Yama opened her eyes. Her rainbow pupils, symbolizing her Herrscher authority, lit up like lamps in her sockets. Raindrops fell on the tip of her nose.
It was raining again.
She had returned to her world, this silent, desolate star. She didn't go to the graves to pay respects as usual, nor did she look at her own tombstone. Instead, she sat cross-legged on the ground, silently pondering in the muddy earth under the gentle, drizzling rain.
"But wanting to have it both ways! Wanting a perfect ending! Wanting the trolley to stop at that fork in the road where it never has to hurt anyone! Is there something wrong with that?!"
...He was so stupid it made her want to laugh. Even though she had seen countless Lins, none were as foolish as him. Did he think this was a game about saving the world? Reality isn't something you can achieve just because you have ideals, ambition, or even ability.
Everyone dying at the end of the story—that is a Bad Ending.
Many people surviving after giving their all—that is a Good Ending.
But everyone overcoming the tragedy... that is merely a beautiful fairy tale.
In her time spent reading all the books in the world, Yama often came across a genre she called "Adult's Fairy Tales." Not "adult" (erotic) stories, but "adult" fairy tales. Plots filled with twists, protagonists enduring many hardships, a world constantly surrounded by crisis... and a theme revolving around beauty.
The endings of these stories always achieved a perfect conclusion in various ways. Some even used Deus ex Machina to overturn previous settings just to let the characters have a happy, beautiful ending. Perhaps this is the fairy tale of an adult: only after experiencing darkness are they more willing to turn toward the light.
But Yama knew they weren't in an adult's fairy tale. This wasn't a story. Reality is bizarre and sudden: those who don't want to die will die; those who don't want to kill will kill. Your friend might be laughing with you one second, and be torn apart the next.
The greatest lesson she took from her experience was this—people don't leave profound last words before they die, and there are no spotlights on a corpse while rose petals fall to form a beautiful image. They only become monsters in an instant, charred to a crisp by fire, their brains and eyes crushed out by gravity, or their bodily functions stripped away until they become mummies...
Is there light after crossing the darkness? Perhaps it's just something... deeper and more despairing.
"The other one has started a new life. Why are you still moping around?"
"Who's there!"
The sudden voice made Yama spring up. In such close proximity, she hadn't sensed a living presence?
"Who am I? Well... that's a long story. It might start from tens of thousands... hundreds of thousands? Or perhaps an unknown amount of time ago. But if I start from myself, it's only been a few thousand years." The voice pondered with some distress, then dismissed it. "Who I am is no longer important. An old ghost wandering the Sea of Quanta, or a failure—use whichever sounds better."
"Was it you who imprisoned me in that bubble world?" Yama reacted immediately. This kind of silent approach had happened before—she had been ambushed while observing parallel worlds inside the Second Divine Key and thrown into the bubble world with Lin.
"Isn't that obvious?" the other replied easily. "Don't worry, I have no ill intent. You and that Lin both gained quite a bit, didn't you?"
"What is your purpose?"
"What is my purpose..." He chewed on Yama question word by word. After a long silence, the voice appeared again.
"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, and the carbon in the things we eat were all formed from the scattered remnants of ten thousand stars during the Big Bang. So, every one of us is a star."
"Every person we meet, every step we take in life, every time we look up, every time we open our eyes, every choice we make—it's all different from another person. Our existence and every day we spend are miracle after miracle."
"If the Big Bang hadn't happened? If one star after another hadn't been destroyed? If the Earth's terrain had changed slightly? If it had been another sperm that entered the egg? Everything would be different from now. The birth of every individual is a stack of one tiny probability event after another."
"We come from the starry sky, acting out life on this tiny planet. Our existence itself is a miracle, a miracle more beautiful than any fairy tale."
He chuckled and asked Yama a question someone had asked him a long, long time ago: "So, are you willing to write a new Adult's Fairy Tale?"
The heavy rain hasn't stopped since that day.
...
"Active Reaction..." Mobius grew more astonished as she examined the document. She only needed one glance to know if the content was real or fake. It was impossible for Lin to know this kind of knowledge regarding MANTIS; some of it was information that current research hadn't even reached yet. This was equivalent to dissecting a MANTIS inside and out and distilling the key parts.
That man was not as simple as the so-called "time traveler" he claimed to be. He had an understanding of Fire Moth and MANTIS far exceeding anyone "now." And the principle of this technology called Project Soldier... or rather, another "aspect" of a MANTIS, was clearly written there.
At the end of the document, that person left two sentences.
"I don't know if handing these to you will cause further changes to the Honkai. But someone once told me that even if there's only a one-in-a-billion chance, there is a possibility of success."
"I believe in humanity, and you are humans. That is all."
Then came a string of garbled characters, looking like something typed by accident and forgotten.
"What do you think?" Mobius asked the helmeted man standing behind her after she finished reading.
"The content won't be wrong." Lin confirmed the information regarding MANTIS. "I don't know who he is, but I believe him."
"...How novel. You have moments where you believe someone without reason?"
"A feeling."
"Then it's even weirder."
Believing someone based on a feeling didn't seem like something Lin would do. But Lin didn't want to dwell on the topic. He asked the pensive Mobius: "And you? How do you plan to use these things?"
"...Heh." A crazed smile, one that hadn't appeared on Mobius face for a long time, quietly surfaced. "Yes... how indeed?"