Let's rewind time just a little.
After 'Elysia' led the Fire Moth rebels to surround the World Government's headquarters building, a bloody conflict broke out.
Or rather — it was a one-sided massacre.
Because Lucius had preemptively eliminated the officer in charge of headquarters security, throwing the troop mobilization into complete chaos. Units that should have arrived within five minutes were delayed for a full half hour.
By that time, the killing had long since ended.
The Second Fire Moth's rebels, led by 'Elysia', swept through the entire headquarters building without the slightest effort, sending every last senior official of the World Government who had gathered for their meeting straight to heaven.
Though perhaps not every single one — even amid the crisis, one senior official had managed to escape.
That person was Nicholas.
"Is my head still on?! Is my head still on?!" Once he had retreated to safety, a horrified Nicholas clutched his head with both hands and screamed.
"Mr. Nicholas, please be assured — your head is very much still attached. We have withdrawn to the temporary Schicksal-controlled zone. You are safe now."
After a long moment, the panic on Nicholas's face gradually settled.
Only then did he have the presence of mind to look over the young man who had pulled him out from among those rioters.
He had short black hair, looked extremely young, wore a sharp military uniform, and stood with a solemn expression.
But the most eye-catching feature was the streak of red dye at his brow.
Nicholas remembered now — this was a staff officer recently promoted within the World Government's Combat Command, going by the name Lucius, and one of the personnel involved in drafting the campaign plan against the Herrscher of the Void not long ago.
Having confirmed Lucius's identity, Nicholas couldn't help but sigh with feeling: "If not for a loyalist like you, I would have died at that traitor Elysia's hands! Rest assured — I will not treat a righteous man like you poorly."
"Mr. Nicholas, I ask only that you take command of the overall situation and purge these rebels led by Elysia!"
Seeing that Lucius had not used his life-saving deed to demand personal rewards, Nicholas felt even more satisfied.
"Good. The World Government has collapsed, the Fire Moth has rebelled, and the Herrscher of the Void lurks outside like a tiger eyeing its prey. Humanity stands on the brink — this is precisely my moment to restore order!"
Nicholas was filled with fighting spirit. Having escaped danger, the memory of the bloody scene still fresh in his mind, he felt a certain long-dead brother of his beginning to stir back to life.
This delighted him immensely — even more than the thrill of surviving. Now was the very moment the world could be drenched in blood, and his brother's revival was not far off!
Thinking this, he said excitedly: "Come, we move immediately. Contact Schicksal's combat personnel — I will strike these rebels with an iron fist!"
And so, with Lucius at his side, Nicholas returned to the 'loyal' temporary Schicksal organization, immediately ordered the seizure of the European continent's governance, and got ahead of the Second Fire Moth in taking control of Oceania as well.
He then followed Lucius's advice and, under the pretext of purging rebels and traitors, launched a sweeping purge of all personnel originally belonging to the Fire Moth.
At the same time, in response to Schicksal's provocation, the Second Fire Moth also announced a purge of Schicksal's moles within its own ranks.
And so, for a stretch of time, both sides traded insults calling each other traitors while simultaneously hammering their own organizations with iron fists.
The result: Schicksal and the Second Fire Moth's infighting ended up killing off great swaths of the vermin on both sides.
As for the Second Herrscher threatening all of humanity?
Just look to the skies, folks — she was probably still gathering strength, preparing to strike back at Earth!
Kolosten.
After Schicksal seized control of the European continent's governance, this city was chosen as headquarters.
In Schicksal HQ's combat command room, Lucius — the man behind the alias Mu — studied the incoming reports from all directions, lost in thought.
After this period of purging, both the Second Fire Moth and Schicksal showed signs of organizational paralysis.
After all, quite a lot of vermin had been cleaned out, leaving many positions vacant.
Filling those empty roles was easy enough, but new people needed time to settle in, which created tremendous friction in both organizations' operations.
So Lucius felt it was time to begin the endgame.
First, the Herrscher of the Void would descend with unstoppable force, crushing the resistance from both Schicksal and the Second Fire Moth.
Human civilization would teeter on the edge of annihilation. People would yearn desperately for a savior's arrival.
In that moment of crisis, the deceased Kallen would return under the name Theresa, leading Schicksal to defeat the Herrscher of the Void.
Then, riding that immense prestige, it would be perfectly natural to push for the Second Fire Moth's merger into Schicksal.
As for Nicholas, Schicksal's current Archbishop — Lucius felt he would probably enjoy the living environment at Black Dolphin Prison.
Having reviewed the plan in his mind and confirmed there were no flaws, Lucius smiled with satisfaction.
"Excellent. Our plan is flourishing magnificently!"
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The buzzing of his communicator pulled Lucius from his thoughts. He opened it and found a message — from Eden, of all people.
Reading the contents, Lucius's pupils contracted sharply, and cold sweat broke out instantly.
[Eden: Elysia seems to have discovered something. She left the Golden Court this morning. This is the message she left behind.]
[Eden: Image]
The image showed a sticky note, with a single line written in elegant handwriting:
— Don't bother saving breakfast for me. I'm going to go beat up a bastard.
