While everyone on Elysia's side was fired up, all clamoring for the old scoundrel to keep showing off, Sparks' livestream room was painting an entirely different picture.
The concurrent viewer count had already blown past five million, and the number was still climbing at a visible rate.
On screen, the game's story had paused on a dialogue box from Chapter Ten: Under The Deep.
"Oh my, just look at you poor little water friends," Sparks said.
She stared at the danmaku cascading down the left side of the screen like a waterfall, the corner of her mouth curling into the most mocking arc imaginable.
"You're all so naive it's almost heartbreaking. I knew from the very start that scheming rat Su Yu was never going to be kind enough to just hand you an entire chronicle update out of the goodness of his heart."
She reached out and tapped the screen with a finger.
"What did I tell you? He's just sharpening his knife! When are you people going to learn?"
"This time he even cooked up some faction war event. You actually thought that was a gift for you? That's hilarious."
Sparks crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back into her gaming chair.
"That's just to make you drop your guard, distract you — and then right when you're having the most fun, he flips the knife around and stabs you in the back, wringing out every last tear!"
She leaned close to the microphone, dropping her voice, her tone dripping with the smugness of someone who'd seen through everything.
"I'll go ahead and make a bold prediction right here — Chapter Ten, Under The Deep. Just from the title alone, you know it's tied to that Bronya."
"After this, Bronya is definitely going to Sea Abyss City, and she's definitely going to meet that girl named Seele. As for what happens after they meet..."
Sparks deliberately drew out her words.
"You're welcome to use your pathetic little imaginations and take a guess, hm?"
The livestream's danmaku instantly exploded.
[Lady Sparks, shut your mouth! I don't want to hear it!]
[I can feel my brain trembling! No spoilers! No jinxing!]
[How much is that old scoundrel Su paying you to terrorize us like this?]
[Please, spare the children, I just finished crying my eyes out over on Elysia's stream...]
Sparks watched the wailing text scroll by, her eyes flashing with delight. The chime of Elation Points flowing into her terminal rang out crisp and sweet.
She had absolutely no intention of letting these water friends off the hook, and pressed on with her next bombshell.
"You bunch of idiots — guess why, across these last two chapters, Su Yu hasn't given us a single direct shot of Kiana?"
She held up a finger and wagged it.
"Over these four months, you think that white-haired idiot's been living the good life somewhere, eating well and drinking well? No, no, no."
Sparks let out a cold laugh.
"This is a basic but effective writing technique — it's called foreshadowing!"
"You think Su Yu doesn't know you're all dying to see how Kiana's doing right now? The whole internet's spamming 'Bring Kiana Back.' So why hasn't he shown it?"
She leaned into the camera, her expression turning a touch malicious.
"The reason's simple, you poor things — he's stringing you along!"
"He knows exactly what he's doing. If he dumped Kiana's whole storyline on you right from the start, without enough time for the emotion to build, the knife wouldn't cut deep enough, wouldn't hurt enough!"
Sparks laughed wildly.
"Looks to me like you've all fallen, completely and utterly, into that old rat Su Yu's trap! Hahahaha!"
The danmaku section began fighting back furiously.
[Sparks-sparks, you've got some nerve talking about other people! Weren't you bawling your eyes out the last time you watched Final Lesson?]
[Exactly! Snot bubbles and everything, I screenshotted it!]
[Admit it, you're dying to see Kiana's storyline too, quit acting tough. Once it drops, you'll be flooding this stream with tears again!]
Seeing those messages, Sparks' fair cheeks flushed red instantly.
She slapped the table and shot back loudly.
"What do you mean 'flooding the stream with tears'! You people don't understand anything!"
She pointed at the camera.
"That was a PERFORMANCE! A performance, understand?!"
"You little fans are all wiping tears in front of your screens, and as a streamer who dotes on her fans, of course I have to play along with the mood! That's called professionalism!"
The danmaku scrolled by in perfect unison.
[Sure, sure, I totally believe you.]
[Performance, it was all a performance. Following this stubborn streamer.]
[Yeah I totally believe this abstract little gremlin streamer really dotes on her fans, hahaha!]
