Chapter 608.1: The Unsettled Two (1)
Chapter 608.1: The Unsettled Two (1)
Bestial roars filled the battlefield. The desert winds carried a hint of blood-stench. Smoke puffed up from the ground and rose into the sky. Mountains of corpses and carcasses were strewn over the battlefield. It was a scene of carnage.
For a moment, the silver-haired girl thought that she had returned to the epic battlefield of the ancient era, where different races fought desperately for their future.
Indeed, this sight wasn’t unfamiliar to her at all. Or rather, a significant portion of her memories were about that.
Dead bodies, fresh blood, endless war, collapsed giants, fallen angels, and roaring gods.
Those were the things that immediately popped into her head if she briefly immersed herself in her memories, though it was not because she was emotionally affected by them that they were at the top of her mind, but simply because they were visually striking.
Giants had massive physiques that would smash a huge area of soldiers into meat paste whenever they collapsed on the battlefield. Angels tended to be cloaked in light due to their high mana capacity, so they were as eye-catching as shooting stars when they fell from the sky.
As for the gods, they were the stars of the battlefield in the ancient era, so it was only normal for her to have a strong impression of them.
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Most people would have thought that she was cold-blooded if they knew about her thoughts, given her lack of empathy toward the deceased, but that was hardly the case at all. She was only calm because these memories felt empty to her, as if they were just a gallery of images. She felt no emotional connection toward those memories at all.
They weren’t even her memories, after all.
The silver-haired girl shook her head. She turned her attention to the battle happening on the surface, as well as the fight between Shrouding Fog and the beast-headed giant, and she was a little surprised.
She had witnessed many battles through her memories, but she knew that times were different now. This battle was nowhere close to the scale of those between gods in the ancient era, but she could tell that it was already an all-out battle between the current dominant race of the Sia Continent, the humans, and the deviants.
She could say that with certainty because she used to live amongst the humans herself under the name of Alicia Ascart.
That being said, her memories of the time she had spent as Alicia Ascart was extremely blurred, such that the only thing she really recalled was her name. She didn’t feel particularly attached to that identity, and she felt no empathy toward the humans fighting in the desert either.
It couldn’t be helped.
During her awakening as the Black Moon, she inherited the memories of everything that had happened from the ancient era till now. These memories didn’t belong to her—they were really Genesis Goddess Sia’s and the Mother Goddess’ memories—but they were simply far greater in proportion.
The countless years of memories from Sia and the Mother Goddess squeezed out the decade of memories she had lived as a human, fragmenting them into pieces that she had yet to make sense of. Even so, she didn’t pay it much heed.
It didn’t matter how she felt about the humans in the past; they were now her enemies.
Humankind saw the Mother Goddess as an evil god, and they would do everything within their means to stop Her return. Before this greater scheme of things, what she had to do remained the same regardless of whether she regained her memories as a human or not. All it would do was to become a nuisance to her.
She looked at the beast-headed giant forged out of black sludge with an impassive expression, but her heart filled with disgust. The Mother Goddess’ powers induced in her a natural aversion to the Savior’s powers and fallen creatures.
Thus, she raised her hand to channel Light Devourer’s charged energy and unleashed it, but at the same time, she heard her name being called from the surface.
“…” 𝓫ℯ𝓭𝓃𝓸𝓋ℯ𝓁．𝓬𝓸𝓂
Someone here knows me? Alicia was intrigued, though she wasn’t surprised.
She was a prodigy amongst the humans, after all.
Under the influence of the Mother Goddess’ powers, her growth trajectory was incomparable to that of normal humans, reaching Origin Level 2 before awakening the Black Moon’s powers. While this was nothing much in the ancient era, it was a formidable feat for a human. There was bound to be someone amongst the hundreds of thousands of human soldiers below who recognized her.
She had expected someone to recognize her here, and her heart wouldn’t waver because of it. Yet, as if someone had thrown a rock into a still lake, her composed state of mind shook when she heard that voice.
What’s going on? Why am I bothered when I expected this… No, what’s affecting me is not the content of the message but the voice.
Her eyes widened in astonishment. She had to exert all her self-control to stop herself from turning her head over. However, her lapse in attention caused the trajectory of her attack to veer off course.
This isn’t good!
She quickly took corrective action, but the trajectory of the attack didn’t change right away. Nevertheless, it didn’t matter since she had accomplished the main mission.
The beast-headed giant had been destroyed by the rays of light, and Shrouding Fog and Light Devourer were enough to clean up the rest even without her help. Thus, she put her hand down, but the disturbance in her mental state didn’t end.
She couldn’t help but glance in the direction of the voice, only for her line of sight to be covered by Light Devourer’s deluge of white light.
I can’t see who it is…
“…What am I doing?” she murmured with a frown. She then turned to the two calamities and instructed, “I’ll leave the rest to you.”
In response, the aurora flickered and the white fog moaned.
With a wave of her hand, she created a crack in the sky and stepped into the crack, disappearing into the void.
…
A sudden flood of mana opened a spatial crack along a dim corridor.
Light footsteps echoed from the spatial crack, as a silver-haired, crimson-eyed woman stepped out from within. She stopped and took a look at her surroundings before taking a deep breath.
This was the divine temple that used to worship Sia in the ancient era—or rather, it was an imitation based on the Mother Goddess’ memories. The real temple had been long since destroyed by the flames of war, after all.
Perhaps due to having inherited the Mother Goddess’ powers, the silver-haired girl felt a sense of belonging to this place, a feeling of home. It was just that her expression was a little peculiar compared to when she first left.
A voice she had heard earlier on the battlefield between the humans and the deviants had caused a stir in her placid heart, leaving her confused as to what she was even doing.
In truth, she should not have left after dishing out that attack, but ensured the destruction of the Egg of the Beast God. That would have been the safer thing to do rather than leaving it to the Six Calamities, whose intelligence was limited. Yet, she couldn’t stop herself from escaping the scene, as if she was a child who had done something wrong.
This inexplicable feeling frustrated her.
She sensed that it had resulted from the lapse in her memories during her time as a human, but she dared not to verify it. She didn’t think that there was a need to do so, either, especially since there were several things she was certain about.
She was aware that her human parents had died a long time ago, and she remembered that she was adopted by another noble house. It was unlikely that the noble house would mistreat her, out of consideration for their own reputation, but they probably wouldn’t be too close either.
She knew what her personality was like, after all.
While she had a beautiful appearance, she knew that she had a cold nature that made it hard for others to approach her. She didn’t think that she would have opened her heart to the noble house that had adopted her, especially since her father had died protecting that clan’s patriarch.
Even if she didn’t blame that clan’s patriarch for her human father’s death, it would still have been hard for her to feel any goodwill toward him. She would have likely just maintained basic civility with him while keeping her distance.
Or, at least, that was what she had thought till the voice on the battlefield stirred her heart.
Could I have met someone important to me in those few short years? she wondered with a frown as her heart plunged deeper into confusion.