Like warm morning light falling on early spring snow, a soft and singular white wrapped the world.

That pure white split the night. It cloaked every body whose soul the “Greatest Sacrifice” had taken, and rolled outward like mist to every far-flung corner.

The Elf army posted beyond the Empire, Menglan moon-gazing in the desert beside Varie, Anta playing with Copato—everyone on the Sumerland Continent saw it in the same instant, hands pausing mid-task, eyes wandering, bewildered by that flawless color.

At the anomaly’s ground zero, the scene was different.

Adelaide stood still. Before her wasn’t holy light, but a canvas smeared with crimson blood and brown filth.

Shattered stone lay strewn across the field. Blades stuck up from dirt. Limbs and torsos littered the view like a storm of wreckage.

On one great slab of rock sat a person in heavy armor.

“I possess great power.”

The voice came muffled from inside the steel.

“Because of that power, I’m alive.”

Adelaide looked at her. Memory simmered back like embers catching breath.

Yes.

She remembered.

The woman was the lone survivor of this battlefield.

“If we give it up, we can’t protect anything.”

She spoke like she was talking to herself, yet it felt like a question pitched to someone unseen.

“So, why?”

Adelaide heard it and let out a faint sigh.

She bent. From a corpse’s neck, she took a pendant stained red by blood.

She twisted the clasp. It snapped open with a crisp click, revealing a porcelain-white flower hidden within.

It was one of the tokens she, as the King, had bestowed upon her people.

In her rousing vow to counterattack, she’d told them each petal stood for a rebirth granted by God.

So long as the petals remained, they needn’t dread or fear.

They only had to press forward, and their glory would render them immortal.

Ha. What a beautiful lie.

Adelaide looked at the porcelain bloom, a single petal broken, and closed her eyes.

“With all that power, you still couldn’t hold anything in the end, could you.”

The woman in armor didn’t answer.

Her heavy helm turned a fraction toward the horizon.

Then she gave a self-mocking snort and shook her head, rueful as ash in wind.

When Adelaide opened her eyes again, the bloody ruin was gone.

In its place stood a lavish noble courtyard.

There, a white-haired girl crouched beside a woman in a wheelchair, clasping her hand, a dazzling smile on her face like sunlight on clear water.

From afar, they looked tender as family, close enough to share bread and breath.

But the words from the girl’s mouth didn’t match the smile shown to the world.

“I’m so scared.”

No warmth of kinship, no shelter of mutual leaning—her voice trembled like frost on leaves.

“I don’t want to become like her, cast aside by my family.”

As the words fell, Adelaide felt a prickling gaze at the nape of her neck, sharp as a thorn.

She turned and saw two shadows in the mansion window behind her.

Dad, Mom?

No—more than them.

The shadows held more than one face: familiar names she knew and nameless strangers she didn’t.

Men and women. Old and young. Tall and squat. Noble and low.

The warped silhouettes kept changing, but whatever mask they wore, whatever role they took, one thing stayed.

They were all staring at her.

—Why?

—Why can’t you become the her I want?

The words pressed close and cold, like ice breath at her ear, making Adelaide shiver.

But she didn’t look away like she used to. She glared back, gaze iron on iron.

While meeting those frigid eyes head-on, she voiced the question she’d held in her chest a long time.

“Hey, you—why build your everything on their approval?”

The girl tightened her grip around the woman’s hand.

“Because they’re all I have.”

Pain and struggle rasped in her voice, as if saying it drained her to the marrow.

“And you? Why aren’t you afraid?”

Aren’t you afraid they’ll abandon you, like they abandoned Aunt Emily? Leave me alone… leave me rotting in this terrible chair?

She asked it, each word smaller than the last, as if she were speaking a taboo spell.

Adelaide only shrugged.

“Because I found being in a wheelchair, getting pushed around… kinda isn’t bad.”

“Eh…?”

“Because it means someone loves you. Someone cares enough to be your legs, to take you walking through this world.”

She said it, then turned to the window where the shadows stood, and rolled her eyes.