As Sparks traded barbs with the danmaku, the terminal screen belonging to her masked fool persona glowed, its numbers climbing at an unprecedented rate.
She picked up the coffee beside her and took a sip, hiding the smile tugging at her lips.
This project was an absolute win-win.
No — it was a total blowout victory.
That man Su Yu really was a once-in-a-generation genius.
He'd toss out a script on a whim and have tens of millions of people wrapped around his finger, and in the process let her rake in a fortune.
She cleared her throat.
"Alright, alright — since this main storyline's giving us such a generous, hearty helping this time, let's keep watching and see what other surprises Boss Su Yu has waiting for me."
She moved the mouse toward the "Enter Game" button.
"Anyway, for a masked fool like Sparks-sparks, you earthlings' low-tier tearjerker plots are absolutely never going to make me cry!"
The danmaku shot back immediately.
[You literally just admitted you cried, and now you're saying it's impossible. Streamer, your words don't match up at all.]
[New here? Don't worry about it, kid. The streamer just likes talking nonsense, her head's shaped like a cone and her brain doesn't work like ours.]
Sparks' eyes went wide.
"Let me ask you something! Let me ask you something! Let me ask you something!"
Firing off her three-in-a-row question with pure arrogance, she clicked the mouse without a hint of hesitation.
The game screen changed.
Chapter Ten — Under The Deep.
Bronya and the Hyperion crew arrived at Sea Abyss City to aid Cocolia.
There, they learned that the Gem of Desire had fallen into the depths of the Sea of Quanta.
And in Sea Abyss City, Bronya ran into old companions from her orphanage days.
Rozaliya and Liliya.
A pair of twin girls with tails and horns.
They'd undergone some kind of surgical modification, fused with Honkai Beast genes, granting them abilities and combat strength far beyond ordinary humans.
But the cost was equally obvious.
Once every so often, Liliya would fall into an uncontrollable drowsiness and drop off to sleep right where she stood, completely losing all combat ability.
They were the classic Brainless-and-Grumpy pairing.
Rozaliya was always loud and full of energy.
Liliya, by contrast, kept a blank expression, occasionally delivering a lethally sharp jab whenever her sister said something foolish.
The interactions between the two of them and Bronya were full of comedic flair.
The mood of the livestream's danmaku eased up right along with it.
After the crushing, suffocating despair of Final Lesson, having a lighthearted, breezy stretch of story as a buffer made everyone feel like they could finally exhale.
[Hahahaha, this pair of Vodka Girls is hilarious.]
[Rozaliya's got some lungs on her!]
[The old scoundrel Su finally did something decent, I could watch a hundred episodes of this slice-of-life stuff!]
But Sparks wasn't about to give the players a moment's rest.
She let out a cold snort and cut right through the illusion.
"You people really never learn, do you."
Sparks pointed at Rozaliya bouncing around on the screen.
"At a moment like this, Su Yu suddenly serves up this lively, adorable, comedy-relief pair of girls. Heh. That's obviously setting them up to get slaughtered!"
The audience in the livestream immediately wailed.
[Lady Sparks! I beg you!]
[Shut up! Quit with that crow's mouth of yours!]
[We finally got a pair of goofballs, and now you're going to curse them to death too?]
Sparks puffed out her chest, completely unbothered.
"What do you mean, Lady Sparks cursed your favorite characters to death?"
She spread her hands.
"That script was written by Su Yu, and drawn by Su Yu — what does that have to do with me? I'm just giving you all an early heads-up, an inoculation against this guy's malicious intentions."
She put on a deliberately wounded expression and wiped at the corner of her eye — no tears at all, just an act.
"You won't even thank me, and now you want me to shut up. I'm so hurt right now, I could just die of heartbreak."
A wave of gorgeous gift effects immediately lit up the screen.
No shortage of viewers and big spenders started throwing gifts right then and there.
[Take it, take it, take it! Tip's on me!]
[Please, spare us the fake sadness! Hurry up, hurry up, get on with the story already!]
[Streamer, move the story along, quit playacting!]
[Cut the act! Get on with it!]
Seeing those eye-catching gift banners, Sparks instantly dropped the wounded act, coughed a few times, and sat up straight, all business.
