The air in the room was getting hotter and heavier.
Yae Miko lazily fanned herself with one pale hand, a faint grievance smoldering in her eyes.
Su Xuan was absolutely rotten.
He'd lingered around the entrance to her Narukami Fox Domain for ages—
Then turned around, went to find the recovered Ei, and the two of them had a wonderful time together.
And now she was left sitting here, irritated and restless.
Just when the "gate" to her secret realm had been about to open, he'd suddenly turned and left.
Definitely on purpose. Definitely trying to torment her.
She shot a resentful look at Su Xuan, who was presently reclining against Ei's chest.
"Tsk. You really seem to like this big-braid girl," she drawled.
Ei glanced up at her.
Su Xuan calling her "big-braid girl" was one thing.
But what made Miko think she could enjoy the same privilege?
"I like all of you," Su Xuan replied, straight-faced.
That answer caught all of them off guard.
Yae Miko hadn't expected him to answer so directly. Her mood secretly brightened, and she immediately pressed further:
"Really? Because to me it feels like you're just… satisfying your own needs."
Su Xuan didn't reply right away.
Instead, he crooked a finger at her, gesturing for her to come into his arms.
The moment Yae Miko lay down, she felt his fingers lightly pinch her fox ears. Her body shivered involuntarily.
Her throat dry, she still forced out a teasing laugh.
"I was ready just now, you know. You're the one who ran off to find Ei."
"You're not planning to go back on your promise, are you?"
"You mean your question about whether I'll leave Teyvat—or when I'll leave?" Su Xuan asked.
Yae Miko nodded firmly. "Exactly. And I think you know very well how important that is to us…"
Of course he knew what they were thinking.
Before, their concerns had been mostly about their countries' interests.
But ever since he'd thrown the concepts of the Abyss and the world's "end fate" at them, every girl's mind had shifted to how to survive the final calamity.
Most of them were deeply tied to their nations.
When the world ended, even if they had the chance to run away, knowing them, they'd never abandon their people and flee alone.
For them, Su Xuan's existence was irreplaceable.
Whether from personal feelings or the fate of the world, not a single one of them wanted him to leave them—
Or to leave Teyvat—behind.
"I already told you, didn't I?" he said lazily.
"My ideal is to wake up on an eight-hundred-square-meter bed and be pampered every day by exclusive idols."
As he said it, his gaze slid over to the one who could sing and dance: Kamisato Ayaka.
Ayaka froze, then hurriedly said, "If sir wishes to see me dance, I can perform for you while you rest."
Su Xuan shook his head, turning her offer down for now.
Then he glanced up at Ei.
"Ei, since we parted on Yashiori Island, have you gone back into the space where Raiden Makoto's consciousness is sealed?"
Ei looked down at him, confused why he'd suddenly brought this up.
But she still answered obediently. "In order to correct the Raiden Shogun puppet's underlying logic, I did go once."
"Then you must have planted the Sacred Sakura seed."
Ei nodded. "Yes. I…" She hesitated for a breath. "I saw my sister again. And I mentioned you to her."
What she'd met wasn't the real, living Raiden Makoto, but a shard of consciousness the latter had left behind.
Its only true function was to guide Ei to plant the Sacred Sakura and save Inazuma's past.
There hadn't been much time to talk as sisters.
But even if it was just a fragment, once it returned to the leylines, it would merge back with Raiden Makoto's main consciousness.
Five hundred years ago, Makoto could never have known Su Xuan existed.
But after Ei brought him up to that fragment, the fully restored Makoto would now have a faint impression of him in her mind.
"I just told her that because of you, I understood many things," Ei admitted honestly.
"I didn't tell her you have the power to reverse life and death."
Ei had taken his earlier words seriously—about reviving Makoto "if he needed to."
As long as it wasn't certain, she didn't think it was her place to tell her sister something that might never happen.
Su Xuan nodded slightly.
A moment later, the diary copies in the women's hands suddenly glowed.
"It's here," Yae Miko's heart clenched.
When she'd asked whether he'd leave Teyvat, his answer had been vague.
But he'd promised to answer her question, so she believed he would eventually give a concrete reply.
That earlier non-answer didn't count.
Looks like this entry is going to touch on whether he's leaving… she thought, focusing all her attention on the light-screen.
[First of all, a heartfelt thanks to the beautiful and brilliant Miss Fox for her scheming.]
