"...After that, I never saw him again."
Anna walked together with Yu Yi across the Cangyan Xianzhou. Darkness pressed in around them, yet it couldn't make either of them lose their way.
After several days of interstellar roaming, the two of them had rushed and rushed—finally arriving right as the celebration began.
And through the constant outpouring along the way, Anna had more or less understood the experiences this Ranger before her had lived through.
But there was still one thing she didn't quite get.
"The time you spent together, put next to a long-life species, it's basically just a blink—yet Yu Yi, you searched for so long..."
Anna's tone turned teasing. "Was he really handsome or something?"
"Handsome...?" Yu Yi tried to recall that face from her mind, only to realize that after so long, it had already blurred.
"Then why would you search for so long, Yu Yi?"
Even without him, Yu Yi could've lived just fine on her own, given her status.
Her master's dying request had turned into empty talk the moment that person disappeared.
So why... why did Yu Yi keep searching for him for so long?
"Could it be that this is the Xianzhou spirit?" Anna was genuinely curious.
They said the Xianzhou Alliance, sailing through the cosmos, practiced the spirit of the gentleman.
A promise made would be carried out with all one's strength, even if it was a very, very small thing.
Could it be Yu Yi was just living out that Xianzhou spirit, and that was why she kept searching?
"This can't really be called the Xianzhou spirit. I just... learned what he did behind the scenes."
As the darkness fell again, Yu Yi couldn't help but think back to those days...
Back then, everyone had just escaped from inside the stomach. Still shaken, they also carried a trace of joy.
Now they no longer had to worry about a life-or-death crisis. From the bottom of their hearts, they felt relieved.
And it was right then that they discovered—among the foxes who had already lost human form—there was one existence similar to Bolue.
Even though they were in beast form, they could keep their mind. Though very young, they could suppress every fox that had fallen into a rampage.
With surprise piled on surprise, everyone felt the future would only keep moving toward a brighter tomorrow.
"Then Anna, have you ever thought about where it was we escaped to?" Yu Yi asked her another question—one that was also the reason she'd been galloping across the Galaxy in search of him.
Anna furrowed her brow, thinking through the answer.
"You, Cangyan, broke free from Rahu's belly, so the place you were in should've been... beside Rahu."
"That's right. After we came out, we were right next to Rahu. So have you ever thought about why Rahu swallowed us in the first place?"
"That was because the Denizens of the Abundance activated it, so..."
Halfway through, Anna abruptly shut her mouth.
Right—wasn't the predecessor of Cangyan, the Cangcheng, swallowed into Rahu's stomach because the Denizens of the Abundance had activated Rahu?
And now that Cangyan had burst out from Rahu's belly, what it should face would be...
"That's right. Those Abundance wretches who attacked the Cangcheng."
Yu Yi still remembered that scene—those things that, after the Heaven-Mending Creation boulder dispersed, once again blocked the starry sky before their eyes.
The Abundance branches on their bodies were painfully obvious, and those traits spoke of their identity all the same.
They were also people who had received an Abundance blessing—enemies standing opposite the Xianzhou Alliance.
After breaking free from Rahu's belly, they were surrounded by those things again.
Clearly everything had just started to flourish. Clearly they no longer needed to worry about survival.
Yet the threat pressed in again.
And right at that moment...
BOOOOM!
A streak of light split the pitch-black apart, as if it cleaved chaos, as if it cut the Galaxy open.
Seeing that, Anna couldn't help gaping in shock.
Was this the ritual of Heaven-Mending Creation?
So cool!
And Yu Yi remembered clearly—back then, her expression had looked just like Anna's...
...
After Feng Liqi escaped, she thought everything was finally over, only to find herself surrounded by those things without even realizing it.
And then, a piercing brightness slashed down again, cutting countless wretches to pieces.
After the thing that covered the starlight was torn apart by the wretch bearing Sora's face, he chose to cover their retreat alone.
"Feng Liqi, hurry and take them—get far away from here!"
Back then, his figure was dazzlingly bright, axe in hand, facing an endless tide of wretches.
"From the start until now, you've already spent too much strength. You're not their match at all!"
And besides, these things were insanely annoying—you couldn't kill them for good. With Mount Buzhou gone, all of Cangyan was at a disadvantage against them.
"But..."
Aren't you the same?
But before Feng Liqi could say it, he cut her off outright!
"There's no 'but'! Hurry and take them and leave. I'll bring up the rear!"
No one knew—within that desperate atmosphere—how many people would remember a single sentence like that.
At any rate, those old-timers from Cangyan who'd taken part in that battle, when they were dying, what they wanted most was to see the guy who said those words show his face in front of them one more time.
Because he really did bring up the rear...
Three great Path powers gathered on his body and burst into the most dazzling radiance!