"Oh no! Nearly gave me a heart attack!" Lucius's expression shifted drastically; he almost flung his communicator across the room.
But quickly he thought — perhaps things weren't as bad as he imagined.
After all, Elysia didn't know his current location, and the most conspicuous target in plain sight was actually the Faded Elf, who was making a very loud spectacle of herself.
Thinking this, Lucius smiled to himself with a sinister gleam.
"Heh heh heh… let them fight each other. As long as the Faded Elf is there, I'll remain perfectly safe!"
But just as he thought that, a sudden chill ran through him.
It flickered and vanished almost immediately, making him wonder if his instincts had misfired.
But the color drained from Lucius's face once again.
"No. I absolutely cannot treat this as a false alarm — if I do, I'll end up dying miserably."
This kind of scene appeared in countless dramas. The moment a sudden sense of danger was dismissed, the danger would come crashing down on your head very shortly after.
"Looks like I need to think of a countermeasure…"
"Pull the Faded Elf back here to swap shifts with her? No good — she can't be spared right now."
Thinking through his current situation, Lucius suddenly felt things getting complicated.
Right now he was locked to his mission position, and couldn't even run away without risking derailing the entire plot.
"Maybe I could throw out a mental projection to lure her away… hm?"
Just as he was pondering how to avoid being beaten to his knees by Elysia, a sudden development at Nicholas's end caught his attention.
Schicksal HQ. Nicholas's office.
Nicholas, mid-work, gave a violent shudder and slumped face-first onto his desk with a thud.
Then a streak of cyan radiance appeared above his head. When the light faded, only a single peacock feather remained, shimmering faintly, floating in silence.
"I finally passed the will check…" A consciousness stirred within the feather.
She was Sa— more precisely, a mental projection of Sa, dispatched to Earth to accomplish great things.
"Tch… I thought I'd be stuck here until the world ended. The main body's taste in people is truly terrible." The feather drifted above Nicholas's head, its tone thick with complaint.
For Sa herself, she had long since shed all human emotion. But because this projection was dispatched to Earth to deal with humans, she had loaded it with her own personality from long ago.
And it was precisely because she had a personality that the long years of sealing had felt so insufferably stifling.
Still, Sa knew — the main body had done what it had to do.
After all, the Cocoon of Finality on the moon watched Earth without rest. If it noticed Sa's presence descending to Earth, the consequences would be quite unpleasant indeed.
To avoid being ambushed and eliminated, Sa could only use the consciousness waves of Earth's native life forms to mask her own, concealing herself from the Cocoon of Finality.
But even a single mental projection separated from Sa was vastly stronger than anything native to Earth. The consciousness intensity of individual humans was obviously insufficient to provide adequate cover.
So Sa had no choice but to seal her projection, letting it lie dormant — ensuring its consciousness waves stayed low enough to be masked by human ones.
The problem, however, was this: while the consciousness waves were suppressed, the projection was essentially asleep. And asleep, it could not carry out Sova's plans.
To solve this, Sova chose to personally cultivate a being whose consciousness was strong enough to serve as a shield once her projection awakened.
The scale of one's consciousness is not fixed. Everything experienced in reality leaves an imprint upon it, strengthening or weakening it over time.
But Sa chose the more reliable method: accumulation through time.
Given enough experiences, even a paramecium could eventually develop a consciousness on a planetary scale.
Given a long enough life, one's consciousness would naturally grow to the point where it could mask Sa's projection.
What Sa hadn't anticipated was that this process would stretch on for over five hundred years.
And if it weren't for the sudden and irregular surge in Nicholas's consciousness intensity in recent times, she might have waited another few centuries still.
Thinking this, gazing down at Nicholas, Sa couldn't help but remark:
"Humanity should truly be grateful for your antics. Otherwise, I might not have been able to emerge even before this era's Final Judgment arrived."
"But this is where your usefulness ends. You will all become part of my power in the end."
"We should have stayed out of each other's way… but I suppose this is fate."
For Sa personally, she had never truly wanted to risk setting foot on Earth. The energy to be harvested here was incomparably greater than the scraps she fished from the Sea of Quanta — but with the Cocoon of Finality watching, this place was extremely dangerous.
As a being who had written caution into her very creed, she hadn't seriously considered making a move on Earth in all her hundreds of millions of years.
The reason she risked involvement now was a sense of unease that had settled in her heart five hundred years ago.
As a deity of the Sea of Quanta who wielded the Wisdom Eye, she could sense the shape of certain future events to a degree — and what the Wisdom Eye showed her was that she would one day face something deeply unpleasant.
She didn't know the nature of the danger. But she knew that if something was enough to make her feel threatened, it meant her current power was insufficient to handle it.
So to survive the coming calamity, she needed to grow stronger. And to grow stronger, she needed to continue absorbing energy.
In the solar system, the richest concentration of energy was undoubtedly on Earth, under the Cocoon of Finality's control. A single sweep here could net her the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of years' worth of careful harvesting from the Sea of Quanta.
To survive a disaster whose timing she couldn't predict, she had to interfere with Earth — even at tremendous personal risk.