"Well, what can I say — I'm just that kind of fan-pampering streamer."
The game's story continued forward.
The players learned a few things about Cocolia from Rozaliya and Liliya.
That woman who'd seemed so treacherous and scheming in earlier chapters had, in fact, been racked with guilt the whole time.
She genuinely cared about Bronya and Seele, and had always wanted to apologize to Bronya's face — but given everything she'd done, she never knew how to open her mouth.
Rozaliya, who'd seemed so brainless, said something unexpected to Bronya.
["Liliya and I both actually know — the experiments Mama did caused Bronya a lot of pain."]
The smile on Rozaliya's face faded a little.
["But if it weren't for those experiments, Liliya and I wouldn't have survived at all — let alone gained the strength we have now."]
["After Seele and Bronya left, Mama Cocolia started shutting herself up alone in her room a lot. She's really sad, deep down. She pretends everything's fine in front of everyone, but Liliya and I can see through it at a glance."]
["That's why we decided to stay."]
["We figured, if we could help Mama Cocolia now, maybe everyone from the orphanage could be saved, and maybe Liliya's illness could be fully cured too."]
A wave of emotion swept through the livestream's danmaku.
[What a good kid.]
[I didn't expect Rozaliya to actually understand everything under that dumb exterior.]
[She's the big sister, after all — doing it for her little sister and everyone else.]
[Maybe Cocolia had her reasons too?]
[Yeah, I'm starting to feel that way too...]
Watching the shift in the danmaku's mood, Sparks let out a sharp, biting laugh.
"Tch."
She grabbed the pen off the table and pointed it at Cocolia's model on screen.
"You're not seriously about to sympathize with a villain like this, are you? Are you seriously?"
Sparks' tone was thick with unmasked mockery.
"Whatever Cocolia's intentions were — whether it was for the orphanage, or to save the world — what she actually did crossed a line that can never be forgiven a long time ago."
She leaned forward, her gaze sharp.
"You goldfish-brained lot, have you already forgotten what she actually did?"
"Who's responsible for Mei's suffering? She forcibly triggered the Third Eruption. All those millions of innocent civilians in Nagazora — how do you think they died? On those lives alone, Cocolia will never wash her hands clean in this world!"
Sparks leaned back in her chair.
"Sorry, though — I, Sparks-sparks, have never claimed to be some paragon of virtue, or some agent of justice."
"But us masked fools have always been the very embodiment of chaos, the representatives of doing whatever we please."
She raised one eyebrow.
"I dislike Cocolia, so I called her out. That's all there is to it."
"It's got nothing to do with justice or morality — I just plain can't stand this kind of thing, using 'salvation' as a banner to destroy other people."
Sparks twirled the pen in her hand, an oddly strange smile spreading across her face.
"You probably don't know this, but there's an old story."
The danmaku in the livestream quieted a little.
"There was once a group of people who prayed for eternal life to a certain Aeon who governed the laws of life."
Sparks' voice took on a faraway, ethereal quality, as though she were recounting some ancient legend.
"That Aeon was generous. It bestowed a blessing on that group, granting them immortal bodies."
"But what happened in the end? That endless life eventually drove them to the opposite extreme, giving birth to something so monstrous the entire universe fled from it — the corruption of Abundance."
Sparks paused, looking straight into the camera.
"That Abundance Aeon never turned away a single petitioner. Every wish, granted."
"By the most basic standard of values, that sounds like a thoroughly good, generous being, doesn't it? Right?"
Someone in the danmaku typed out a question mark.
"But unfortunately," Sparks spread her hands, "no matter what that Aeon's original intentions or goals were, that power ended up horribly abused. That blessing brought disasters to the universe beyond imagining."
"In fact, because of all that uncontrolled growth and disaster, it even gave rise to another Aeon — one that exists solely to kill Abundance and purge those monstrosities."
The players in the livestream were completely lost.
[Lady Sparks, what mythology is this even? Some hidden lore from Honkai Impact 3rd?]
[What Abundance Aeon? What monstrosities? This isn't the Honkai setting at all.]
[Is the streamer having another one of her episodes?]
Sparks looked at these comments and broke into a grin.