“Sure, life gets inconvenient. But it’s still better than licking their boots like a lapdog every day, right?”

The girl heard and went quiet a long time.

“Your world… it doesn’t only hold them anymore?”

Adelaide smiled and nodded. The white-haired girl watched her, eyes lifting just a little.

Slowly, the fawning smile at her lips faded.

She lowered her face and let a sliver of relief draw an arch.

“I see… then I can too…”

A warm breeze brushed Adelaide’s cheek, and it carried the girl’s last whisper away like petals on wind.

In that spring wind, Adelaide closed her eyes again.

When she opened them, the girl, the woman, and the courtyard were gone.

This time, she stood in a square little room.

A small sofa. A little chair.

A four-year-old laptop. A withered plant in a plastic bottle, like a brittle reed in a jar.

To anyone from the Sumerland Continent, it was a sight from another world.

To her, it was familiar as an old coat.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me?! Zhang, you brain-dead idiot! It’s all your fault, and you still have the nerve to pin it on me?!”

The roar came from the desk. Adelaide turned and saw a sloppily dressed woman in glasses, screaming into her phone like steam whistling from a kettle.

She saw the woman’s break, saw her fingers rattle over the screen, bang out a hundred words, then erase them all, replacing them with a more acceptable reply.

[Yes, Mr. Zhang, I’ll follow up and supervise. It will be resolved before noon tomorrow…]

She hit send and the room fell into a short hush, like a pond after stones sink.

After a while, she scoured her scalp with her nails, muttered “moron,” dragged the keyboard close, reclined her chair to the max, and slumped like a cast net over a barrel.

She pressed the power button. Her mouse clicked to a flower icon on the desktop, muscle memory smooth. She opened the otome game she’d downloaded yesterday.

A takeout box of Xinjiang fried rice noodles sat at the edge of the desk like a half-eaten moon. Blue light from the screen flashed on her glasses, flicker by flicker, pouring someone else’s carefully built fantasy into her irises. It drew a silly giggle from her lips.

“Aah, Lady Haireya the tsundere is so cute… So great, so great. I wanna be the heroine, get stepped on, get water dumped on my head…”

Her mouth spilled messy, shameless lines. She drooled at the blue-haired, dashing villainess like some lust-struck fangirl, every inch of her radiating the frightening zeal of an extreme shut-in.

Except for her eyes.

Her mouth said love, but the gaze behind her lenses was dead, like a specimen soaking in formalin, pupils fixed on a hollow far horizon.

Adelaide knew.

More than anyone, she knew the woman didn’t really like games; she was chasing a narcotic, something to let her flee the day.

Escape. Pain. Then escape again.

That was her life, looped like a snake biting its tail.

This time, Adelaide said nothing.

She watched the shadow cast by the screen crawl over her. She watched the woman squawk, then go still like a lamp snuffed, then shovel two bites of noodles, then hammer the keys in a storm.

She watched for a long time, until the woman nodded off, hands slack around mouse and keyboard.

The game kept running on auto, ignorant of the room beyond, dutifully playing line after line like a wind-up doll.

Click.

Adelaide stepped forward and tapped the Auto icon off. She froze the beautiful, venomous lady on-screen at the moment right before the climax.

That way, when the woman woke, she wouldn’t miss the dramatic beat.

After doing that, Adelaide looked one last time at the sleeping figure in the chair.

Then she closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, what filled her pupils had changed.

No more past. No more self.

Like everyone else on Sumerland, Adelaide finally came to that pure white world.

Unlike the others, a blurred white shadow stood before her against that empty backdrop.

It was a very strange shadow.

It had no sure shape, only the rough hint of limbs and a head. It had no features, just lines that kept shifting across where a face should be. It wouldn’t fit on any meaningful axis; its length and width defied measure. One glance made it seem small as sand; the next made it vast as a skyscraper.

Yet this abstract thing, which seemed unable to match any real being, for some reason didn’t awaken the primal fear of the unknown.

Instead, the instant you saw it, you understood one absolute fact.

The presence before you could only be It.

The shadow that had threaded through the girl’s lives, now finally stood before her.

