Silence — March 7th had fallen into a silence unlike any she'd experienced since waking from the Six-Phased Ice.
Her mouth formed a small 'O,' eyes half-lidded, staring blankly at the photographs scattered across the floor.
A birthday cake with the number '1' placed before a toddler. Caelus, Stelle, and her, all clapping in celebration.
A child, still learning to walk, tottering and stumbling forward — charging toward his mamas and papa, who stood with arms wide open, ready to catch him.
Caelus riding a flying toy, the child clinging to his trouser leg from behind, terrified of being left behind, while Stelle and March 7th tidied baby clothes nearby, watching it all with warm, smiling eyes.
And then others — more photographs.
Ordinary moments, yet beautiful. Fragments full of laughter and joy, captured by the lens. Even March 7th, the supposed 'protagonist' of these photos, felt an inexplicable warmth welling up inside her as she looked at them — a deep, quiet happiness, as if these memories truly belonged to her…
"Ah Qi, have you really forgotten every little moment of our happy life together?"
Stelle's hands slowed as she gathered the fallen photographs. Her back was turned to March 7th.
From the toddler cradled in her arms came the soft sound of sobbing, and transparent droplets fell — drip, drip — onto the floor.
March 7th watched this scene, and then, all at once, she laughed — a laugh of sudden, easy acceptance.
"Ah, so that's how it is. I'm a mama, huh."
She cast one last glance at Himeko, Welt, and Dan Heng — their expressions a complicated tangle of things — then smoothed the furrow from her brow, reached over, and scooped Little Caelus out of Stelle's arms.
"Little Prayer-Star, shall Mama take you to find Papa?"
They say you either explode in the silence or perish in it. When March 7th's brain could no longer withstand the flood of overwhelming information, only two outcomes were possible.
One: a complete system crash — total shutdown of all cognitive function.
Two: a Big Bang-level expansion of mental capacity.
As they say, you become who you spend time with. Having played alongside Team Star Rail for so long, March 7th had absorbed no small amount of their influence — and now she deployed a stroke of breathtaking genius.
These two had chosen to prank her in this manner. Very well. She would play along with the script they'd set up and ride the current wherever it took her.
"Mm, Mama~"
Little Caelus wrapped his small arms tightly around March 7th's neck, though inwardly he was rather surprised. He had actually considered this possibility — it just hadn't ranked very high in his probability estimates.
Looks like Ah Qi has grown up after all!
"Good boy. Then let's have a little talk about that ice cream you stole earlier~"
Assuming the poise of a mother about to discipline her child, March 7th carried Little Caelus toward her room.
Hm?
Caelus blinked. Was Ah Qi trying to…
Himeko, Welt, and Dan Heng hadn't even had a chance to say a word before March 7th, to their slack-jawed astonishment, carried Little Caelus back into her room.
The bedroom door clicked shut. The living room fell abruptly, utterly quiet.
Stelle, maintaining her role, continued collecting the photos that had fallen to the floor. Himeko, Welt, and Dan Heng's attention shifted — naturally, inevitably — to the Little Haxxor Bunny.
"And this child is…?"
Himeko ventured cautiously.
On the surface, she looked somewhat like Bronya.
"She's the daughter of Caelus-cub and Seele."
Stelle didn't even blink. She delivered the words with complete, earnest sincerity — the kind that sent Himeko's coffee cup rattling with a threefold tremor.
"?"
"..."
"!"
Himeko, Old Yang, and Dan Heng looked at each other, their expressions a masterwork of conflicting reactions.
Especially Seele — she ducked her head shyly, hair tumbling forward to hide the burning tips of her ears.
Seeing Seele's flustered, bashful demeanor, the three of them exchanged a look of mounting, inexplicable bewilderment.
Sweet, well-behaved Seele — the impression everyone had of her was that she never lied, never participated in the absurd theatrics Team Star Rail cooked up. So what on earth was this reaction about?
The performance didn't last long, however.
Seele decided she couldn't keep cashing in on 'Seele's' reputation for sweetness and trust in everyone's eyes. After a few seconds, she relinquished control of her body back to White Seele.
