"All right, all right, enough crying and stomping."
Caelus was in a splendid mood. Smiling, he strolled over and patted the small shoulder of the still-fuming Herta puppet the way one soothes a cat with its fur standing on end.
"I! Am! Not! Crying and stomping!"
Herta jerked her head up, thoroughly unamused, and glared at him, biting off every syllable. Those amethyst eyes drilled into Caelus with pure venom.
"Okay, okay~" Caelus raised both hands in a French military salute, his tone as gentle as if he were coaxing a three-year-old.
"By the way, where's my reward for testing the Simulated Universe? Where are my adorable little Herta dolls? Time to pay up, isn't it?"
"Reward?!" Herta shot up like someone had stepped on her Tail, tiny hands planted on her hips, her volume spiking. "You wreck my Simulated Universe like that and you still want a reward? Nuh-uh-uh!"
"Tch. Shut off the Unreasonableness Module, would you?" Caelus plucked the little hammer out of her hand before she could put it down and tapped the head of it against her smooth forehead. "Don't even think about weaseling out. Sure, one or two utterly negligible accidents may have occurred during testing."
He pinched thumb and forefinger together to show exactly how tiny, then spread his hands, the picture of innocence. "But what does the Simulated Universe breaking have to do with me, Caelus?"
"The worst I did was kill a few bugs. That alone squeezed your processing power dry? Doesn't that mean your optimization wasn't up to scratch?"
"Your hardware can't keep up, and that's my fault?"
"And even — I'm saying even — if one percent of this were on me, doesn't that leave ninety-nine percent on you? Never heard that with great power comes great responsibility?"
"Then think about how much precious data you got out of that test run. Are you going to erase everything I contributed?"
This one-two-three combo — logically airtight, delivered with total conviction, and shifting the blame entirely onto the accuser — struck Herta dumb.
Her lips parted, but her throat had gone tight, and an inexplicable twinge of guilt crept up on her.
The Simulated Universe had crashed outright under this man's hands. The architecture had collapsed. What awaited her was an overtime hell with no daylight in it… so why, being cross-examined like this, could she hardly lift her head?
Insufficient optimization was absolute nonsense!
Having eaten dirt the previous two times it got broken, Herta had reinforced the Simulated Universe inside and out before this test — firewalls, redundant computing units, all of it!
And the result?
He'd blown the damn firewall sky-high along with everything else!
But then again.
This test had indeed recorded a great deal of extraordinarily valuable Aeon data, particularly the portions concerning Tayzzyronth.
Caelus hadn't merely completed the test objectives perfectly; he had overachieved, harvesting data on other Aeons as well — including partial data on [Order] being annexed by [Harmony].
A haul no less staggering than an archaeologist stumbling onto the tomb of the First Emperor!
"Fine, fine, I admit it — I was a little… emotional just now." Miss Herta shut down the Unreasonableness Protocol and waved a hand, irritated. "Payment as agreed! As for the little Herta dolls… I'll send you all down to the Herta City warehouse later. Pick your own."
"Help yourselves to any Curio on the station. Anything else you want, take it up with Asta… All right, you can get lost now."
Herta pointed at the door, issuing a very courteous eviction notice.
"The kind of woman who pulls out and forgets your name!"
Caelus at once curled his fingers into a delicate orchid gesture, touching the tips lightly to his cheek, and turned on Herta a look compounded of grief and accusation.
He flung off the hand she was using to shove him toward the door, like a maiden cast aside by a faithless lover, his voice sliding into a plaintive, lilting register, as though at any moment he might break into a lament from the inner chambers: "Sister spoke such solemn vows in days past, sweet words that set this heart of mine ablossom… and now, once she has had her use of me, she turns her face faster than a page, and gives me nothing but cold looks?"
Caelus heaved a long, sorrowful sigh. "In the end, honeyed words move the heart, but when the moment comes, all is cold indifference — fickle as the wind, and not a trace of recognition left in her eyes~"
"I… you…"
A jolt went through Herta's whole frame. Her delicate little face crumpled, her body shuddered outside her control, and her joints let out a faint creak.
Had this been a body of flesh and blood, it would have been one solid sheet of goosebumps by now!
