Chapter 171
"No," Kevin said, shaking his head. "His talent is exceptional. I cannot allow him to waste it, so I refuse."
"Ah, I figured it wouldn't be that simple." Irene nodded, having anticipated as much from the start. "You should have a rough idea of his situation. Given his current state of mind, the chances of him passing the trial are extremely low."
"Gray Serpent shared some details with me," Kevin said, shaking his head. "But that is no excuse for stagnation."
He knew — Siegfried's wife was dead. The child he once had was gone. But those were experiences Kevin himself had lived through, and countless others had as well. It was a harsh demand, perhaps an unreasonable one. Yet with Finality bearing down on all of them, everyone had to learn to stand back up.
There was no time to stop and grieve. No room to linger in regret. If you didn't rise and face what was coming, you wouldn't even have the luxury of regretting it afterward.
"It really is a bit too much to ask of someone," Irene said, shaking her head. "Not everyone can take that kind of blow and still get back on their feet."
"..." Kevin said nothing. He knew that too — he had seen plenty of people broken beyond recovery. He knew them, some of them well. But he still couldn't stand by and watch a warrior of that caliber simply sink into despair. So he wasn't going to let Siegfried go. There was nothing left to say.
"Alright, I wasn't really expecting it to work anyway." Irene nodded, and then a playful glint crossed her face as she looked at Kevin. "But since you're clearly so free right now that you're personally handling little errands like this..."
"I'm guessing you didn't go into the Realm. Am I right?"
"Because there was no need." Kevin shook his head. "That is a place for successors. Not for me. I simply sent her there and left."
"Oh, give it a rest." Irene waved her hand, a grin spreading across her face. "You were scared. You didn't dare go in. You chickened out."
"..." Kevin met this with silence. But beneath that perfectly composed, stone-faced expression of his, Irene could just barely make out a flicker of exasperation — the look of someone who had absolutely no idea how to deal with her.
Raven, standing nearby, watched the two of them and suddenly felt very strongly that she should not be here. How had this conversation gotten so weird? And were these things she was actually cleared to be hearing? It felt an awful lot like Irene was just airing out her boss's dirty laundry to his face.
After a brief moment of hesitation, Raven leaned back against the railing behind her, pushed off hard, and flipped herself right over the edge — gone.
She had to admit, eavesdropping was surprisingly entertaining. But Raven knew one thing very well: some things were simply better left unheard. The less you knew, the better.
Irene heard the movement, glanced back, and then shrugged at Kevin. "Alright, looks like I scared off a little raven. Oh well — no other business then."
If Kevin wasn't going to release Siegfried, there was no point pushing further. And there was nothing else she needed to ask him about. That settled it.
"What about you?" Kevin asked. "What are you going to do now?"
"What I need to do." Kevin turned his gaze to the distance. He could feel it — the concentration of Honkai energy was climbing, and with Herrschers now involved, the singularity was beginning to stir.
"Ah, is it starting?" Irene turned to look out as well. As a Herrscher herself, she could feel the ambient density rising all around them.
Not surprising. Right now, within this small Nagazora City, no fewer than three Herrschers had converged. Well — three by the external count, though she alone housed considerably more than that.
The gravitational pull of three Herrschers on Honkai energy was no small thing. It was already interfering with the singularity's stability. Irene heard movement beside her and turned — Kevin was already gone.
"Tch. Not even a goodbye. You're not Batman, you know." Irene rested her chin in her hand, gazing out at the distance. "Whatever. I'm not going to crash that party."
[You have other things to take care of.] [Irene]'s voice surfaced at that moment. [Now that the Schicksal milestone has been cleared, the System should have a reward queued up, shouldn't it?]
[Ah, you're right.] Irene nodded, glanced around, then in one quick step vaulted up to the roof of a nearby high-rise and settled herself straddling the edge of the parapet, looking out over the distance.
Her consciousness slipped into the Palace of Consciousness. Inside, she stretched lazily, and Wendy, noticing her arrival, looked up and greeted her. "Speaking of which, Irene — there's something you should be keeping an eye on."
"What is it?"
"The Herrscher of Sentience," Wendy said, looking at Irene. "If the only major divergence between our timelines is that I survived my Destined Death, then broadly speaking, things shouldn't deviate too drastically. Which means... the Herrscher of Sentience should emerge before long — the one who mistakes herself for Fu Hua."
