The hand Welt had wrapped around the grip of his gun froze inside the pocket of his trench coat.
He drew in a deep breath.
His gaze swept back and forth several times between Su Yu, who stood blocking his path, and Sirin, who still glared menacingly from behind.
Reason told him that this man called Su Yu, with his clear eyes and lucid logic, showed absolutely no sign of having his mind controlled by the Herrscher of the Void.
And that rumored "madwoman," Mobius, was at this moment wearing an expression of pure amusement, as though enjoying a good show.
It was a bizarre iron triangle, yet one that somehow maintained a delicate balance.
In the end, Welt did not draw his gun.
He pulled his hand from his pocket, fell silent for a long moment, then slowly nodded.
"Fine."
Three minutes later.
A small lounge area just outside the Mobius Laboratory.
There were none of the bone-chilling dissection tables or flickering red lights from inside here—only a few not-particularly-spacious modular sofas and a frosted-glass coffee table.
Su Yu and Sirin sat on the long sofa.
Sirin still maintained her keep-away posture, her legs curled up on the sofa, her arms hugging her knees, like a cat ready to bare its claws at any moment, watching the man across from her warily.
Welt sat in a single armchair, his hands crossed atop his knees, his spine held perfectly straight.
Mobius, for her part, did not sit. Holding a cup of eerily green nutrient fluid, she leaned at an angle against the incubator beside her, those serpentine eyes sweeping back and forth across the three of them, an undisguised, spectator's cold smile hanging at the corner of her mouth.
Su Yu drew a deep breath and broke the suffocating silence.
He didn't beat around the bush. Instead he recounted everything that had happened over this period of time, spilling it all out like beans from a jar.
From picking up a frail Kiana in the stairwell that rainy night, to being forced to make a game to raise her "cognition" so she could survive stably in this world.
When he came to that "System" that only he could see, Su Yu's voice paused.
He turned his head and looked at Mobius, who was leaning against the machine.
"Doctor, what I just said... and what I'm about to say—I hope you can keep it confidential."
"Confidential?"
Mobius looked as though she'd heard some enormous joke. She rolled her eyes without the slightest restraint and let out a scoffing laugh.
"Do you take me for one of those idiots who love to chatter away on academic forums all day?" She swirled the nutrient fluid in her hand. "My mouth is far tighter than you imagine, little lab rat.
"An ultimate research project this interesting, this contrary to common sense—how could I possibly be foolish enough to let someone else in for a slice of the pie?"
With this promise from Mobius, as good as a venomous oath, Su Yu finally set his heart at ease.
He told Welt the System's true purpose: to resurrect the Kiana who had already died on this world's timeline.
Welt listened quietly.
As Su Yu's account went on, the brow behind those black-framed glasses knit tighter and tighter.
A System? Raising cognition to stabilize existence? Making a game to resurrect a girl who had shot herself dead in an IF-line?
Absurd.
It sounded ten thousand times more absurd than his own decade-long insistence on building Wotan.
If someone were to pull a random person off the street to hear all this, they would absolutely take Su Yu for some severe chuunibyou patient who'd escaped from a mental hospital.
And yet, Welt did not laugh, nor did he refute it.
He slowly lifted his eyes and looked at the white-haired girl sitting beside Su Yu—her face full of impatience, yet radiating a terrifying pressure that was all too real.
The Herrscher of the Void, Sirin.
That she could sit here at all was the most ironclad proof of Su Yu's preposterous words.
That "delusion" about a Honkai invasion he'd clung to for these ten years—in the eyes of his colleagues, wasn't it just as laughable, just as insane?
This young man before him was not lying. Everything he said was true.
Within this seemingly peaceful, ordinary world, there truly lay hidden a despair and a struggle that spanned dimensions.
"You said just now..."
Welt's voice was somewhat hoarse. He had keenly caught a single detail within Su Yu's words.
