A blood-red tube like an umbilical cord latched to her lower belly, then ran into the hollow in the blood-red man's chest.

The silver-haired girl was still fogged. She reached to yank the foreign thing. Like a dream not yet ended, her hand slid through the translucent tube and caught nothing.

As if to lift her from the haze and spell out where she stood, a seductive male voice brushed her ear again.

"To welcome my dearest fiancée, I spent so long weaving this dream. Some details might be off. I filled the gaps with my own scenes.

"But overall, I'm confident calling it a faithful adaptation. You barely feel any dissonance, right, Jiaqi?"

"Jia...qi..."

"Plus, I shared with you the 'Truth' every being aches for. So—are you satisfied with this dream?"

...

"Jiaqi..."

She still murmured the name, eyes resting in her palm like a bird on a fallen branch.

After a long moment, light crept back into her blood-red eyes. She lifted her head and answered.

"That was... the worst dream, you vile senior."

"Ah, looks like I was sentimental," Krus said, bowing theatrically, the apology silk-thin. "I thought you'd want to recall your true past at the end—"

"—Still, though the dream was awful, I should thank you. It reminded me of many important things."

The Follower's sham apology got cut off. He blinked, surprised, then tilted his head and smiled, loose as a cat in sunlight.

"Oh? Important how, and what?"

Adelaide looked at him, gaze still a little unfocused, like it was fixed on a distant shore. "A lot... so much I shouldn't have forgotten."

An empty room, no one there. A head buried in a pillow, nose stinging with tears.

Lower belly cramping, knees about to buckle. Still bowing to a developer screaming in her face, apologizing through grit.

Weight spiking. A body warping within a year. Heartbeats tripping and falling. The fear of not making thirty.

Memories that once made Adelaide shake and gag now spilled out in a calm voice, like rain tapping a window.

She raised her hand, turned her wrist, and looked at skin smooth as carved jade.

The heart misbehaves, sure. But otherwise, this body hasn't wronged me.

The blood of a Sacrifice Domain bearer keeps her from aging. No wrinkles. No calluses gnawing the palms. No long, ugly scar from a jut of rebar.

Oh, and periods. Even that’s nothing now; Blood Magic takes care of it. What a convenient body.

Adelaide spoke with a faint curl of her lips. Her voice never matched the lightness of her words, and finally fell silent.

After a while, she let out a self-mocking snort and lowered her arm.

"Those days taught me hard lessons. I grew pampered and forgot them, even felt they weren’t part of me. Ha, I’ve been stupid, haven’t I, Senior Krus?"

"Oh, what a pitiful girl. Fate is so unfair to you," Krus said, shaking his head, pity draped like velvet over a knife.

"I'm sorry. I hoped the dream would help you recall something fun, cheer you up. Had I known it’d get this heavy, I wouldn’t have done it." He put on deep regret.

Then his tone flipped. He clapped, smile stacking back onto his face like masks. "But it’s fine. Soon... you’ll be free of these nightmares, Jiaqi!"

"Fun things... not none." Adelaide picked up his first half as if she hadn’t heard the rest, voice steady as a thread.

"Hm?"

"Thanks to you, I remembered—over there I was an old net-addict. Life was bitter; I got by watching other people’s highlight reels online.

"From all that lurking on forums, I distilled something useful."

She raised a finger, wearing that remembered grin—hey, let me make you a bowl of beef noodles—and kept going, ignoring his puzzled face.

"I found a crowd on the internet who call themselves the for-the-lulz crowd. They swarm hotspots in packs. They dogpile with spam and mob harassment, slap labels, even dox innocents.

"When someone criticizes them, they say they have no stance. It’s all just for fun. If you take it seriously, you’re 'owning it'." She sighed, eyes soft then sharp. "At first, I thought it was cool—like Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, or a Camus protagonist. Unbound, free, contemptuous of stale rules. Absurdist chic.

"So I called myself one for a while. But guess what—more forums, closer to them, and it felt wrong."

"Oh? What felt off?" Krus still wore that cheerful mask, but his reply lagged, like a drumbeat slipping.

"They aren’t as free as they claim. Most aren’t stance-less. They only become 'for-the-lulz' under things they hate.

"Brush against what they love, and they jump. Their fury can outstrip the straight-laced folks they mock."

After enough of those cases, I figured something out," Adelaide said, voice like a blade wrapped in silk.

"There’s no such creature as they claim. Real nihilists, existentialists, absurdists wrestle the void day and night. No one knows its despair better.

"Yet they keep challenging it, trying to carve a path for human beings through meaninglessness. People like that wouldn’t build their pleasure on smashing the meanings others bled to make.

"The online 'for-the-lulz' crowd borrows the label, hides behind it, puts on a 'no stance' cloak, just to cover a fear buried deep in their gut."

Adelaide’s face burned with righteous disdain. "Those mouths full of pleasure and lulz are cowards. They won’t admit they have stances, loves, hates.

"They’re weaker than people who can publicly own what they love. Isn’t that right, Follower of Pleasure, Senior Krus?"

At those weighted four words—Follower of Pleasure—Krus’s face darkened. The curve at his mouth vanished, but the ironic smile didn’t; it settled on Adelaide’s face instead.

