After receiving the urgent report that Edenmere had been attacked by unknown humans, Feliciana and the others decided to return to Edenmere immediately along with Elara and the other angels. However, since they had been preparing to escort Tianwang Team via the Adventurers' Guild teleportation array in Norvale to Crescent City, Feliciana and Cyrae could only instruct Clemens and his group to go ahead to Crescent City—or directly to Orhus, the capital of the Crestvale Republic—and wait for them there.
At first, Tianwang Team was somewhat unwilling, but Elara could not ignore an emergency in her homeland. Feliciana felt the same. After weighing priorities, escorting Tianwang Team had to be postponed.
The entrance connecting Edenmere to the main world was located in the sky above Elara Woodlands, several kilometers outside the royal capital, Norvale. Since the last time they left Edenmere, the position of this exit had barely changed.
Normally, angels were stationed nearby to guard and monitor the entrance. But when Feliciana and the others arrived, the angels there were nowhere to be seen—meaning the invaders had successfully found the entrance and had already entered Edenmere.
The invaders this time were the third System squad: Shenhui Team.
As soon as Shenhui Team entered Edenmere, they encountered fierce resistance from the angel race. However, Shenhui Team's strength was extremely high. Even though there were few of them—only five—their overall level was on a completely different tier from other System squads. In addition, Shenhui Team possessed many weapons and miraculous items that did not belong to this world. Each member was far stronger than a ten-winged angel. As a result, despite being vastly outnumbered, they still inflicted significant losses on Edenmere.
Ordinary angels had no ability to resist. After all, very few high-ranking angels remained in Edenmere. Later, however, Reed took the field. Along with her, several high-ranking angel prisoners who were being held were temporarily released to fight together. With the firepower boost of guns and artillery obtained from Earth, they finally managed to barely hold back Shenhui Team's slaughter. Reed had returned to Edenmere this time specifically to test the real combat effectiveness of Earth weapons inside Edenmere. That was also why she had previously worked on developing an ammunition production line—to strengthen the angel race's combat power through Earth firearms.
Shenhui Team's knowledge of the angel race came largely from the book I Turned into an Angel and Traveled to Another World. When the angels suddenly pulled out guns and fought back during the struggle, Shenhui Team was clearly caught off guard. Some members even suffered minor injuries midway through. However, even though the magically modified firearms Reed improved in theory had greater power, the light-element environment in Edenmere was far too dense, and the enemies' individual strength was far too overwhelming. After gradually adapting, Shenhui Team slowly regained the upper hand.
This back-and-forth bought precious time for Elara and the others to return to Edenmere.
With Feliciana joining the battle, even without Gisphrael's possession, she could easily repel one or two Shenhui Team members working together. Elara, Adrian, and Cyrae were somewhat weaker; fighting Shenhui Team members alone was difficult for them. But with the added fire support of other angels, they were still able to reverse the overall situation in Edenmere. Seeing the tide turning, the invaders retreated one by one, escaping the battlefield via spatial teleportation.
However, Shenhui Team's invasion of Edenmere was not merely about slaughtering angels and creating chaos.
From limited exchanges during the fighting, Feliciana and the others realized that Shenhui Team's strongest leader did not seem to have taken the field. Moreover, according to reports, there had been six humans who initially entered Edenmere. In other words, Shenhui Team's captain was likely still inside Edenmere somewhere, and no one knew where he had gone.
At this point, Elara—Edenmere's highest ruler—named a location: the Cloud Palace, where the newborn angels had previously been shown the memories of the Light God from ten thousand years ago.
The Cloud Palace floated high in Edenmere's sky. It was said to be the oldest structure in existence, already present when Galadra first created Edenmere. Inside the Cloud Palace, there was also a directional teleportation route into a highly classified internal space within Edenmere—one that only the Elara of each generation was allowed to know about.
