It was almost the exact instant the membrane was pierced by the flaming Lance—in a room on the same floor, Bronie's consciousness sank into the mental world.
Her baby-faced expression was completely blank, like a three-no duck whose emotional core had crashed. Her silver-grey eyes glimmered with an eerie light as she stared fixedly at the System interface.
[Big bro. Gets it.]
First time, panic. Second time, rush. Third time, steady. Fourth time, calm. Fifth time, laugh it off. Two simple words contained a thousand unsaid things. The System didn't even bother explaining itself to Caelus; it just squirmed in place.
The interface was still displaying a slapstick repair animation—a screwdriver, a wrench, a hammer, a saw, all clanging about with absurd cartoon energy.
Bronie watched as the weirdly rendered cartoon saw cut a chunk of code off the bottom of the screen, then a mouse cursor shaped like a pair of white gloves copy-pasted the code block to another location.
"Hey. System."
She rapped the screen with the hammer. Bronie strongly suspected the System was doing this on purpose just to enjoy her reaction—but she had no proof.
Otherwise, why did this auto-battle bug always trigger at this particular kind of moment?
Bronya, Seele, and before them, Raven. Tallying up all the female bodies and doing the math—the trigger rate during self-comfort activities was twice as high as during normal activity.
[Big sis, you gotta believe me! I think it might be related to emotional state, and also...]
The System's tone shifted from passionate and heartfelt to slightly sheepish, like a hapless goon being interrogated by Zhang Mazi.
"And also?" Bronie raised an eyebrow.
The next moment—the saws and hammers and repair tools all vanished. The System interface returned to normal, at least in terms of its expression, looking no different from usual.
A clear, crisp chime rang out, like a water drop striking smooth river stone. A notification pinged.
[BUG Compensation: Trial Character Card Gift Box ×1]
"Hm?"
Bronie blinked at the notification, her expression flickering through several states. A thread of hope crept into her voice as she spoke:
"Didn't this bug already give compensation before?"
She'd practically started treating the auto-battle auto-triggering as an intended game mechanic at this point.
"Are you telling me that repeated runtime errors are going to have compensation now too? Then why only a Trial Character Card Gift Box? Where are the Crystals?"
Bronie's expression grew solemn. If that were really the case—she would hail the System as the strongest in existence!
[Ha— haha, how could that be possible...]
The System forced a dry laugh.
[Only the first trigger of a BUG gets compensation...
[ERROR — DISPLAY CORRUPTED] —!!!
※☆!!! ...So you're saying...††:]
Within the span of one second, Bronie's expression cycled through bewilderment, shock, and outright disbelief—a masterclass in facial transformation worthy of a Great Magician of the Masked Fool.
But the reality she'd just grasped made her heart and lungs temporarily stop.
"Just now... did a new bug trigger?"
[Strictly speaking, it qualifies as a secondary change to an existing issue, which is why the compensation has no Crystals.]
"A secondary change to an existing issue?"
Bronie's brow furrowed. A very bad premonition began to form. "What new nonsense have you pulled this time—?!"
"Mmh~~"
The sound was unmistakably female—a brief, involuntary, breathlessly delicate moan that escaped from a body stirred by desire. The kind of sound that made anyone who heard it feel their pulse surge, instinctively craving to immediately bring divine punishment upon the enchanting troublemaker right then and there.
Beneath the purposely dimmed, warm, and ambiguous glow of the lamp, crystalline liquid traced a path along the silver-haired girl's temple and corner of her lips, sliding over her snow-white skin. Her shapely legs wrapped tightly around Caelus's waist, her lotus-like jade feet interlocking with each other—a lock that forbade departure.
Caelus hadn't moved. But the silver-haired girl had—the sensation arriving from below caused the faint biological-instinct blush on her delicate face to bloom into an intoxicating crimson flush.
"Mmh... what's going on... Nianao... are you sneaking into my blankets again?"
The silver-haired girl's eyes were tightly shut. She murmured indistinctly, fighting to crack open the tiniest sliver of an eyelid, as if just surfacing from an immensely deep and lengthy sleep.
The voice was unmistakably Kiana's—but compared to the energetic, adorkable, paramecium-brained Kiana, this voice, though still bright, carried the serene and gentle warmth of a woman who had settled into life. A wife's quiet tenderness.
Caelus's brain kicked into overdrive.
His knowledge of the second part of the Honkai Impact 3rd story was shallow at best—he'd only caught a few glimpses during the Spring Festival event where the old cast appeared.
Nianao was young Kiana's vision of the future—the crystallization of her entire childhood longing, the accidental manifestation of a deepest heart's wish, given limited form by the Authority of Finality that had leaked out of her. Calling it a pet didn't quite fit. A little sister born from a new spiritual fragment, perhaps?
Regardless of what their relationship was, the existence of Nianao combined with that unmistakably wife-like tone meant that the consciousness currently inside this body had arrived from at least six years after the end of the Honkai conflict.
This was the God of Earth. Finality—Qibao!
"Sss—!"
Caelus sharply sucked in a breath.
The multi-core processor allowed him to think and act simultaneously. His gentle murmur was like pouring fuel onto a flame—it caused something to shift, which prompted the silver-haired girl to let out another soft moan.
"Ah~! Don't... push like that... wait, this isn't... what is this feeling... what happened?"
Perhaps because she was gradually surfacing from deep sleep, the exquisite and novel comfort radiating from her body—a sensation she had never once experienced—finally made Kiana realize something was very, very wrong.
The silver-haired girl slowly opened her eyes through the haze.
A thousand-plus golden stars were scattered across the ceiling in a grand stellar tapestry, a coffered frame layered in tiers, with LED strip lights tracing its contours. Between the flowing light and shifting shadows, it was like the Milky Way cascading down from above.
