The miraculous resurrection of the carnations dominated Chloe Vance's attention for the remainder of the school day.
While Mr. Harrison droned on about the socioeconomic impacts of the French Revolution, Chloe spent the entire period sketching new table layouts on her tablet, occasionally sending Airis awe-struck glances.
Airis simply took neat, meticulous notes, her mind operating on a dual track.
On one track, she was a diligent high school junior navigating the mundane social politics of Sakura Crest.
On the other, the twenty-seven-year-old salaryman inside her was rapidly testing the boundaries of her newly acquired [Divine Authority Pinnacle].
The 'Gabriel's Halo' hadn't just given her wings and a glowing ring; it had fundamentally rewritten how she perceived the universe.
The world no longer felt like a chaotic, unpredictable place. To a God-Tier entity, reality was simply a canvas waiting for instruction.
She could feel the delicate, fragile lifeforces of everyone in the building. It was a sobering realization.
The mundane humans around her were entirely defenseless against the hidden, supernatural world.
If lightning-wielding Espers like the bus hijackers decided to target Sakura Crest, or if a rogue Cultivator like Aunt Eleanor sneezed too hard, the collateral damage would be catastrophic.
Airis glanced sideways at Chloe. Her best friend was currently chewing on the end of her stylus, completely absorbed in choosing between 'ivory' and 'eggshell' napkins. Chloe was fiercely loyal, relentlessly positive, and entirely mundane.
A slow-paced life requires a peaceful environment, Airis reminded herself, her sapphire eyes softening.
And my peace is directly tied to the people who anchor me to this normal life.
Airis closed her textbook. She didn't need to perform any grand gestures or chant any incantations.
To a divine emissary, miracles were a matter of simple will.
She focused her gaze on Chloe. Deep within the conceptual void behind Airis's shoulder blades, the twelve invisible wings flared.
She channeled a microscopic fraction of her [Holy Light], compressing it into a dense, dormant seed of absolute divine protection.
Bind, Airis commanded mentally.
An invisible spark of pure, platinum-white energy shot from Airis's eyes and sank harmlessly into Chloe's chest, anchoring itself to the girl's soul.
Chloe didn't flinch. She just let out a sudden, relaxed sigh, her shoulders dropping as a wave of ambient comfort washed over her.
The ward was completely undetectable. It wouldn't activate if Chloe stubbed her toe or failed a math test.
But if a lethal kinetic force, a supernatural curse, or a malicious entity ever attempted to strike her, that tiny seed of Holy Light would instantly detonate into an impenetrable, absolute physical and spiritual sanctuary.
"Everything okay, Airis?"
Chloe whispered, noticing Airis watching her.
"Everything is perfect, Chloe,"
Airis smiled, looking back at the whiteboard. One anchor secured.
Two more to go.
Dinner at the Dover estate that evening was a quiet, intimate affair.
Alexander sat at the head of the long mahogany table, nursing a glass of red wine. He looked exhausted.
The rapid deployment of the new private military contractors and the ongoing investigation into the melted bus doors were clearly taking a toll on the billionaire warlord. Victoria sat beside him, gently rubbing his arm, offering silent, steadfast support.
Airis sat across from them, cutting her roasted asparagus with immaculate aristocratic grace.
She watched her parents. She knew their secrets now.
She knew Alexander was the mundane shield that protected the family's wealth, completely unaware that his wife, his brothers, and his sister-in-law were all terrifying, reality-bending monsters.
She also knew that, despite all his billions, Alexander Dover felt entirely powerless against the supernatural entities that had threatened his daughter.
You don't have to carry the weight of the world, Dad, Airis thought, her heart swelling with a profound, complicated affection.
You gave me a home. You gave me a family. I will not let anything in heaven or on earth touch you.
Airis set her silver fork down and delicately patted her lips with a linen napkin.
She let the [Domain of Absolute Grace] slip just a fraction of an inch past her absolute suppression.