A voice came from every direction, like rain falling on all roofs.

“I heard your unwilling call, and so I summoned you here.”

It spoke so.

“And in exchange for summoning you, I fulfilled your wish.”

“You begged for power, so I gave you an unmatched body.”

“You longed for approval, so I gave you fame above ten thousand.”

“You came here and, as promised, saved this world. That heart is your wage for resisting chaos.”

“With it, you could have become the world’s only king, above all living things.”

“No one could deny you. No one could betray you.”

“You would never again fear being the ‘loser’ in their mouths.”

The voice was neither man nor woman, and yet you knew it belonged to a living thing. It was neither high nor low, like all beings speaking at once, all voices braided together, and yet with no trait you could separate. It was “ordinary” to an abnormal extreme.

This was a god’s tongue, a primal, transcendent sign. Nothing extra. Nothing missing. It carried to Adelaide a truth in its most fundamental, complete form.

The truth was a simple question.

“Now, when you are about to discard all this—will you not regret it—”

“Stop.”

Adelaide cut off Its “truth.”

“…?”

Lines in the irregular white shadow twisted, like a tilted head, puzzled by the girl’s raised palm.

Adelaide lifted her chin, looked at It, and snorted.

“Seriously? Three flashbacks first, then you drop a chunky block of chuunibyou lines that sound like a third-rate isekai toilet-paper finale? You think I’ll have an epiphany and gulp down your cliché pep talk? What, am I supposed to smile serene and deliver some moving line like, ‘we were never losers to begin with,’ then, like every hot-blooded protagonist, swear I’ll never regret sacrificing for friends and lovers, and force the theme into a neat uplift?”

“And while I’m at it, should I throw in a ‘thank you for supporting me all the way, I wouldn’t be here without you’?”

She rolled her eyes like tossing a stone into a still pond, clicked her tongue loud, and kept going.

“I’ll admit one thing. That clingy dumbass ex-king outside talks out his ass, but he did say one thing right…”

“…Which was?”

“That is, finally… finally getting to see you once, of course I’ve got to…”

She bared her teeth, lifted a hand, flipped Him the bird—then lifted the other hand and flipped Him off again.

Then, jaws clenched like a trap, she spat out the line she’d hoarded for ages, one word at a time.

F—

You—

And—

Your—

Grandpa!!!!

“…?”

“Dumb f***, what’s with the mentor act here?”

“…”

The god grunted, but Adelaide didn’t give Him air to breathe. “He wasn’t wrong about that one thing. You really are begging for a verbal beatdown!” Then she opened fire like a machine gun.

“What gives you the right to play wise teacher here? Huh? Didn’t you engineer all of this, you damp little creep? Now you want to play the good guy? From beginning to end, it’s your circus. Fate this, prophet that—oh right, especially that bull*** ‘prophet.’ I thought the ‘prophet’ was Matis that coward, but think about it—no way. He was about to die, where’d he find time to mail letters to everyone? More like every ‘truth’ he knew was spoon-fed by you. So in the end it’s your solo show, and you cosplayed as the prophet after, to roleplay your own reveal, huh? Wow, I hate to say it, but what are you, a grade-schooler? Dressing up your ego like that, you don’t feel the least bit ashamed? And your so-called ‘fate’ and ‘script’ even came in different editions for different people? What now, you think you’re a DM running an immersive murder-mystery, and you get to pull narrative tricks? Ever thought about the players you treated like NPCs, how they suffered—”

She started counting on her fingers, flinging grievances like pebbles into a storm: the ‘peak’ parents you assigned just to grind her, the rusty scissors staged at the birthday banquet, the botched soul-fusion tech that made her eat dirt daily, and the whole people you turned into slaves and tragedy, just to deliver Mira to her side. Ten fingers weren’t enough; each finger rose and fell again and again until her reservoir of complaints finally drained. Her face heated like iron on coals; the more she vented, the hotter she got, until she ended up screaming at Him, unreserved.

