"Hmm?"
In the prison known as the Deep End, the nun knelt on both knees, her beautiful eyes slightly closed, her hands clasped together in prayer.
The nun's face was exquisitely beautiful, her holiness seeming to come with its own Hallelujah BGM. However, if one shifted their gaze slightly downward to the cross-patterned vestment slit up to the side of her waist, revealing her plump, well-proportioned snow-white legs...
It would uncontrollably remind one of classic works on a certain pink app with tags like nun, clergy, busty goddess possessing boki-inducing power, imprisonment, bondage, and so on.
"Hmm?"
Aponia, who was conducting her daily prayers, opened her perpetually lowered eyelids. A trace of confusion leaked through her compassionate face.
"What happened?"
She could feel the changes within the Elysian Realm.
"This feeling is... reality? Has a part of the Realm overlapped with the real world?"
Her gentle voice became solemn and surprised.
Theoretically, this was an impossible occurrence. After all, the Elysian Realm was a data world primarily composed of the memory entities of the Thirteen Flame-Chasers, supplemented by various other complex programs.
Even if it was one of the pinnacle crystallized achievements of the Previous Era's science and technology, having consumed vast resources, and containing certain technologies that would seem like magic to the people of the current era...
No matter how high its technological content was, or how special it might be, it still could not change the fact that the Elysian Realm was merely data running on massive servers.
Yet Aponia had actually sensed the real world from within the Realm!
In the Deliverance trial area, a certain white-haired uncle was sitting on a white plastic chair, slurping noodles while waiting for Kiana to respawn and return to continue their loving grandfather-granddaughter bonding.
Suddenly, Kevin looked up toward the cherry blossom forest. He still wore that unchanging, iceberg-like expression, but his already lukewarm ramen—broth, noodles, and all—was instantly frozen solid.
In a somewhat dim laboratory.
"This is!?"
The small hand holding the test tube should have been as steady as Mount Tai, but at this moment, the liquid inside spilled out. Mobius turned her head to look toward the location of the cherry blossom forest, her snake-like pupils gradually condensing into an even more vibrant hue.
"Could it be that guy causing a commotion again?"
"This feeling, could it be..."
Mobius's expression turned serious. She set down her half-finished experiment and slithered toward the direction of the cherry blossom forest like a venomous snake.
The primary data of the Elysian Realm consisted of the memory entities of the Thirteen Flame-Chasers. Therefore, every Flame-Chaser could feel the changes in the Realm to some extent.
Among them, the most bewildered was undoubtedly the weakest cat, Pardofelis, and one of those who perceived the true nature of what was happening was Aponia, who had fully integrated herself into the core of the Elysian Realm.
"Realm data... instantiating?"
The Realm had become entangled with a certain spatial domain, blurring the sharp divide between data and reality.
There wasn't much expression on Aponia's unworldly face, which was exactly one of her ways of showing intense shock.
She immediately used her unique traits to leave the Deep End and rapidly teleported outside the cherry blossom forest, confirming the source of the anomaly.
It was very obvious.
A faint black mist and a demonic red energy intertwined, erupting into a pillar of light that pierced through heaven and earth. The energy fluctuations broke through the clouds. Even from a distant location, its massive momentum was clearly visible.
"So it really is Miss Silver Wing."
Standing far away, Aponia gazed with a hint of bewilderment toward the location of the light pillar.
Less than two meters in diameter, its height had already reached the horizon. The demonic red light spread to the clouds in the firmament, merging as one with the Realm.
"Is that... the power of corruption from the Jizo Mitama?"
As one of the Thirteen Flame-Chasers, she shouldn't have been unable to recognize the Herrscher of Corruption's power, yet right now, Aponia couldn't draw a definitive conclusion.
The nature of the Honkai energy seemed to have changed. Even if the change wasn't blatantly obvious to her senses, the fact that an individual could perceive a shift in energy properties without needing high-precision instruments was already an outrageous deviation!
"What did Miss Silver Wing do? Why would the Honkai energy undergo a change?"
This bizarre scene left Aponia somewhat unable to comprehend. She raised her head to gaze distantly at the demonic red light pillar, her eyelids widening to their absolute limit at this moment, as if she had seen something unfathomable.
"The threads of destiny..."
Aponia stared in astonishment at the empty firmament that was now glowing with a demonic red aura.
Beneath the firmament, above the heads of the people in the cherry blossom forest, there were fine lines of varying lengths, suspended, interwoven, and tangled—the threads destiny used to string up its puppets. Their original colors were being corrupted by the demonic red.
"!... They've been corrupted!"
Compared to the intertwining of the Realm and reality, the Jizo Mitama's ability to reverse-corrupt the threads of destiny was what truly made Aponia feel a sense of unimaginable disbelief.
The demonic red color flowed against the current, seeming to want to trace the stream back to its very source, but ultimately appeared to fail, and then...
"They... dissipated?"
Aponia watched those red threads dissipate like flickering candlelight, murmuring, "...How is that possible...?"
Fifty thousand years ago, Elysia had indeed paid the price of her own sacrifice to rearrange the stars.
But this so-called rearranging of the stars couldn't possibly accomplish everything in a single stroke.
Elysia's sacrifice had bought them a great deal, but in reality, it hadn't completely broken them free from destiny.