"What I mean is," she said, pointing at the camera, "whatever you hear, whatever you see in my stream, don't take it too seriously — just treat it as a joke!"
"But!"
She raised her voice, a hint of teasing warning in her eyes.
"If you go around blabbing about this out there later and stir up any trouble online, whatever you do, just don't mention your master's name, okay?"
That absurd, cryptic remark set off another flood of danmaku.
[Okay okay okay! That's some seriously impressive buck-passing.]
[And here I thought you had some deep cosmic truth to share, turns out you're just doing your abstract nonsense thing again!]
[We mere mortals really can't keep up with the streamer's brain.]
[I gotta say, the streamer's really got something going on, anyone else understand what's happening here?]
While Sparks traded jabs with the danmaku, the in-game story was heating up to a fever pitch.
The true form of the Gray Serpent revealed itself.
The cooperative relationship between it and Cocolia finally came to light in full.
As it turned out, the surgical modification that fused Rozaliya and Liliya's bodies with Honkai Beast genes had been overseen and completed by the Gray Serpent.
The Gray Serpent, representing the World Serpent, had struck some kind of dangerous bargain with Cocolia.
Then, the situation abruptly spiraled downward.
Einstein was attacked by a mysterious figure inside the underground facility.
That mysterious figure not only knocked her unconscious but also forcibly activated the Eye of the Deep.
The massive surge of energy released the instant the Eye of the Deep activated acted like a super-massive black hole, drawing in every Honkai Beast across the entire Pacific.
Monsters came flooding in like a tide.
Faced with an onslaught on a scale impossible to defend against, Cocolia made her decision: abandon Sea Abyss City.
She stopped Bronya, who was preparing to head into the depths of Sea Abyss City to search for Einstein.
But Cocolia's interference only ignited Bronya's rebellious streak completely.
Old memories of being deceived and kept in the dark all came rushing back, and Bronya flatly refused the order to withdraw, charging alone into the depths of Sea Abyss City.
Watching Bronya's retreating back, Cocolia had no choice but to send Rozaliya and Liliya after her as reinforcements.
Theresa, Rozaliya, Liliya, and Bronya converged inside the city.
Facing an overwhelming swarm of Honkai Beasts, Theresa had no other option.
She unleashed her Valkyrie armor — Blood Knight: Moonlight.
On screen, Theresa's small body was enveloped in blood-red armor.
The cross unfurled, transforming into a storm of blades that swept away a massive number of Honkai Beasts.
But the true despair had only just begun to appear.
The gigantic monster Tlaloc crawled out from the depths of the Eye of the Deep.
It was a creature so massive it filled the entire screen, radiating an oppressive aura of pure annihilation.
After a brutal, grueling battle, the four of them together managed to bring Tlaloc down.
But by then, the energy powering the Eye of the Deep had already weakened to the brink of shutting down entirely.
With Einstein missing and her fate unknown, no one knew how to restart the massive device.
And before long, drawn by the Honkai energy signature, the main Schicksal force would arrive and surround this undersea city.
Once that happened, they'd lose forever their chance to enter the Eye of the Deep and recover the Gem of Desire that had fallen into the Sea of Quanta.
There was only a sliver of time left.
Bronya stood at the edge of the Eye of the Deep, staring into that deep, glowing light.
She didn't look back.
Without hesitation, she leapt into the Sea of Quanta.
A beautifully rendered cutscene followed.
Bronya's body sank through hazy blue quantum light.
Space warped and twisted around her, flashes of bizarre, otherworldly sights flickering past.
When she opened her eyes again—
She found herself in a strange space.
There was no direction here, no gravity — only endless blue and drifting fragments of data.
A boy stood before Bronya, reaching out his hand to her.
At the edge of the frame, a worn old doujinshi with a butterfly hairclip tucked inside it floated silently in the Sea of Quanta.
That butterfly hairclip.
It belonged to Seele.
It seemed to foreshadow that, somewhere within this boundless quantum sea, Bronya was about to reunite with the person she had spent years desperately searching for.
As Bronya's gaze lingered on the hairclip, the screen slowly faded to black.
The music stopped.