"Oh, you mean Little Senti. Yeah, I know." Irene waved her hand. How could she possibly forget about that? She just had to wait.
Little Senti couldn't be born until after Otto finished repairing Master's body. There was nothing she could do to rush it — she just had to wait for it to happen, then sort it out afterward.
And sorting it out, honestly, wasn't that complicated. The real issue was that nobody trusted that the Herrscher of Sentience could be anything other than a threat. Fu Hua herself got all twisted up about it, insisting over and over that the other entity wasn't her — which only made Little Senti furious.
And then Sirin, who had been trailing after Fu Hua, kept pushing back in an attempt to reclaim her Class Monitor's body. The two of them just kept butting heads until fists started flying.
Really, if either of them had softened up even slightly, it never would have escalated to an all-out brawl. It was entirely solvable through peaceful means. No punches necessary. She just needed to stroke the fur in the right direction, and everything would be fine.
Wait — speaking of Little Senti, hadn't she been forgetting something?
Irene suddenly went quiet, her expression shifting to a look of deep, troubled contemplation. Was there something critically important she had overlooked? Something related to Little Senti?
Just as she was turning it over in her mind, [Irene] strolled over and looked at her with a measured, unhurried expression. [Darling. Where exactly is Master's soul right now?]
The moment she heard [Irene]'s words, it clicked. Oh. Right. Where had Master's soul gone? Kiana hadn't mentioned anything about her Class Monitor taking up residence inside her head.
So if Fu Hua's soul wasn't with Kiana — then where on earth had it gone?
---
Fu Hua was lying on a cold floor. Then, gradually, she became aware of a sound — something being struck repeatedly, and the distant noise of combat coming from somewhere nearby.
Fu Hua opened her eyes.
Iron bars. A cell. And a room that was... how to put this... the room of someone who never left their house. Her gaze swept the space in a single pass before locking onto the figure furiously hammering a keyboard.
Sirin?
"Ugh, I lost again?" Sirin stared at the screen in front of her. She had only copied the techniques she'd observed from Kiana playing against that Bronya girl. By all logic, she was just fighting against an AI — how had she not managed a single win? What kind of inhuman hand speed was that?
She slammed the keyboard a few more times. Then, as if sensing something, she turned to look at the newly awakened Fu Hua. "Oh. You're up?"
"Sirin?" Fu Hua tried to stand, but a hollow, drained sensation throughout her body forced her to stay half-crouched on the floor. "What are you doing?"
"Isn't it obvious? Playing a game." Sirin rolled her eyes. "What's wrong — did sleeping scramble your brain? Actually—" She tilted her head. "—you were always a bit dense, weren't you."
Sirin stood up, stretched, reached a hand under her loose top to scratch an itch with complete nonchalance, and then stepped directly in front of Fu Hua in one stride.
"What I'm curious about is how you managed to get in here. And your condition is not good."
"I don't believe I have any obligation to tell you." Wariness sharpened Fu Hua's eyes. She had heard Irene say she would handle this, but that didn't mean Fu Hua was about to simply extend her trust to Sirin.
"Mm-hm." Sirin crouched down until she was at eye level with Fu Hua. "You might want to think carefully about your situation. You're in my space right now. And I'm the one who protected you."
"Otherwise, what did you think those brittle feathers of yours were going to do?"
Sirin snorted. She didn't know what technique Fu Hua had used, but she could tell clearly that Fu Hua's condition had been catastrophically bad at the time — beyond words. The fact that she had needed this long just to wake up said everything. If it hadn't been Fenghuang Down keeping her alive, Fu Hua would have been ready for a shallow grave.
"...Where is Kiana?"
"Outside. This is my space — she doesn't know you're here." Sirin crossed her arms. "But if you want to leave, you'll have to agree to one condition."
"I will not—" Fu Hua started, but before she could finish, a game controller materialized beside her hand. She stared at it. Three question marks flashed through her mind.
Then she felt her body being moved — shifted — and suddenly she was sitting on a soft cushion, and there was a screen in front of her, still flickering with the game that had been playing moments ago.
On the other side of her, Sirin was already holding her own controller. She glanced at the utterly baffled Fu Hua, then blinked with complete innocence.
