novelraw Chapter 256 : From This Day Onward, This Was True Love
Chapter 256 : From This Day Onward, This Was True Love
Chapter 256: From This Day Onward, This Was True Love
Outside the cave, the seemingly endless curtain of rain had ceased at some unknown moment.
The gloomy rainclouds and dark gray smoke quietly dispersed.
What remained was nothing but the beautiful full moon and starry sky.
As if she had gained immense security from his embrace, the girl closed her eyes in Rast’s arms. A few strands of pale golden hair slid down her forehead, brushing against Rast’s arm with a faint tickling sensation.
Such a quiet and obedient appearance made it difficult for Rast to tell whether Emis had already fallen fast asleep or was merely resting with her eyes closed.
Yet through his Spiritual Sight, Rast could clearly perceive the warmth of the soul-flame within the girl in his arms.
No longer was it the fragile spark that had seemed ready to extinguish in the cold wind at any moment. It had now become a bright flame.
Within the endless night of Spiritual Sight, only these two torches remained, symbols of Rast and Emis’s hearts—sharing warmth, leaning on one another.
Clear and blazing, utterly unwavering.
“Speaking of which, we can’t just keep staying in this cave, can we?”
“It’s so damp and cold here, not a good place at all. Should we step outside first and find another spot?”
Rast thought for a moment before speaking softly.
Hearing this, the girl stirred slightly, nestling herself closer into Rast’s arms.
She answered with a faint hum, yet did not open her eyes.
“This is your own Mental Image World, Xiao Ai. Now that the Incarnation of the Order, that Judgment Angel, has completely disappeared… you are the sole master of your own Mental Image World.”
Rast gave a somewhat helpless glance at the girl in his arms: “In other words, Xiao Ai, right now you are the Creator here, the God of Genesis.”
“If you wished, you could shift the heavens and stars of this place… and teleport us instantly to any corner of this world.”
For the Creator of a mental world, moving their spiritual forms out of the cave was nothing more than a single thought.
Yet, listening to Rast’s words, Emis only buried her head deeper into his embrace.
She answered softly, and once again pressed her cheek tightly against Rast’s chest.
“All right, all right, I understand.”
The corners of Rast’s mouth curved into a helpless smile.
He crouched down and lifted the girl in his arms.
Then, without using any supernatural ability… he simply carried Emis, following the guidance of the distant cold moonlight, stepping across the jagged stones and pools of water, walking toward the cave’s exit.
It was just like many years ago, after the flood had receded, when a half-grown boy had carried in his arms a little girl who had fainted from hypothermia, warming her with his body heat as he trudged step by step out of the cave in search of adults for help.
…
From the depths of the cave to its mouth was but a finger’s snap for a Legendary, yet Rast walked for a long, long time.
Until the instant he fully emerged from the cave, his vision suddenly broadened.
Before his eyes stretched nothing but the glittering night sky and the grass growing so thick it brushed past his ankles.
Beyond the lawn at the cave’s mouth lay a steep cliff.
Below the cliff, one could see an endless sea of forest, and at the edge of the mountains burned the town of Canaan, engulfed in black smoke and roaring flames that seemed as if they would never be extinguished.
When they stepped out of the cave, Emis had already awakened once more.
She rose from Rast’s embrace, then held his hand as they walked to the cliffside hidden within the grass.
The two of them sat there, back-to-back in the grass, silently gazing up together at the sky above.
The sky was so vast it made one hold their breath.
Was it because they had been too long in the darkness of the cave, or was it simply that tonight’s starry sky was unusually clear?
Either way, the winter night sky was so beautiful it made one forget everything, soothing even the deepest scars.
“To be honest, Rast, you are dazzling in my eyes.”
“Though it was only a childish and naïve ideal taken from knightly tales… Rast, you have carried that ideal throughout your life.”
“At no more than six years old, you were willing to risk your life for this dream, to cross the floodwaters in order to rescue someone who was, at that time, little more than a passing stranger.”
She did not know how much time had passed when her soft murmur rose from behind Rast.
