["Perfect Human Being" system running normally.]
[Host: Shin]
[Age: 16]
[Race: Human (?)]
[Bloodlines: Pillar Man (Ultimate Being), First Witch, Saint (Incomplete), Lands Between Demigod (Incomplete)]
[Evolution Points: 177 → 77 (+0.04/day)]
[Available Evolution Paths: Elixir Field (Lv.1), Spirit Shrine (Lv.2), Limb Pillar (Lv.1), Spine Dragon (Lv.3), Soul Core (Lv.2)]
[Elixir Field (Lv.1) — Upgrade cost: 100 points]
[Spirit Shrine (Lv.1 → Lv.2) — Upgrade cost: 200 points]
[Lv.2 Skill: [Qi Swallows the Five Elements] — You will receive absolute immunity to supernatural forces corresponding to the active palaces of your [Spirit Shrine's Divine Palace], and may absorb them to convert into fuel for [Refining Essence into Qi].]
[Current immunity: Fire]
[Limb Pillar (Lv.1) — Upgrade cost: 100 points]
[Spine Dragon (Lv.3) — Upgrade cost: 400 points]
[Soul Core (Lv.2) — Upgrade cost: 200 points]
Returning from the completion of a special mission — beyond the chat group itself upgrading to Level 4 (unlocking red packet/item transfer functions, removing the account-substitution limitation, and other new features) — Shin's personal gains were equally substantial.
Setting aside the evolution points for a moment, just the foxfire thread Junko had given him, once absorbed by the [Spirit Shrine], had made him feel like he'd undergone a genuine qualitative transformation.
Outside the mansion, on the clifftop by the sea.
The sea breeze was cool. Waves broke against the rocks in bursts of fine spray.
As was his habit, the young man stood facing the wind, his inner vision turning inward.
In the heart of that soaring city of Yaoguang, a cluster of dark red foxfire burned without smoke, quietly and steadily.
Shin knew what this thing was capable of. Seven tails' worth of foxfire could purify the entire magnificent Lunar Capital to nothing — one seventh of that was a force difficult to even begin imagining.
Though for some reason he still couldn't summon Junko's consciousness through it as the [Spirit Shrine's Divine Palace] skill description promised — nor could he transform into Junko's appearance.
For now, though, it was more than sufficient for practical use. Once properly deployed, it could erase every living thing for thousands of li in every direction, evaporate the sea, and purify existence back to nothing from the root.
"So this is what it feels like to be in an elder's good graces."
A moment of reflection.
He truly wanted to get stronger. And there was nothing more effective than a powerhouse extending a helping hand.
He told himself the Great Witch would understand his good intentions — after all, the Type-Moon world was deep waters, and if the entity that had wiped out the Witch's clan was truly the Holy Church, he was going to need to be very strong before he could settle that account.
This was all for the Great Witch's revenge. He'd even put himself at risk for her sake.
"Lady Junko is already this powerful — I wonder about that good friend of hers, the Five-Sphere Goddess…"
An image flickered through Shin's mind — a deity who wore a cheap T-shirt and carried three spheres hanging from chains around her collar.
If that one also needed someone to look after her in her old age, he wouldn't be entirely opposed to volunteering for that too— ahem. Joking, of course. At this rate he'd become someone with three surnames.
Shin slowly extended his hand, and focused his consciousness at his fingertips.
A thread of foxfire, thin as a single hair, sprang to life at his fingertip — no heat, and yet the space around it developed faint creases.
He let his gaze drop to his feet.
There, a small red wildflower bloomed in the sea wind — petals beaded with morning dew, swaying gently.
Shin held his breath, guided that thread of foxfire, and touched it lightly to one petal.
There was no anticipated incineration. No withering.
Instead — the moment the foxfire touched the petal, the entire flower burst with a vitality it had never known before.
Every vein, every petal, was purified to an absolute extreme.
It became completely translucent — like a sculpture carved from red gemstone — and began radiating a fragrance so sweet and penetrating it would make any onlooker mistake it for some legendary immortal herb.
"Remove the dross, preserve the essence — this is what purification means…"
Shin thought for a moment, then let that remaining trace of foxfire drift gently over the clifftop behind him.