“So yeah, f*** this! You arrogant, fate-fondling, dog*** dumb*** of a brain-dead god! Hear me? That’s right, I’m calling you a ghost-white p***k, you little b******, you s***-for-brains, you mongrel! And I’m not just gonna curse you, I’m going to burn your heart! No matter what, I’m burning it! Even if you offer some other solution now, I’m still burning it! Don’t ask why. Because you f***ing deserve it! That’s right, crawl back to your cozy little heaven closet and sob in secret! You love hiding up there, peeping at our pain and getting off on it, don’t you, you home-wrecking side piece!”

“…”

He listened, silent as snow on a grave.

Only when Adelaide ran out of new vocabulary and had to pause did that neither-male-nor-female, neither-old-nor-young voice return.

“Feel better?”

“Not really. But I’m done,” Adelaide said with an eye roll sharp as a knife.

“Good.”

“Good my ass. I still won’t thank you.”

He didn’t flinch at the blasphemy. The white shadow just nodded, and continued.

“You passed my final test.”

“…What the hell?”

“The test of whether you qualify to wield the rights of my heart. You passed.”

“Hah? Even now you’ve got to perch up high and act cool.” Adelaide’s eye twitched. She almost threw up another middle finger, but held back, clicking her tongue in disgust instead.

“As expected. You’re a god with bad taste beyond saving.”

For some reason, at that, the blank face of the white shadow bent with a curve, and the flat voice picked up a hint of laughter.

“A mean woman, paired with a god of mean tastes. Everything in its proper place, isn’t it?”

“Proper my ass!”

“In any case, my power. Take it.”

“Tch! Like I’d need your permission to use it!”

Pricked by His attitude, Adelaide felt a fresh wave of snark rising. The white shadow seemed unwilling to endure another barrage and began to fade.

But before vanishing, as if remembering something, He spoke again.

“And though you say I toy with fate, there are two I cannot move. One is Chaos. The other is you—like Chaos, you descended from a higher plane.”

“Hah? Trying to whitewash yourself at the end? Useless. I said I won’t thank you.”

“You don’t need to thank me. But you have a right to know.”

He shook His head. His voice receded like tide, leaving only meaning, clear as a bell.

—I want to congratulate you.

—It wasn’t fate. Your decisions earned you this Happy Ending.

—So be proud of yourself.

—You will go on in happiness.

—This is the reward you’ve earned.

This time Adelaide didn’t shoot back. She froze for a heartbeat.

A cool touch brushed her cheek like night dew. She blinked, swiped a hand, and felt the wet.

When she looked up again, the white shadow was gone. The pure white space began to fracture like ice.

“What is this…”

Great, playing the good guy now. Way too late.

She bit her lip, thought for a moment, then curled her mouth in a small, self-mocking smile.

And then, she returned to reality.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump…

The Sacred Heart’s eternal pumping throbbed in her palm, and a flood of mana radiated out, brightening the world like dawn.

Time seemed to slow, thick as honey.

She saw crimson lines creep over the Sacred Heart’s flawless white surface. She saw Mira reaching toward her. She saw Richard VI’s soul like black fog clutch his face and loose a stretched, agonized howl.

All of it because she had just crushed the sacrifice array.

God-tier mana was burning in her hand like a star.

And the effect of sacrificing it boiled down to a single word.

—Purification.

Yes. Extreme purification.

Sacrificing it wouldn’t give Adelaide godly speed or strength. It wouldn’t grant her some power to cast a transcendent spell.

But unlike Savia Rose, a byproduct charged by the World Tree, the Sacred Heart was literally part of a god’s body, the purest thing under this sky.

And that was precisely what Adelaide needed now.

Granted, Richard VI wielded near-divine authority. Even if a god descended, they might not gain much against him. But that didn’t mean he had no fatal flaw.

As he’d bragged, Mira herself was his weak point.

He was strong, but his strength wasn’t rooted in himself. It was stored inside Mira. Their link, though, rested on another system entirely—the bloodline link modified by Tessmi’s Lament.

In other words, his control over that power sat on a curse. A strong curse, but not god-tier.

