War ground on like a millstone, and neither army had expected the other to be such a barbed thicket.

“Why won’t they pierce!” Alisa yanked her bowstring like a storm-torn harp, and arrows whooshed like a meteor shower through the high blue, streaking straight for foes kilometers away. Yet bolts that could topple city walls hit and vanished into a pitch-dark hollow, like starlight swallowed by a new moon, and no glimmer bled back out.

The proud Minotaurs met their own flint-hard trouble, their axes—reaping moons that usually hewed a man in half—stalled by a single red-haired woman with a pike. Nalitte moved in heavy armor like a rooted mountain; her pike swept like a gust over wheat, and she gave not an inch before horn and blade.

“Beef! Beef! Beef!” The cry rang like dinner bells through smoke, bright and savage.

That other assault chilled the Minotaurs to the marrow, like winter wind under wet fur. Tiger Girl charged with her great club like a kitchen tempest bent on stew, hurling herself forward as if the fire already crackled. Her crushing blows fell like falling stones; even the Minotaurs staggered under them, and their howls for aid tore the air like torn banners.

“Undead, heed my command…” The bandaged girl flicked paper charms like drifting leaves, and her voice told bones to rise like the tide.

The fight burned so hot that her face bandages came loose like melting snow, and a pale, lovely face showed through like moonlight behind thin cloud.

Adventurer-zombies rose row by row at her will, lifting rust-cankered blades like dredged anchors from a grave-sea. They had failed and been swallowed in the Rainbow Sanctuary, sand-buried and forgotten; meeting the living now, the slivers of will in these far-from-home dead wished only to drag others into the same shoreless dusk.

Other low-ranked heroic spirit warriors locked with zombies and skeleton soldiers, ghost steel against bone, a reef-grind between waves of the dead. This was a war of the fallen, no flashing blades to the eye, only the grind of will and the assay of souls like stones in a riverbed.

“It’s getting heavy!” Tiger Girl’s breath smoked like a forge, and pressure pressed on her shoulders like rain-soaked mail.

“Purify!” Kasi exhaled the word like a bell-note, set a small silver cross to her breast like a calm star, and a gold, gentle light poured down over her like dawn mist before spreading out like ripples on a lake.

That light struck undead bodies like boiling water, and rot sloughed off like bark after a fire. Decayed muscle unraveled like rotten rope, and their dying souls finally drifted to a still harbor, granted a summer-long rest.

Gargoyles wheeling overhead didn’t fear that glow, stone-winged and soulless like statues given storm. Made of rock, they were spellborn things without souls, and the light slid from them like rain off slate.

Three meters long, those brutes beat black wings under a necromancer’s death-veil like crows under a thunderhead, demon-faced and stone-skinned. They punched through the saintly glow like spears through silk and arrowed straight for Kasi like hawks stooping.

“Cloud Pigeon!” A woman in blue robes stepped in like rain, just when the sky seemed to split.

She swept her staff, and a water-curtain shimmer pulsed out like a river’s skin; then the sky popped full of plump white pigeons like fresh buns in a steamer. The pigeons beat their wings in file like snow squalls and swarmed the gargoyles; size meant nothing before a blizzard of feathers, and in moments the stone fiends were buried in white like boulders after first snow.

Coo, coo, coo! The battle-sky filled with rising and falling coos like surf on a shingle shore.

“Wan Han, why are you attacking us? We don’t want to be your enemies, like wind against wind—I only want to find my sister’s trail here!” Lia stepped to the center line like a lone reed in a flood and shouted to the gray-green-haired man, her voice a bright ribbon through the din.

Even now, a thread of mercy stayed the golden-haired girl’s hand, a dew-drop trembling on grass; she hated war the way one hates frost on seedlings, because without war her country wouldn’t have vanished overnight like a lantern snuffed.

“You… you’re the girl from back then.” Wan Han lifted a hand like a quiet wall and stopped Alisa’s shot, then spoke to Lia with a dusk-flat tone.

“Yes. I’m Lia, princess of the Principality of Covilailia,” she said, voice steady like a held cup.