"The condition is that you play a few rounds with me. I'm bored out of my mind."
"...Huh?"
---
Irene's Palace of Consciousness
"Hold on, hold on, let me think." Irene, having just realized she had missed an absolutely critical variable, was starting to feel genuinely flustered. Right — so where was the Class Monitor's soul right now?
Had she been left inside the body? If that was the case, would Little Senti even be able to manifest normally? And if she could — the moment Fu Hua laid eyes on a Herrscher fighting over her own body, she would probably detonate on the spot.
"Irene's messed up," Nuwa said, chin resting on her hand as she observed Irene's increasingly frantic thought process. "Rare to see. Though regarding Hua..."
"Yeah, I genuinely have no idea where Hua would instinctively transfer to if she truly activated the Zeroth Rated Power of Fenghuang Down at the critical moment."
"Even the wisest make mistakes," Fuxi said from the side, shrugging as she watched Irene. "Sometimes trusting your own planning too much makes you overlook things that needed consideration."
In the end, they were all guilty of the same thing — too much faith in Irene's ability to orchestrate everything, and so none of them had noticed that Fu Hua's soul had been unaccounted for this entire time.
"Well... I'll just ask Kiana and Sirin when I get back," Irene said, tilting her head back to look up at the ceiling. "It's possible that there was a hiccup this time around, and she didn't manage to trigger the Zeroth Rated Power at all."
"The second possibility is that the Zeroth Rated Power transferred Fu Hua to some feather out there that we have absolutely no information on — a random transfer. Which means Fu Hua..."
"Has been molting for five thousand years," [Irene] said flatly, spreading her hands. "Just within the story's events, Taixuan Mountain alone must have had countless feathers shed from her. There could be Fu Hua feathers in all sorts of inexplicable places."
"If it's the second scenario, we're better off dealing with Little Senti first, then using Little Senti's abilities afterward to locate Fu Hua."
"'Molting for five thousand years'," Nuwa repeated, the corner of her mouth twitching. She couldn't quite argue against it, annoyingly enough. "Hua is the Celestial of Red Kite — technically it should be a molting bird, not a molting chicken."
"Is there really a difference?" [Irene] shrugged. Losing feathers was losing feathers.
"At least 'bird' sounds better." Nuwa gave a confident nod. A molting bird was at least marginally more dignified than a molting chicken. "Don't you think, Elder Sis— ow!"
Nuwa hadn't even finished the sentence before Fuxi, who had been watching with rapidly declining patience, punched her sister in the arm. This was not the moment to argue about nomenclature.
And besides — neither 'molting chicken' nor 'molting bird' was flattering. Both were bad.
"Well, I'll just take it one step at a time. I can't believe I let this slip through the cracks." Irene shook her head, a flicker of exasperation crossing her face. "Alright, let's look at something more cheerful."
She opened the System panel — the first time she had done so in quite a while. Almost everything was unchanged, except for one thing: at some point, her Honkai Resistance had improved.
[Honkai Resistance: Excellent]
"Oh, was this one of the benefits I got back then?" Irene studied the panel with mild interest. Herrschers weren't generally threatened by Honkai corruption in the first place, but a boost was a boost.
As for her Honkai Adaptability — still maxed out beyond established limits, same as before. Though now that she thought about it, her Adaptability felt considerably higher than it had been when she first hit the ceiling. By how much exactly, she couldn't say — but in a direct comparison, the current her would decisively outclass the version of herself that had just reached the limit.
That was probably one of the perks of emergence. Either way, it was useful — she could exert control over a significantly larger volume of Honkai energy now. In a clash of raw power, that was a meaningful advantage.
And just as she had expected — completing the Schicksal milestone came with a reward.
[Raising the Sword of Rebellion Against Heaven]
[Description: Resolve the threat of the Herrscher of the Void.]
[Status: Completed]
[Bonus Objective: Prevent the Final Lesson from occurring. Stop the Destined Death of Himeko from coming to pass.]
[Reward: Role Card — Skill: Bidirectional Resonance]
Irene claimed the reward. She set the skill aside for a moment and watched the pure-white card drift slowly down before her. She reached out and turned it over.
Then she read the name on it, and her eyes went wide.
[Briar-Blood Blossom — Cecilia]
"Oh."
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