The HUNT's power made him unstoppable. The ABUNDANCE's power let him replenish himself from the bodies of the wretches he cut down.
And FINALITY let him accelerate and slow brief stretches of time.
This guy—by sheer force of one person—carved a passage straight through the Cangyan that Feng Liqi had wrapped up and protected.
Along the way, corpses floated everywhere. It was chilling.
If anyone had seen that scene back then, it would've left them with the deepest nightmare.
And Feng Liqi didn't dare look back, pouring all her strength into wrapping everyone up, pushing relentlessly outward.
Only when the sounds of killing and shouting around her quieted did she begin paying attention to changes in the surroundings.
That was when she realized—the Abundance wretches had already surrounded that guy, determined to kill him.
These wretches were bold enough to clash head-on with the Xianzhou Alliance. Roaming the cosmos, they were naturally arrogant to the bone.
And now some guy was actually provoking them all by himself—then they would make him understand what cruelty meant!
"You think you can hold us back alone?"
The wretch shaped like an ox—red-bodied, with a human face and horse feet, its cry like a baby's wail—stared dead at Sora, trapped in the center.
They were the Denizens of the Abundance that dared to launch an assault on the Xianzhou Alliance: the Jishu.
Their race had originally been normal primate humans, but after receiving an Abundance blessing, they chose to indulge in it and fall into it.
Relying on their Abundance blessing, they believed they could flourish forever across the universe, constantly waging Abundance wars.
They'd even used many Abundance blessings to make all kinds of weapons.
Rahu was one of them.
And precisely because of that, the Jishu's pride could not be trampled.
So facing this guy, they wouldn't hold back in the slightest!
"Once we deal with you, we'll just chase down that food that escaped, and stuff it back into Rahu's stomach."
"Your struggling ends here!"
Facing the things closing in around him, Sora smiled.
"Is that so?"
Though ten thousand lives wrapped around him, Sora still stood alone in the universe.
"Of course. No matter how much you talk, you can't possibly escape this place!"
The Jishu numbered in the tens of thousands—Sora, by himself, had no way out!
This guy was already on a dead end road. There was no chance of turning it around!
Facing them, Sora only smiled, tightening his grip on the axe.
...
By the time Feng Liqi and the others contacted the Xianzhou Alliance and countless Cloud Knights were dispatched to assist, the fighting here had long since ended.
The countless wrecks left behind spoke to the battle's ferocity.
Those dead Abundance wretches were like ants, completely filling an entire star system.
And on those wretches, the wounds left behind weren't just from blades and sword-cuts—there were all kinds of gunfire and explosions too.
The truth of it all only surfaced when the Alliance reached a planet and encountered a Ranger temporarily stuck there due to ship trouble.
From their mouth, they learned the full picture.
The Jishu—one of the top-tier Abundance clans that even the Alliance found hard to swallow—had, in this battle, suffered casualties on a massive scale.
Nearly three-fifths of their people had been left here for good. Even their pride, their Abundance weapon, had been damaged.
You could say the Jishu, that race which used to run wild across the Galaxy, had its strength chopped in half in one stroke.
No—
Calling it chopped in half wasn't right. It was more like getting your knees cut off.
After this battle, if the Jishu wanted to recover their former strength, they'd probably need several hundred years of lying low, growing quietly, recuperating.
But that was impossible. The Xianzhou Alliance would never give up a chance to kick a drowning dog.
So that once-glorious race could be said to have been thoroughly crippled.
And all of that was only because they'd provoked one certain guy.
"Where is he? Where'd he go?!"
But the women from Cangyan didn't care about any of that. All they wanted was to know where he was.
Unfortunately, in the end, all they got was a disappointing answer.
...
"We act without asking about the road ahead—but he really did fight to the very end."
The Ranger shook their head, indicating they didn't know where that person had gone.
But as they said it, a faint smile appeared on their face.
"Still... that guy really was something."
The reason this Ranger remembered him so vividly was because that guy kept talking while chopping wretches down.
"If you're wretches, then I'll be Covered-in-Golden-Fur and suppress you!"
"At the end of wretches, who dares claim the peak! Once you see golden fur, the Dao collapses to nothing!"
"Heh-heh-heh, I'm telling you, Jishu, you've got the makings of an Emanator! Perfect—if you're not an Emanator I don't kick you. Come on, let me kick you a couple times!"
As for why he didn't use red fur?
Probably because someone didn't want their late years to really turn ominous.
And just those two lines made countless wretch groups over the next few hundred years go cold and start shaking the moment they heard them—terrified that the guy who called himself Covered-in-Golden-Fur would show up right next to them.
I mean, haven't you seen how glorious the Jishu once were, and how miserably they lived after they messed with him?
And a few hundred years after that battle, the Jishu were wiped out in one fell swoop when the Xianzhou Alliance found an opening.