A gentle, imperceptible wave of soul-cleansing peace rolled across the dining room.
Alexander paused, his wine glass hovering in the air.
The deep, stress-carved lines on his forehead smoothed out.
The dark storm of corporate anxiety and fatherly terror that had been brewing behind his eyes simply evaporated, replaced by a sudden, inexplicable sense of absolute safety.
"Alexander?"
Victoria asked softly, sensing the shift in her husband's posture.
"I'm... I'm alright,"
Alexander murmured, letting out a long, deep breath that seemed to carry the weight of the last seventy-two hours with it.
He looked around the brightly lit dining room, his eyes finally resting on Airis.
He offered a warm, genuinely relaxed smile.
"Actually, I feel exceptionally well tonight. The tension is just... gone."
"It must be the wine,"
Victoria teased gently, though she too looked noticeably more radiant, the passive grace washing away her artistic fatigue.
While they were distracted by the sudden onset of profound relaxation, Airis struck.
She willed two more seeds of compressed, dormant [Holy Light].
They flashed across the table like invisible shooting stars, sinking seamlessly into the souls of Alexander and Victoria Dover.
The divine wards anchored themselves perfectly.
Her parents were now conceptually immune to sudden death, supernatural assassination, and demonic interference.
If Aunt Eleanor's hidden cultivation clan ever turned on them, or if Uncle Robert's alchemical enemies came knocking, the attackers would find themselves crashing headfirst into the absolute authority of the Archangel Gabriel.
Airis picked her fork back up, chewing her asparagus with a deeply satisfied hum. Her fortress was secure.
Her mundane life was heavily armored.
But later that night, as Airis lay in the darkness of her luxurious bedroom, listening to the soft patter of spring rain against the reinforced glass of her windows, a lingering sense of unease tugged at her mind.
Her family was protected. Her best friend was protected.
But twelve miles away, in the grimy, dangerous heart of the Southside Industrial District, the most vulnerable piece of her existence was sleeping completely unprotected.
Lin Ye.
He had taken the 'Nine-Revolutions Marrow Cleansing Pill'.
His body was optimized, and his mind was sharp enough to conquer the State Exams.
But he was still a mortal boy living in a city secretly crawling with Espers and Wardens. Furthermore, Airis knew that the universe hated anomalies.
Her intervention in his life—the groceries, the space heater, the legendary alchemical pill—had altered his fate.
In the webnovels Lin Ye used to read, altering fate always drew the attention of the hidden world.
If a stray supernatural battle spilled over into Unit 2B, Lin Ye wouldn't survive.
I cannot let him die, Airis thought, throwing the heavy down duvet off her legs. If he dies, my past is erased.
My soul's anchor to this timeline is compromised. Besides... he has suffered enough.
Airis stood up in the center of her dark bedroom. She was wearing her pale blue silk pajamas.
"System," Airis commanded silently.
"Function Four. The Twelve Wings."
The platinum light didn't illuminate the room this time; Airis kept the visual manifestation strictly clamped down.
But she felt them.
The twelve conceptual wings of pure, holy authority unfurled from her back, stretching through the walls of the mansion.
She didn't need to open the window.
She didn't need to physically fly through the rain.
The wings granted limitless supersonic flight, but they also granted mastery over the concept of space itself.
To an Archangel, distance was merely a suggestion.
Airis closed her eyes and visualized the dingy, cramped layout of Unit 2B.
She visualized the wobbly kitchen table, the peeling wallpaper, and the drafty window.
She folded her wings inward, wrapping them around her physical body.
Step, she willed.
There was no sound, no flash of light, and no displacement of air.
One second, Airis Dover was standing in a multi-million-dollar Riverdale estate.
The next second, she was standing on the scuffed, sticky linoleum floor of a Southside apartment.
The transition was instantaneous. Airis opened her eyes.
