How can a retired savior be considered retired if he drops to 40,000?

Judging from the latter's expression, he obviously has a lot to ask: Why did you drag me to the bottom of Fujimaru Ritsuka's dream world just because of a disagreement? Why is there such a structure in her mind? What exactly is the "abandoned hole" "abandoned"? What does "you" mean? Do you know that there are many people here?

But in fact, the first question that came to Coates's lips was a simple and intuitive question:

"You define this as a 'hole'?"

He pointed at the scene in front of him, clearly questioning his ability to name "you" whose subject he had not yet clarified.

During Curze's brief trip to the fantasy world, he did learn something about magic. At least he knew that the scenes in other people's spiritual worlds were mostly between the physical universe and the subspace: they might not have too much logic and operate according to inexplicable laws that contradict reality, but they would not completely transcend human cognition. But in this area, he felt that the rules he had summarized were not enough.

In front of him was a pure, devouring darkness, which made Curze, who was born in darkness, instinctively want to peek at what was hidden behind it. However, the Primarch's keen senses, which were many times stronger than those of mortals, warned him not to do so.

The darkness does exist to conceal certain existences, but this concealment is for protection - the things beneath the darkness that even make him, the embodiment of fear, shudder should not be exposed.

Why is this structure connected to the bottom layer of Fujimaru Ritsuka's dream?

"Alas, actually, I was planning to do this and other tasks secretly while you were asleep, but you never slept, so I couldn't do anything about it." Merlin still had that annoying frivolous smile on his face, and said something in a cheerful tone that sounded wrong. "In that case, I have no choice but to let you know what I'm going to do first, and then ask for your consent."

This statement obviously aroused Coz's rebellious emotion: "What if I don't agree?"

This sentence earned Merlin a seemingly hearty laugh: "Your Excellency the Primarch, you are joking. Considering that we are on the same side at the moment, there is no need to let things progress to this point, right?"

"Can I understand this as you must accomplish your goal even if it means bloodshed?"

Koz even seemed a little excited when he confirmed this, but unfortunately Merlin didn't respond to him and just turned his head to look at this insignificant direction, so it was difficult to judge the actual scale of the darkness:

"This is the 'waste hole'." He put away his smile and explained, "Just think of it as a 'landfill' for the 'evil information' that Ritsuka has consciously or unconsciously picked up during his journey."

Coze briefly weighed whether to stick to the previous topic. However, considering that this was Fujimaru Ritsuka's dream world, he had to rely on the power of the half-suicidal demon in front of him who had deliberately given himself a fluorescent effect so that he could be very conspicuous in pure darkness. He thought it was necessary to let him go for the time being.

"What do you want to do by bringing me here?"

"I want to tell you why the Emperor chose you when there are many Primarchs who 'do not exist in the real universe' due to death or disappearance."

Curze stared at Merlin unhappily: "Well, I hope you can make your words clearer."

"The simplest way to put it is that the Emperor observed the existence of this 'abandoned hole' and hoped that if it got out of control, someone would be able to at least suppress the damage caused by the rampant 'evil intelligence'." Merlin described it in a straightforward manner, "and among the Primarchs, your nature is the most suitable."

"…My essence."

"After what happened just now, you should have a basic understanding of your own nature, right? After taking off the constraints of your physical body, that should be your instinct."

Curze slowly lowered his head and looked at his hands. In this near-total darkness, the Primarch's vision could only capture limited information, but he knew that his hand, which looked hideous and hard due to the attached armor plates, was there - after touching the soul of his offspring in some form, the subtle cutting sensation, which was different from touching flesh and bones, still remained at his fingertips like an illusion.

"I guess so." He said carefully, "At least it can be used."

Darkness is the appearance, fear is the means, and foreknowledge is a pair of eyes given to him by the Creator to guard against being blinded. The real power he holds tightly in his hands is judgment and punishment, the discretion of crimes, and the punishment of evil thoughts.

Perhaps this was the original intention of the Emperor when he created him. But the biggest mistake he made was to install a human heart in a judgment machine.

