"No. She's left for now."
I opened my eyes and shook my head as I answered. After taking a moment to catch my breath, I began sorting through everything I'd just learned.
Without a doubt, the memories I'd seen belonged to the ancient era when the God of Light still existed. Back then, human technological civilization on the Eldoria Continent had been highly advanced—remarkably close to what I'd once imagined. And from No. 18 Cyra's perspective, it also seemed that the four great Element Angels had enjoyed fairly good relations with humans at the time; the two sides appeared to have worked closely together.
But inevitably, everything drifted toward tragedy. During the decisive battle against the God of Light, Gisphrael—No. 18 Cyra's true identity—chose to face Bruto alone. As expected, she suffered a fatal counterattack aimed directly at her soul. With both sides ending up nearly mutually destroyed, Gisphrael was left with only half of a fragmented soul, and her mind slipped into confusion. Then, by accidentally touching a randomly opened spacetime "bubble" near her, she was thrown—by sheer coincidence—into Earth.
"Gisphrael? That's the legendary Element Angel from over ten thousand years ago. She shouldn't possibly still exist in this world! How could it be her?"
As expected, when Cyrae heard the truth about No. 18 Cyra's origin from me, she looked completely unable to believe it. She hesitated for a long moment, then couldn't help asking again:
"On top of that, you just said it seems all Element Angels look exactly like me. What's going on with that?"
"Uh…"
I couldn't answer.
One Michelle resembling Cyra so closely was already strange enough—and that question had never been resolved. Now it turned out every Element Angel looked the same. And because Gisphrael's memories were incomplete—likely due to her damaged soul—she hadn't shown me anything that explained why. To be blunt, even she probably didn't know the reason herself.
And setting aside the issue of their appearances, there was another problem I couldn't explain: how could a spatial passage appear on the Eldoria Continent ten thousand years ago in the first place? If I hadn't personally experienced and verified it, I could never have accepted it as real.
In principle, Earth and the Eldoria Continent should have been synchronized in time. Once I ruled out every impossible factor, only one explanation remained:
Gisphrael's "crossing" to Earth likely involved time as well.
But the key question was—how could a spatial transit corridor meant to connect two different parallel universes warp time along with space?
"Do you remember?" Cyrae said. "You once mentioned that the root cause of the spatial passage opening was Adrian's necklace being struck by Nicola's sword. Could it be that necklace…"
Cyrae's experience showed again. In a flash, she latched onto a crucial detail. If she hadn't mentioned it, I might have forgotten entirely: that necklace had, in the end, been a gift from a future twelve-winged Nicola—sent back through time specifically for Adrian.
Later, when the Nicola of this world struck the necklace hard with the Condensation Sword, the enormous energy sealed inside it was triggered. Combined with the fact that the Cycle of Rebirth was descending at the time, and the earth-element environment was wildly unstable, everything spiraled completely out of control.
"That's it!"
Suddenly it all connected. I slapped my forehead, and the missing pieces fell neatly into place.
"If power from Future Nicola—power strong enough to change time—mixed into the spatial passage through the necklace, then when the corridor went unstable from the vampire's death and the flood of dark element energy… that time-altering power could've lost control too. And in that chaos, it might have randomly linked Earth to the continent ten thousand years ago."
In an instant, it felt like everything could be explained.
"But… it still feels like too many details don't add up." Cyrae looked thoughtful, murmuring to herself. "Why would that future Nicola deliberately give Adrian that necklace? Wouldn't she know what consequences it would cause?"
Without meaning to, she pointed out something I'd completely overlooked.
A twelve-winged Nicola who returned from the future should, in theory, know everything that would happen afterward.
Which meant… it was entirely reasonable to suspect that the necklace, the spatial passage between Earth and Eldoria, and the chain of developments that followed might have been intentionally guided from the very beginning.
"No way…"
My scalp tingled. My brain suddenly felt overloaded.
The necklace had clearly been indispensable to the passage's opening, yet no one could tell what future Nicola might have done to it. And if she truly knew the future in advance… then perhaps even what I had experienced—passage instability and even the Water Angel being brought into this world—had all been within her plan?
No matter how hard I tried to think, though, I still couldn't imagine what her purpose would be. Maybe she'd simply been following the flow of history, and there was no "conspiracy" at all—maybe I was just scaring myself.
At least, from my perspective, the way events had unfolded hadn't really been a bad thing. Putting everything else aside, No. 18—Gisphrael—had, consciously or not, helped me many times. Without her power supporting me, I never would've been able to repel Michelle's attack so easily this time.
And from the memories she showed me, it was clear that, in the past, Gisphrael and Michelle had been extremely close. No wonder she was willing to break away from me at the critical moment just to prevent me from killing Michelle.
"Forget it—let's talk about something more realistic."
It was obvious Cyrae also realized the truth behind all this was far too complicated. She stopped pressing the topic and asked instead:
"Since she left on her own, will she come back? Without her possessing you, wouldn't your power still be incomplete?"
"You figured that out too?"
I couldn't help sounding surprised. I hadn't told anyone that my strength had dropped back to where it was before the possession. Yet Cyrae had inferred it from only a few scattered clues.
"I do have some background in soul research," Cyrae said, a hint of pride slipping into her voice. "Your current condition is quite similar to my clone technique. Once you understand Gisphrael's true identity, it's easy to connect the dots and make the deduction."
As she said, the clone technique was invented by splitting off a portion of one's soul and embedding it into a light puppet. Since the split soul couldn't remain away from the main body for too long, it had to periodically return to "synchronize" to maintain stability.
Gisphrael's remaining half-soul and the portion of the Water Angel soul I already possessed formed the same kind of complementary relationship.
When two incomplete halves of Gisphrael's soul were forcibly fused together through reality-altering power, they effectively completed a full Water Angel soul. That was the real reason I'd been able to wield reality alteration almost without limit while Gisphrael was inside me.
Of course, I wasn't the only one benefiting from the soul-completion process. If anything, Gisphrael gained just as much: she received a significant portion of memory from my soul, temporarily regained normal clarity, and recovered much of her mind.
The mechanism resembled a clone-and-original relationship—but with a crucial difference: each personality originated from a relatively independent individual in a parallel world, not from the same person's soul being split apart. Moreover, we hadn't truly merged into a single being. We retained distinct behavior patterns—and when our thoughts and personalities could no longer align, the only option left to Gisphrael was to forcibly separate from my body.
"Don't worry. She'll come back."
On this point, I wasn't concerned at all.
"If she stays away from my body for too long, that remaining half of Gisphrael's soul will quickly fall back into a deranged state—possibly even fade away completely. So she has to return often and fuse with me again in order to stay conscious."
Even though we'd clashed hard over what to do about Michelle, I wasn't worried about Gisphrael's whereabouts. If anything, after living through this incident, I'd gained a deeper understanding of the soul—so much so that I suddenly found myself feeling a trace of concern about Cyrae's own condition.