[Even though the little "villain roleplay" game she tried to set up didn't fully play out the way she imagined—]
[The important thing is that the final goal was achieved.]
Kujou Sara muttered under her breath, "Game… what game…"
Ayaka's face burned scarlet.
Yae Miko's original plan had been to create a "nation of service" for Su Xuan.
In other words, to let him openly "conquer" Ei in front of everyone.
If even the highest ruler of Inazuma yielded, then the retainers and citizens could hardly do anything but follow.
In practice, the "game" had gone very differently from what she'd envisioned.
But the result was indeed what she wanted.
[Originally, I thought her elaborate hospitality was her way of asking for my help.]
[To resurrect Raiden Makoto? Kitsune Saiguu? Or maybe Chiyo?]
[But no.]
[What she wanted was the answer to a single question.]
[Whether or not I will ever leave Teyvat.]
Every girl watching the diary felt their heart tighten at once.
This wasn't just Yae Miko's concern.
All of them cared about it deeply—
Whether Su Xuan would leave, and if so, when.
[My answer is…]
[Right now, I can't say with 100% certainty whether I'll leave Teyvat or not.]
Yae Miko: "?"
It was the first time she'd ever seen Su Xuan treat his own future as something uncertain.
What was that supposed to mean?
The girls surrounding him glanced at each other.
But they all sensibly swallowed their panic and confusion and kept reading.
[The reason I can't be 100% sure is simple.]
[At the moment, I have no method of traveling to another world.]
[I don't know if I'll have one in the future, either.]
[So I can't give her a definitive answer.]
Everyone let out a small sigh of relief.
At least he wasn't going to just get up and walk out of their world right now.
But their relief didn't last long.
Because the more they thought about it, the more that answer sounded… wrong.
A man who could shatter the false sky by hand and casually build a starship for interstellar travel—
Claiming he had no way to reach another world?
If he could break the false firmament from the ground, what about from the heavens?
The false sky could heal itself, sure. But there was no way its recovery speed could match his escape speed.
All he had to do was rush through the hole with his starship before it closed and—
He'd be gone.
"So why say he has no way?" someone whispered.
Several pairs of eyes turned toward Su Xuan.
Yae Miko's expression had grown darker by the second.
Seeing this, Su Xuan casually added another line to the diary.
[Just now, Miss Fox was joking and smiling.]
[In the blink of an eye, her face turned stormy.]
[I don't know if I've guessed her thoughts correctly—]
[But the reason I say I have no way to reach other worlds is because…]
[In the cosmos that Teyvat belongs to, it seems that aside from this world, every other world has already been destroyed by the Abyss.]
[At least in this star system, there shouldn't be a second habitable world left.]
[And honestly, in this cosmos, Teyvat is the only place I actually know.]
[The other worlds—if any remain—are completely unfamiliar to me.]
[Lumine and I are both "outsiders."]
[But there's a big difference between us.]
[At the very least, Lumine, as a traveler from beyond the world, still belongs to this cosmos.]
[I don't. I don't belong to Teyvat, and I don't belong to any world in this cosmos either.]
[Strictly speaking—]
[I'm someone who came from outside this universe entirely.]
All the girls: "?????"
No wonder he'd said he had nowhere else to go.
Even if he did leave Teyvat, there was nowhere in this universe worth going.
Because everything outside was already ruined.
Good news: Su Xuan wasn't running off any time soon.
Bad news: the Abyss was apparently way scarier than they'd thought—
And Teyvat was nothing more than a lonely little boat drifting in an ocean of death.
What shocked them even more was that there were… other universes beyond this one.
Their heads felt like they were about to start smoking.
This kind of information was far beyond what their worldview was built to handle.
"Someone from outside the universe…"
The Inazuman girls stared blankly at the man resting against Ei.
Being from "outside the world" was already hard enough to imagine.
But Su Xuan's true origin was somewhere beyond the universe itself.
"Beyond the universe… there are more universes?" Ayaka whispered, dazed.
Hearing her murmur, Yae Miko quickly pressed a finger to her lips.
Shh.
She gestured for them to stay quiet.
And wait for what Su Xuan would write next.
They didn't have to wait long.
[Talking about how the Abyss has swallowed most of the universe made me realize something.]
[There are other things very similar to it.]
