"Huh? It's gone," Reisen Riou froze mid-task.
"What's gone!?" Raiden Ei asked.
"Ahem, nothing big—just a signal dropped. Let's keep going."
Afterward, Reisen tackled the issue. It wasn't major, but it still needed handling.
Anything's worth fixing if it's a problem.
"Traveler's signal's gone? Right on schedule, I guess."
"But where'd he take my One System, Ten Thousand Minds Machine?"
"…"
Reisen checked the logs for Traveler Aether's One System, Ten Thousand Minds Machine.
Aether was always bouncing around, so the machine often lost signal. As long as he returned to a signal zone within a month, it was fine.
This time, though, he entered a place and went completely dark. A month later, still nothing.
That's why Revival pinged Reisen last night.
Not a huge deal, though.
Aether's loss was no biggie—Reisen had already milked him for plenty.
Seven-element foreign sword techniques, recipes Aether collected, world secrets he uncovered.
Aether's adventures, while less earth-shaking than his sister's, weren't small potatoes either. Never world-flipping, but loud enough.
Those finds were useless to Reisen, though—just fun trivia.
They were all outside Inazuma.
While sorting the data, Ei showed up.
"Reisen, Liyue's Lantern Rite is coming. There's a big order this year. Help Miko handle it. You've dumped your project on that Dottore kid anyway," Ei said.
"Cool, I'll check out Liyue and see Sister Ganyu. We've kept up letters, but it's been ages," Reisen nodded.
"Wait a sec," Reisen paused. "What's the big order?"
"Morax placed it himself. You wouldn't know," Ei rolled her eyes, handing him a note.
"Whoa, the Geo Archon's going all out," Reisen said, stunned by the list.
It included tons of Inazuma's top forging materials—five tons of premium Jade Steel, half a year's output from the Mikage Furnace.
Plus a bunch of miscellaneous items.
The kicker? Morax requested fifty master smiths (Forging LV6) and over two hundred senior smiths (Forging LV4–LV5). Clearly, the old man was planning something huge.
"No kidding. His kin, Soaring Serpent Marshal, died in battle. That'd piss anyone off," Ei said, her mood dipping as memories surfaced.
"What's wrong?" Reisen, startled by her gloom, cracked some jokes to cheer her up.
"Just thinking of old friends," Ei said softly.
"Now that you mention it, I miss mine too. Back when I hung with Bona, it was a blast. The Akademiya's gone downhill since," Reisen sighed.
Maybe that's the curse of long-lived beings—erosion.
Suddenly, Reisen's face stiffened. "Hold up!"
"This erosion's off," he said, casting Miasmic Grand Fog to envelop them both.
The fog cocooned them, and they instantly felt lighter.
"The erosion's gotten worse," Reisen and Ei said in unison, locking eyes.
For a god like Ei to lose emotional control, only Celestia's erosion could do that.
It even hit Reisen. If not for his stash of fate-defying tools, he wouldn't have noticed.
"This erosion's terrifying," Reisen said, wiping cold sweat. He checked his memory banks.
His multiple storage sites were mostly consistent with normal databases.
Then he cross-referenced one in a Miasmic Sealed Chamber.
Reisen's face darkened. A third of his past-life memories were glitched—some nonsensical, others buggy.
A huge chunk was fuzzy, and other databases showed damage in those sections.
One corrupted database? Fine. But all of them? Celestia was playing dirty.
Rubbing his face, he looked at Ei. "How's your memory check?"
Ei had similar setups, with even more databases, given her vast memories.
"Some memories are slightly warped," Ei said, rubbing her temple. "Looks like erosion's hit us multiple times unnoticed. This can't go on."
Ei wondered if she should create a Plane of Euthymia or craft a puppet to hold her Gnosis, like her other-timeline self.
But she scrapped the idea. AI-led governance failed hard in that timeline.
AI as support? Great. As ruler? Ei shook her head.
Even sentient AIs like Revival and One Mind, Ten Thousand Wits knew their limits. Lacking human empathy, they picked optimal solutions, which weren't always best.
Their choices often defied human common sense.
Add human ethics, and AIs bugged out, sometimes burning themselves up.
Reisen once tested a weak AI with ethics—it crashed instantly.
A strong AI he painstakingly built? Also crashed.
Good thing purified soul fragments were reusable, or Reisen would've been gutted.
As for sentient AIs, Reisen had just two. He didn't dare test them. One slip, and all Inazuma would be screwed.