His father did give him a sense of justice that was almost paranoid, but that was not enough. The justice that was always out of reach only drove him crazy.

"What do you mean by bringing this up?" Coze cleared the complicated thoughts surging in his mind and forced himself to focus on the current topic. "Are you implying that my essence can..."

He paused, then chose a phrase that better reflected his displeasure: "'Sweeping the trash' here?"

Merlin laughed. I don't know whether this half-incubus didn't understand the atmosphere, or he understood it but was deliberately trying to make things difficult for him. In short, Curze was indeed offended once again.

"Oh, it's a great help that you understood it so quickly. You don't really need to do anything, just leave a little bit of your essence here."

The Flower Magician raised his hand and made a "little bit" gesture, but Koz was very skeptical about this so-called "little bit".

"What exactly is this so-called 'malicious intelligence'? You haven't explained it yet."

"In layman's terms, it refers to the evil thoughts that everyone has in life. For most people, it is the thoughts that they think about but don't really do. For example, 'The lunch is so bad that I should beat up the cook', 'My friend who was in a similar situation has become very successful and I hope he will lose everything soon', 'My boss is so annoying, why doesn't he just die' and so on."

Merlin described the malice of human nature in a cheerful tone:

"But you think that most people would not put such thoughts into practice, right? This means that these 'evil intelligence' is normally thrown into the 'waste hole' for disposal. But if that person's 'waste hole' is filled with a large amount of 'evil intelligence', resulting in the bad thoughts having nowhere to go... you can imagine what will happen, right?"

Conrad Curze looked at the darkness before him, which was too large no matter how he measured it, and remained silent with doubt.

"Of course, what I've said above is the situation of 'ordinary people' whose lives don't have too many ups and downs." Merlin restrained his smile here, "In Fujimaru Ritsuka's 'abandoned hole', it's not just her own 'evil information' that is stored. She originally had a physique that 'is easy to form bonds with others', and because of the various things that happened before... this 'abandoned hole' gradually became like this."

"What's in here?"

"'Evil intelligence' that is related to her but not hers - the grudges of the dead, the curses of the defeated, the realities that do not exist or have been erased, the urge of things that want to be born but have not been born to break out of the womb. If you want a more concise definition, the phrase 'all the evil of mankind' is very suitable."

Curze looked at Merlin's calm face suspiciously. The faint light emanating from his body made his demeanor clearly visible to the viewer even in the darkness.

"…If Fujimaru Ritsuka is just a mortal, why hasn't she been crushed by so many evil thoughts?"

"Well, first of all, it's because there are excellent guardian knights here, and secondly, she has signed a contract with something similar before, so there are loopholes to exploit with this contract. Of course, there are various other reasons, but they are not important." Merlin smiled, "Ritsuka is a very good master, so even after the agreed journey is over, everyone is willing to continue to help."

Conrad Curz was annoyed by Merlin's sarcastic tone. He pretended not to understand that the other party was making fun of him for being unpopular, and was about to ask the next question when the entire space began to fluctuate slightly.

"It seems that the outside has been successful. The singularity has been eliminated, and the information about 'Jestal' has poured in." Merlin said.

Koze still couldn't see anything, but he was too familiar with similar things - he didn't really need vision to know what flowed into this thick darkness. He sensed greed and arrogance, he sensed plunder and theft, he sensed killing and sacrifice in the name of justice, he sensed more complicated sins and evil thoughts. The appearance of Jestal's development and prosperity for more than a hundred years was peeled off and fixed in reality, and the rotten blood underneath it flowed in here unscrupulously. Just a glimpse was enough to shock the heart.

Koz suddenly remembered the puzzling title that his father had given to Fujimaru Ritsuka on his own initiative before they left the Star Torch: "Sin Drinker".

She was literally sipping sin.

"In our world, this is an imaginary world that shouldn't be 'proven to exist'." Merlin's enthusiastic but actually cold voice didn't care about Curze's shock at all. "To put it simply, it's similar to the 'Observer Effect'. As long as things in the imaginary world cannot be recognized, it can't affect the real world because it 'doesn't exist'. But in this world, the rules don't work that way. The generation of subspace entities has always disregarded human will. Therefore, as the outsider Fujimaru Ritsuka gradually embeds his existence into this universe, this 'abandoned hole' will one day be 'proven to exist' by something other than humans - it's just a matter of sooner or later."