His face was the same, yet he felt different to her, like a fog rolling in on a familiar shore. Weight had settled on him like lead; less razor-sharp than before, but more dangerous, like a mist that hides a cliff.

“Hoh? A princess? And so young…” The rough marvel rolled like a low growl from the lines, a ripple through tall grass.

“Wan Han, there’s no real clash of interests between us, like rivers running side by side. As long as you don’t hurt anyone, you can take the Rainbow Sanctuary’s resources.” Her offer lay open like a palm in sunlight.

“So simple, such an earnest little girl…” Wan Han shook his head, his eyes a shallow gray like dead water, showing no joy, no hunger, only stillness. “What I need demands your ruin, like a seed needing the field burned. Or say it this way—it’s also something you desperately want.”

The line struck her like a pebble in a still pond, and Lia paused, ripples widening.

Even with battle raging like thunder around them, Lia felt it clear as a bell: Wan Han bore no personal malice toward her or her companions; his blades swung only toward that thing, like a moth to one flame.

“A th-thing…? What thing?” Her voice trembled like a wire in wind.

“Something that can raise the dead,” Wan Han said with a cold smile that felt like a draft under a door. His muddied gray eyes fixed on Lia like needles, watching her flinch. “No matter how they died, I can bring the one you love most back to life.”

“Re—resurrect!?” The word sliced her heart like a sudden sword, and Lia froze like a deer in moonlight.

Feeling came first, like winter blooming in her chest; then memory surged like spring flood. In her mind, father and mother rose up, the dead king and queen who had always been warm as hearths. Every year on her birthday, they’d gather her with the city’s folk for a feast like a lantern festival, letting everyone share one bowl of joy.

Those days were too bright, like peaches in sun.

If they could come back… but how could that be? Doubt hissed like rain on coals, and Lia’s reason bristled like a hedgehog.

People don’t return from death, she told herself, steadying like a mast. The Church’s so-called resurrection is only a perfect healing, smoke and mirrors in a busy market.

But rumor drifted back like incense. Wan Han had recruited Murder Fiends by granting wishes, one wave after another; Nightmare Rust was just that. That monster’s power was resurrection, dying and returning like a cicada shelling, annoying the Butterfly Snow President and the Body Pillow Lord like mosquitoes at dusk.

If Father and Mother could also…

“No. No.” She shook her head hard, as if to shake rain from a cloak, driving out the whispering demons in her heart like crows from a field.

Even if he can raise the dead, there must be a price, a hook under the bait; history repeats like drumbeats to prove it.

“True resurrection is impossible,” she said, voice aligning like a compass. “By the Heisenberg Principle of Life, you can’t keep body and soul compatible at once. Any ‘resurrection’ either warps the soul like a twisted reed, or turns the body into an undead thing.”

That was the current academic stance, a stone tablet in the square.

Things like heroic spirits and souls could hold a shade of the living mind like a reflection in water, but they lacked substance like mist. Zombies and liches had bodies like empty houses, but their minds twisted so far they were no longer the people you knew, like masks stuck fast.

Some tried magic to revive kin, and the returned loved one went rabid like a dog in summer and ate them; such tales piled up like dead leaves, and ended in tragedy.

Thus necromancy stood beside cloning as taboo, a red line for Inner Ring civilizations, strangled by law like vines on a wall.

“Haha… ordinary means won’t do, of course.” Wan Han let her words fall like peas off a drum and spoke onward, voice soft as fog. “Nightmare Rust is my proudest specimen, but it’s caged by many bars. Ordinary flesh is born with limits, like rings in a tree—division counts, genetic collapse. These are laws carved into life’s grain; twist them too hard, and you get monsters.”

“Exactly! That’s why true resurrection doesn’t exist!” Her answer snapped like a banner in wind.

“I thought so too, until… I found this.” He looked at his already green-stained left hand like a gardener admiring poison ivy, and his smile widened, warping like heat-haze.

“What?” The question fell like a pebble.

“The World Tree Maiden. If the vessel is their body, every limit breaks like frost at sunrise.”

“You— you want to use a World Tree Maiden’s body!” Horror ran through her like ice water.

“Precisely,” he said, voice smooth as oil. “Will you join me, and finish a perfect resurrection like completing a circle?”