“To believe with certainty that what you do, the path you walk, is right… Even after losing most of your memories in Deep Blue Port, even when facing repeated suspicion and oppression from others, you have never wavered from your original dream.”
“Even if you were cast into hell, even if you faced death, you have never regretted your choice.”
“Unlike me, who always felt regret again and again, always wishing to swallow some medicine of repentance and start over from the beginning…”
Her voice faltered for a moment.
“I’ve always been like this, shaken and confused time after time, with dark and negative thoughts rising in my heart now and then.”
“Even that day in the cave, when I first saw you cross the floodwaters to save me, my first thought wasn’t gratitude… it was, ‘Ah, so now I’ve actually become just like him, a homeless orphan,’ a thought of resistance and rejection.”
Rast merely listened quietly.
He knew this was a confession that had taken the girl immense courage to voice, and what he should do at this moment was simply to listen in silence.
“To be honest, when I first met Sister Grey, when I heard you recount your encounter with Shiltina at Deep Blue Port, and your bond with that female knight… my heart rose with great hostility and unease.”
“Because I knew that compared to Sister Grey, who gave you the ideal of the ‘Shoreguards’, and compared to that equally dazzling Shiltina, a human girl named Emis Justia was so utterly small and humble, dim and without brilliance.”
“Compared to me, it was those like them, who shared the same radiant ideals as you… they were the ones qualified to walk at your side, to support you, to lean on you as true companions.”
Emis seemed to smile faintly, and in the cold air of the winter night, one could see the white mist formed by her words.
“So, I began trying to disguise myself, so that in the short time I spent with you, I could seem stronger, more capable, more beautiful… more worthy of you, Rast.”
“But lies, in the end, must collapse.”
She lowered her head slightly:
“No matter how much I disguised myself, wearing the cloak of the Judgment Angel…”
“The real me was, in the end, nothing more than that ordinary village girl from Canaan.”
“That’s right.”
Rast nodded.
“As a Night Traveler, I once walked through different fragments of the River of History.”
“From the long history of humanity since the Age of Gods, countless radiant heroes had once been born, who with human bodies carved into the pages of history imprints that could rival the gods.”
“In the battle of the Fractured Coastline, when I personally witnessed Leader Sisel’s final supernova explosion, the same thought surfaced in my heart as in yours, Xiao Ai—”
“The brilliance of that day was dazzling and unreachable. Perhaps even if I spent my entire life, I could never reach it.”
“But—”
His voice paused for a moment: “So what if I cannot?”
Rast looked down from the cliff at the town of Canaan, bathed in fire.
“Perhaps I can never create the brilliance of that day’s supernova, but I can still fire that Sin-Etched Armor-Piercing Bullet at the Gravekeepers. I am myself… my one and only self.”
“I am still a Shoreguard, still an Ally of Justice… I may not become that senior who paved the way for the next generation of Shoreguards by sacrificing heroically, but I do not need to.”
“Since the inheritance has already been broken—”
“Then let me be the last generation of Shoreguards, reaching the end of the Nightworld, and cutting off that destiny of the Shoreguards that has stretched across countless epochs.”
“So, isn’t that enough?”
He turned back and reached out to caress the girl’s pale face.
“Xiao Ai, you don’t need to become Shiltina, nor do you need to become Grey.”
“You only ever need to be yourself.”
“There’s no need to be dazzling like a hero. Even if you are just that ordinary village girl from Canaan—crying, timid, afraid of the dark and of loneliness—in my eyes, that is already beautiful enough.”
Hearing this, Emis slightly widened her beautiful sky-blue eyes.
“What’s this… when I finally mustered the resolve to bare my heart, you say such cheating words.”
She muttered softly, but quickly calmed down again.
“But indeed, it does sound exactly like something Rast would say to comfort a girl.”
Emis smiled faintly: “After all, back when I had just lost my parents, you even said, ‘From now on, let me be your father.’”
“Don’t bring up those childish black histories from when I didn’t know any better.”
Rast sounded somewhat helpless.