"That the night before last, Kiana, through some resonance of power, briefly returned to the Honkai world... and in the Sea of Quanta, faced off against Kevin?"
Su Yu nodded.
"You mean, in the Sea of Quanta, that time when Kevin fled with the Gem of Desire?"
Welt's voice suddenly rose sharply. His body leaned forward involuntarily, almost lifting off the sofa.
"That time when Bronya awakened as the Herrscher of Reason?!"
"That's right."
Watching Welt's agitated reaction, Su Yu already had a bottom line to work from.
He looked at Old Yang, his tone turning somewhat grave. "Mr. Welt, the timeline Kiana came from—or rather, the story-line I understand—has already suffered some extremely serious upheavals. The original course of many things has already changed."
Su Yu paused, then laid a cruel fact before the man.
"Right now, all those memories in your mind about past experiences and future developments—I'm afraid... they can only serve as reference."
Hearing this, Welt seemed drained of all strength. He slowly sank back against the chair and fell silent for a long while.
Su Yu watched him, then raised the question he cared about most.
"Mr. Welt, you... which point in time are you from?"
If it were the end of the Honkai Impact 3rd main story, then what Old Yang knew would be the defeat of Finality.
But if it were the Honkai postscript, or perhaps...
Welt raised a hand and, somewhat wearily, rubbed the space between his brows.
"The sea of stars."
He spat out the words.
"My memory cut off during a battle against Foehn... together with my companions from the Astral Express."
Welt's voice dropped low, carrying a trace of grief and regret he couldn't quite conceal.
"After that, when I opened my eyes again, I was already in this world."
Su Yu's eyes lit up abruptly.
The Star Rail era!
Old Yang was actually that "Nameless Guest" who had already crossed the sea of stars and witnessed the rise and fall of countless worlds!
What did this mean?
It meant that Old Yang not only knew the complete picture of the Honkai Impact 3rd world from beginning to end, but even possessed a breadth of vision and experience far surpassing that of an ordinary person.
This was outright a super-cheat-level ally!
Just as Su Yu was secretly thrilled by Old Yang's origins—
"Hey, you two."
Sirin, who had been curled up in the corner of the sofa the whole time, finally erupted, unable to bear it any longer.
She slammed a palm down on the glass coffee table, rattling the water cups atop it with a buzzing hum.
"What Sea of Quanta? What Star Rail? And what's this nonsense about Kiana becoming the Final Herrscher?"
Those golden eyes of Sirin's were full of irritable frustration as she glared fiercely at the two of them.
"What on earth are you two talking about?! Why does this Queen have none of these accursed memories at all?!"
In her understanding, she was still the deity who had perished together with Cecilia on the snowfields of Siberia, or else the avenger who, having seized this body, wanted to destroy the world.
Those futures about the sea of stars, about Finality, were to her nothing short of a fairy tale.
What angered her even more was that Su Yu—the one always trampled beneath her feet—was at this moment chatting away enthusiastically with that detestable Welt Yang, treating her entirely as an outsider!
"Calm yourself, Your Majesty the Queen."
Su Yu turned his head and reached out to press down on the back of Sirin's hand—that hand ever ready to summon the Subspace Lance.
Though she couldn't actually summon it right now.
"That's a matter of the future; it's perfectly natural for you not to know. What matters most now is that we have the bargaining chip to go back."
Sirin froze for a moment, staring at the hand covering the back of her own. The scolding that had already reached the tip of her tongue jammed abruptly in her throat.
She let out an awkward cold snort, viciously yanked her hand back, and turned her head away, saying no more—yet the irritable killing intent around her miraculously subsided.
Welt watched this scene, and a flicker of astonishment crossed the eyes behind his lenses.
He watched as the Herrscher of the Void, who had once brought endless calamity to the world, was at this moment soothed with a few words by an ordinary young man without the slightest trace of Honkai energy.
He finally realized that this man called Su Yu before him was, in all likelihood, the only person in this world who could create miracles—and the only one who could understand his own situation.