An unfamiliar ceiling.
Not her own room.
Where am I?
The next second—her pupils snapped into focus—and what greeted her eyes hit her like a fully loaded freight truck barreling at 200 km/h, slamming her thoughts into absolute chaos: upside-down, pitch-dark, the world spinning, a bolt from a clear blue sky!
BOOM.
An unfamiliar gray-haired young man was bare-chested, half-kneeling before her. His eyes, full of bewilderment and shock, drifted slowly downward—and the instant they landed on a certain place, his gaze contracted to a pinpoint.
Her thoughts slammed to a dead stop like a skull cracking against a wall. Even her breathing seemed to vanish with it.
Who am I?
Where am I?
Who is he?
What are we doing?
Qibao was past thirty. Of course she understood what happened between a man and a woman. But she still could not comprehend the current situation—
Qibao's instinct was to immediately invoke her Authority to observe the worldline.
The next instant, something even more baffling and incomprehensible occurred.
She couldn't feel the Authority of Finality.
After Dr. Tesla and Dr. Einstein had crammed her skull full of theory, after she had written countless volumes of "3 Years of Finality, 5 Years as God of Earth"—she had finally transformed what had once been a transcendent existence that crossed through her into something that truly belonged to her!
Even if she still couldn't fully master it, she could wield more than half of it.
Yet right now, she couldn't sense even a trace of the Authority of Finality.
Not just Finality's power—not even the tiniest flicker of a Herrscher's power. The only thing she had was a pitifully small amount of Honkai energy—pitifully small, as in roughly equivalent to what she'd had at age sixteen.
Wait, no. There was something strange about this energy. It looked like Honkai energy on the surface, but its fundamental nature was somewhat different from true Honkai energy.
As the Herrscher of Finality, she could sense the anomaly in the Honkai energy within this body.
But this was absolutely not the time to worry about Honkai energy!
"Kiana, how are you? Did I hurt you?"
The frozen world set back into motion—in reality, barely two seconds had passed. Caelus gently stroked the girl's flushed pink cheek, his voice as soft as it could possibly be.
"You..."
[——Who are you?! Let go of me, NOW!]
The instant Caelus moved, Kiana moved—she balled her fist at the maximum speed her current body allowed, but before it could launch, she lost all power, like a robot in a blackout.
"Caelus, I'm fine—but it seems like something unexpected happened."
The familiar voice made Kiana's mind sharpen instantly. That was her own voice!
Her body had spoken on its own!
No—no, that wasn't it. Another consciousness was controlling her body!
[Who are you?]
Despite being in an extremely, extremely compromising physical state, Qibao forced herself to calm down at lightning speed. She had been a qualified warrior for over a decade.
[Shouldn't I be the one asking you that? You've entered my body at the single most important moment of a girl's first intimate encounter with the person she loves, my friend.]
Caelus-in-Kiana—let's call her White Comet—immediately flipped the table and went on the offensive.
Not like there was any other option.
It wasn't that Caelus didn't want to be decent about this.
He'd had zero intention of pulling any consciousness over here. Like, he was just trying to have a private moment—how on earth did it end up like this?!
The culprit was the System!
Both he and Qibao were victims here!
And now he was stuck—couldn't proceed, but he was already halfway in.
[Your body...]
Because the raw visual shock of waking up mid-situation had been so earth-shattering, and the back-to-back anomalies had piled on so fast, Kiana hadn't registered the physical body at all at first. Only after White Comet's prompt did Qibao finally react.
This was indeed not her body.
After becoming the Herrscher of Finality, her physical development had been entirely under her own control. Since Mei and Bronya had both grown, she had released her own body's limitations as well, eventually settling at a mature form of around twenty-four years of age.
But the body she was currently in seemed to be... genuinely around sixteen years old in development.
What is going on?
My consciousness has entered someone else's body?
Another Kiana?
A parallel world? Or the Sea of Quanta?
As the Herrscher of Finality—a god within the Solar System—when she was bored on the moon or spacing out during a lecture, Qibao often used her Authority to observe other worlds. Something even Susanoo-users could do was child's play to the Herrscher of Finality.
Qibao naturally knew that parallel worlds contained isotopes of herself.
But why had she ended up here?
Had the Authority of Finality misfired again?
Qibao's previously sharp and composed expression crumbled apart and turned frantic.
I haven't even been trying out any new abilities recently!
Because the Authority of Finality was so overwhelmingly powerful and her growth in mastering it hadn't kept pace, accidents occasionally happened when she used its special functions.
For example: once, during the New Year, she'd thought—if I could know everyone's wishes in advance, I could give them all a surprise, give them the best possible gift, right?
So she attempted to slip into everyone's dreams—and the result was... dreams were inherently disordered and chaotic. Her unrestrained wandering through them caused everyone's dreams to bleed together into one tangled mess. If Vita hadn't stepped in, things might have gotten a little messy.
That time, she also hadn't been able to leave the dreamspace on her own—her Authority had diffused entirely into the dreams themselves. She'd had to go through a series of entertaining adventures before things resolved themselves happily.
That incident was also the event that gave birth to Nianao.
[...Ah, this...]
As that memory surfaced, Qibao's entire state absolutely fell apart.
For two reasons.
First: something had started moving, and the explosive cocktail of sensations she had never once experienced—wonder, shame, and guilty transgression—erupted and spread across her entire body.
Second: it seemed like she had ruined someone else's good thing. She was the one in the wrong here. She had occupied another person's body at the precise moment of that person's first intimate encounter with her boyfriend.
WHY IS THIS HAPPENING—?!
Since becoming the Herrscher of Finality, Qibao's composure had never once been shaken to this degree!
Explosion within explosion—a chain detonation!
So the question was:
In this situation—could she even reasonably ask for things to stop?
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