Aside from a few scattered survivors—and the whereabouts of the Abundance weapon Rahu being unknown—everyone else was exterminated.
In the campaign to eradicate the Jishu, those figures wreathed in Heliobus fire were even more astonishing.
And so, the Cangyan Xianzhou—the Xianzhou rebuilt from ruin—made its name known across the cosmos.
And those two lines, too—after the Jishu's fall—made countless people on Cangyan step onto the path of the Galaxy Rangers.
Only... even when many reached the end of their lives, they still never saw that guy again.
...
"Phew~"
Yu Yi let out a breath, pushing the memories welling up in her heart back down.
She was no longer the youth she'd once been—she'd matured a thousand times over.
Not to mention, after living through several hundred years, she'd long since grown used to endings like this.
So every few years, she came back to attend the Heaven-Mending Creation ritual, treating it as a way to mourn that guy who broke his promise.
Catch up with old friends over these days, see whether the Fearless General was still the same as always.
Go look at the fox who kept staring at the moon, and go with her to that grave site to burn some joss paper.
Then go meet that Dragon Lord who always wandered around every scenic spot, and see if she'd cooked up some brand-new "history" again.
Those old friends were the threads that tugged Yu Yi along—making her come meet them like clockwork every few years.
And now that the time had come again, she shouldn't be so heavy-hearted.
"Miss Anna, this festival will last a while. So relax and enjoy yourself here on Cangyan—put all expenses on my tab."
Reaching the edge of the celebration grounds, Yu Yi invited Anna, "While you're at it, you can also look around during the festival for people from the Federation of Hope."
She naturally hadn't forgotten why Anna had traveled with her in the first place.
"Thank you, Yu Yi."
Anna thanked her, then entered the festival crowd together with her guard.
Seeing that, Yu Yi also chose to go meet her old friends.
The ritual's opening ceremony was still going on.
The day had only just opened up—there weren't many places she could go yet.
But since she'd come to this edge, there was definitely someone in one place.
Following her memory, Yu Yi kept walking, until she finally saw the fox-eared woman sitting on the ground.
She sat there in front of a pit, her eyes full of countless memories.
The pit in front of her was already overgrown with green grass, and in the very center, a wooden sword carved from wood was stuck into the earth.
To Ahri, this was the place most worth missing.
"Yu Yi, I thought you weren't coming back this year."
Yu Yi's arrival, of course, didn't slip past her senses.
"I was getting ready to come back, and just happened to hear the dormant Rangers were gathering, so I spent some time on it."
"And? How'd it go?"
"Same as always."
Same—no results at all.
Yu Yi came to Ahri's side, and together they looked at this pit that was like a meteor crater.
For this outcome, Ahri had long since gotten used to it, so she wasn't surprised in the least.
She just chatted with Yu Yi about little everyday things, and listened to what she'd seen out there.
A Ranger's life wasn't only romance—it was also stuffed full of all kinds of stories.
Like how Yu Yi once ran into a guy who tried to rope her into a pyramid scheme: "Wanna come worship our True Dragon in the Mirror?"
He claimed that as long as you believed in that true crimson dragon inside the mirror, you could be healed—your body's injuries mended.
"So I looked it up, and—hey—it's actually a faith movement that only sprang up in the last few months. No idea how they made up some red dragon in a mirror."
Yu Yi told stories from the universe, and some of them even made Ahri smile in spite of herself.
That feeling was like being back in those nights long ago—when it was Ahri, Yu Yi, and that person together.
And then their exchange stopped, because something outside suddenly changed.
That sky-canopy which had been split by a streak of light earlier suddenly became unstable.
Black-and-white flashes flickered nonstop, draping the entire festival in an eerie atmosphere.
"Did something go wrong on Feng Liqi's side?"
They both lifted their gaze to the heavens, only to find that silhouette still standing in the sky.
So if Feng Liqi was fine, why had this sudden change happened?
Just then, Ahri's phone rang, and a Foxian face appeared on the screen.
"Reporting, Commander—our Observatory detected a special object that suddenly appeared, and it's falling toward Cangyan!"
"A special object? What is it?" Ahri pressed urgently.
The Heaven-Mending Creation ritual was Cangyan's most special celebration—also the one that absolutely could not be disturbed.
Even the Xianzhou Alliance knew not to meddle with Cangyan's affairs during this period.
So what was this "special object" that suddenly appeared?
"We don't know. But we can confirm it's been captured by our Xianzhou's gravity, so it's falling toward the Xianzhou!"
"Captured by the Xianzhou's gravity... could it be a meteor?" Yu Yi voiced a guess, but it was quickly shot down.
"If it were a meteor, how could they call it a special object?"
A meteor falling was something every planet in the universe would run into—there was no way it counted as special!
So what was falling?