There lay a large flower field that the Great Witch "Flower" had once carefully tended — but with Flower rarely returning to Witch's Island over the past two years, many of the blooms had wilted and died, leaving only rotting stems making the soil look forlorn and bare.
And when the foxfire from Shin's fingertip drifted across that field—
Rustle.
A wave of colour.
Like a creator's brushstroke given life, the already-decayed stems reversed their fate at the foxfire's passing.
Dead wood meeting spring didn't begin to describe the sight.
Within seconds, hundreds upon hundreds of flowers that had already died bloomed simultaneously — and every single one opened more radiantly, more purely than it ever had in its living days.
A wild sea of colour unfurled beneath the morning sun, the concentrated fragrance of it completely overpowering the salty sea wind.
Shin stared at the scene before him, something stirring in his heart.
He found himself wondering: what would this force do if applied to a person?
Would it return them to the purest form of their soul? Or simply cause the body to disintegrate in the process of being "purified"?
Or… something else entirely?
Shin looked at the various bloodlines listed in his system. An impulse flickered in him — to try purifying himself.
Purification carried the property of bringing incomplete things toward completeness. If he used it well, he might even be able to fill in those bloodlines currently listed as "Incomplete" all in one go…
But just as Shin was sinking into quiet contemplation of his power—
"WAAAAHHHH——!"
A sharp, devastated wail, brimming with grievance, punched straight through the thick walls of the mansion nearby and rang through the morning calm, startling him back to the present.
Shin's whole body jolted. He knew that cry far too well.
Merrow.
"What happened?! Did Kaguya and she—"
His heart sank. The jet-black wings on his back snapped open — he became a blur and shot back toward the mansion.
Truth be told, when he'd come home the night before with Kaguya, he'd had to deal with the Great Witch's sustained expression of reproach — and then there was his little nun Merrow, who had cried for quite a long time. She'd said things like "Brother, you even have a child already" and "Even though Brother's wife isn't me, I'll try my best to be a good stepmother" while sobbing, and had made moves to scoop up the loli Kaguya and carry her off.
That had given Shin quite the shock — anyone who didn't know better would have thought Merrow's artificial-human trait was acting up and she was trying to harm Kaguya.
Though of course Kaguya, being a Hourai immortal, wasn't in any danger.
Still — to soothe Merrow, Shin had invested considerable effort. For instance, that evening, he'd made good on a certain long-standing promise and given her a very thorough reward.
Though he kept feeling like the Great Witch's expression had grown noticeably darker after that — odd, since she'd always seemed enthusiastic about him doing those things before.
Slam!
Shin shoved the front door open and stepped inside.
When his gaze landed on the staircase leading to the second floor, he found exactly what he'd feared.
The staircase was in chaos, strewn with wet laundry that hadn't been hung out to dry yet.
The laundry basket had been knocked on its side. Several of the young man's shirts, along with Merrow's and the Great Witch's dresses and hats, lay scattered across the steps and floor.
Merrow was crumpled on the side of the staircase, both hands over her eyes, shoulders heaving in great, shaking sobs — crying with the full drama of a girl who'd lost everything.
Not far from her, the now-loli-sized Kaguya stood with an expression of resigned exasperation.
"What's going on? Merrow, did you fall?"
Shin rushed over and helped Merrow up from the floor where she'd collapsed.
He glanced at the loli Kaguya nearby, uncertain who to blame.
Yes, technically the Moon Princess came with a certain degree of scheming baked into her personality — but she'd only just arrived. She couldn't seriously have jumped straight into palace intrigue on day one.
"Wuh… Brother… wahhh!"
The little nun looked up the moment she saw Shin and immediately buried her face in his chest, her sobbing hitting a new pitch.
Merrow's trembling hand pointed at Kaguya beside them — but she was crying so hard she couldn't form a complete sentence.
Shin: ???
Wait, Kaguya — are you actually making moves?
"Kaguya. You had better give me a very reasonable explanation."
He looked at Kaguya, hands on hips.
Given that this world's Kaguya was missing the Yagokoro Omoikane who might otherwise have helped regulate her personality, and had grown up somewhat free-spirited as a result — well, as her "husband," naturally it fell to him to take responsibility for getting her back on track.
"My dear, that look in your eyes is just absolutely breaking my heart~"
Kaguya sighed, in the manner of someone who is genuinely exhausted by the injustice of it all, and the red eyes flashed with the very specific look of I did absolutely nothing wrong.
