In the office, the expensive precision server let out a faint hum, jarringly loud in the dead silence of the deep night.
Su Yu sat in the swivel chair. The indicator light on the voice recorder in his hand had gone completely dark, and its once-warm casing had slowly turned ice cold.
In this studio he had built with his own hands—only a few hours ago it had been packed with laughter and well-wishes.
But now the loneliness seeped up like damp moss crawling out of the cracks in the floorboards, coiling tightly around his ankles.
"Finished watching?"
The voice came without warning from the shadows by the door.
Sirin leaned against the doorframe, still hugging Bella's doll.
Her amber eyes glittered in the darkness with an almost eerie light, her gaze fixed on the side of Su Yu's face, still streaked with tears.
"You didn't head back first?"
"Hmph."
Sirin let out a snort, not answering the question.
"Now that you're done watching, get out here. That disgusting, spineless human emotion—the stench of it radiating out of here makes me want to throw up."
Sirin spoke quickly, with a deliberate note of revulsion.
Only she herself knew how violently the heart in her chest—the one that belonged to Kiana—had pounded as she watched Su Yu tremble while clutching that cheap voice recorder.
That emotion, the one called "jealousy," or perhaps "resentment," was frantically gnawing away at her reason.
That man did not belong to her.
Even that day, when she had used those base, downright vulgar methods to try and leave her own brand on this man, to force him to his knees with that so-called "submission ritual."
Perhaps he really had thought about looking at "Sirin."
But at least in this moment, from the very instant he took hold of that voice recorder—
Every single gaze Su Yu turned on her passed straight through this young, beautiful shell, forever chasing after that tearful little Paramecium hiding in the depths of her consciousness.
Sirin lowered her eyelids and avoided the gaze Su Yu cast toward her.
This was "Kiana Kaslana's" body.
What he held in his hands was a gift given to him by "Kiana Kaslana."
And she herself had nothing.
"Hey, human." Sirin's voice dropped lower, carrying a hoarseness she herself hadn't noticed. "You—"
The words reached the tip of her tongue, but she couldn't get them out.
What was it she wanted to say? What did she want to ask?
Did she want to ask whether the one he was looking at now was her? Did she want to ask whether, in his heart, that Kiana Kaslana mattered far more? Did she want—
So that was it.
Sirin bit her lip.
So that was it—some questions had already been answered before they were ever spoken aloud.
"I'm going back."
She turned around, feeling an irritation greater than any she'd known before.
"Wait."
Su Yu called out to her.
Sirin's steps halted, but she didn't turn around.
"Is there something else? Human."
There was an awkwardness in her voice that even she was unwilling to admit to.
"Thank you, Sirin."
Sirin froze.
That man was saying "thank you" to her.
And the one he was thanking was "Sirin."
Not "Kiana."
Just "Sirin."
This truth made the corners of her mouth curl up without her realizing it.
How strange.
She was supposed to regard this man as her enemy, as something to be exploited, or as prey that had to be conquered—
But for some reason.
This one "thank you."
Somehow it left her feeling more satisfied than the night she had watched the man struggle beneath her feet.
It made no sense.
But—
The warmth from the soft, fuzzy texture of the Benares doll in her arms was undeniably real.
This doll—she had inspected it carefully.
There was no listening device, no bomb, nothing of the sort.
It was just a handmade doll, a little ugly to look at, stuffed generously full of cotton.
This was a gift for "Sirin."
The first birthday present she had ever received in this world.
It had nothing to do with Kiana Kaslana.
The moment this thought surfaced in her mind, Sirin felt her heart pounding wildly.
Her head felt a little dizzy, but it was different from the dizziness of that "submission ritual."
It was closer to how she'd felt that night—when the man sat across from her, watching her drink a strawberry milkshake, faithfully noting down her preferences, his eyes tinged with tenderness.
She didn't know what kind of feeling this was. The darkness of the Babylon Laboratory had nearly stripped her of the ability to "love" and to "be loved."
Only in that false dream—that woman called "Cecilia," and at the very end, before she faded away, the embrace of Cecilia—had ever given her the faintest trace of warmth.
But this warmth.
On this silent night, it flowed bit by bit through Sirin's chest.