"...In other words, sooner or later this place will be transformed into a subspace entity because of the concept of 'all the evil of mankind'?"

"It hasn't progressed to that stage yet, so I can't say for sure. After all, this is unprecedented. Of course, I hope it can become a subspace entity - then Ritsuka can get rid of this damn thing completely. But according to the joint deduction of the learned people in Chaldea and the Emperor, the more likely result is that this 'abandoned hole' will become a subspace projection of Ritsuka that does not exist yet in the future."

There were some sounds of fighting coming from afar, it seemed that their location was not yet the front line of the "Abandoned Hole".

"So, you said you need my essence." Curze deduced, "You need my judgment to determine sin, and my punishment to eliminate sin. The size of this 'abandoned hole' is gradually expanding, and you need a new gatekeeper."

"That's not entirely true, but it's fine as it is," Merlin said with a pleasant smile. "It's great that you understand. I'll be happy to—"

Caught off guard, Koz felt a sharp pain in the little finger of his left hand as if it had been cut off: Merlin had already cut off a small piece of his essence from his body before he finished speaking.

This could almost be considered a hostile act.

"--I haven't agreed yet!" Koz reached out to grab Merlin in rage, but - not surprisingly, the flower magician placed another phantom here.

"This is a dream. As a creature of dreams, you can't hide your thoughts from me, you know?" The Dream Demon had the same smile on his face as always, and said calmly, "And there's no need to be so angry, right? Although the injury to the essence is indeed not easy to heal, this amount of damage will only take a month or two for you to grow back. In short, thank you very much for your help, and you can go back next--"

Merlin's voice gradually faded away, and the darkness in front of him gradually became thinner at the same speed. This behavior of running away immediately after succeeding made Curze even more angry, but before he began to think about how to retaliate, he found that the memory of this matter in his mind was rapidly fading at an abnormal rate.

"Merlin! What have you done to my brain again!" He yelled angrily at the border between dream and reality, but all he got in return was the Flower Magician's hearty and infuriating laughter:

"I didn't do anything, okay? Although the 'Abandoned Hole' is an imaginary world similar to the subspace, it is also a dream.

"——Isn't it normal that you don't remember anything that happened in your dream when you wake up?"

-

Curze opened his eyes in the corridor of the Storm's Edge.

He didn't quite remember what he was doing standing here, but the only thing that was very clear was that the anger burning in his chest was directed at Merlin.

The Dream Demon, who had only cast an illusion here, could not be caught for the time being, and the reason for his anger was unclear. Conrad Curze hesitated for a moment whether to let it go, but just as he was thinking, he found that Fujimaru Ritsuka, who had just returned to the ship and had not even changed out of the Orthnaus Spiritual Exoskeleton for combat, brushed past him - holding a paperback version of the "Record of the Holy Words".

"What are you going to do?" he asked, puzzled. "Don't you also clearly believe that 'the Emperor is not a god'?"

Fujimaru Ritsuka turned around with a gloomy face and said, "But I think I saw Tzeentch in the dreamlike gap between the re-weaving of human nature. It's so unlucky. I must pray quickly to 'get rid of the poison'."

This incident was enough to make anyone tense up and alert instantly, so it was normal for Koz's tone to carry a bit of nervousness that he himself was not aware of:

"You saw the Chaos God himself? What happened?"

"I don't remember. That's the big problem." Fujimaru Ritsuka still had a gloomy face. "Although it is said that things in dreams will naturally be forgotten after waking up, why is 'Between the Cracks' also considered a dream!"

She ran to her room muttering these angrily. Curze silently watched her back from where he stood. Somehow, his anger towards Merlin intensified.

Meow——(Pa pa)

I'll probably wrap up the Jestal thing in the next day or two, and maybe do some Storm Edge tea drama after that, or maybe not, and then jump into the next story chapter... To be honest, I haven't figured out where the next story should take place (.)

