Turning our gaze back to not long ago, or rather, to the distant past...
This is Kolosten five hundred years ago, the location of the very first headquarters of the organization known as Schicksal.
Similarly, this is the place where Kallen Kaslana, one of the Kaslana ancestors and the only person in Schicksal's records to be truly crowned with the title of "Saintess," the benchmark for today's Valkyries, met her end.
The origin of all tragedies.
The Honkai of the millennium never brought only one answer to the man. In the territories he had never known or touched, the Sublime One from the Outer Path also responded to the prayer of the one named Otto Apocalypse.
And at this moment, this response from the Great One, this answer known to no one, is walking upon time. He will cross the power of hundreds or even thousands of years, making those withered branches sprout new buds...
Fire burns in the collapsed houses, the city has already fallen apart, you can already hear the cries of children, the screams of the crowd, the order that people once took pride in has collapsed at this moment, the former home is no longer a home, and the friends of the past are no longer friends...
On the burning streets, the Lord of the Seat walks here.
"I pray for the fallen in battle,"
A golden blade was drawn. The Knight, dead yet wandering the earth, was crushed by the God, turning into a wisp of gold that merged into the girl's shadow. Let the dead no longer wander in the mortal realm...
"I wait for the desperate..."
"While I can still linger,"
Beneath the burning and collapsed ruins, He gently smoothed the pained face of the man half-buried under the debris, closing the eyes that had widened in despair.
"Like an eternal candle in the wind... because it once burned fiercely, it never yielded."
In the distance, the white-haired prisoner with braided hair broke free from her bonds at her execution ground. Relying on the creed passed down through her family since ancient times, she fulfilled her lifelong conviction at the place of her death.
"The distant horn calls long, painting glory with death..."
The Saintess stood before the helpless child, using her hands to catch the Honkai Beast's limb that was thrusting at the child. What responded to her was the sharp secondary limbs of the God's creation unfolding before her...
The white-haired Saintess calmly closed her eyes, welcoming the end of her destiny...
"Yet... this is presumption... this is blasphemy—"
The expected pain never came. The sharp limb that had been thrusting toward the "Saintess" was now held firmly in the "God's" hand, unable to move forward a single inch.
"You shall kneel, O Presumptuous One, for He has already come before you."
The fixed causality of history could not be altered. The God's creation showed no reverence to the Sublime One before it, stubbornly thrusting its secondary limb forward in an attempt to fulfill the already established history, just like the gears of fate, refusing to stop turning for a single moment.
"Stubbornly ignorant... May you fall into the deepest abyss, burned by those countless fires—simply because you defy, simply because His will cannot be reversed."
Golden patterns, like burning flames, crawled up the beast's body along its secondary limb. Its existence was being denied by God, and the fixed anchor of history was gently pried up at this moment...
...and then, the Supreme Being drove it down heavily from another direction, establishing a brand new foundation for this world.
The golden patterns covered the God's creation. The creature, which knew nothing of emotion or fear, finally looked at the Great One before it in confusion...
"How utterly foolish, Rebel... Do you not know... that Heaven's Will... cannot be defied?"
The golden patterns covered the last remaining corner of God's creation. The struggle between the Rebel and God finally ended with the price the Blasphemer deserved: the fixed history was rewritten, and its own existence was erased...
In the long river of history, a certain God-created being from Kolosten five hundred years ago thus vanished: the vicious beast that killed Kallen Kaslana no longer existed...
Yet His footsteps still had not ceased, as the God who resolved to go against the current once again stepped into the torrent of history and fate.
"Wait a minute, kind lady who saved me... Where are you going!?"
The Saintess, who had been saved by the God who waded upstream along the river of history, subconsciously tried to grab the blonde girl before her, who made her heart strangely throb...
Immediately after, the Saintess and God both vanished from this Singularity that had been born to overturn the past history.
"Whoa... What is this!? Time is flowing backward???"
Kallen Kaslana, who had been swept into the torrent of history along with them, saw a strange sight she had never witnessed in her entire life. The terrain shifted, and all people and things were rapidly flowing in reverse...
"Um... Hello there, young lady?"
The Saintess looked at the God beside her, whose arm she was still holding, puzzled by her familiar yet indescribable face. Hearing the call, the blonde girl turned her head, tilting it slightly as she looked at the young woman who was nominally the mother of the bloodline that formed her own body.
[So much like...]
The two thought in unison—
[This child's appearance... if her eyes were changed to green... she looks just like Otto. Could she be Otto's illegitimate daughter from somewhere?]
[No, no... what am I thinking... this "child" is moving backward in time! But the way she tilted her head just now was so cute—if the great inventor were a cute girl like her, it would be even better!]
"..."
Unaware of the rich inner monologue playing in Kallen Kaslana's mind, Snow turned her head back after finishing her inspection of the Saintess.
[She looks almost exactly like Kiana, as if they were carved from the same mold... Is this face the standard template for the Kaslana family...]
[Hmm... I wonder why Father would like her... She barely matches half of the descriptions in Schicksal's records... I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder...]
Snow glanced at Kallen again, her expression twisting slightly.
In Snow's eyes, the latter was now smiling foolishly, her face incredibly expressive... Although saying this about her own mother was a bit rude... but—
[This person is so silly, what is she smiling at...???]
Resisting the urge to grab Kallen's cheeks and pinch them wildly, the girl turned her gaze to the long river before her, searching for her other target on this journey.
"Ah... it's you—"
She seemed to have discovered an unexpected surprise, a hint of astonishment etched on her face.
[Heh... then this time, let's leave no regrets for that Immortal... Guardians of Shenzhou.]
"Eh? Miss Time Traveler? What are we going to do now?"
Seeing the girl beside her humming to herself the whole time, Kallen finally couldn't sit still and asked her.
"For the losers and the desperate; for the down-and-out, the forgotten—"
"We resolutely march forward, responding to the call from afar..."
The God grabbed the bewildered Saintess beside her and stepped back into the torrent of the ancient era, moving upstream against the current.