In the center of the screen, four emotionless white words appeared:
[To Be Continued]
A dead silence fell over Sparks' livestream room for a full five seconds.
Then—
[?????]
[That's it?! That's all?!]
[No way! It cuts off HERE?! Su Yu, are you even human?!]
[I just finished wiping my tears, ready for the reunion, and you give me TO BE CONTINUED?!]
[Cliffhanger dog! Su Yu you old scoundrel, get out here! This is going to be the death of me!]
[I'm not sleeping tonight! Update this thing! Right now! This instant!]
The players were now in an absolute limbo of having watched something without getting any payoff at all.
They scratched their heads and paced like ants on a hot skillet.
This particular blend of restlessness, fury, and desperate anticipation, born from an unbearable craving for what came next, hit harder than plain sadness ever could.
The alarm chime for gathered Emotion Points in the terminal fused into one continuous, piercing tone.
These genuine human emotions crossed the boundaries of the network, flowing steadily into power for the System that housed Su Yu.
And at the final destination where all those emotions converged—
Inside Anti-Entropy's underground headquarters in Arc City—
A shrill red alarm suddenly tore through the silence of the control room.
It was the highest-level alert triggered by the Honkai energy detectors positioned throughout the city.
Tesla's eyes snapped open.
She'd been resting with her eyes closed, slumped over the console — now she shot bolt upright.
"What's going on?!"
Her hands blurred across the keyboard, pulling up surveillance feeds from across the whole city.
The data displayed on the main screen made her pupils contract violently.
The red energy waveform graph was blowing past its peak values in a way that defied physical law entirely.
"A double Spatial Rift."
Tesla turned to face everyone else in the control room, her voice cracking slightly, laced with unmistakable shock.
"A double Spatial Rift has appeared! And this time... this time the scale is far, far larger than last time, at the airport and the recycling plant!"
Her fingers slid across the main console, pulling up several key surveillance zones and projecting them enlarged onto the central screen.
"Take a look at this."
The time was eight in the evening.
Arc City had fully settled into nightfall.
In the surveillance footage—
Above Arc City's bustling commercial district, in what should have been deep black night sky, vast, strange curtains of light had appeared.
That curtain of light wasn't static.
It looked like an aurora, or like a mirage reflected off the surface of water.
Within that veil of light, faintly visible, floated the outlines of distorted, gigantic spheres — the silhouettes of world bubble formations.
Inside them, strange, massive creature-shapes drifted, their forms utterly incompatible with Earth biology.
Enormous tentacles, floating jellyfish-like structures, dark purple masses of energy.
Those visions blanketed nearly half the city's sky.
The scene looked like something out of a dream — and yet carried an unmistakable wrongness at its core.
In the surveillance footage of the commercial streets—
Countless pedestrians had stopped in their tracks.
The city's usually rushed rhythm had been paused entirely.
People craned their necks, staring up at the sky.
They showed no sign of panic.
Some pulled out their phones, adjusting the zoom, snapping photo after photo of the sky above.
Others pointed and murmured to one another, awe written across their faces.
Across every major social platform and local forum, posts about the strange phenomenon were already springing up like mushrooms after rain.
[A sci-fi blockbuster-level holographic sky phenomenon just appeared over Arc City!]
[Whoa, miHoYo just dropped a new version update today, and now they're pulling this kind of massive offline marketing stunt tonight?!]
[That's insane! Those monster projections are unreal! This is actual bare-eye 3D!]
[Big Bro Yu's really cashing in with this one, how much did this marketing budget cost?!]
Staring at screenshots of those forum comments, Tesla's stylus snapped clean in half in her grip.
"These idiots," Tesla muttered through gritted teeth.
Standing beside her, Einstein's expression had turned extremely grave.
"This isn't any holographic projection."
Einstein's voice was quiet, but it carried clearly through the blaring alarms.
She pointed at the screen, at the readings showing the anomalous spatial curvature parameters.
"This is the Sea of Quanta."
She turned to face the rest of the control room.
"More precisely — this is a real scene, one that genuinely exists within the Sea of Quanta, projecting itself onto the physical structure of our own world."
Einstein drew a deep breath.
"That means... as of today, the World Barrier has been significantly weakened yet again."
____
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