No matter what, I'll just read Plague War (You) carefully first.

(End of this chapter)

Chapter 36 The man was not thinking about anything, he was just eating cookies

Lanmalok leads his team on a "mission".

He dispatched a team to intercept the Imperial tax collection fleet that was leaving the civilized world of Jestal, and demanded an inspection of the cargo in the entire fleet in the name of searching for possible fugitives.

Judging from the time when each team sent back their communications, they might have encountered some difficulties after boarding the ship, but Lanmalok didn't care. He only asked his soldiers to complete the mission.

These contacts reported some administrative or armed institutions that they did not know about, which were set up by the Empire 10,000 years later, some local specialties used by Jestal to deduct tithes (food, dried vegetables, local spices, a few expensive handicrafts and luxury goods), some ships and facilities that were not true to the Empire, and a mess of so-called "state religion" personnel. They obviously had some minor frictions on these ships and between government officials, but for Lanmarok, he only cared about the results of the mission.

None of the teams found any trace of the fugitive, a common outcome in pursuits and investigations. Lanmaroc shouldn't have been upset, but he had a strong feeling that "something was wrong."

He recalled the whole process again: they decided to hunt down the fugitive, they followed the fugitive's trail and jumped into the warp, they encountered a warp storm, they found a way to return to the physical universe but found that ten thousand years had passed, they pieced together the current situation of the empire with the fragments of information in the short-range communication waves floating in the universe, they...

No, wait, relying solely on intra-galactic communications in this remote star region, can they compile the current situation of the empire into such detail?

In addition to the logical problems, he also had a vague feeling that he had forgotten something.

This feeling of something being wrong made him feel a little uneasy, and when a Dark Angel Fire Wing Grand Master felt uneasy, it was easy for him to start looking for the source of his uneasiness almost paranoidly.

As soon as he started thinking about it, he found more and more things that were wrong: Why did he only stop the tax collection fleet leaving the port, but not block the entire port? Why was he so sure that the fugitives the Dark Angels were chasing were on this fleet? In the final analysis - after they left the warp, they found that ten thousand years had passed, so why did he conclude that the fugitives they were chasing were still alive? Even encountered the same warp storm? And also landed on this planet?

The whole thing was wrong. This made Lanmarok nervously check all his actions after the Lion's Mane jumped out of the warp - the warp storm destroyed the Geller position of the ship, and some inexplicable and unspeakable accidents happened on the ship. He suspected that these... things still left some effects after the ship left the warp.

Lanmarok probably knew what was going on, but these things should not be made public, even within the Dark Angels. And in addition to him, the entire crew on the ship should be subject to similar investigations - but this is the amount of work that he cannot complete quickly alone. If possible, he hopes that those who know about this investigation can be limited to a specific inner circle to which he belongs, however -

——However, he suddenly discovered that a very unreasonable entry appeared in the communication record of the Lion's Mane: a short-range communication from the Emperor's Vision was received, and the timestamp showed that this incident occurred twenty-six Terra standard hours ago.

If such an important communication was received, then any crew member on the Lion's Mane, whether Astartes warriors or mortal auxiliary soldiers, would know that the matter should be reported immediately and the final decision would be left to him.

The problem was that the communication record was marked as "processed", but he had no recollection of the incident at all.

-

"If the 'man in charge' on the Dark Angels actually sends a transmission asking what's going on, I'll be the first to laugh at him in his face."

Yago Sevitarion made a bold statement in the main control room of Storm's Edge, but Fujimaru Ritsuka, who was curled up in a chair next to Somni, holding a cup of hot milk and looking particularly golden from a psychic perspective, did not object strongly:

"You are just taking your anger out on me," she pointed out objectively. "Before I told you that this man was called Lanmarok, you didn't even know his name, and you probably had never met him in person."

"What does it matter? Laughing at the jailer is one of the few interesting entertainments in the boring life of any prisoner." Sevatar argued, "A lady like you certainly doesn't understand, but please don't deprive us of the means to have fun."

