Chapter 504: Biased Awakening
"Cecilia, we must abort."
It was Eastiel’s voice, cutting through the comms with that unnerving calm he only found in the middle of disaster.
"You have landed on the ground, right? We’ll land in a bit. We’ll meet you soon, alright? Stay put."
Cecilia barely heard him. She was looking at the gods. The sky above them was fracturing over and over, blue light splitting the bruised clouds, the black leviathan screaming, the vortex churning with renewed fury, and they didn’t even glance at it.
Their eyes, completely unconcerned with the apocalypse unfolding overhead, were fixed on her.
Only her.
Was she truly that important?
Even her, this woman who was afraid of giving birth to a child who would grow up resenting her husband, their father, for the curse he had passed down?
Who was afraid of becoming the mother of a child who hated the man she loved—
She was chosen... after all? Or was it never a choice in the first place?
Was it simply... because of the way she was?
Even now, she was projecting her own complicated feelings about Oathran onto the unborn child. Her anger, her hurt. The wound she carried, the terror of imagining a future where her child carried that same wound, magnified across a generation.
She had told herself that letting the baby go was a form of protection. For Oathran, who wouldn’t have to watch his child inherit the Key... for the baby, who would never have to grow up in a world where they might learn to hate their own father.
She would rather send them straight to the gods’ embrace than risk that. She would rather lose them than watch them suffer.
But the gods had come here.
Personally.
To call out her coping mechanism. To tell her to stop lying to herself. To remind her that she was allowed to want things—
They loved her so much, her, who had spent the last month convincing herself that the baby wasn’t real, that it was just a construct of the scenario, that letting it go would be a mercy for everyone involved?
"Can I really... keep my baby, Mother?" Cecilia asked.
Momo smiled. It was complicated, the relief, the sadness all at once.
"Do you think you can?" Momo asked back.
"Can I really... give birth to it and abandon everything else for it...?" Cecilia’s voice cracked on the question.
She was asking for permission. Permission to be selfish. Permission to be... a mother.
"Eh." Momo shrugged, surprisingly casual given the context. "That’s all I did for this couple hundred galaxy years. It’s a bit tiring at times."
"Even... having a bias over it... and prioritizing my baby over everything else...?" Cecilia’s eyes were wetter now, the tears spilling over and tracing silver lines down her cheeks.
"What did you think we were doing in the Sixth Realm, huh?" Momo pointed at herself, then jerked her thumb at Bunny, who was nodding over and over again in vigorous agreement.
Ah.
The Massacre of the Sixth Realm.
The destruction that the System still whispered about with trembling terror. The dead star gluttons. The perpetrators. The gods who had wiped out an entire dimension, leaving nothing but ash and eternal silence above the upside down lake.
They had been protecting their children.
Which included her.
Cecilia stared at them, these two ridiculous, bickering, terrifying, gentle gods.
Ones who had massacred a realm for their children. Ones who would do it again.
"You..." Her voice broke. "You really..."
"Oh, oh, oh! Cecilia, get ready!" Momo grasped her shoulder and spun her toward the sky, her finger pointing up at the churning vortex. "Look! Get ready to catch him. Wait for it... wait for it..."
Cecilia blinked, her tears still wet on her cheeks, her mind still reeling from the revelation she had just absorbed. "What? What are we looking for? What?!"
"Use your telekinesis! Get ready!" Momo said, her voice urgent.
"Huh?!"
That was when she saw it.
A giant white dragon, its scales gleaming like fresh snow against the bruised black of the storm, tumbled from the massive churning wall cloud.
It should have looked enormous. It was enormous, a creature of myth and majesty, its wings half-furled and tattered, its serpentine body trailing streamers of blood and black ichor, but against the sheer scale of the vortex, against the leviathan that still coiled somewhere in the clouds above, it looked small.
A falling star, pale and broken, plunging through the darkness toward the distant earth below.
His wings were shredded in places, the membrane between the great ribs of bone torn through by claws larger than he was. One of his horns was gone, shattered at the base, leaving only a jagged stump that still wept blood.
His scales, usually so pristine, were scorched and cracked, blackened in places.
"OATHRAN!"
Her hands shot outward before she could think. Before she could calculate the weight, the velocity, the mana cost—
She caught him.
Her telekinesis surged outward like a second set of arms, vast, invisible and impossibly tender.
It caught Oathran mid-fall, not with the violent halt of a barrier, but with the gentlest, cradling deceleration. The white dragon’s descent slowed, his tattered wings folding, his massive body slowly suspended in the air as though the sky itself had decided to hold him.
Cecilia flew forward without thinking.
There was no calculation, no strategy, no logic weighing the odds.
There was only him, her dragon, her husband, the father of her child—falling from the heavens like a broken star. And she crossed the distance between them in heartbeats, her hands outstretched, her belly heavy with the life they had made together—
It was beyond the power of the mana potion now.
It came from somewhere deep within her, somewhere she didn’t even know existed, where she never was able to reach before—mana surged.
A flood. A tide.
A river of pure, luminous energy that poured from her soul like light from a newborn sun.
It was warm... golden and effortless, flowing through her veins and into her telekinesis, wrapping around Oathran like an embrace she had been waiting her whole life to give him.
What the fu—
[Wow! Cecilia, we admire the essence and POWER of your soul!]