Then she spelled it out, one word at a time.

"Or perhaps I should call you... the Crying Infant, Ma・tis?"

Crying Matis—the legion-tier spell Firefly left the first time she met Adelaide and Mira. If not for Varie’s rescue, at least one of them would’ve died beneath that wicked art.

Now, as she spoke the name again, she wasn’t pointing at the spell itself, but at the story buried behind it.

No one else could hear the layer in her words. Only the man before her caught it. His face clouded at the name, like storm ink bleeding into paper.

"Don’t look like that, Senior Matis. I understand you," Adelaide said, patting her scarlet dance dress, relaxed as if chatting gossip over tea. "When I first saw the story behind that spell, I pitied the child.

"A newborn—neither as promiscuous as his father nor as deranged as his mother. His mind hadn’t yet hardened into a creed that kills like sipping water. Pure as blank paper.

"Yet for an ugly birthmark on his back, the Nuhaman midwife called him 'the devil’s child'..."

How unfair, Adelaide breathed. "Tell me—if a second ago you’d only just spit the amniotic fluid from your throat, and the next you open your eyes to see an adult, face crazed, lunging at you with a gleaming butcher’s knife—what’s the first thought that leaps up?"

The blood-red man said nothing. His eyes narrowed, a warning like a blade under a sleeve. Adelaide didn’t care; she went on.

"Of course: 'I don’t want to die.'"

She shrugged, light as ash. "So I said, I get you. You used your power to kill the tribespeople there, but the wound that maniac gave you was permanent.

"Put any soul in those conditions, and they’d carry that shadow for life."

"...Interesting hypothesis. But I don’t think I understand your point," he said, smile without warmth. Adelaide shrugged again.

"You see—then a lot starts making sense. Why you accelerated the spread of Chaos and destroyed the Nacha Tribe’s habitat, forcing them toward Elf lands.

"Why you used their drifters to butcher the Nuhaman Tribe, and seeded them with Chaos drugs to stoke fear among the Elves.

"Why you posed as a detached onlooker, 'just here for the fun', yet quietly woke the Soul Devourer Sormaidon early.

"Why, knowing what Firefly was doing, you still let her strike us alone.

"Oh, right. You even spared a gifted Nuhaman child during the massacre, trafficked her into the Douglas Family, and let her steal everything that should have been mine..."

"At this point, let’s be frank. You were gambling. Even if Fate kept you from killing me early—the one sent by the gods to end you—you could at least thin my support, right?"

She spread her hands, a wry smile cutting like a crescent. She added how Mira’s little trick almost worked, then continued.

"Sadly for you, though you did a lot under the rule of not attacking me directly, Fate blocked those cheap shots. So you had to take another road.

"You stoked conflict between the Elves and the Nacha Tribe, used that rift to cloak your plot, kept them from uniting against your awakening of Chaos.

"You gifted the Sarman Empire’s royal house with the curse Tessmi’s Lament, so one day you could use it to control Mira and hold her as leverage against me.

"You even ate your most loyal servant, stole her rapid regeneration, to resist the void’s corrosion after you chose to betray the Lord of Chaos.

"Oh, and there’s this."

Adelaide looked down at the umbilical tether. Where it met her lower belly, a faint pink heart pulsed with her breath, bright then dim, like a firefly behind skin.

"I kept wondering why only I react so strongly to Mira’s scent. Ayu, a Blood Mage like me, can smell her too, but never gets as extreme.

"No weak knees, no brain turning to mush..."

She raised her head again, eyes teasing as a cat at dusk. "After meeting you, I get it. It isn’t anything else. It’s Nuhaman blood that triggers it."

You staged an “accident” to implant this sigil in me, a hidden thorn under the skin, and cranked up my sensitivity to Nuhaman blood, didn’t you?

“Oh, just a harmless joke,” the man said, words light as smoke. Adelaide snorted and shook her head, frost snapping on her lips.

Right—just a harmless “joke.” It couldn’t possibly trigger that prophecy—“you’ll die after your first fight with me.”

Yet it guarantees one thing.

When you truly strike at me, in front of you, a fellow Nuhaman, I’ll become a girl with her head flooded and her legs jelly.

I won’t even stand straight, much less focus enough to cast. Tell me I’m wrong.

He didn’t answer; silence clamped down like a lid.

The fear he hid in that earlier dream seeped out of Adelaide’s mouth like cold smoke.

Matis, oh Matis—

You donned a mask called Pleasure, a painted smile over a devoured heart.

You sacrificed everything you cared for, burning altars to lay out your chessboard.

You even betrayed the Lord of Chaos with no way back, cutting the bridge while you crossed.

You stole its boundless chaos, reached for divine prerogative, and claimed the power to reshape souls.

And all this wasn’t for some damn “wedding.”

Nor for a grand, cheerful funeral to please yourself.

You never changed.

Deep down, you’re still that pitiful infant whose first sight on opening his eyes was a knife tip.

Adelaide laughed.

It was a smile of scorn, thin as a blade.

Admit it, Matis.

You’re only trying to live.

You cling to breath like a drowning man to driftwood.