The smell of the apartment hit her first—a mixture of old dust, the metallic tang of the cheap space heater, and the lingering scent of cooked jasmine rice.
The only light came from the orange glow of the heater and the pale, watery moonlight filtering through the single, grime-caked window.
Airis stood perfectly still, her sapphire eyes adjusting to the gloom.
There, sleeping on the narrow, sagging mattress in the corner of the main room, was Lin Ye.
He was buried beneath the thick, luxury winter duvet she had sent him.
His dark, messy hair spilled across a cheap, flat pillow.
He was breathing in a deep, steady rhythm, the rise and fall of his chest slow and completely unburdened.
The dark circles that used to haunt his eyes were gone, erased by Uncle Robert's alchemical gummy
He looked peaceful. He looked... like a normal teenager.
Airis took a slow, silent step forward. Her bare feet made no sound against the floorboards.
She walked over to the edge of the bed and looked down at him.
A sudden, massive wave of complex, suffocating emotion crashed into her chest, so intense it bypassed her divine immunity and brought actual, stinging tears to her eyes.
She was looking at herself.
Not a clone, not a twin, but the exact physical vessel her soul had occupied for twenty-seven agonizing years.
She knew the exact map of scars on that body.
She knew the burn mark on his left forearm from the deep fryer at his first fast-food job. She knew the constant, gnawing hunger that used to live in his stomach.
She knew the absolute, crushing despair of crying yourself to sleep because the electricity had been shut off in the middle of winter.
For the first time since her rebirth, Airis Dover completely dropped her corporate, pragmatic shield.
She sank to her knees beside the cheap mattress.
She looked at the boy's face, her own face from a lifetime ago, and she felt a profound, devastating sense of grief for the childhood he had been robbed of.
"You worked so hard,"
Airis whispered, her melodic voice cracking, barely louder than the hum of the space heater.
"You survived so much. I'm sorry nobody was there to catch you."
Her hand trembled as she slowly reached out. She hesitated for a fraction of a second, terrified that touching him might trigger a paradox, but the System remained entirely silent.
Airis gently, delicately brushed a stray lock of dark hair away from his forehead. She let her fingertips lightly caress his cheek.
His skin was warm, completely devoid of the icy, malnourished chill she remembered so vividly.
It was a touch of pure, unadulterated self-compassion. The twenty-seven-year-old soul was finally comforting the orphaned boy who had been forced to face the world alone.
Lin Ye stirred slightly at the touch, leaning into the warmth of her hand with a soft, unconscious sigh.
Airis pulled her hand back, wiping a rogue tear from her own cheek. She couldn't stay. She couldn't risk waking him.
She stood up, her expression hardening with absolute, divine resolve.
She was going to give him the one thing he had never had in his previous life: an absolute guarantee of safety.
Airis allowed her conceptual disguise to drop just a fraction.
The dark, dingy apartment was suddenly flooded with a brilliant, blinding, platinum-white light.
The [Gabriel's Halo] materialized above her golden-blonde hair, humming with a sound like a choir of thousands.
The twelve massive wings of pure, glowing feathers erupted from her back, stretching across the small room, phasing through the peeling wallpaper and the cracked ceiling.
She raised her right hand, pointing her delicate index finger directly at Lin Ye's chest.
She didn't use a tiny, microscopic seed of light this time.
For Lin Ye, she opened the floodgates.
"I claim this soul," the Archangel commanded, her voice no longer a melodic whisper, but a resonant, multi-layered chord of absolute authority that vibrated through the very foundations of reality.
A massive, concentrated beam of pure Holy Light shot from her fingertip, striking Lin Ye directly in the heart.
The light didn't burn him; it washed over him, sinking deep into his bones, his blood, and his soul.
The twelve wings curled forward, conceptually wrapping the sleeping boy in an impenetrable cocoon of divine sanctuary.
For five seconds, Unit 2B was the most heavily fortified, holy location on the face of the Earth. No Esper, no Cultivator, no demon, and no god could touch the boy sleeping on that mattress without answering to Airis Dover.
