Chapter 1492 — "Erroneous Copy"
Blade of Dawn · Page 4 of 4
She waved a hand as she spoke: "I know what you're worried about. You're worried that the connection between me and the Lady of Night is growing ever more inseparable, that I'm gradually being drawn in and devoured by that lost Divine Realm of Shadow, that I might become another Wilder—a 'Lost One' trapped in the Divine Realm of Shadow, never able to leave—or worse..."
She blinked and let out a soft breath: "The anchor generator's logs record that after the Starchart Keeper falls into an abnormal state, erroneous duplication and overflow may occur... When you learned that, you didn't smile once for an entire day."
Gao Yang's voice was low: "So you realized it too."
"Didn't I say it already? I'm not stupid—and besides, intelligence is my job in the first place. It's just that when certain things happen to yourself, your reaction lags a tiny bit," Amber pursed her lips. "Right now the Lady of Night is gradually waking from Her slumber, and with Her awakening, Prandel vanished, Palansanto vanished, the entire Kingdom of Violet vanished, and the ruined city at the border of the Divine Realm of Shadow has become whole again. In a sense, the 'errors' produced by Her slumbering state seem to be getting repaired one by one as She awakens. So tell me... what will the next 'error' to be repaired be?"
"...It's all speculation. There's no evidence right now that can confirm you..."
"How could there possibly be evidence? The Gondor mages who ran the human-creation project back then are all dead. Heaven knows where they captured my soul from," Amber waved a hand. "But even without hard evidence, there's no shortage of indirect clues. My shadow affinity. My experiences traversing the Divine Realm of Shadow. My connection to the shadow-dwellers. The things those cryptic shadow-dwellers whisper to me. And these..."
She raised her hand. Shadow Dust flowed around her fingertips, like illusory blue smoke, like fragments of light and shadow.
"These things you call knockoffs—as you said, they look very much like 'erroneous copies' originating from the Lady of Night. So then I, who can keep dragging 'erroneous copies' out of the Divine Realm of Shadow, am most likely the first and greatest 'erroneous copy' of them all."
Some things Gao Yang had thought of, and Amber had thought of too. It was just that they had always had a tacit understanding: before matters became clear, before there was a reliable solution or line of thinking, neither of them had chosen to speak it aloud.
But now, Amber had spoken it aloud.
She suspected that she herself was the "erroneous copy" mentioned in the anchor generator's logs—the one produced after the Lady of Night fell into an abnormal state. It would explain every anomaly that had ever happened to her.
It also explained her innate shadow "talent."
Gao Yang did not speak. He only gazed into Amber's eyes, and how long passed, he could not say, before he finally broke the silence: "It's not as though we've never dealt with a divine calamity before."
"But this may not be a divine calamity—and perhaps it can't be settled by force either," Amber said offhandedly. "Honestly, if the Lady of Night really were a god with malice toward the mortal world, and she chose to descend and take up arms, I don't doubt for a moment that you'd raise a coalition of dozens of nations and charge straight in—it's not as if you haven't bulldozed a god or two, or things near enough to gods, along the way. But what if this is just a system error on the part of the Pathfinders? You can't very well tear down the Firmament Station, can you? And even if you did tear the damn thing down, that wouldn't necessarily do any good..."
(End of Chapter)