"The coordinates are nearby."
A cute pink-haired girl who looked like a personified Intertwined Fate sprinted down the corridor of Herta Space Station toward the rescue signal she had received.
Her name was March 7th, one of the Astral Express crew.
After the space station had come under attack from the Anti-Matter Legion, March and her partner Dan Heng had been asked by Station Master Asta to head into the occupied sectors and rescue stranded researchers.
To improve efficiency, the two had planned to split up temporarily, only to receive a rescue coordinate midway through—so they immediately rushed over together.
"This is… the Curio Room?"
Murmuring the words, March exchanged a glance with Dan Heng and immediately ran inside.
The good news was that the Curio Room didn't seem to have been attacked.
And there were survivors.
"Hi—"
March had just stepped in, ready to greet them, when she suddenly realized that the scene before her was… off.
The gray-haired young man kneeling on the ground looked stricken with grief, as though on the verge of tears. His eyes glimmered faintly with moisture as he stared at the gray-haired girl lying there like a sleeping beauty, utterly unresponsive.
Completely immersed in his own world, the young man didn't seem to notice the newcomers at all. Grabbing the girl by the shoulders, he shook her desperately, trying to wake her by sheer force.
"Stelle~!"
"Stelle~!"
"Get! Up! Aaaaah!"
His cries echoed through the room like some tragic wail from the depths of a valley, so sorrowful it sounded like a ghost calling from beyond the grave.
March felt as if she could hear her great-grandmother calling her name.
The grief in it was enough to make listeners ache and onlookers weep.
At once, March covered her mouth, and Dan Heng, who had just stepped in behind her, couldn't help shifting his brows slightly as well.
They were too late…
Another tragic scene of life and death.
The Anti-Matter Legion had swept through the station like wolves through sheep, and there had been no small number of casualties.
This wasn't the first parting March had seen that day.
She only hoped it would be the last.
Looking at the sobbing gray-haired young man, March could clearly see the agonized grief written across his handsome face.
That gray-haired girl must have been someone very, very important to him.
Even March could tell, from their clothes, hair color, and the almost tangible sense of resemblance between them, that the two were almost certainly blood relatives.
Brother and sister?
Or older sister and younger brother?
Hearing his heartbroken cries, March found herself aching a little too. She bit her lip and walked over, gently patting him on the shoulder.
"Please accept our condolences. Maybe we came at the wrong time, but the Anti-Matter Legion is still roaming nearby. This place isn't safe…"
The gray-haired young man, who had been immersed in his grief, came back to himself the moment her hand touched his shoulder. He looked up blankly, his eyes still wet with tears.
"I'm March 7th. He's Dan Heng. We came on Station Master Asta's orders to carry out a rescue…"
March's brows drooped. Even though this wasn't her fault, she still felt a pang of guilt.
If she and Dan Heng had arrived just a little earlier, maybe this tragedy could have been avoided.
"I'm sorry. We were too late."
"No!"
The moment he heard the word late, the young man seemed to be struck by something. He snapped his head up, golden eyes blazing as if lit with fire.
"I won't let Stelle leave me like this!"
"I'm going to revive her!"
"Huh?" March's clear eyes widened instantly.
"Revive?"
Dan Heng's brows furrowed at once, his gaze turning sharp and vigilant.
Unable to accept the death of someone important, and thus wanting to revive them…
He knew what kind of road that could lead down.
"Sir," he said, stepping forward, trying to reason with him, "I understand how you feel. But the dead cannot be brought back."
His voice was calm, but he was already trying to prevent this young man from slipping down the wrong path.
"No, it can be done!"
The obsession in Caelus's golden eyes intensified. It was as if he hadn't heard a word.
"On my home planet, there was an elder known as the Wife-Loss Douluo. He left behind a secret technique, one said to bring the souls of the deceased flying back from beyond."
The moment Dan Heng heard the words revive and secret technique, a whole set of highly sensitive alarms went off in his head. By the time those last two words landed, he was one breath away from drawing Cloud-Piercer on the spot.
Something in Caelus's eyes—the despair, the anguish, the obsession—stirred fragmented shadows of memory buried deep in Dan Heng's mind.
Though he had long since decided that he was no longer that person, he could still sense that person's unforgettable grief.
And because of that, he absolutely would not allow anything similar to play out in front of him again.
One hand slipped behind his back, already poised to draw his spear.
The moment the man before him showed even the slightest trace of Abundance power or an Abundance artifact, Dan Heng would immediately send him off with a "Dreams reveal the unrealized."
But then Caelus's next sentence made that hand stop dead.
"All you need to do is write a love story with yourself as the protagonist—one containing sincere, genuine romance—spread it across the galaxy, then keep a female college student as your lover and truly, from the bottom of your heart, love her as though she were the deceased. At the same time, place three spoonfuls of sugar into the dead person's mouth and recite a specific incantation. Then your beloved can be revived."