"N-no, that's not right."
White Seele hastily offered a flustered correction.
[MY PARALLEL WORLD SELF!!]
In the mental channel, Little White Seele let out a roar of mortified indignation. Her parallel-world counterpart was wonderful in every way — except for the occasional streak of mischief that left her completely at a loss.
White Seele meekly lifted her head. The moment her gaze met Himeko and Welt's startled stares, she quickly spread her hands in explanation.
"That's not it — Sister Stelle is joking."
The reliable trio swiveled their eyes toward Stelle in near-perfect synchrony.
Stelle shrugged, and admitted: "Alright, fine — I was joking just now… She's actually Bronya and Caelus-cub's daughter."
Seele hadn't even finished the breath of relief she'd let out when she heard those words. She blinked and looked over at Stelle.
"..."
The three fell silent.
Gray hair, gray eyes, gray features — at a purely surface level, under normal logic, the most plausible conclusion was still that she was Bronya's daughter.
A pregnancy and birth completed within a single month, and both children looking to be at least two or three years old — under ordinary circumstances, impossible. But then…
"Could there have been a micro-stellarquake on the Xianzhou?"
Himeko set her complicated emotions aside for the moment and asked with measured seriousness.
A stellarquake's gravitational collapse would produce enormous changes in the spacetime curvature of the surrounding stellar region — generating a relativistic coordinate system where the flow of time became inconsistent.
She'd heard about it once in casual conversation with Asta: apparently, a staff member at the space station had been in love with a girl who got caught in a stellarquake zone.
In the vast Galaxy, accidents that produced temporal discrepancies were not unheard of.
"A micro-stellarquake?"
Stelle's eyes went wide.
There was actually a perfectly fitting explanation for the current situation?
As expected of Navigator Sister Himeko — truly well-informed!
"Yes, yes!"
Stelle nodded with the rapid enthusiasm of a pecking little bird.
A micro-stellarquake it was, then!
The gray-haired girl's puffed-up, dead-serious little expression coaxed a faint note of helpless amusement into the corner of Himeko's eye.
Stelle's acting ability and Caelus's were not even in the same league.
If Little Caelus's performance had earned Himeko a seventy-percent confidence that Little Caelus was Caelus's child, then Stelle's performance had dropped that seventy down to fifty.
Just as Himeko was about to press further with more questions, Stelle's expression abruptly changed. She sucked in a sharp breath, and for one brief instant her legs went soft beneath her.
"Kyaaaa!!!"
From March 7th's room came a high-decibel, crystal-clear shriek.
Everyone froze for a beat — then rose to their feet. All of them, save Stelle with her carefully maintained unreadable expression, strode quickly toward the door. Dan Heng raised his hand and knocked:
"March, what happened?"
...
Five minutes earlier.
Click.
March 7th carried the marshmallow-soft Little Caelus over to her bed, with its pink floral sheets.
"Calling me Mama, were you? Teaming up with Stelle to prank me, were you?"
She pulled off his little shoes and dropped him onto the pile of fluffy pillows. Her usual bright, cheerful tone now held a thread of sly, triumphant glee at having seen through the scheme. She tapped her slender fingertip against Little Caelus's forehead, once, twice:
"From this moment on, this young lady is your Mama~!"
As a veteran instigator himself, Caelus had, of course, anticipated March 7th's train of thought. He was already calculating which counter-script to deploy, while keeping up his adorable little disguise on the surface.
"Mama~ what are you saying? Klee doesn't understand~"
The syllables stretched out in a sugary, malt-taffy drawl. The little head swaying side to side, the little ahoge bobbing — for a moment, March 7th was thoroughly subjugated.
A cute-type toddler's psychic attack.
She almost broke again.
Several seconds passed before she came back to herself, cheeks flushed a tipsy, intoxicating rose. She reached out and 'ferociously' grabbed Little Caelus by the straps of his overalls — which had already slid from his shoulders down to his elbows — and yanked them up:
"Stop pretending! A while back I was teaching myself to make ice cream by following a video, and I hid the batch in the third shelf of the fridge — I said I'd share it with everyone once it was done, but you two went and snuck it multiple times while it was still unfinished!"