"Don't get the wrong idea, human."
Sirin replied, and even she didn't notice the faint, barely perceptible tremor in her voice.
But she still maintained the dignity befitting the Herrscher of the Void.
"I have no wish to owe you any favors—hmph, but seeing as you've been so utterly loyal, I suppose I'll grudgingly grant you one thing—"
"Happy birthday, foolish human."
"Hmph, enjoy your precious few moments of happiness. Once we return to that world, you won't get to spend days like this ever again."
"After all, as my servant, your life, your everything—including your birthday—"
"All of it belongs to me."
After tossing out those words, Sirin all but fled the office.
[Side quest detected: Tame the Queen progress increased! Current progress: 60%]
[System note: Tsk, tsk, tsk. "As my servant, your everything belongs to me." Congratulations, Host—you've been thoroughly filed away as Lady Sirin's private property. Care to guess: if you don't have the power to stand against the Herrscher of the Void when the time comes, whether you'll end up as Lady Sirin's plaything?]
[PS: In a raising sim, the greatest taboo is letting your target find out you're weaker than they are. Keep at it, little man!]
"Your mo—"
Staring at those three deliberately enlarged and bolded characters, "little man," Su Yu had ten thousand curses he wanted to hurl.
Forget it.
It wasn't the first day this Sys had been so good at driving up his blood pressure.
But still—
"Sixty percent."
Su Yu looked at the office door and exhaled a long, heavy breath.
"All done talking, BOSS? I saw Kiana head back already—you didn't go and break her heart, did you?"
Bronie's voice piped up just then.
"It's a bit complicated." Su Yu smiled. "Bronie, keep an eye on Kiana for me. Make sure she gets home safe."
"That's basically you questioning my professional competence." Bronie blew a bubble. "But since that idiot's already handed you the gift, is there even any point in me staying hidden around the company anymore? Playing undercover for you two lovebirds is a lot of pressure for this Hack Bunny."
"Honestly, I don't think it makes any difference whether you hide or not—you never leave the house anyway, and you attend every meeting as a hologram."
On the other end, Bronie fell silent for a moment.
"BOSS."
"Hm?"
"You realize saying things like that is a great way to get your ass beaten, right?"
Su Yu chuckled, chatted a bit of nonsense with Bronie, then cut the line.
The office was left with only Su Yu.
He sat back down in his chair, the cold glow of the computer screen reflected in his eyes.
He softly called out in his mind.
"Squad Monitor."
Fenghuang's voice surfaced almost instantly.
As if she'd been waiting all along for him to speak.
"I'm here."
"Squad Monitor, I want to see Kiana. Even just a glimpse, or a single word."
"Not right now. Kiana is at a critical stage of the Tai Xu Sword Qi Heart Essence Chapter. Any outside disturbance could cause her divine essence to collapse. Sirin's emotions are unstable at the moment, and for Kiana that's the best possible opportunity for a breakthrough. We can't give up halfway."
Fenghuang's voice carried a composure spanning fifty thousand years, yet Su Yu could still hear a trace of helplessness within it.
Su Yu was silent for a few seconds.
Over this period, Su Yu had told Fenghuang as much as he could about everything that had happened—including the founding of the Anti-Entropy research team, and Wotan, down in that underground hangar.
After quietly hearing all of it, Fenghuang had said to Su Yu from the heart: "Congratulations, Su Yu. Like Welt, you're no longer alone—you now have comrades you can trust to watch your back."
But for now, Fenghuang had told none of this to Kiana.
Su Yu lowered his head and looked toward the pocket of his shirt.
The metal casing of the voice recorder pressed a cold sensation through the fabric.
At the very end of the recording, that idiot had said she would lend him her shoulder.
But she wasn't here.
"Squad Monitor, I want to ask you for a favor."
"Speak."
"Could you use your power to recreate something inside the consciousness space?"
Fenghuang didn't answer right away.
After two seconds, her voice carried a hint of surprise: "I can, but I need to have seen the actual object with my own eyes. What is it you want to recreate?"
"A cake made by Kalpas," Su Yu said. "That girl loves sweets more than anything... And, help me pass along a message."
Fenghuang fell silent again.
"...Alright. Anything else?"