Ahri and Yu Yi traded a look—both could see the calm in the other's eyes.
Then the two of them moved together toward the place that could observe it.
...
The Federation of Hope was in the middle of the festival right now, but Titania seemed to sense something and turned her eyes toward the sky.
"This familiar feeling..."
Her expression was off, because just now she'd felt something intensely familiar.
"What is it?"
"I feel like I sensed that Sora guy... but it also feels like something's not right."
That line made everyone nearby show shocked expressions.
"Sora?!"
"Yeah. Over there—and it's coming toward us fast."
Titania pointed to a corner of the sky, and that direction was exactly where Ahri and Yu Yi were heading.
"Then what are we waiting for? Let's go together."
Robin was the first to start walking that way.
After hearing what Titania said, staying at this festival any longer would only feel like torture.
Maybe Sora was coming back—if it was true, of course they had to be the first to go greet him.
So the Federation of Hope group crowded together and headed that way.
...
"Princess, this thing's really good—here, try it!"
"Eat it yourself. I'm not hungry."
"No way. I promised Her Majesty that when we go back, I'll make sure you gain five pounds! Come on, open up—ah~"
Anna accepted Ouja's feeding helplessly.
When there were outsiders around, Ouja was perfectly normal, but the moment it was just the two of them alone as master and servant, Ouja would never sit still.
But it was all Ouja's goodwill, so Anna didn't say much.
Besides, it really did taste pretty good. When they got back, she'd have the kitchen make some.
As Anna chewed, she suddenly felt the thing at her neck giving off a faint warmth.
Huh?
Confused, she took out the warm object—it was a weathered bullet.
This was the special token she'd received, something the guardian deity had specifically handed her when she left.
Even though she couldn't understand the guardian deity's roars, from all those exaggerated gestures, she could more or less grasp the meaning.
In other words: once this thing reacted, it meant its partner (Sora) was nearby.
Anna had worn this bullet for a long time without it ever reacting—yet now it was warm!
So that meant Sora was close?
Anna's gaze swept across the surrounding crowd, but she didn't find any familiar figure.
Or rather, compared to that—everyone around her was looking up at the sky right now.
Because far off at the distant horizon, a flaming meteor streaked through the darkness.
Anna's attention locked onto that meteor, and as it drew closer, the warmth at her neck grew even more obvious.
Could it be...?
Anna jumped straight off the stone bench. "Ouja, let's go."
"Princess, what is it?" Ouja sounded confused.
"That way might be the person we're looking for!"
Master and servant headed toward that direction as well.
...
That flaming meteor pulled every gaze at the festival over to it.
The Heaven-Mending Creation ritual never said anything about something like this happening—what was going on?
"Could it be an enemy invasion?"
But if enemies had invaded, why hadn't any alarm sounded?
Everyone was full of questions, but soon people relaxed.
Because that flashing silhouette had already gone to meet it.
"Our General's gone up there, so there's no way this thing can stir up any—"
Before the words "storm" could leave his mouth, the speaker froze.
In the sky, the General met that flaming meteor head-on—and then there was no "then."
Their General got smashed by the flaming meteor... and fell with it.
"That idiot—what the hell is she doing?!"
Jin Xing felt something was very wrong, and rushed over that way.
"Cangyan is in trouble. We're all Xianzhou generals—how about we go lend a hand together?" Jing Yuan said with a smile to Feixiao.
"Sure. Perfect time to test the Fearless General's skills!" Feixiao grinned, breaking into a bright, hearty smile.
But when the two generals arrived, plenty of people had already gathered here.
Strands of high heat drifted from ahead, making it clear: this was where the flaming meteor had crashed.
And when Ahri arrived, on the nearby cliff face, a butt was sticking out.
By her senses, she understood immediately whose butt it was—
Feng Liqi, who currently held Cangyan.
And at the same time, the scene in front of her made her hallucinate back to something she'd experienced with a phone long ago.
When she'd gone with Sora to meet Feng Liqi before, wasn't it like this too? Half her butt hanging out.
But now Feng Liqi was extraordinary—who could make her end up like this?!
Carrying that confusion, Ahri stepped to the edge of the crater and looked down.
Her pupils shrank involuntarily, proof of the massive shock she'd taken.
Because lying in the crater was a person, and at this very moment, he seemed to have fallen into sleep.
That face—she could never forget it.
"Sora... Big brother?"
She stood at the crater's edge, just like their first meeting.
Only back then, the young Foxian girl had seen a sword—and this time, it was an unconscious man.
At the same time, a circle of people had already gathered around them.
By the time Jing Yuan and Feixiao arrived, the atmosphere at the crater's edge had turned extremely strange.
"Looks like the two of us generals came at the wrong time," Jing Yuan said, catching the scent of trouble.
---
T/N: SORAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!