Caelus blinked. Had that happened?
He couldn't remember.
If it had, it was definitely the System's fault — either it had issued a quest to steal ice cream from the fridge, or he'd simply spotted Crystals sitting in there. It wasn't as if he could be expected to leave them behind.
"The pillow fight where you and Stelle ganged up on me — which made me end up eating Himeko's Trailblaze meal alongside Dan Heng — all of those old grudges and new scores are getting settled today!"
With that, March 7th flipped Caelus around into her lap, yanked down his trousers, and exposed a round, milky-soft little bottom — her palm hovering in the air just above it.
"Watch me give you a taste of what you've got coming~!"
Smack. March 7th's palm landed on Little Caelus's bottom with a bright, flat sound, her smile radiant beyond measure.
"It's only natural for a Mama to discipline her child~!"
"Hehe~"
The palm came down — soft as patting a marshmallow — while March 7th muttered away under her breath: "That'll teach you to film my embarrassing moments… that'll teach you to steal my ice cream… you dare do it again next time~?"
The little bottom quivered softly with each gentle smack.
Next time he'd absolutely dare.
The nerve of a mere Ah Qi — daring to humiliate me like this!
Just as Caelus made a snap decision to activate counter-script number seven and launch his counteroffensive against March 7th — he suddenly felt something was wrong.
The overalls, which had been perfectly fitted, even slightly loose, abruptly became tight. Tighter still came the sensation of being constrained, of being bound — and then a faint, weak pain as something forced its way through that constraint.
"Say it fast — Mama, I was wr—!!!"
March 7th's snow-pale little hand had just arced upward for another disciplinary swat, fingertips mere inches from Little Caelus's bottom — when everything changed in an instant.
The transformation timer had run out.
Nothing like the heart-rending, smoke-pouring agony of ATPX4869 — Caelus's body simply reverted, within one second, in defiance of every biological and physical law.
The entire process was practically magical. But magic did not extend to the brand-new children's clothing purchased from the shop.
The new outfit gave a tremendous rrrrip and exploded into a rain of shredded fabric. The shoulder straps snapped off like shooting stars and rocketed toward the ceiling. The sides of the overalls split open in a web of cracks, and the lightweight cloth stretched, tore, and burst apart into tiny strips.
March 7th watched, helpless, as Caelus expanded back into his familiar young man's silhouette. She stood rooted to the spot as if struck by lightning, pupils dilating in an earthquake of shock.
The pink-haired girl sat at the edge of the bed, legs pressed neatly together — and a bare Caelus was sprawled face-down across those smooth, jade-white thighs, adorned with their fairy-tale garter trim.
Given the nature of that position: the very instant Caelus transformed back, March 7th felt something searing and urgent pressing against the inside of her thigh — and pushing through.
The abrupt, unexpected intrusion left March 7th stunned rigid for a full twenty seconds before the shock detonated into a screech of explosive, mortified embarrassment.
Her pretty face flushed to a ripe cherry at visible speed. The tips of her ears went scarlet in an instant.
"Don't scream! You idiot!"
Caelus immediately sat up and clapped a hand over March 7th's mouth. The whimper rising in her throat was smothered by his palm into broken, scattered little wisps of air.
Her breath caught in her throat like a snapped string on an instrument. Eyes fixed on that familiar, unmistakable silhouette — memories of that night between Stelle, March, and the others flickering through her mind — March 7th's brain went into complete overload, her eyelashes trembling violently.
Knock knock knock!
"March, what happened?"
The moment Dan Heng's voice came through the door, March 7th's heart slammed against her ribs — thump, thump — as if trying to break through her chest. The corners of her eyes blushed with an involuntary, physiological flush.
If everyone opened that door and found her and Caelus in this state, she'd have no business staying on the Express anymore. She'd be better off heading straight to Scalegorge Waterscape and burying herself alongside the Ambrosial Arbor.
Social death at its most absolute.
She had walked in here carrying Little Caelus, after all!
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