Otherwise, if one person's sacrifice could allow all living beings in the world to break free from destiny, Elysia would have done it long ago.
What she primarily influenced was the destiny of future Herrschers, giving the Herrschers born in the future the additional option of choosing the destiny to 'become human'.
Rearranging the stars couldn't affect the general public, or even the destinies of the MANTISes. At most, it had snatched back some of the threads, granting the puppets a greater degree of self-control.
But the threads of destiny themselves still existed.
In the original worldline, when Mei first met Aponia, Aponia had glimpsed a future where Mei brought destruction to the Realm. To prevent the Realm from being destroyed, Aponia had even considered killing Mei.
After Kiana, Raiden Mei, and Bronya entered the Realm, Aponia was also able to peer into the futures and destinies of the three. Only Silver Wing transcended destiny.
This was one of the reasons why Aponia had left the Deep End to personally speak with Silver Wing the very first time she entered the Realm.
But now, right before her eyes, Kiana and Mei's threads of destiny had completely dissipated...
Unbelievable. This maneuver was already challenging the worldview Aponia had cultivated ever since she gained the ability to peer into destiny.
"Why... how did they do it?"
Aponia could not comprehend it. She admitted that the Herrscher of Corruption was akin to a god in a data space like the Elysian Realm, but that absolutely did not include interfering with the threads of destiny—she shouldn't have been able to even affect them in the slightest!
Being merely a Herrscher was far from enough to completely reverse destiny.
That was an authority belonging to a true god!
Although Aponia herself didn't know what kind of existence a true god was.
But, right in front of her, Silver Wing had used the Jizo Mitama to completely sever the threads of destiny, grasping the entirety of the future in her own hands.
"A god?"
"! What happened to me?"
Rin looked at her fair and tender little hands, directly materialized a mirror in the data world, and leaned in close.
In the mirror, the young girl had a pair of lively and cute sky-blue eyes, and her delicate, petite melon-seed-shaped face was adorned with thin, cherry-like lips.
Even though her outward appearance hadn't changed at all, Rin knew that she was already different compared to before!
She felt a sense of relief as if she had been completely reborn, and her Authority seemed to have undergone a fundamental transformation.
"It's very simple. You've become a god."
Holding the magnificent tachi—which was radiating an excess of light and divine charm as if it had undergone a PRI-ARM upgrade in a game—that had severed the threads of destiny, Silver Wing spoke in a light tone.
Kiana: "What? (△°)"
Mei: "Be-become a god? o_o"
The two dumbfounded girls finally snapped out of the massive commotion caused by the Divine Awakening, only to be struck with utter bewilderment again upon hearing Silver Wing's words.
Equally clueless were the two fox-eared, cherry-pink-haired girls who looked like they were carved from the exact same mold.
Only Rin—the weapon spirit of the Jizo Mitama and now a newly born god—looked thoughtful, a few flashes of realization crossing her small face.
"That's right, becoming a god. Not the kind of god in your typical understanding. As for what kind of god exactly, I can't say for sure either."
Silver Wing said this, the smile on her face growing ever wider.
As the master of the Jizo Mitama, she could feel the changes in this Divine Key following the Divine Awakening.
The most important among them was the Authority of Corruption.
As everyone knew, the Authorities of all pre-sequence Herrschers were merely projections of the Herrscher of Finality's power across different dimensions. The Herrscher of Corruption's core was no exception; it was originally meant to be a shadow of the Authority of Finality.
After the Fantasy Evolution, the core of the Jizo Mitama—that inactive Previous Era Herrscher of Corruption core—had sublimated into Rin's Godhood, and the nature of the power of corruption changed along with it.
The original attributes of the power of corruption still existed, but its essence was now completely different. The Authority was no longer a projection of Finality, and it extended in two directions, evolving into new powers uniquely belonging to Rin.
One of these was [Data], or rather,[Digital].
The current Rin, if placed in the Digimon universe, would be equivalent to a seedling of a newly born Yggdrasil host computer.
Once she grew into a towering tree, she would be able to utilize the network to create a Digital World...
It would only be a newly born, initial-level Digital World. The Digital Worlds entered by the DigiDestined were all relatively perfect worlds that Yggdrasil had iterated and updated over several generations.
Coupled with the Authority extending in the other direction, Rin could completely convert all the Flame-Chasers' memory entities into existences akin to Digimon.
Not just the Flame-Chasers, but other memory entities as well.
The new Authority in the other direction of extension was [Memory].
[Could it be because it was used together with the Fenghuang Down too many times? Did it catch the infection?]
Silver Wing muttered in her heart.
The Authority of Memory allowed her to use the Jizo Mitama to copy the memory entities of those who had been completely corrupted and manipulate them, whether for combat, research, or other tasks.
Ready-made memory entities were naturally viable too.
Also, existences whose power vastly exceeded hers and Rin's could not be copied. Or rather, even if they could be copied, they wouldn't be able to afford the energy consumption required to maintain their existence.
Besides that.
Silver Wing pondered.
Isn't this ability perfectly geared to counter the Memokeepers of the Garden of Recollection?
Memokeepers all existed in the form of memes. Ordinary weapons found it very difficult to pose a threat to Memokeepers, but when facing the current Jizo Mitama, it could directly corrupt and destroy [Memory]!
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