Welt drew a deep breath.
He placed both hands on his knees, leaned his body forward, looked into Su Yu's eyes, and, solemnly, word by word, spoke the secret that had weighed on his heart for ten years.
"Su Yu.
"Although no one has ever believed this secret of mine, I must tell you."
Welt's voice trembled slightly.
"The Honkai... may one day invade this seemingly peaceful world."
He waited for Su Yu's shock, waited for his disbelief, even waited for that inevitable "how could that be possible."
But to his surprise—
Su Yu merely looked at him calmly, and then slowly nodded.
"I know. I know."
Su Yu's voice was very steady.
"That is precisely what I had to see you for today—what I wanted to tell you."
He watched Welt's eyes go wide in an instant and continued, "The System has warned me. Because an extremely serious Honkai occurred on the original timeline, the chain reaction it produced has already led to extreme instability in the dimensions of time and space."
"There may be other people... or other things, that stray into this world."
Su Yu's expression grew more solemn than ever before.
"No matter who or what strays in, it is bound to trigger enormous trouble."
"And if it happens to be those Herrschers arriving with Honkai energy, in a berserk state, or a judgment-class Honkai Beast..."
Su Yu did not finish the sentence.
But Welt understood better than anyone the world-shattering, cataclysmic consequences contained within those unfinished words.
Once the Honkai descended, this fragile world—without any anti-Honkai armaments, without any Valkyrie corps—would in an instant become a living hell on earth.
The lounge fell into a prolonged, deathly silence.
Only Mobius gently swirled the nutrient fluid in her hand, producing a faint sound of water.
Welt sat in the single armchair, looking at Su Yu before him, then glancing at Sirin beside him—who, though her face was full of displeasure, showed no sign of going berserk.
More than a decade of loneliness.
More than a decade of being treated as a madman.
More than a decade of pouring all his funds and his heart's blood into that seemingly bottomless pit in that lightless underground, all for a doomsday that might never come.
He was so very tired.
Welt slowly leaned back against the chair.
He removed those black-framed glasses he had worn year after year, and lowered his head.
Amid a silence that stung the nose, this man who had once fought gods with a mortal's flesh, who had shouldered everything in the name of the world—the master of Anti-Entropy—
raised a hand and, with the rough back of his finger, secretly wiped away the trace of warmth welling at the corner of his eye.
All his efforts over these dozen-odd years, all his stubborn insistence, had not been in vain.
The Honkai truly might invade—and he had, at last, in this world where he was utterly alone, found an ally who could completely trust him and fight shoulder to shoulder beside him.
Mobius crossed her arms, her fingers rapping out a rhythm rapidly against them.
Those green serpentine eyes swept once around the two silent men.
She had no interest whatsoever in that mutual-admiration reunion-of-comrades drama.
"Alright, gentlemen."
"Since the tears have been wiped away and the identities have all been matched up."
She tilted her head slightly, her gaze locking onto Su Yu.
"Why don't you give a little lecture to me, who never got to witness that world with my own eyes? This Honkai you two keep going on about, the one capable of destroying the world, and these so-called Herrschers—what exactly are they?"
Su Yu said nothing. He simply stood up and walked toward the console not far off, the one connected to the main server.
His fingers tapped rapidly across the keyboard.
Before long, a crude but intuitive physical model he'd hastily constructed popped up on the screen.
It was a data equation he had built based on materials extracted from the System's database, combined with the physical laws of this world.
At the very center of the model was a red dot representing the population density of Arc City.
Su Yu pressed the Enter key.
On the screen, a high-energy reaction source representing a "Herrscher's descent" lit up above the red dot.
Immediately after, ring upon ring of energy ripples spread frantically outward with that point as their center.
The estimated probability of buildings collapsing, the speed at which infrastructure would be crippled, and the mutation curves of living beings upon contact with Honkai energy—all cascaded down the side of the screen like a waterfall.