Caelus spoke with total certainty, as though he believed in this ancient legend with all his heart.
"Eh?" March stared blankly.
"…"
Dan Heng went expressionless.
He stood there stiffly for a long moment, his face twitching faintly as if he had just fought a difficult battle. Then, utterly exhausted, he let out a sigh and lowered his spear hand.
"Write a novel? Keep… keep a female college student? Add sugar? What kind of nonsense is this?"
March's face screamed What the hell did I just hear?
Had the Synesthesia Beacon translated something wrong?
What kind of secret technique was this bizarre?
And also—
beloved?
Weren't they twins?
Unless—
Unless this was one of those forbidden relationships?
Like a detective suddenly spotting the crucial clue, March's pupils began to shake.
"So, Miss March 7th… would you help me?"
With eyes full of sorrow and heaviness, obsession written all over them—like a drowning man looking at the last piece of driftwood—Caelus gazed pleadingly at the pink-haired "personified Intertwined Fate."
"Huh?"
March, already overloaded by the sheer amount of information, was stunned yet again.
She had never imagined that a person's eyes could express such a complicated bundle of emotions—and the worst part was that she could actually read them all.
In his previous life, Qiqiong had just been a low-level office drone. At most, he'd appeared in a few embarrassingly amateur club skits back in college. His acting skills couldn't be called high.
They could only be called nonexistent.
But things were different now.
He had stepped onto the Path of Elation.
And more importantly—
the mask.
The invisible Mask of Elation he wore on his face allowed him to produce any expression he wanted, down to the tiniest micro-expression, with absolute perfection. No flaws. None at all.
On top of that, it offered him a fair degree of resistance to emotional sensing or manipulation. Anything that tried to probe his feelings could only touch the emotions he chose to display on the surface.
He had sworn not to use a mask to hide his true feelings anymore—
and Aha had responded by giving him exactly such a mask.
As expected, Aha really was too much fun.
"Me?"
March leaned forward slightly, pointing a finger at herself. Her face looked as disbelieving as if someone had just asked her to go fight Sukuna.
Kind-hearted and pretty as she was, Miss March 7th didn't mind helping someone grieving for lost family.
The problem was that, from the start, her Synesthesia Beacon had apparently broken. She had absolutely no idea what this person was talking about.
"Yes. You."
Caelus grabbed March by the shoulders, looking straight into her blue-violet gradient eyes, and nodded solemnly.
"This is for you."
He shoved a Curio he'd picked up from the room into her hands:
miHoYo protagonist heritage weapon number one—
a baseball bat.
Looking at the bat suddenly stuffed into her arms, March was completely at a loss.
"From now on," Caelus declared, patting her shoulder, "I'm keeping you."
"Huh?" Confusion surfaced in March's sky-clear eyes, and she instinctively protested, "But I'm not a college student?"
Dan Heng: "…"
Wasn't the important part supposed to be the keeping?
And wasn't that Curio technically Herta's property?
Using someone else's belonging as payment…
And if you were going to do that, why a baseball bat?
You could have picked any number of much cuter, softer-looking curios off the floor that would suit a girl better.
There were too many things to complain about.
It was like getting hit by Garen's Q three times in a row.
Dan Heng fell silent.
"It's fine. As long as your age is roughly that of a college student, it counts."
Caelus spoke with grave seriousness.
"I've already written love stories before with myself as the protagonist. They may not have spread across the galaxy, but plenty of people have read them, so that means the secret art is already halfway complete."
"Now," he said, "I'm going to perform the final step."
Without giving March any time to react, Caelus turned and went back to Stelle's side.
At that moment, March felt the gray-haired young man's entire presence change.
Solemn. Reverent. Nostalgic. Simply looking at his back, she could already imagine endless stories between the two of them.
March had been through plenty of adventures and loved all kinds of novels. Her imagination instantly spun into overdrive—
A forbidden love rejected by conventional morality.
The scorn and condemnation of outsiders.
The despair of their parents…
"Wait," she said suddenly, "what about the sugar step?"
Dan Heng gave her a look she did not notice.
"I already added it earlier," Caelus said. "Deoxyribose."
Which was, of course, a joke.
"Huh?" March's entire art style seemed to crack for a moment.
The gray-haired young man seemed to be gathering emotion.
Then, in a single instant, all the feeling boiling inside him burst out like a volcano. As though throwing aside every external factor, shattering all worldly prejudice, he screamed with every ounce of his being:
"Rise again—my beloved!!!"
His layered, grandiose voice echoed through the station corridors.
Watching the man who seemed utterly possessed, March's heart filled with even more pity and grief.
This person…
he had probably gone completely insane from sorrow.
Just as March was about to speak up and comfort Caelus, her whole body suddenly froze like a stone statue.
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