Three Divine Wishes: Yes, I'm OP!

"So... I guess I should call you Elder Brother, huh?" Calista asked with a slight tilt of her head.

It was not her first time meeting Melvin; she recalled the brief introduction a year ago when Akasha had visited him in the Blackwood Kingdom.

Melvin’s black eyes, streaked with their white sword-like marks, locked onto her illusory form and lingered just long enough for recognition to sink in.

’She was with Master and the Mistresses before... right?’ he thought, noting that while Calista’s face was unchanged, everything else about her was strikingly different.

The shadowy wings, the curling horns, and the way the darkness seemed to respond to her presence made it obvious she’d taken the chance to gain some serious upgrades from Dream Land.

"Elder Brother, huh?" he repeated, the words cool and almost testing. "I guess so... especially seeing that you’ve changed quite a bit."

He began strolling across the expansive cathedral floor, and Calista naturally matched his pace without an invitation.

Her steps were silent on the marble and wood, while the stacked sigils drifted upward in their steady ascent toward the lofty reaches above.

Between the floating zafus and the ordered marks of weapons and abstractions, the two of them moved like figures given more space than conversation strictly required.

"So, how long have you been Lord Dream’s disciple?" Calista asked with genuine curiosity.

There wasn’t much she knew about Akasha beyond the details he chose to share in her presence... and Melvin was an even greater enigma, largely because he was rarely around.

As for Calista herself, although she wasn’t truly in the Hub of Knowledge at the moment, this illusory form was still her—at least a fragment of her consciousness.

Even so, she longed to feel less like a distant member of the Pantheon of Infinite Dreams and more like part of a true family.

After all, she had never been given the chance to have one of her own.

Not wanting the silence to stretch on too long, she decided to break it by asking a little about her fellow disciple.

"Hmm, since I was just a little boy," Melvin answered. His voice stayed even. He did not offer warmth in the face of it.

"About... Twelve years now."

Hearing such a tone and the coldness behind his words, Calista arched a brow in slight confusion.

’Does... he perhaps not like the Pantheon?’ She wondered to herself as she placed her hands behind her back as they walked.

"It sounds to me... like you’re not too fond of being his disciple"

At her words, Melvin’s gaze moved across a column of sigils without truly settling on any one of them.

"You shouldn’t make assumptions," he said with a slight shake of his head.

"I owe everything to Master... without him, there is no me. The respect I have for him goes far beyond mere fondness."

Calista glanced at him from the corner of her eye, sensing the chill in his tone but choosing not to press directly into it.

"Well, that sounds pretty convincing," she replied, though to her it seemed less like he enjoyed being part of the Pantheon and more like he was here out of a sense of debt.

Melvin shrugged at her words, his attention drifting back to the strange sigils around them as he tried to make sense of their meaning.

"Think what you want," he said as they kept walking.

----

After a brief stretch of silence, Calista cast another glance at him.

’He’s really... like a block of ice,’ she thought, noticing he had no interest in getting to know his fellow disciple and was only offering sparse, dry answers.

"Well... do you have any family members?" she asked, unsure what else to say.

But at that moment, Melvin suddenly came to a complete stop.

Instantly, the cold around him deepened in a way that Calista couldn’t directly explain.

In that moment, his memories rose—his mother’s face first, sad and freed in the same instant as the winter took her; his sister beside her, the same terrible peace fixed into ice while the last of their breath became crystal.

Then the throne room: his father hanging naked, entirely incapacitated, reduced to nothing resembling the man who raised him... of the man who led so many millions.

As the memories kept surfacing, a thin layer of frost began to cling to the hem of Melvin’s white robes.

The air close to him grew sharply colder, until Calista’s illusory shape appeared poised at the boundary of her own secluded winter.

When he spoke again, the easy warmth in his tone had vanished.

"I don’t have any family," Melvin said flatly. "Because I killed them all."

Calista tilted her head, black hair brushing the imagined line of her shoulder.

The air around him still felt off, as if a sudden winter was pressing in too tightly for a hall that shouldn’t hold frost, and she was wise enough to know the ground she’d just stepped onto.

"Cold stuff..." she said, and left the subject there.

In the next moment, she raised a hand and gestured across the vast cathedral—the floating zafus, the spiraling columns of sigils, the seamless blend of marble and wood stretching beyond easy sight.

"As you probably know... this is the Hub of Knowledge," she said, smoothly shifting the topic to avoid ruining a bond not yet formed.

"All you need to do is sit on a zafu, focus clearly on what you want to learn, and the Hub will do the rest. It will take you straight to the knowledge you seek."

Her form thinned after that, shadow-wings and horns dissolving with the rest of the illusion until Melvin stood alone again among the ordered sigils and the waiting seats.

After a while, the chill surrounding him began to fade bit by bit, and he allowed it to.

Once his breathing had slowed into something more natural, he picked a zafu and settled down, white robes draping around him, long black hair flowing down his back.

He closed his eyes.

One intention, held without ornament.

’The Loria Humans.’

In an instant, the zafu lifted, carrying him upward before gliding across toward one of the lower-world sigils in the stacked columns, the mark sharpening into focus as he drew closer.

HUMMMM!!!!

White light wrapped around him as the gap narrowed, starting as a faint barrier before growing into a complete cocoon, until Melvin and the seat beneath him vanished into the glow, leaving the cathedral floor empty once again.