That was why Adelaide chose to sacrifice the Sacred Heart.

As part of a god, the Sacred Heart might not crush the millions of souls inside him. But against any curse in this world, it was the perfect antidote. The best. Period.

With a sacrifice that pure, amplified by Adelaide’s Sacrifice Domain, even a genius like Matis the Follower of Pleasure couldn’t resist.

In a blink, the black fog that had coiled tight around Mira was torn by pure white light. Richard VI howled as he was ripped apart, peeled off Mira like rotten bark.

At the same time, a thousand thousand souls spilled through the rifts the Sacred Heart had ripped open, raising a silent, joyful cheer.

It was the sound of freedom. It was the sound that marked the final ruin of Richard VI’s plot.

And yet, inside that chorus of release, two voices rang discordant.

One was Richard VI himself, mid-purification, gnawed by fear. Decades of scheming, everything sacrificed, only to end like this—his earlier swagger gutted, leaving only rage and pain as he watched his prize turn to ash.

That was normal. His gain stood against all living things. When the latter rejoice, he must despair.

Even so, he wasn’t the only off-note.

“Sis… why…”

Mira strained to reach Adelaide, every inch an effort, lips moving on a tremble.

First the tips of her hair, then the roots—those gold strands forced on her were draining away, revealing her true color. A black like a pearl gleaming in the dark.

Unlike with Savia Rose, this time Tessmi’s Lament wasn’t just suppressed. It was erased, utterly and everywhere, by the Sacred Heart’s white light.

The curse that had tormented her for nearly ten years was finally being lifted. Healthy color was returning to her cheeks like sunrise. But in her lovely green eyes there was no relief. Only confusion and loss.

“Why…”

She kept asking, chasing an answer like a child chasing fireflies.

It wasn’t just Richard VI whose plan had failed.

Hers had too.

Everything she owed should have been repaid today. But the very person she wanted to atone to had rejected her, again.

If godlike power wasn’t enough to pay the debt—then what could she do?

She didn’t know.

So she asked the question again and again.

Why?

Why refuse this power?

The one she asked only smiled and shook her head.

Adelaide held the heart, feeling its pulse weaken, its weight thinning in her palm like mist.

But it wasn’t only the Sacred Heart losing weight. Her own heart felt hollowed too.

So stifling. So hard to breathe.

Her chest felt pressed under ten boulders. Her face, unlike Mira’s blooming health, was draining of color fast.

She could feel her blood being drawn out and fed into the sacrifice array, a river turning to thread.

Sacrificing a god’s flesh wasn’t a free feast stolen clean.

Just keeping the array stable devoured a fortune of her blood—the “flowing red gold” they praised.

And this time, the heart that could have remade her blood was in her own hand, fading to nothing.

Adelaide knew. When the sacrifice ended, even in the best case, she’d be back where she started the day she woke—sitting in a wheelchair.

Even so, she didn’t regret it.

Why?

The answer was the same as the answer to Mira’s question.

Because…

“We said it… a big sister is the one who becomes her little sister’s hero…”

With her words, the Sacred Heart beat one last time. Gentle white light rose again, drowning the world like snowfall.

When it receded, it looked as if nothing had happened.

The underground chamber held its old places. Dust lay thick on the devices, undisturbed.

Oh, no. Not quite nothing.

Not far behind Mira, a puddle of tar-black ooze spread across the stone—slime-shaped, but so vile it made even the legendary Plasma Slime look cute by contrast.

It squirmed in the most twisted, wrong way, like a nest of worms under bark, and it made a sound that wasn’t human or ghost.

“N-no… impossible! How could I—”

The voice cut off.

A silver sword stabbed through it, pinning it to the floor like a nail through a beetle.

Above it, an ancient flintlock aimed down; the silver-white barrel still glinted in the dim, like moonlight on steel.

Seeing that flintlock’s shape, the black liquid couldn’t help but whisper its name.

“Náma—Judgment…?”

It was the holy gun every imperial citizen knew, the emblem of the Supreme Tribunal’s authority; each time the Firestone inside sparked, a dread evil fell like a star.