[Like the Honkai next door, the Will Overmind next door, the Black Tide next door…]
[But the one most similar to the Abyss has to be the Will Overmind of a neighboring universe.]
[Whether it's the Abyss or the Will Overmind, they're both sentient energy bodies that erode and destroy life on a cosmic scale.]
[The Will Overmind is also deeply connected to the Honkai.]
[But in terms of directly taking over an entire universe—]
[Only the Abyss and the Will Overmind have managed that.]
[Here's the rough idea behind the Will Overmind.]
[In one universe, there was a civilization—]
[A civilization whose beings were made entirely of energy.]
[In Teyvat terms, think of slimes and other creatures composed purely of elemental energy.]
[That's the basic idea.]
[Those beings were all formed from a specific kind of energy.]
[And one day, they "merged" with another energy called Honkai.]
[I'm pretty sure they got a lot stronger afterward.]
[Because after that, they began conquering their universe.]
[During their conquest, they created a weapon called the "Assimilation Engine."]
[Using it, they could enslave, occupy, and dominate other beings.]
[But then the "Assimilation Engine" went out of control.]
[It spawned the very first Will Overmind.]
[And it didn't stop there.]
[The continued existence of that engine led to more and more Will Overminds.]
[In the end, those energy lifeforms spread throughout the universe—]
[Until the entire cosmos was filled with them.]
[In other words, the whole universe became a single type of energy lifeform.]
[Like the Abyss expanding through the stars.]
[The Abyss will eventually devour all life and take over the entire universe.]
The girls were speechless.
An entire universe turned into one kind of energy being?
No—more accurately, one single attribute of energy life form occupying everything.
They couldn't even imagine it.
At best, they could pretend the universe was filled with a single element—like endless Pyro or Electro.
But clearly, the Abyss and the Will Overmind were nothing as simple as "elements."
[But all things considered—]
[Between the two, I still think the Abyss is gentler.]
[Most obvious example: in front of the Abyss, if your will is strong enough, you can extract power from it.]
[You can even, in some cases, coexist with it.]
[In front of the Will Overmind, though—]
[It only tells you one thing:]
["Your destruction has nothing to do with you."]
[After conquering its own universe, one Overmind managed to slip into another.]
[It caused a lot of trouble. Its first instinct was to send everyone to the afterlife together.]
[Unfortunately for it, being just one fragment away from its home universe meant it was limited.]
[Its performance wasn't that impressive—]
[Even after charging for twenty seconds, all it could do was blow through a planet's core and shatter the world.]
[In the end, two girls collaborated to create a reality-warping field with a radius of around ninety-six thousand kilometers.]
[They overlaid that field over the Overmind's personal space—]
[And erased it from existence.]
[You'd think that was the end of it.]
[But the one they erased was just a fragment.]
[Back in its home universe, the Overmind still existed in full.]
[Unless you wipe out the universe where the Overmind lives—]
[You can't truly erase it.]
[Sometimes, I wonder if the Abyss is the same.]
[Maybe it started out as some experimental accident—]
[A failed weapon that turned into a universe-spanning virus-like energy.]
[If that's true, then you'd either have to destroy the device that first spawned it and then slowly clean the Abyss out of the universe—]
[Or just blow up the entire universe in one go.]
[Alternatively, you become the core of the universe itself—]
[Rewrite the rules, and delete or alter the properties of the Abyss.]
[Otherwise, how do you destroy something like that?]
[You wipe out one part, it just grows back again.]
[Children and grandchildren without end—there's no cleaning it all.]
The girls all shivered.
By Su Xuan's logic, the Overmind taking a whole universe wasn't fundamentally different from the Abyss's encroachment.
What terrified them was the idea that such horrors might have started as… technological accidents.
Someone tried to create a weapon, the machine went haywire, and the end result was this.
A whole universe turned into nothing but a swarm of sentient energy.
Unless you had the power to detonate an entire cosmos in one shot, there was simply no way to erase it.
[…Oops. I think I might've scared Ei and the others a bit.]
[The Abyss really is a monster compared to the Overmind—]
[But it's still a more "gentle" monster.]
[Even if we can't erase it outright—]
[There are ways to make it detour and go around.]
[If you can't beat it now, you don't stand in its way.]
[If you can't provoke it, then at least you can avoid it.]
[Even if you can't win, you can at least refuse to die in front of it, right?]
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