Bella opened her contacts and found that the number from last night wasn't saved in her phone.
But her memory operated far above the human average. Anything she'd encountered even once could be recalled given a little effort.
She recognized this number.
Here was the issue: if it belonged to someone she was close with, she would have saved it. If not, she wouldn't have bothered to memorize it. That created a gap shaped by her own habits.
And through that gap, the memories began to seep back. A great many of them, including the ones connected to Sadako, slowly grew clearer.
But just as the full picture was about to lock into place—just as the memory chain was nearly complete—it fell apart again. A proper memory had a structure: at minimum a starting point, an endpoint, and the shared experiences threading between them. Together, those pieces formed a coherent chain.
Except here, on the verge of completion, the far end dropped away into a void. Every piece of content connected to 006 and Sadako was simply swallowed—and the chain snapped.
Bella fell back into deep uncertainty. Did she really know people called 006 and Sadako?
She gathered herself and tried again, drawing on her psychic training. The memories climbed back—and broke apart again at the final moment. The doubt flooded back in.
"What's wrong with you? Are you sick?" Natasha set aside any residual jealousy; Bella had gone pale.
"Bella! Snap out of it!" Yinglong was beside herself, and in desperation pulled out her tiny toy-grade seven-bladed weapon and started tapping Bella on the head with the flat of one blade.
"Natasha, I'm fine... I don't have the full picture yet, but this isn't something targeting only me. I need to think—"
"Yinglong, stop hitting me. Stop—stop! I can't push any further or my head will split open." Bella forced herself to pull back and go still.
The Eastern trip had yielded two unexpected incidents—the Ashina situation and the Calypso encounter—but outside of those, her formal study time had produced only modest gains in spellcraft. What the journey had really deepened was something else.
A practice called mind-fasting—purging distraction and allowing the inner state to settle into a stillness that was both empty and whole.
She couldn't reach true emptiness, not yet. But she could bring a turbulent mind back to calm. Her current level of practice was just sufficient for that.
"Stop thinking about them. Don't think about them..." Bella regulated her breathing. She met Natasha's baffled stare, gave a small gesture—I'll explain later—and watched her adopted little sister read the signal instantly, nod, and back off.
Bella retreated to her bedroom and began, piece by piece, to sort through her thoughts.
She hollowed herself out deliberately. Imagined herself as a third party, someone completely external to the situation, viewing everything from a detached vantage point.
The conclusion was unavoidable: 006 and Sadako were in serious trouble, and she had no idea what kind.
It was a deeply strange, contradictory feeling.
She couldn't allow herself to chase those specific memories. Every time she did, they recovered just far enough to collapse again. So she isolated that section of memory, and the rest of her thinking immediately sharpened.
Whatever had happened to those two, it bore the signature of a supernatural force. Not a weak one. And from the texture of it—Bella could feel it—this looked like the work of a divine-level being.
Not a god, though. The physical world imposed too many constraints on full deities.
And the fact that it hadn't affected Yinglong suggested the entity was on roughly the same level as her. Which meant...
An angel?
Or a demon.
Bella glimpsed the outline of something in the background of this situation. Whatever it was operated at a relatively high level—well beyond anything a standard supernatural practitioner in the material world could achieve.
The technique used wasn't modification—it was falsification.
Modification meant working within an established framework and overwriting it with greater authority. Like a supervisor correcting an employee's report: the supervisor outranks the employee within the rules, so the correction holds. But if the janitor tried to demand the same report be revised, the employee would simply ignore her—her authority wasn't sufficient.
Falsification was different. Falsification implied deception. It didn't require superior authority—it required stealth. Going back after hours, sneaking in, changing things without anyone's knowledge or consent. The outcome shifts and no one's the wiser.
On a truly cosmic scale, this kind of trick amounted to very little—nowhere near the primordial forces that bent the flow of grand fate itself. But Bella knew enough to recognize that doing it this way was, frankly, rather pointless.
She mapped the situation out from her outsider's perspective.
The solution was going to be complicated.
Divine-level beings had a particular trait—they came in packs. Yinglong was a perfect example: her entire clan of divine dragons lived in Kunlun. Strike one, and the elders came. Strike the elders, and something even older stirred. Angels and demons, Bella suspected, operated the same way.
Solving this through raw personal force was unrealistic. Fortunately, Bella knew quite a few people.
When the sky falls, it's not always the end of the world—that's what tall people are for. The real despair is when the sky falls and you realize you're the tallest one there.
She still had people above her. Quite a few.
She reached for her phone and called the X-Men. The person she had in mind was Jean Grey—the Phoenix.
That was the key.
Yinglong could detect the problem but couldn't solve it. What this situation needed was a being that stood above even a divine dragon.
"Dr. Jean Grey—do you remember that time I brought a mutant by to help treat Professor Xavier?"
She kept it deliberately vague. No names.
For Jean, Charles Xavier was as much a father figure as anyone. And Sadako had previously helped cure a lingering injury that Jean's biological father, Professor John Grey, had been carrying since a car accident years ago. Sadako had left a strong impression on her.
Jean couldn't quite parse what Bella was getting at, so she followed the thread: "Of course—that was the one, the... the... who was it again?"
Her memories had been tampered with too. The image was almost there, almost resolved—and then the moment it was about to land, everything associated with Sadako winked out.
Jean's gaze went blank for two seconds.
Then her eyes turned sharp.
Something inside her—something vast, something that lived in a dimension no human mind could fully perceive—felt the challenge and turned its gaze downward.