"Pass a message along to her for me."
"What message?"
Su Yu drew in a breath.
The hum of the air conditioning drifted through the corridor.
From somewhere in the distance came the mechanical sound of an elevator running.
In his mind, Su Yu quietly sketched out that carefree, heartless grin Kiana wore whenever she ate cake.
"Tell her I'll always be waiting for her to come back. No matter how long it takes, I'll be right here, keeping watch."
Fenghuang received the message in full, without prying and without comment.
"I'll pass it along for you. And also—"
Fenghuang paused.
"Happy birthday, Su Yu."
"Thank you."
Fenghuang didn't reply again. The link quietly closed.
The consciousness space.
The Mount Taixu illusory realm.
Endless ridges rose and fell, stretching away through a sea of clouds. Waterfalls poured down from the sheer cliffs, crashing into deep pools and sending up sprays of mist.
The air was filled with the crisp scent of vegetation and stone.
Kiana sat cross-legged on a jutting rock platform.
Her eyes were closed, her hands resting on her knees, her fingertips trembling faintly.
Sword qi coursed slowly along her arms, occasionally stalling and clogging at some meridian node, then flowing again once she adjusted her breathing.
By the third hour of cultivation, the circulation of her sword qi hit a bottleneck.
Kiana opened her eyes.
She was in no rush to continue.
Her gaze fell on the sea of clouds before her.
The clouds churned, pushed by the wind toward the distance, revealing the bottomless canyon below.
It had been a week.
This week of training had left her more exhausted than running ten thousand kilometers.
But the moment she closed her eyes, Su Yu's face—wearing that faint exasperation and doting tenderness—would rise up before her.
"That idiot's definitely pulling another all-nighter to catch up on his schedule right now, isn't he? With no one to keep an eye on him, he's bound to be drinking iced black tea like it's water again."
Kiana looked up at the eternal, unchanging sky above Mount Taixu, a flicker of nostalgia crossing the corner of her eye.
She counted on her fingers.
The time she and Su Yu had spent together added up, at the very most, to less than two and a half months.
From their meeting in early May, to today, late July.
A little over seventy days.
In that rain-soaked stairwell, that man had handed his umbrella to a ghost he had no reason to care about.
Under the lights of the convenience store, he'd fabricated an identity for her without a moment's hesitation.
In the cramped space of the apartment, he'd found new ways every single day to cook different flavors of food—because he'd noticed she scrunched up her nose when she got sick of instant noodles.
And then there was the rooftop.
The moment his hand seized her wrist.
His nails dug into her skin, blood dripping from his palm. Looking straight into her eyes, he'd screamed in a raw, howling voice: "I will absolutely, absolutely never let you die—!"
Kiana shut her eyes for a moment, pushing that image out of her mind.
And then there was that dream—the dream where he'd been killed by the Herrscher of the Void over a thousand times.
Yet she had the faint feeling that it hadn't been a dream at all.
And now, because of that damned Herrscher inside her, Su Yu was out there dealing with everything all on his own.
That aching feeling—of "a single day apart feeling like three autumns"—washed over her like a rising tide.
"I'm causing her trouble again..."
"Tch, since when did this young lady get so sentimental?"
Kiana rubbed her nose, murmuring under her breath.
"Just wait for me, Su Yu. Once I beat that annoying Herrscher into a pulp and lock her in the little dark room, I'll go back and switch every one of your computer screens to a giant Homu..."
Her temples throbbed dully. She rubbed the corner of her forehead, her fingers unconsciously tracing circles on her knee.
Her mind was full of that face—the dark circles deepened from night after night of no sleep, the way he coughed when he choked on iced black tea, the goofy face he'd suddenly made while taking her ID Card photo.
She wanted to see him.
She wanted to hear the sound of him grumbling about the System's pop-ups.
She wanted to see the back of him tapping away at the keyboard with his legs crossed.
She wanted to smell the scent of laundry detergent on his shirt.
She wanted—
Footsteps came from behind her.
Almost by reflex, Kiana straightened her back, planted her hands on her knees again, and struck the standard "I'm-cultivating-diligently" pose.