Yet right after, he saw the golden-haired girl before him looking at him, smiling quietly—just like back then in the cave, when Emis had let out a laugh at his troubles.
“There’s one more thing I must confess to you, Rast.”
After smiling, the girl leaned her body a little closer to him.
“In the past, the feelings I held toward you… they weren’t really affection or admiration, but dependency.”
“After all, at that time I was only six years old, a little girl whose body hadn’t even begun to grow—though I shouted that I liked you, how could I have truly known what ‘love’ was?”
Emis’s gaze dropped slightly as she spoke softly.
“On that rainy night when both my parents died, a great void opened in my heart. I even felt the urge to end my life—”
“Just like a drowning person instinctively grabbing at the nearest straw, in my dazed state, I instinctively regarded the black-haired boy who rushed into the cave to save me as my lifeline.”
“Like a broken person yearning for wholeness, in order to fill the void in my heart… I treated you as my lifeline, regarded your dream as my dream, saw you as the meaning of my life’s existence.”
“And later, as Canaan was destroyed, the hollow in my heart only grew larger. To fill that emptiness, my dependence on you deepened further… and with time, that emotion gradually twisted—”
“In the end, it had already become a special impulse for exclusive possession, interwoven with dependency and possessiveness.”
Hearing this, Rast nodded slightly.
“Actually, I was the same.”
As Emis spoke these words, Rast was also reflecting on his own heart.
Trapped in the past of Deep Blue Port, was not his own feeling for Xiao Ai also a pathological kind of dependency?
Because he had lost his past memories, lost himself in the purgatory of the time loops, he instinctively regarded Canaan as his lifeline, and treated the ever-smiling girl as his mental support and pillar.
During that time, he had never truly considered what place the individual named Emis held in his heart.
“Yes, in the past, we were more like two broken beings drawn to each other.”
“Each of us incomplete… only when the two of us were together could we become whole human beings.”
“That was not love, but merely a kind of pathological possessiveness.”
The girl’s voice drifted in the night breeze, and Rast’s thoughts wandered slightly.
But in the next instant, Rast’s eyes opened wide.
A warm, moist touch slowly spread across his lips.
This was no longer the kiss from before, meant only to reignite Emis’s soul-flame, a Bodily Fluid Exchange without stray thoughts.
The girl’s lips were soft, trembling slightly.
“So, let us cast aside all those impurities from before, and… begin again from zero.”
“From this day onward…”
“This will be true love.”
In the girl’s whispered voice, Rast felt within his Mental Image World the sound of a seed breaking its shell and sprouting.
Above the dead Crimson Wasteland, an illusory high tower rose into the sky.
It was the once-broken Fool’s Library, now rebuilt, brilliant and dazzling… not as the Nightblade bestowed by the Nightworld, but reborn as Rast’s very own power.
Inside the library, the dim staircase shone with dazzling radiance.
It was the Judgment Higher Sequence—the ten radiant steps lighting up one after another, all unlocked, leading straight into the boundless beyond.
In Rast’s Fool’s Library, the Judgment Sequence did not need to be cultivated step by step like others… because the bond between him and Emis had been capped at full value from the very beginning.
In a daze, Rast saw the distant flames fade away… the ruins of the town burned to ash by fire bloomed once again with prosperity, buildings reappearing whole and magnificent in the glow.
The desolate ruins turned back into that lively town of Canaan.
At his side, illusory figures, young and old, appeared on the cliff, their outlines shrouded in hazy halos, like old photographs steeped in night.
They were all residents of the town: Uncle Mudd carrying his old hunting rifle; the neighbor aunt who had taught Emis to cook; the bakery’s proprietress in her flour-stained apron, carrying a freshly baked raspberry pie; the old blacksmith who, despite his age, loved scaring children with ghost stories…
Now, these phantoms of those who once lived in Canaan gathered around Rast and Emis, gently applauding.
That applause seemed both celebratory and filled with relieved blessing.
Blessing the last two orphans of Canaan, blessing this fated pair who had finally come together, reunited at last.