Fortunately, she had come prepared: using Nicholas as her shield, she would then manipulate the Herrscher of the Void, leveraging the Herrscher's power to personally sink everything on the surface into the Sea of Quanta.
Her main body would wait in the Sea of Quanta, simply collecting what the Herrscher of the Void fed to her.
In this way, she could evade the Cocoon of Finality's interference entirely.
With that thought, the feather drifting above Nicholas's head gave a small tremble, and began reading through his memories.
"Let me see… Schicksal, Second Fire Moth… infighting again."
"All the better. With both organizations tied up with themselves, neither can intercept the Herrscher of the Void when she sinks the surface life into the Sea of Quanta… bang!"
Just as Sa was thinking this, she heard the door to Nicholas's office swing open.
She looked toward the entrance and saw a black-haired young man with a red streak at his brow stepping inside — Lucius, operating under the alias Mu.
Sova glanced at him and dismissed him. In her current state within the spiritual realm, only someone with a consciousness intensity far exceeding normal humans could even perceive her.
She was about to wake Nicholas and have him deal with this visitor, when she heard a voice from the man — surprised and puzzled in equal measure.
"A peacock feather… what on earth is this thing?"
The swirling feather went still.
Watching Lucius approach, Sa activated her spiritual power and commanded: "Stop."
But she watched as Lucius, after halting, began to struggle violently — and quickly broke free of her control, seizing the feather hovering above Nicholas's head with one hand.
He then looked at it with absolute seriousness and asked: "What are you?"
Sa was somewhat taken aback. After probing Lucius's consciousness intensity, she felt the entire feather go numb.
She found that his spiritual strength far exceeded ordinary humans — under normal circumstances, only once-in-a-generation talents could possess such consciousness intensity.
"What rotten luck. I emerge and immediately run into someone like this."
Though the man's spiritual strength was unexpected, it was nothing she couldn't handle.
Releasing the seal on this projection's power would resolve the situation easily.
But the problem was: that power was meant for dealing with the Herrscher of the Void. Spending even a portion of it on this man would reduce centuries of careful planning to nothing.
Still, Sa only sighed briefly at her misfortune. As a being who had walked extremely far in the realm of consciousness, she knew how to achieve maximum effect with minimal force.
Find the weak point in a consciousness — even the smallest expenditure of power could be enough to manipulate a target's mind.
And so the feather trembled, and from it emerged a voice — strange and familiar, woven together in a curious, inexplicable way.
"Have you truly forgotten? I am the person you care about most."
"Look again… and tell me… who… am I?"
A peculiar spiritual force followed the voice into Lucius's mind. Sova watched as Lucius fell into a daze.
"Good. Now let me see… what is it you care about most…"
Inside Lucius's sea of consciousness.
Lucius's figure materialized, effortlessly taking hold of the peacock feather.
He could feel the spiritual force trying to coax out whatever he held most dear within himself.
Thinking it over, Lucius relaxed his grip on his own control a little, letting his consciousness be drawn along by the current.
Honestly — he was curious himself about what he cared about most.
Then he watched as threads of radiance began gathering within his sea of consciousness.
Quickly, a figure appeared — bearing a striking, nine-out-of-ten resemblance to his good friend Kiana.
But compared to Kiana's pure and unblemished aura, this 'Kiana' had blazing golden eyes and an presence as deep and oppressive as an abyss — like a deity gazing down upon all creation.
And her size seemed just a little too large. She was blocking out the sky entirely.
"Ah — it's the Herrscher of Finality!" Lucius felt deeply unlucky. "The person I care about most is… you?"
But then he watched as an equally gigantic version of himself suddenly materialized behind the Herrscher of Finality, a savage grin on his face, and drove a fist straight down onto her head.
After a satisfying impact, the Herrscher of Finality knelt on the ground in utterly humiliating fashion, tears streaming uncontrollably from her majestic golden eyes.
"Yes! That's it! That's exactly what I wanted to see!!!" Lucius was thrilled beyond words.
But quickly he noticed these memories transforming into streaks of light, drifting toward the feather in front of him.
Seeing this, Lucius waved his hand and scattered the memories, while simultaneously piecing together what Sa was trying to do.
"I see. You want to use the person I care about most to control me?"
Inside his sea of consciousness, a strange smile slowly curved Lucius's lips. Now that he understood Sa's intention, a bold idea took shape in his mind.
"Heh… so my scapegoat just walked right in, didn't it?"
Time flows differently between the realm of consciousness and the real world. From Sova's perspective, her spiritual force had met only a slight resistance upon entering Lucius's mind before she effortlessly plucked a single memory from within.
At the same time, Lucius's answer to her question arrived without delay.
"I think you look like my deceased, 163-centimeter-tall, 55-kilogram, pink-haired white moonlight."
As Lucius spoke his answer, Sa — having absorbed his memory — began to change.
The feather started radiating iridescent light, and amid the brilliant glow, 'Elysia' emerged from within it.
Sa raised her hand and looked it over, a smile of surprise crossing her face.
"So this is the person you care about most?"
She then turned to look at Lucius, her eyes full of tender feeling, and said:
"Actually… I am the consciousness of your white moonlight who has already died. I have returned from death."
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