Ruan Mei listened in silence.
Asta stared, dumbstruck.
Screwllum stood there, blank.
"When she's pleased, I'm 'Caelus'; when she's cross, I'm 'brat.' My whole fate turns on her moods — summoned at a whim, dismissed at a whim." Caelus paced slowly around the rigid Herta, his intonation growing more piteous by the word.
"Shut! Up! Already!"
Herta finally broke completely, the composure of a Genius abandoned. She practically shrieked as she lunged and clamped both hands around Caelus's arm.
Her voice shook with pure frenzy. "Right now! This instant! Put that acting away! And no more talking in that freakish tone!"
"Would you look at that~" Caelus instantly slid into a see-how-flustered-she-is expression, orchid fingers pointing elegantly at Herta. "I say a few extra words, and little sister carries on like this~"
"Daddy — fine, you're my daddy, are you happy!?"
Herta sprang straight up on the spot like a cat with its fur on end.
Her scalp crawled, her fists were clenched, and she was seconds away from hitting him with a Cosmic CQC Hazardous Wrestling Combo Shoulder Throw.
"Tch."
Caelus let out a short snort — impossible to tell whether it was regret at not getting to play longer or plain disdain — and dropped the whole affected posture in an instant, sliding back into his usual laziness.
He smoothed the sleeve Herta had crumpled, as though that pining, cloistered wife had never existed.
You. Absolute. Bastard.
Herta noted that her blood pressure and emotional volatility had been spiking with unusual frequency lately. The program inside the puppet body had already warned her that making her blood pressure dance like that was bad for her health.
"Let's go, Star-baby."
Caelus called out to the Stellaron spirit, who had been off to one side diligently studying his affected tone and mannerisms, and to Asta, who was gaping, her soul halfway out of her body.
This run through the Simulated Universe had been a genuine blast, and the returns had been enormous.
He recommended Herta speed up the repairs. He wanted several more runs.
"Th-thrilling~!"
Even before Caelus's theatrics raised goosebumps on her arms — and still now — Asta's mind remained locked on that vast spectacle that had swept across the cosmos.
That unprecedented fireworks show Caelus had set alight for her!
Deep in those azure eyes, the ultimate brilliance replayed itself, surging like a tide:
Light!
Boundless, endless light!
Beginning at the glittering headwaters of the galaxy, racing toward the lonely edge of the universe!
It was a sacrifice that used an entire universe as fuel. Countless stars and Swarm alike detonated like billions of supernovae going off at once, setting the cold dark thoroughly ablaze.
The radiance poured together into a vast river of light, and then into a downpour of light drenching ten thousand worlds — flame blooming like flowers, blossoming across every cosmos!
Its magnificence and splendor would shame any celebration ever known!
Asta's family was hardly poor, yet she had never in her life seen a fireworks display so extravagant it verged on blasphemy… when even the gods themselves became part of the fireworks.
That ultimate radiance seemed engraved into her soul.
And whenever the image came back to her, a strange flutter stirred that she could not suppress, and a joy unlike any she had known burst through her chest.
The feeling spilled over, impossible to hide.
Without thinking, Asta reached out and took Caelus's hand, lacing her fingers tightly through his.
How to put it?
It was a whim she couldn't explain. She wanted to test it — whether doing that sort of thing in reality felt any different from doing it in the Simulated Universe.
Caelus accepted it as perfectly natural.
It was Stelle who broke stride for an instant, feeling through their empathy link the warmth and the faint tremble of pressure in that palm, and turned to look at Asta.
The girl's pink hair spilled over one shoulder, the outer corners of her eyes tilted up in a dazzling smile, her cheeks flushed a tender, heart-stopping red. Her eyes seemed to be glowing.
Stelle blinked, then understood, and a proud grin spread across her face — That's Lord Caelus for you!
And just as Asta, blushing, was casting about for an excuse to ask Caelus on a date —
"Darling, one moment."
The voice came from behind them, clear and cool as jade steeped in the misty rain of Jiangnan, carrying a rhythm all its own.