Kiana suddenly sprang up, snatching a tree branch with lightning speed and assuming a textbook opening stance: "Squad Monitor! I wasn't slacking off! I was just now... just now comprehending the spiritual energy of heaven and earth!"
"No need to put on a show, Kiana."
Fenghuang's voice carried a hint of amusement. She stepped up close and opened her tightly clenched right hand.
"I just saw Su Yu. Today is his birthday."
Kiana's movements froze.
"Huh? Today? ...Oh no, I completely forgot in all the busyness."
She smacked her forehead in dismay, her ramrod-straight spine slumping in an instant, her eyes brimming with guilt.
"It's that guy's birthday, and here I am playing in the dirt in a place like this... I'm way too useless as a Little Junior Sister."
"He isn't blaming you. On the contrary, he asked me to bring you a gift."
Fenghuang extended her palm, and that faint wisp of true qi condensed in the air, transforming into an exquisite cup cake.
It was a projection of the real world—it couldn't fill your stomach, but its sweet flavor was utterly, genuinely real.
"He said you love good food more than anything, and that he remembers it all. He also asked me to pass along a message to you."
Fenghuang paused, her eyes gentle as she looked at the girl before her, who was on the verge of tears.
When Kiana took the cup cake, her fingers were shaking.
"He said—come back soon, Kiana. He'll always be waiting for you."
Having said this, Fenghuang lingered no longer.
Her figure was like mist scattered by the mountain wind, growing transparent from the edge of the rock platform until it vanished entirely into the light of day.
On the mountaintop, only Kiana remained.
She lowered her head and looked at the cup cake in her hands.
The cream flower didn't so much as stir in the constant-temperature air of the consciousness space, and the chocolate drawing of Homu had one ear drawn crooked.
She scraped up a bit of cream with her little finger and put it in her mouth.
Sweet.
It really was so sweet.
The cream was rich and smooth, the cake base soft to the extreme, melting the instant it touched her tongue.
She scooped up another spoonful.
This time, as the spoon reached her lips, something warm rolled out from the corners of her eyes, falling onto the cream of the cup cake and leaving a tiny little dent.
Kiana wiped her face roughly with the back of her hand.
"What the heck, you idiot Su Yu..."
Her voice was muffled, her nose badly stuffed up, her words coming out heavily nasal.
"Saying you'll always wait for me to come back—that's way too cheesy!"
She took another bite of cake. Tears and cream went down together, salty and sweet all mixed up, the taste turning very strange.
"What golden-hour eight-o'clock soap opera did you steal that line from? A washed-up, corny romance scene like that—it could only fool a... a naive idiot like me who's never even dated anyone."
Sniffling all the while, Kiana stuffed big mouthfuls of cake into her mouth, muttering indistinctly.
"But... but this young lady really did want to hear you say something like that, you big idiot."
She sniffed and wiped her face clean with her sleeve.
Then she lowered her head and took another big bite of cake, her cheeks puffed out like a hamster's.
The mountain wind swept across the rock platform, lifting the loose strands of hair at her forehead.
In the distance the waterfall roared, and the mist refracted a faint rainbow in the light of the setting sun.
The cup cake was scraped clean to the bottom.
Kiana used her index finger to scrape every last bit of cream off the inner walls of the cup, not wasting even the tiniest trace.
She set the empty cup on the rock platform and propped her hands behind her.
Looking up at that ethereal, illusory sea of clouds overhead, her voice was torn to pieces by the wind, yet it carried a resolve she'd never known before.
"Wait for this young lady. I'll come back soon... I definitely will."
Her words faded into the wind of Mount Taixu.
And on the other end, in the real world, Su Yu was standing on the balcony, gazing at that distant city of lights that seemed as though it would never go dark, the last faint trace of warmth from Kiana's voice recorder still lingering in his palm.
"Human, what are you looking at?"
Behind him, Sirin had come out at some unknown point.
"Looking at the moon." Su Yu didn't turn around. "Don't you think tonight's moon looks a lot like a doughnut with a bite taken out of it?"
"Human associations really are so impoverished they're nauseating."
Sirin walked over to Su Yu's side and followed the line of his gaze.
Beneath that pitch-black canopy of sky, two souls that had never belonged to the same dimension were sharing a silent drink together, across the chasm dividing reality and the Imaginary.
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