The intense platinum light flared one final time as the ward permanently anchored itself, and then began to rapidly recede.
Lin Ye gasped, his eyes snapping open.
The sudden influx of divine energy had pulled him from the depths of sleep.
Airis reacted with the speed of a God-Tier entity.
Before his dark eyes could focus on her face, before his brain could register the girl standing in his room, she folded space.
Step.
With a silent rush of displaced air, Airis Dover vanished, leaving behind only the faint, lingering scent of ozone and burning myrrh.
Lin Ye bolted upright in bed, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
He scrambled backward until his back hit the cold wall, his eyes darting frantically around the dark apartment.
The space heater was still humming.
The rain was still pattering against the window. The deadbolt was still locked.
The room was completely empty.
But Lin Ye was absolutely certain he hadn't just woken up from a normal dream.
His retina still held the burned-in afterimage of an impossible, blinding platinum light.
He squeezed his eyes shut, and the memory of the dream rushed over him with terrifying, vivid clarity.
He remembered a being standing over his bed. He couldn't see the face—it was entirely obscured by a radiance so pure it hurt to look at.
But he remembered the halo, a ring of condensed starlight humming with a musical chord that he could still feel vibrating in his teeth. And he remembered the wings.
Twelve massive, impossible wings of glowing white feathers that had wrapped around him in an embrace of absolute, unshakeable warmth.
He raised a trembling hand and touched his own cheek.
Right where the angel in his dream had touched him, his skin felt incredibly warm.
The lingering sensation of a soft, delicate hand still rested there.
"What... what was that?" Lin Ye whispered into the darkness, his breath coming in shallow gasps.
He looked down at his own hands. The intense, divine light from his dream hadn't terrified him.
It hadn't felt like a threat. It had felt like the ultimate sanctuary.
He felt a strange, heavy weight settled deep within his chest—not a burden, but an anchor. He felt entirely, unequivocally safe.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and walked over to the window, peering out into the rainy, smog-filled street.
Two days ago, a mysterious girl in a black town car with an impossibly smooth voice had given him a legendary pill disguised as a vitamin.
Tonight, an Archangel with twelve wings had appeared in his dingy apartment and bathed him in holy light.
Lin Ye was an analytical prodigy. He was excellent at math.
But none of the equations in his AP Calculus textbook could explain the sheer, metaphysical absurdity of his life over the past week.
"A hallucination," Lin Ye muttered, rubbing his eyes aggressively.
"It has to be. The gummy pill is probably rewiring my brain chemistry.
The town car was real, but the angel... the angel was a stress dream about the scholarship exams."
It was the only logical conclusion his exhausted, scientifically-minded brain could accept.
The alternative—that a literal, biblical deity was sneaking into his apartment at midnight to grant him blessings—was simply too much to process.
He walked back to the mattress and pulled the heavy winter duvet over his shoulders.
He closed his eyes. The scent of ozone and myrrh was already fading, replaced by the familiar dust of the Southside.
But the warmth on his cheek, and the profound, soul-deep sense of peace the angel had left behind, remained.
"Just a dream," Lin Ye smiled softly, his muscles relaxing entirely into the mattress.
"But a really good one."
Within seconds, the seventeen-year-old boy fell back into a deep, dreamless, and absolutely impenetrable sleep.
Twelve miles away, Airis Dover materialized in the center of her luxurious bedroom.
Her bare feet touched the thick Persian rug.
The twelve massive wings folded away, the halo vanished, and the room was plunged back into mundane darkness.
Airis let out a long, shaky breath, her knees feeling unusually weak. She walked over to her bed and collapsed onto the silk sheets, burying her face in her pillow.
She had done it. Her parents, her best friend, and her past self were all shielded by the ultimate divine authority. Her slow-paced life was permanently secured against the hidden, supernatural world.