Successfully opening Oret's terminal and obtaining Julius's home address, Noah casually tossed the terminal back beside Oret, who was sound asleep on the street.
"Guess what we're going to do next?"
"Go treat that Dark Tide child." Phrolova answered without hesitation.
"Correct." Noah smiled: "Looks like you understand me quite well."
The moment the words left his mouth, Phrolova's mind blanked. Her gaze darted away as she hastily came up with an excuse:
"Because... because I learned a lot about you from Jinzhou."
"Oh~ So that's how it is."
Seeing Noah's sudden realization expression, Phrolova secretly breathed a sigh of relief.
Good thing she was quick-witted and managed to come up with such a reasonable excuse in time.
A white light circle expanded beneath their feet. The scene shifted, and the two moved to a relatively remote area within Septimont.
Not far away, a boy with Dark Tide erosion patterns crawling across his face was curled up outside a rusty iron gate, staring blankly. He lacked any of the liveliness and vitality a child his age should have, instead carrying an indelible gloom.
"Hello there, little friend."
Noah slowly approached, bent down, and gently stroked the boy's head. The power of Separation silently seeped into the boy's body like moisture nourishing the earth. He spoke softly:
"I'm a doctor your father found. I can treat your illness. It might hurt a little. Do you want to try?"
"Remove the Dark Tide?"
The air froze for three seconds. The boy suddenly sneered, his nails digging deep into his palms:
"Forget it. Just return the money my dad paid you. I don't need anyone to save me."
Noah was slightly stunned, then realized the child mistakenly thought his father had paid a large sum for this.
The power of Separation was gently extracting the Dark Tide from the boy's body like pulling silk, but it still needed some time. Noah decided to chat with the boy:
"Little friend, you sound so resolute. You don't want to live anymore?"
"That's right."
Even knowing that children in Wuthering Waves tended to be precocious, Noah didn't expect a child to answer so firmly.
After a pause, he tried to comfort him:
"Your father really wants you to live. In places you can't see, he has worked very hard and seized every opportunity."
"He didn't have to work this hard."
The boy seemed to be stabbed in the deepest part of his heart. He turned his head away, his voice becoming choked:
"They argue every day because of me. Mom says to have another child, Dad says to sell the house for treatment — it's all my fault. It would have been better if I was never born."
Sensing the death wish hidden in the boy's words, Noah was momentarily at a loss for how to comfort him.
Even though it was only a tiny trace of Dark Tide that even Leviathan itself hadn't noticed, it was already enough to crush a family that was desperately fighting to survive.
"You really should die."
Phrolova bent down and stroked the boy's cheek. Her words shocked Noah.
Before Noah could react, Phrolova continued:
"However, someone is willing to pay the price for you to live."
"Price..." The boy froze. His eyes wavered.
What price? Who was paying the price? Was it Mom and Dad?
"I know you're in a lot of pain, but when facing difficulties, if you choose to retreat, we will only lose more."
Phrolova earnestly gave encouragement:
"So, don't compromise with fate. The more pain fate inflicts on you, the more you must firmly tell it that you will not be crushed by it."
Disasters may come unexpectedly, but luck will follow closely behind.
"Living on is the best blessing."
The power of Separation finally cleansed the remaining Dark Tide. Noah withdrew his hand, took out a mirror and placed it in the child's hand, then quickly pulled Phrolova away.
Taking the mirror, the boy subconsciously turned his head away. He didn't want to look at his face covered in black patterns, like mold on dead wood that couldn't be wiped away no matter how hard he tried.
But this time, the mirror reflected a clean face.
He froze. His fingers stiffly rose to touch his cheek. His voice began to tremble:
"This... this is..."
He suddenly rubbed his eyes. His heart pounded wildly, afraid it was an illusion. Only after opening his eyes again did overwhelming joy explode:
"It's gone! The Dark Tide on my face is gone!"