"What is it?" Caelus stopped and looked at the Jiangnan beauty approaching in pale green heels with an unhurried, graceful stride. "Shouldn't you be processing all that precious observational data? Or helping Herta resuscitate her Simulated Universe?"
Faint grumbling still drifted out of the office behind them.
"The data is properly archived and available for in-depth study at any time." Ruan Mei's voice was warm, though those lively jade-green eyes stayed gentle and still, betraying not a flicker of feeling. "As for the Simulated Universe… the Aeon prototypes under my charge are tightly bound to the Paths. They will repair themselves. My intervention isn't required."
"Right now, you are more important to me."
She came to a stop in front of him, those emerald eyes fixed on him with total attention.
Ruan Mei had come to the test in person with one primary goal: to study Tayzzyronth and its Swarm, and obtain the key data needed to cultivate — or even revive — a Propagation Emanator. That would be the crucial bridge to probing the deeper mysteries of the Path of Propagation.
Caelus's test run had handed her a mountain of precious data far beyond her expectations.
And then, when Caelus unexpectedly became a Propagation Emanator inside the Simulated Universe, was granted near-complete Path authority by Tayzzyronth, and afterward genuinely set foot on the Path of [Propagation] in reality…
His very existence had outgrown the category of "data sample." He had become a one-of-a-kind phenomenon of immense research value!
"Do you remember what you promised me earlier?" Ruan Mei asked softly.
"…?"
A brief and entirely genuine blankness crossed Caelus's face.
It wasn't an act. He really had forgotten.
Displaced time perception was to blame.
Only two days had passed on the outside, but inside the Simulated Universe, under time acceleration and every buff that blurred subjective duration, the span Caelus had actually lived through came to roughly twenty days.
And the internal timeline of the Simulated Universe itself had spanned a good three Amber Eras and more!
What had he promised a few days ago?
For the moment, it genuinely escaped him.
Faced with his blank look, Ruan Mei smiled faintly and produced a standard measuring cup from behind her back, as though she had prepared for this all along.
"Fill it for me, darling. I need sufficient genetic serum before I can begin my research."
"Genetic serum… fill it!?"
A chill ran up Asta's spine as she glanced at the graduation marks on the cup.
Five hundred milliliters!?
That was enough to wring a normal man dry ten times over.
"That's all? Who exactly are you looking down on?" Stelle put both hands on her hips and threw her chest out.
In the name of practicing Propagation, what she'd wrung out of him would have filled a bathtub deep enough to soak in.
"Oh, right, I remember now. There was that."
One mention from Ruan Mei and the promise from twenty days ago came back to him.
But was it really okay to bring it up that breezily?
As for five hundred milliliters?
For a man who had set foot on the Path of Propagation, that was nothing. He could manage it with an extra zero on the end… ahem, though that would take time, obviously.
"I recall you said you'd be collecting it yourself?" Caelus blinked.
"Mm~ That's right, and so…" Ruan Mei drew out a pair of snow-white, finely woven lace gloves and slid them onto those slender, jade-pale hands. "I've already prepared."
"Darling, would you prefer the laboratory or a bedroom? Either suits me."
"Oh, and besides the genetic raw material, I'd like to attempt a fusion as well."
"Ahem, ahem, ahem!"
Asta couldn't hold back two coughs, cutting off Ruan Mei, who was drifting closer and closer to Caelus and was a hair away from starting the private tutoring session. She forced a smile onto her face. "Miss Ruan Mei, I think perhaps there's another way to go about this…"
At the very least, don't flirt with Caelus right in front of me!
And she was going to explain derivatives to him hands-on… and attempt a fusion…
Asta's feelings were a tangled mess.
Ruan Mei, interrupted, showed no annoyance at all. She simply turned and regarded Asta with a level gaze. "Why is that?"
In all of Herta Space Station, the only opinion Ruan Mei cared about was Herta's. In her eyes Asta ranked as a slightly more notable passerby.
"…"
Asta's lips moved, but nothing came out.
She thought of how she'd been racking her brains for an excuse just to get Caelus alone, to get a date out of him — and here was Ruan Mei, filing a straight-up requisition for genetic serum.
No, hold on!
Genius or not, is there no such thing as fighting fair anymore?
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