Because the situation was urgent due to the invasion, Elara could no longer adhere to the restrictions. She led Feliciana and the others through the Cloud Palace into that internal space. There, they found a place resembling a massive control room, filled with high-tech display screens and various instruments—very similar to ancient technology. Shenhui Team's captain, June Ching, finally confronted the main group face-to-face for the first time.
Although each member of every System squad carried a System with them, in reality these Systems appeared to be managed by a single AI-like consciousness, seemingly with the purpose—explicitly or implicitly—of training the System squad members. System squad members were basically all human. June Ching was the strongest person among all the System squads; his power even exceeded that of a single elemental angel who possessed a complete authority.
Feliciana could not defeat him. Everyone who fought June Ching in this battle was unable to win and suffered considerable losses. June Ching, meanwhile, was also disappointed—because the protagonists described in I Turned into an Angel and Traveled to Another World, who were supposedly capable of defeating a god, were actually so unimpressive. Because of his arrogance, he did not deliver a killing blow. Instead, he continued carrying out the mission the System had assigned to Shenhui Team: destroying everything inside this control-room space.
As for what this control room actually controlled, and what its function truly was, even Elara herself did not know. The Elara of each generation had been told that none of the buttons or devices here were to be touched lightly.
After June Ching destroyed everything here, the dense light-element energy within Edenmere suddenly began dissipating at extreme speed, as if some protective barrier surrounding Edenmere had abruptly vanished. As the barrier disappeared, the light source within Edenmere—previously sustained by an immense concentration of light elements—also began to weaken. Only then did everyone see Edenmere's true form:
It was a gigantic continent floating in outer space, with a maximum width of nearly one hundred kilometers. Beside it, they could see a planet—covered mostly by oceans—whose environment was very similar to Earth. Eldoria Continent and the Dark Continent were both located on that planet.
With the plan successfully implemented, June Ching revealed some of the background truth he had learned through the System missions.
Edenmere was originally a continental fragment that had split away from the planet, linking Eldoria Continent and the Dark Continent. It continuously orbited the sun of this stellar system and the main-world planet where the continents lay, completing roughly one cycle every hundred years. The entire orbital route had been carefully designed by intelligent hands and was controlled automatically by this control room. Because part of its orbit brought it extremely close to the sun, Edenmere was perpetually rich in light-element energy. The so-called "Sunship Star" was exactly what people on the planet saw when Edenmere drew near.
At present, Edenmere was at the point in its orbit where it was closest to the main-world planet. Destroying Edenmere's control system therefore meant that Edenmere would no longer be able to move away again and return to its predetermined trajectory. Before long, it would fall onto the planet. A landmass fragment of such enormous size crashing down would unquestionably be an extinction-level disaster.
June Ching—and Shenhui Team as a whole—had come precisely to complete this step. Their further objective was to create a massive catastrophe, forcing the true god hidden behind this world—the "Saint"—to reveal itself, thereby completing the System's ultimate goal of slaying a god and breaking free of the System.
Because Edenmere's fall could not be avoided, and because June Ching did not believe Feliciana and the others had the power to undo it, he teleported away and left, allowing everyone—along with the entire angel race—to wait for death.
Feliciana, Adrian, and the angels as a whole truly could not stop it. However, June Ching and his team had overlooked a variable that should not have existed in this world at all: Gisphrael from the eighteenth parallel world.
At the critical moment, Gisphrael appeared again beside Feliciana and fused with her. Feliciana, now possessing the complete power of the Water Angel, finally wielded the authority of reality—successfully nullifying the extinction disaster that the fall should have caused, and placing the Edenmere landmass down in an ocean far from the other continents.
Originally, Adrian's trip to Edenmere had been for the purpose of proposing. But with Edenmere suffering such a catastrophic event and many elders dying as a result, the matter of a proposal could no longer be addressed. Elara had to remain in Edenmere to handle the angel race's aftermath, while the main group returned to Eldoria Continent to gather information about Shenhui Team and determine their next moves.