The boy jumped up excitedly, his gaze immediately turning toward the direction Noah and Phrolova had left, but they were already gone.
[Daily Quest: If I Had Never Come Into This World (Challenge) completed.]
...
The two walked side by side on the street. Phrolova's gaze would occasionally shift from the surrounding scenery to Noah's face, then lower again to watch her own feet walking the same path as the person beside her.
She suddenly let out a soft laugh.
"We've already walked quite far. What are you thinking about? Why are you smiling the whole time?"
Hearing Noah's puzzled question, Phrolova pursed her lips:
"I'm just feeling a bit emotional."
She couldn't remember how long it had been since she last helped someone. The last time she did a good deed was extremely long ago — so long that her memory had become blurry.
So... doing good deeds was such a relaxing and pleasant thing. It made one's soul feel as if it was floating, like stepping on a soft white cloud in the blue sky.
"You know? Reviving my relatives has always been the heaviest and most obsessive thought in my heart, because they are the most important people to me."
She opened her heart to the person beside her and took the initiative to talk about her unsightly past:
"To prevent them from dying completely, I used my own body as a vessel to contain their Remnant echoes."
"Countless days and nights, I could hear them murmuring and crying every day, saying: Child, save us, we don't want to die."
"There were too many voices. They were too noisy. I was too tired, too exhausted. I wanted to save them, but I kept failing, and failing again..."
At this point, Phrolova took a deep breath, still shaken by that nightmare-like period:
"I also once thought unrealistically like that child — what if I didn't have to bear such a fate? What if I or they had truly died..."
Her words came to an abrupt stop. She then apologized:
"Sorry for making you laugh. You must think that someone like me is very cold and indifferent, right?"
"No, I don't think so."
Noah shook his head and turned to look at Phrolova beside him:
"The expectations of over a thousand lives, the murmurs that haunted you day and night, the failures after countless futile efforts, the unwillingness — anyone would be crushed breathless by that weight."
"No one wants to revive them more than you do, but in the face of the clear heavenly law of life and death, the harder you tried, the more powerless and desperate you felt. To the point that you instinctively wanted to escape this pain by thinking: it would be better if they were truly dead."
"Such indifference is such an inappropriate appropriateness."
After speaking, Noah let out a low sigh.
If Phrolova had not experienced all this tragedy, she should have been an outstanding violinist. At the very least, she would have lived a peaceful and warm life.
Even if she awakened her Resonance ability later, she might have been recruited into Black Shores and become an excellent Bloom Bearer.
But there were no ifs.
Cruel reality had always trampled on her originally gentle and kind nature.
In the end, she became the blood-stained Supervisor of the Fractsidus.
Just as this daily quest described: Everyone wants to go to heaven, but heaven and hell are often not something we have the right to choose.
Regarding this, Noah felt both sympathy and sorrow.
He pondered as he walked forward, then suddenly noticed that Phrolova beside him had not kept up. He turned back and saw her standing dazed in place.
Tears uncontrollably poured from her eyes, sliding down her cheeks like broken pearls.
She had thought Noah would silently gloss over her words, or that he would joke and tell her that her wish had come true. The only thing she never expected was for Noah to so genuinely acknowledge her struggles and contradictions.
The powerlessness soaked in hundreds of years of failure and pain, the instinctive escape born under the heavy shackles of life and death — all of it was gently accepted and understood by him.
Like a delicate key, it gently opened her tightly closed and dust-covered heart, deeply touching her and filling her eyes with hot tears.
This feeling of being understood felt so happy, so joyful.
He truly understood her so well.
"Sorry, I lost my composure again. Thank you..."
Phrolova wiped away her tears and quickly caught up to Noah. Her raised face carried a faint smile:
"From now on... I won't have to suffer like before anymore."
"..." Noah turned his head away. The gentleness that had spread across his face was once again withdrawn into indifference. He whispered softly:
"Perhaps."