"But you are no longer a prisoner?" Fujimaru Ritsuka said matter-of-factly. "By the way, I haven't had time to discuss this with Conrad yet: if there are other Night Lords on that ship, I think we should just save them from the Dark Angels as well."

Sevatar was speechless for a moment, and carefully looked up and down at Ritsuka's awkward sitting posture, then spoke carefully: "Yes, there is, but..."

Fujimaru Ritsuka frowned and put down the cup: "Are you worried that your brothers in the legion will be an eyesore to Conrad again, or do you think I can't talk this over with the Dark Angel?"

Sevatar didn't say anything, but just shrugged with a strange look, trying to brush off the question. Ritsuka wanted to keep insisting, but a holographic screen that Somni pulled over from her side attracted her attention.

"Thank you, Somni." She leaned over to the screen and read it carefully for a few seconds, then her tone became noticeably happier. "I told you! Seventeen is the right age to go to school!"

Sevatar, who usually didn't have big emotional fluctuations, also showed obvious surprise at this time: "Found it?"

"Alita's student record. Here." Ritsuka turned the light screen he was waving at towards Sevatar, not caring that he was not actually nearby - anyway, Astarte's vision was enough for him to see the electronic photo attached to the student record:

Straw-colored hair, fair skin, and a few freckles on her face, this was undoubtedly the Alita in his memory. But this was obviously not the Alita he knew: the girl in the photo looked more tender than he remembered, and there was an obvious, more vigorous and energetic spirit that had not been destroyed by the reality of suffering.

Sevatar felt mixed emotions.

"...Can the dead be resurrected?" He took a long while to finally ask this question so that the atmosphere would not become completely dull. "Does the 'Rewriting of Humanity' that rewrites the history of the singularity also care about this?"

"This cannot be called resurrection. The technology that can completely and without side effects resurrect the dead is not something that humans can reach in my knowledge... but the Emperor seems to be able to do it, so psychic power is really cheating."

Fujimaru Ritsuka dragged back the light screen and explained while studying the address information on Alita's student records, "Alita is still alive, but simply because the past has been changed, the event of 'you killing her' did not happen, so of course she is alive."

"... Then, the people who died in the singularity...?"

"Not everyone can come back alive. Although it is natural that the 'present' events will change because the 'past' has been tampered with, the annoying thing is that the 'unborn', an entity created in the subspace, is not bound by the rules of linear time."

Fujimaru Ritsuka gritted his teeth as he said this: "If the souls of people are taken away by demons in the singularity and they escape to the subspace, the reconstruction of events in the real universe will not be able to affect them. The souls of people have been taken away, and the demons themselves have the corresponding souls, which is the best evidence. Therefore, at the corresponding time after the reconstruction, the souls of these people will automatically disappear. In reality, the parties involved will naturally die due to various reasonable reasons."

She turned her head and glanced at Sevatar: "Speaking of this, Alita was able to survive thanks to your decision to burn her along with the soul-stealing demon. Since the 'cat box' could not prove her death after it was opened, she must be alive."

Sevasta's already heavy mood was further complicated by these words.

Fujimaru Ritsuka obviously sensed the other person's feelings, but she didn't say anything to comfort him. Instead, she asked directly, "I'm going to go play with her later. She said she'll treat me to round wheat next time we meet. Do you want to come with me?"

"Hmm..." Sevatar was confused. "But after the 'Re-Editing of Humanity', we had no intersection with her in history. She shouldn't remember you and me, right?"

"Yeah? Any questions?" Ritsuka showed she was very experienced in this matter. "Then just treat it as our first meeting and get to know each other again. That's what 'connection' is all about. Someone has to take the initiative to step forward!"

"… Even so, your promise of 'please eat round wheat' never happened. Even if you go find her, Alita won't fulfill it."

"Don't be so rigid. It's normal for girls to buy some snacks and eat together on the way when they meet for the first time." After confirming the specific coordinates, Fujimaru Ritsuka happily drank the milk in the cup in one gulp and confirmed with Sevatar again, "Aren't you coming with us?"