And now, a silver-haired girl held it one-handed, hovering it over her head like a raised verdict.

Realization hit the black liquid; it shrieked and thrashed again, wild as a netted eel.

“No, no no, after all I did—no way, no way I die here—”

—Bang!

Its words ended with a thunderclap that shook dust like ash from a hearth.

Even if Jiaqi never reached the ending in that other world, this world still faithfully replayed the final line of the game called Holywell Academy.

—The evil awakened by a colossal ritual circle fell at last beneath the heroine’s holy gun.

The “script” ended there.

But this world’s time didn’t stop.

With the gunshot, other sounds stirred in the basement.

One was the dull thud of a body meeting stone, heavy as a sandbag.

The next, a cry that cut like a torn string.

“Sis!”

Adelaide crumpled; Mira sprinted and caught her, folding her into her arms like shelter in a storm.

Despair hit first; even through cloth, the chill of her skin seeped into Mira’s palms like winter river water.

“Sis, sis… sis, don’t— sob… sis, don’t die…”

In that instant, time felt like it flowed backward, back to the night of her fourteenth birthday.

Back then, she held her sister’s cold body the same way, weeping, calling again and again into an empty sky, begging her not to die.

Only this time, the sorrow didn’t last.

A cool hand brushed away Mira’s tears, light as a leaf.

“Huh…?”

“Oh, come on… I’m not dead. Why’re you crying like that?”

No hospital bed, no years of bitter waiting—Adelaide had already opened her eyes.

Mira stared wide, then her brows knit tight; like a girl of fourteen again, she wailed even louder.

“Sis, sis… sis, sis, siiis—waaah!”

She buried her face against Adelaide’s chest, sobbing, while Adelaide could only rub her hair with a helpless, warm smile.

“I—I’m sorry. This time I… I didn’t do anything again…!”

Hearing her self-blame, Adelaide let out a small sigh, wind through grass.

“Nope. Mira saved my life again. Same as last time.”

“Huh?” Mira blinked, lifted her face, and saw Adelaide pull something from the torn fabric at her chest.

It was a necklace set with rubies.

“Bloodcloud Stone…?”

“Yeah. Remember? One of the gifts you brought me from Sanda. Anta made it by hand, so I kept it on me for the memory… Ha, I didn’t think it’d literally save my life.”

As she said, the gem had lost its vivid red; a nasty crack split it down the middle, an ugly wound no modern-art angle could dress up.

But that very crack was the sign the Bloodcloud Stone had done its work.

As Mira once told her, that Sanda-born mineral boosts blood-making, and when crushed it can pull a bleeding patient back from the brink.

Its effect is much weaker on a bearer of the Sacrifice Domain, but while her blood was being siphoned for the offering, that strange property barely kept Adelaide alive when her Sacred Heart couldn’t make blood.

Mira stared at the necklace for a long beat, as if the gift she’d given with other intentions turning crucial didn’t feel real—and it gave her no pride at all.

Instead, once she knew her sister wasn’t in danger, she tossed her own credit aside and started sniffling again.

“Why… why did you say those things! Idiot, idiot, idiot!”

“Ow—getting scolded?!”

Tears streaming, Mira thumped Adelaide with tiny fists, then pressed her face to her chest again and cried, “Saying such self-degrading things in front of everyone means… you can’t be king anymore!”

Adelaide hemmed and hawed, scratched her head, and finally spoke, troubled as a cat in rain.

“Well… how do I put it… I thought it over and realized, if I can’t use this so-called royal power to spoil my little sister, then being king isn’t worth it—ow ow, stop! I’m wrong, I’m wrong!”

“Idiot!!!”

Two “idiots” in one day—new record since they made up, right?

Even so, Adelaide’s face held not a trace of gloom. She just kept stroking Mira’s hair, slow as smoothing silk.

She lifted a lock and saw that black, exactly the same as in her memories; she smiled.

Every muscle ached, and her head and ears hummed like a hive, but—

Her mood was bright as morning after rain.

Because everything before her eyes now was all she’d ever wanted.