliver Kiana herself into the laboratory, and finally, when Fenghuang tried to make amends, gunning her down with a single shot.
From beginning to end, everyone had been a chess piece on his board.
Fenghuang, Teacher Himeko, Theresa, and herself.
Kiana abruptly slammed a fist down onto the stone table.
The bluestone surface split open from the center into a spiderweb of cracks, the coarse porcelain teacup leaping up, toppling to the ground, rolling far off, and finally coming to rest beside a clump of wild grass at the cliff's edge.
The tea soaked through the bluestone slab, seeping slowly into the body of the mountain along the cracks.
Fenghuang stood across from the shattered stone table, neither dodging nor moving.
She only watched Kiana quietly, waiting for that flame of anger to burn itself out.
On the shattered stone table, the tea was still seeping down along the cracks.
Fenghuang stood in place, waiting for that surging fury to recede from Kiana bit by bit.
After a long while, Kiana drew back the fist she had slammed onto the table. A layer of skin had been scraped from her knuckles, a few tiny beads of blood welling up; she paid them no mind.
Only then did Fenghuang speak.
"I do not beg for your forgiveness."
Her pace was the same as before, neither fast nor slow.
"No matter what reasons there were, I betrayed you—that is fact. For Himeko's death, I bear unshirkable responsibility."
Fenghuang lowered her head, looking at that spiderweb of cracks across the tabletop.
"If a life could be traded for it, I would willingly give my own to bring Himeko back."
"You don't need to say any more, Squad Monitor."
Kiana's voice cut her off.
Not interrogation, not mockery, nor forgiveness. Only a very weary, hollow calm—the kind left behind after a stone that had pressed on the chest for far too long is finally shifted away.
Fenghuang raised her head.
Kiana stood across from the shattered stone table, her white hair somewhat disheveled by the mountain wind. Her eyes were still a little red, but her gaze no longer burned the way it had a moment ago.
"I can't say that I forgive you," Kiana said. "At least, not yet."
Fenghuang said nothing.
"But I can't bring myself to hate you anymore, either."
Kiana lowered her head and glanced at her scraped knuckles, casually wiping away the beads of blood with the thumb of her other hand.
"You were deceived by that bastard too."
When she said "that bastard," her enunciation came down very hard.
"The Tai Xu Sword Qi—I'll cultivate it properly."
Kiana lifted her head once more, her gaze passing over Fenghuang's shoulder to land on the distant, churning sea of clouds.
"As for the accounts between you and me... let's settle them after we return to that world and beat that damned Otto to a pulp."
The wind at the cliff's edge stilled for an instant.
Fenghuang looked at this girl before her.
She had not said "I forgive you."
But she had called her "Squad Monitor" again.
Her shoulders no longer rose up high the way they had a moment ago, and the center of gravity of her body had shifted from the back heel back to the very middle.
These subtle changes were more real than any forgiveness spoken aloud.
Fenghuang opened her mouth, something lodged in her throat leaving her, for a moment, unable to find the right words.
"I... don't know what to say, Kiana."
This was probably the first time in fifty thousand years that Fenghuang had admitted to being at a loss for words.
"But I will do everything in my power to help you."
Kiana did not take up this line. She bent down, picked up a fragment of the stone table from the ground, weighed it in her hand, then casually tossed it down the cliff. The fragment vanished into the rolling sea of clouds, not even a sound coming back.
"Then let's keep going." She patted the stone dust off her hands. "The cultivation of the Tai Xu Sword Qi—I want to train it to full mastery, and quickly."
Kiana turned around and faced Fenghuang once more.
"And then I'll tell Su Yu that you're living in my head too."
As she said this, the corner of her mouth tipped up a little.
"I can't wait to see that guy's shocked face. Think about it—he runs around outside all day, comes home and still gets nagged by me; if he suddenly found out there's a fifty-thousand-year-old elder living in my head too, what kind of expression do you think he'd make?"
Kiana used two fingers to tug the corners of her own eyes apart, pulling a face.
"It'd definitely be like this."
Fenghuang looked at this girl before her—who had been smashing a table moments ago and was now already pulling faces—and for a moment felt a touch dazed.
Then a thought rose up.
Should she tell her that she had, in fact, long ago established a Spiritual Link with Su Yu—that the man not only knew of her existence, but had even been studying the Tai Xu Fist under her for several months now?
Fenghuang gave it three seconds of serious consideration.
Never mind.
That matter wasn't hers to handle.
When Kiana went bounding off, all eager to "report" to Su Yu, only to find that man saying with a guilty face, "Ah, well, this... actually I've known for a while now"—that scene, she'd leave for Su Yu himself to fret over.
Fenghuang bent down and picked up a reasonably flat fragment of stone slab from the ground, setting it between the two stone stools to serve as a temporary tabletop.
"Rest's over," she said. "Horse stance. From the top."
Kiana put away her face-making, drew a deep breath, and squatted down once more.
The mountain wind surged up from the foot of the cliff, blowing both their robe hems and the tips of their hair toward the very same direction.
The thoughts in Kiana's mind were still a tangle; the scenes that had just unfolded in the Sea of Quanta replayed before her—matched against what the Squad Monitor had said.
She could draw a conclusion: she really had returned, briefly, to the Honkai world, and using the Herrscher of the Void—plus that indescribable, unnameable power—she had helped that girl called Seele, and saved Bronya.
Su Yu had not lied.
She truly might be able to return to the Honkai world—back to that world that brought her pain, yet also held the mission she must go and fulfill, the important people she must return to see.
Going back, going back, going back—the possibility of it had already unfurled itself before Kiana anew, like a door once shut tight at last swinging open.
But the moment she truly grasped that "going back" was no longer a joke, even as Kiana felt the thrill of it, her heart also clenched tight.
To return to that world meant tearing herself away from this peaceful, dream-like world; it meant she could no longer pass each carefree day as though nothing weighed on her; it meant Su Yu—
No. That's not right.
Kiana gave a wry inward laugh. If it were that guy Su Yu, he would surely follow her back, no matter what method he had to use—
Even if she refused him, even if she wouldn't let him share in shouldering such a crushing responsibility alongside her.
But he would surely grasp her hand, look her in the eyes, and say, word by word, "You're the female lead of my game. If you died, what would I do?"
Idiot Su Yu, idiot, big idiot.
The corner of the girl's mouth curved upward; for some reason, just thinking of that idiot made the confusion and fear in her heart recede a good deal.
I'll cultivate the Tai Xu Sword Qi properly, become stronger—strong enough to protect that idiot.
But then another new worry welled up, one a little sweet and a little impossible to put into words.
What if Su Yu and Mei met?
How on earth was she supposed to introduce him to Mei?
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