The whole process took no more than three seconds before that red dot, representing Arc City's millions, was utterly devoured.
This was not war at all. This was a one-sided, physical-sense erasure.
Mobius stopped the fingers tapping against her arm.
She stared at the casualty figures leaping wildly across the screen, and at that destruction radius growing in geometric multiples.
At first, she thought Su Yu was merely doing some exaggerated game-CG previsualization.
But as her gaze swept over the underlying formulas and energy-conversion rates supporting the model, the ease on her face gradually vanished.
As a top-tier scientist, she understood better than anyone the meaning these equations represented.
He was not joking.
If this kind of energy truly existed, then this model was an inevitable reality.
"A very brilliant deduction."
Mobius straightened up from the console and looked at Su Yu, the light burning in those green eyes growing ever more intense.
"Though your current physical constitution—whether muscular strength or neural reflexes—has indeed been enhanced to a degree that could be called monstrous."
"But this, after all, is merely your own personal mutation."
"How do you expect me to believe that a single lifeform—the Herrscher you speak of—could truly unleash this kind of destructive force that violates the law of conservation of energy?"
Su Yu was in no hurry to refute her.
He moved his hands off the keyboard and turned around.
"In this laboratory, what is the hardest, most solid thing there is?"
Mobius was taken aback.
She looked at Su Yu for a few seconds, as though assessing the risk behind this request.
Then she turned and walked to a storage cabinet against the wall, entered a passcode, and took out a silver-gray metal block only the size of a fist.
"This is a special titanium alloy used for testing the hulls of deep-diving vessels."
Mobius set the metal block down heavily on the coffee table—just from the sound, one could tell this thing's density was absurdly high.
"Its compressive limit exceeds the direct detonation of any known conventional weapon. You want to use it to prove your theory? Be my guest."
Su Yu walked up to the coffee table.
Welt sat up straight as well, his gaze fixed tightly on the young man's hand.
He knew that what was about to happen would utterly overturn Mobius's understanding of the world.
Su Yu extended his right hand, hovering it above the silver-gray metal block.
"Star of Eden, unleash."
There were no flashy light-and-shadow effects.
In the very instant these words fell—
The space around the coffee table underwent an extremely bizarre distortion.
It was as though a pane of transparent glass had suddenly been melted and deformed by high heat.
There was no sound, and no warning of any kind.
That special titanium alloy, enough to withstand the terrifying water pressure of several thousand meters in the deep sea, was, beneath Su Yu's palm, like a block of tofu placed under a hydraulic press.
It began to cave inward and compress frantically. The metal surface gave off a teeth-grating friction sound.
One second.
The originally fist-sized metal block was forcibly crushed into an extremely tiny point.
Immediately after, that point, in a gravity field it could not withstand, utterly collapsed.
"Pfft."
A tiny pinch of silver-gray powder, finer than flour, scattered down onto the surface of the glass coffee table.
Not a single sizable fragment remained.
It was the trace left behind when a molecular structure was directly ground to dust—and, along with it, the very concept of the matter's existence was wiped away as well.
Dead silence.
Mobius's breathing turned rapid.
Her chest heaved violently as she stared fixedly at that heap of powder on the tabletop.
Her brain was running frantically, trying to calculate just how terrifying an energy output would be required to reduce an alloy of that strength to dust in an instant.
This had already exceeded the realm of physics she knew. This was absolutely not something any genetic modification or biological mutation could accomplish.
"Little lab rat..."
Her voice trembled from extreme shock and excitement.
"Is this... some kind of superpower that interferes with reality? Or is it merely a weapon?"
Across from her, Welt abruptly rose to his feet.
He stared fixedly at Su Yu's right hand, which had just been withdrawn, the eyes behind his lenses widened to their utmost limit.
Others might not recognize it, but how could he not?
These decades of long years had not erased those memories carved into the depths of his soul.
That was the Divine Key that had accompanied him through countless days and nights of battle.
"That is... the Star of Eden?!"
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