She opened her hands, gesturing at the scattered wet clothes.
"I only noticed that little sister Merrow here was working so hard at the laundry — her delicate little hands were going red from the lye soap."
"So I thought, as future housemates, shouldn't I pitch in and help?"
"Help?"
"Yes. My dear, surely you haven't forgotten what my power actually is?"
Kaguya walked gracefully to the pile of wet laundry and let a faint, invisible ripple of energy unfurl from her fingertips.
It was the authority of "Eternity" — carrying the property of keeping a thing's entropy at constant zero. It was the purifying force that could cleanse the impurity of the Lunar Capital, and it was also the core principle behind the Hourai immortality elixir.
"I simply thought: if these clothes could remain permanently clean, permanently undamaged, permanently free from ever needing to be washed again — wouldn't that make things much easier for little sister Merrow in the future?"
"So I added just a tiny, insignificant amount of 'Eternity' to the clothing."
Shin paused, still not quite connecting the dots.
Adding "Eternity" to the clothes? That sounds like a good thing, doesn't it?
But when he looked back down at Merrow — still crying her eyes out in his arms — it suddenly clicked.
Merrow's magic was [Healing].
In the sixteen years she had spent on Witch's Island, her self-assigned purpose, her proof of value, was in looking after Shin and the Great Witch's daily lives.
She'd started out unable to even cook — still needed the young man to teach her — but she'd worked at it diligently. She'd taken on all the household chores herself, used her [Healing] magic to mend Shin's injuries when he came home from outside, patched and repaired their clothing, kept everything clean—
Her [Healing] magic was a key part of all of that.
And Kaguya's [Eternity] was something higher — absolute, permanent, requiring no process. A fixing of the state of things.
If everything stopped getting dirty, stopped wearing out, stopped getting damaged — then what was Merrow's purpose?
She'd have no purpose at all.
And it had been taken from her, in the most casual possible way, by someone who'd just walked in the door — a stranger who got to be with her beloved Brother, and who had now, with a single gesture, erased every last shred of her reason to exist.
"Wuu… Brother… Merrow is already… already useless… wuu…"
Merrow's tears were genuinely heartbreaking:
"The clothes won't get dirty anymore… and with Kaguya here, Brother won't ever get hurt either… please don't abandon Merrow, Merrow doesn't want to be thrown away, waaah——!!"
Shin started to speak, then stopped — genuinely at a loss for words.
In the future timeline of the Witchcraft Arc, this little nun's deepest psychological wound was exactly this: being abandoned. She had always been searching for her own worth and value.
Rather than empty reassurances that she'd never be thrown away, it would probably be more effective to actually find her something to do — for instance—
At that moment, Kaguya seemed to realise she'd let her good intentions go disastrously wrong. She hadn't expected Merrow to react so strongly.
She tried to step in and fix it:
"Oh dear, little sister Merrow — I truly only wanted to make things easier for you, honestly. Look, if you don't have to do all these chores, won't you have so much more time to do things you actually—"
"Go away! You go away! You took Brother and now you're taking Merrow's work too, you terrible woman!"
But that, clearly, made things considerably worse.
Merrow showed an emotion she'd never shown before: fierce. Though combined with her tear-streaked face, the effect was more like a very indignant kitten with its fur up.
A jellyfish has hissed. The sea has been rocked.
Creak——
But at that very moment, from the library at the far end of the corridor, the sound of a door being pushed open came drifting through.
The commotion appeared to have roused the Great Witch, whose silhouette came drifting out of the library, looking down on the scene from above.
She had already heard everything.
From Shin's spectacular display of flowers blooming on the clifftop outside, to Merrow's sharp, anguished wail inside.
She didn't know the full details. But the sight before her — her beloved adopted daughter, reduced to crumpling on the floor in tears by the woman who'd come in from outside, the woman who'd used a pretty face to bewitch her Shaya and won his favour — filled the Great Witch with a very clear sense of: if I don't do something here, this mansion's pecking order is going to get very confused very fast.
"Mother?"
Shin saw the Great Witch emerge — face cold as stone — and had a premonition of incoming disaster.
"…"
"Come now. Tell me."
"Between this woman — and your mot
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