A sudden urge surged up in Vincent's chest: he wanted to use that huge chunk of gray crystal he'd just gained to try "Black Box" again, just to see what he might pull this time.
"Return to reality!"
The next instant, before he could lose his grip on reason entirely, he shouted the thought urgently in his mind, and his figure vanished from the Nation of Disorder at once.
A gambler who can't leave the table when he's winning ends up broke.
If he couldn't trust himself to control the urge, the smart move was to get away from the "casino" immediately.
...
Back in reality, Vincent, seated on the sofa, snapped his eyes open, raising his left hand to give his right a light slap, then patting both cheeks in quick succession, shaking himself out of that gambler's mindset.
"???"
Bernadette, who'd been resting with her eyes closed, asked, puzzled, "Even if your little father-daughter moment didn't go great, there's no need to slap yourself. Want me to teach you how to be a good father?"
Vincent gave her a flat look. "Do you have a lot of experience in that department? Don't you remember how things went with Cattleya?"
"..."
Bernadette was quiet for a few seconds, then said, dry, "Sure, I might not be great at it myself, but I know how to teach it — I did, after all, experience firsthand how my own father handled things with me."
"Huh, fair point. But that's not what this is about."
Vincent spread his arms and tilted his head back, letting his whole body sink into the sofa. "It's because of 'Black Box.' I almost couldn't stop myself from using that gray crystal — the stuff meant for advancing to Sequence 4 — to gamble on Black Box again."
"Hm? Where'd you even get gray crystal for advancing to Sequence 4?"
"So — I gave the Evernight's daughter a Broker 'position,' and right after that, I got handed a massive chunk of gray crystal, more than enough to advance."
Bernadette immediately raised the exact same question Vincent himself had. "But it was you who gave her Lord of Chaos's honorific and brokered the 'deal' between the two of you — by rights, that shouldn't count as brokering something for 'someone else,' should it?"
"The only explanation I can come up with is that I was under your spirituality's control at the time, so it got counted as you."
"Isn't that a bit of a stretch?"
Vincent shrugged. "Got a better explanation?"
Bernadette thought it over for a moment, came up with nothing, and said, "So — after that, you wanted to try Black Box again, to see if you could pull another sealed item like that... that strange sword, or maybe something even stronger?"
"That's not all of it."
He rubbed his fingers together, hesitated, then decided to just lay it out plainly. "The truth is... I recognize that 'strange sword.' I know exactly where it comes from."
"I could tell."
Bernadette wasn't the least bit surprised. She'd been able to sense Vincent's emotional shift the moment he'd pulled the blade out — what he'd felt hadn't just been simple shock at its power, the way she had. It had been more confusion than anything.
Confusion, specifically, about why that sword had shown up at all.
Not hard to piece together from there — Vincent clearly recognized it.
"That sword is called Ryūjin Jakka. It's not really a sealed item... well, I guess you could call it a special kind of sealed item, but in its own world, it's known as a zanpakutō."
"Its own world?"
Something jolted in Bernadette's chest.
"Right. Ryūjin Jakka comes from another world entirely — not yours, and not the one I originally came from either, but a strange world where Beyonders go by names like 'Soul Reaper' and 'Quincy.'"
Vincent gave her a brief rundown. "This blade should, by rights, belong to the strongest figure in that entire world. Somehow, for reasons I don't understand, I ended up trading it out of 'Black Box' completely by accident."
"On top of that, its power seems to have surpassed whatever it was originally capable of, and the energy it draws on has shifted too — instead of that world's unique 'spiritual pressure,' it's drawing on my own spirituality and lifespan instead."
Bernadette understood at once. "So you think 'Black Box' might actually connect to other worlds too — that it could pull items from even more of them?"
"Remember all that random junk I pulled in my earlier attempts? I suspect those items were all from other worlds too — they just weren't distinctive enough to be recognized easily."
"I think I get where you're going with this."
She considered it, thoughtful. "So you're curious about what's actually going on here. You want to understand the mechanism behind it?"
"Yeah."
Vincent sat up straight, letting his hands hang loosely over his knees. "Just now, the Evernight Goddess's daughter... said the name 'Vincent' with her own mouth. That basically seals the deal on everything I'd already theorized."
"I really did, somehow, in the future, find a way back into the past. Somehow became the Angel of Time. Did a whole string of 'big things' alongside the Ancient Sun God. And then had a child with the Goddess of the Evernight."
"And then... I — he — just vanished."
"According to the Evernight Goddess's daughter—"
Bernadette couldn't help cutting in. "Didn't you even ask for her name?"
"No. Forgot."
Vincent shook his head. "According to her, right before future-me vanished from the past, he'd tracked down the Wishing Lamp, planning to use the 'Lamp Spirit' to strong-jump into whatever pathway the Lamp Spirit belonged to — that's why she's been so fixated on Lord of Chaos."
"She thinks Lord of Chaos is her missing father?"
Something about that struck Bernadette as oddly familiar — she'd entertained a similar theory about "the Fool," not long ago. Except her guess had turned out wrong, while this woman's guess was, apparently, at least half right.
"Yeah. But I neither confirmed it, nor denied it."
Vincent laid out his concerns. "Like I said before — I doubt a goddess who's spent thousands of years at the top wants some Sequence 5 man suddenly showing up in her life. And she's not exactly the sentimental type — self-interest is basically her only real priority."
Old saying still applies: trust a god's power, never trust their mercy.
"Back to the earlier point — I'm now wondering whether the reason we ended up body-swapping at all was something my future self arranged, back in 'the past.' The same might go for my bond with the Nation of Disorder."
Bernadette made a small "mm." "That's not hard to buy."
"But I still can't wrap my head around how he managed to connect the Nation of Disorder to other worlds in the first place. If it were just the wizarding world on the other end, sure, maybe coincidence. But with even more worlds turning up, that pretty much confirms he genuinely figured out some method for linking to other worlds."
"But..."
Vincent's brow furrowed tightly. "I feel like that kind of ability is way beyond the ceiling of what any extraordinary power in your world is supposed to be capable of. If he really had power that strong, wouldn't he have already conquered your whole world by now? Why vanish instead?"
The moment he said it, something clicked. Unless — future me suddenly woke up with some kind of 'system,' 'cheat,' 'plot armor' thing, and its whole function isn't power at all — just a way to connect to other worlds?
To be continued…
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