“Alright. Cooled off yet?”

Aer’s voice drifted from behind, cool as evening shade over stone.

Ling’s anger ebbed like embers dying, but the ash stayed warm. She’d already sent fifty full-power Magic Cannons, meteors howling, and Lian blocked them like a mountain catching hail.

She crouched, cradling Alicia’s body with winter-still hands. She opened the [Script] like a lacquer box at midnight and tucked the body into its space, like sealing the moon in a jar.

She meant to keep decay away, to hold spring at the edge of a grave until she found a way to call it back.

Then she turned to Aer, who wore a calm smile like a paper lantern in windless air.

“Anything else?”

Her tone bristled like thorny brush; suspicion coiled like a fox behind the curtain. She felt her earlier break had a puppeteer, and the puppet master stood here.

Aer didn’t mind the thorns. Her voice stayed level, still water after rain. “Since you’ve cooled down, I’ll say this. Did you look at the [Script] before stepping in?”

Ling knew this one wasn’t simple; even the [Script] couldn’t show her. But now Aer knew when she had read it, and doubt crawled like a spider sewing threads in her sleeve.

She swallowed it and nodded, a weight settling on a scale.

“Then you saw the letters were different, right?”

Different…?

Oh. Right. They were red then, not the usual ink, bright as fresh blood. Just looking brought pressure, like a hand closing on the throat.

“It was red…”

“Red letters, right?”

Getting cut off irked her like grit in tea, but Aer wasn’t wrong. Ling only nodded, eyes cold as glass.

“Do you know why they were red?”

Annoyance rose like steam; the retort perched on her tongue like a sparrow. She held it. If Aer sulked and clamped shut, she’d waste time on smoke.

“To explain the red, we start with how the [Script] works. It’s not a cheap glimpse of tomorrow. Its heart is communication between worldlines.”

The word caught her like a fishhook. Worldlines—she’d heard it a hundred times in novels and anime, a term used to polish the edge of fate.

But the key was “communicate.” If that was real, she had a hundred bridges to other worlds to seek Alicia’s way back.

Her hope rose like a kite and Aer cut the string.

“I know what you’re thinking. Drop that foolish plan. The [Script] won’t send you to other worlds.”

“It only speaks to other versions of you across worldlines and stores their actions as templates. Almost every worldline lies inside this book.”

“Then it picks the line you’re most likely to repeat and writes it down. That’s why it’s sometimes spot-on and sometimes off, though the hit rate stays high.”

I see. No crossing is a pity. But the mechanism clears the night-knots, the paradoxes that tangled like fishing lines in her head.

“And the red letters?” Her doubt hung like smoke that wouldn’t disperse.

Aer sighed, wind through bamboo. She drew Lian to her side, bent, whispered a few words. Lian nodded and sprinted away, a deer across frost, a hundred meters in a blink.

Aer raised her hand. A blue half-dome blossomed like glass water, covering them both. Inside it, Ling felt a sealed hush, like a bell jar over flame.

Nothing came in; nothing went out; even sound thudded like a bird against glass.

“Why set this up?”

She withdrew her hand from the barrier, dropping the urge to test its hardness, and faced Aer, eyes like flint.

“Just so a certain little one doesn’t get her heart bruised.”

A bad premonition crawled under her skin like distant thunder.

Aer took a die from her sleeve and tossed it. It spun in the air like a white swallow and landed with a red pip glowing on top.

“See? With one face marked ‘one,’ you get one-in-six. Change the rules—give it two ‘ones’—and it’s one-in-three.”

“That’s the [Script]. It gathers templates that fit your future, weighs the odds, low or high, then picks one and shows it. That’s why it’s sometimes right and sometimes wrong.”

She paused, and her sigh turned the air cool. The die flashed, ice-blue, and all six faces became ‘one.’ She tossed it again, and it hung there, a trapped star refusing to fall.

“You get it, right? Now every throw is ‘one.’ The chance is 100%.”

“The [Script] is the same. In every worldline it recorded, Alicia dies at this exact moment. A thing that will happen for sure.”

“And that becomes law. Iron law. Unbreakable.”

Ling froze, a reed in sudden frost. “So… Alicia—”

Aer nodded, and the last hope shattered like porcelain on stone.

“Yes. She’s dead. Completely dead.”