Chapter 212: You Shall Wander in the Deepest Reaches of the Starry Sea
“In the future you envision—”
“Where does your place lie within it?”
Rast’s words echoed through the vast, empty library.
Hearing this, Dean Silver lightly brushed Rast’s cheek with her tail.
The gesture clearly meant—Are you out of your mind? Have you forgotten that the Little Grey before you is merely a recording? And yet you’re trying to converse with her?
However, in the next moment—
According to Grey’s own explanation, this was merely a pre-recorded image saved within the Watchtower, set to automatically play upon detecting Rast’s arrival.
Yet, the moment Rast’s words were spoken, Grey’s voice—supposedly just a playback—hesitated ever so slightly.
“My own… place?”
“As expected, I knew Brother Rast would ask that.”
She smiled, as if through the power of “Fate”, she had foreseen that Rast would ask this very question.
“To be honest, I don’t know…”
“Brother Rast, you once told me—all gifts granted by fate come with a hidden price tag.”
“‘Equivalent Exchange’ is the sole principle governing the extraordinary world, even angels are no exception.”
“So, every wish I made to fate… must be repaid with an equivalent price—the grander the wish, the more miraculous the desire… the greater the price I must pay.”
“At the moment of this recording, I have yet to make my third, and final wish… so I don’t know what kind of price I’ll be paying.”
“Even though I’ve traversed every branch of the future—this one future remains veiled from my sight.”
Grey’s voice, clear as wind chimes, carried an inexplicable tone.
“I don’t know where I’ll end up after making that third wish. Perhaps I’ll be banished to the rifts of space-time, or the abyss of dimensions… or perhaps I’ll drift endlessly in the deepest reaches of the starry sea, never to meet Brother Rast again.”
“That’s why I left this recording and image.”
“To explain everything to Brother Rast… and also, to bid you farewell.”
“After all, no one knows when we might meet again. It could be in a thousand years, ten thousand years—”
“Or perhaps, never again.”
…
“Is this truly worth it?”
Rast spoke softly, gazing at the rippling light screen that shimmered like water.
“You were such a lonely child back then, afraid of solitude.”
“Exiled from the mortal world, cast into the rift of space-time, the farthest edge of the starry sea—aren’t you afraid?”
He remembered long ago, the second time he entered the Echo of History, walking the streets beside the Watchtower’s town, and seeing that solitary little girl.
As the sun set, warm orange light poured from the windows by the streets, and Grey walked alone under the glow, as if she belonged to a different world than the homes ablaze with light.
That scene reminded Rast of the little match girl.
And now, that moment repeated itself.
The once solitude-fearing girl was now the one to choose departure, casting herself into the lonely deep of space.
“Of course I’m afraid…”
Rast’s silent murmur, as if crossing time itself, seemed to reach Grey’s ears.
“I know all too well what a coward I am… without Brother Rast’s support, I can do nothing…”
“It was like that then, and honestly, it’s still the same now—only, during the days I’ve been apart from Brother Rast, I had to keep disguising myself in a hardened shell, acting independent, strong, mysterious before others.”
“But deep inside, I’m still that same little girl who once wept helplessly on the cliff.”
“Even so, this is something I must do.”
Grey’s words sounded like both farewell and a faint smile.
“When you realize you’ve done something wrong, you shouldn’t escape or deny it, but instead admit your mistake with courage, and do everything in your power to make it right.”
“This truth too, was something Brother Rast taught me… wasn’t it?”
“No matter what my personal intentions were, the second wish I made to Fate did indeed shatter the peaceful, ordinary life that once belonged to Canaan…”
“It is an undeniable fact that the destinies of Brother Rast and Xiao Ai were rewritten, forced onto a twisted path.”
“Then, since I have erred, I must bear the responsibility… exhaust all possibilities to steer the fates of Brother Rast and Xiao Ai back onto the correct track.”
Her voice carried a trace of reluctant bitterness.
“Originally, I still hesitated and struggled within… not out of selfishness, but simply because the thought that I might never see Brother Rast again caused my heart to ache with sorrow and unwillingness.”
“However, my two encounters with Xiao Ai completely solidified my resolve.”
Her voice paused slightly.
“Even a young girl barely over ten years old, who had lived all her life in a border town and never seen the outside world… could make such a resolute choice for the sake of reuniting with Brother Rast, for the sake of a better future.”
“Then how could I, of all people, do any less?”
“No matter what, I am the successor personally chosen by Cisel, the holder of ‘The Fool’s Library’…”
“And more than that, the newly appointed ‘Shoreguard’—acknowledged by Brother Rast himself.”
“What a Shoreguard should do is pave the way for those who come after, even at the cost of their own blood and effort—”
“Just like during the Battle of the Fractured Coastline, when Leader Cisel used his life to pave the way for me…”
“And now, it is my turn to follow the footsteps left by Brother Rast and Leader Cisel.”
Grey’s voice grew lighter, more distant.
“Then, farewell, Brother Rast.”
“Though this is merely a pre-recorded message, merely a glimpse of the future seen through the River of Fate…”
“To be able to meet you once more in this form, to say my goodbye to you in person—I am truly happy.”
“If all goes well, then perhaps, just like Xiao Ai…”
“One day, we too shall meet again in that distant future—”
…
The girl’s voice grew ever more distant and ethereal, until it vanished completely.
And the ripples that had once danced like water on the crystal-clear light screen also gradually faded, ultimately returning to pitch-black void.
Rast gently reached out and shut off the projection device before him.
He closed his eyes and stood silently in the quiet library for a long time without making a sound.
Only after a prolonged silence did Rast open his eyes again.
“I say… are you okay?”
The latest first published on 69 Shu Ba!
Dean Silver crouched on a bookshelf nearby, cautiously testing the waters: “Even if learning all of this at once might be a bit hard to digest, the world is still a beautiful place, so don’t go doing anything drastic.”
“Should I call a therapist for you? The technology in this world is quite advanced, so I imagine the standard of mental health care isn’t bad either… Oh right, isn’t my own ‘Moon’ Sequence essentially a born therapist?”
“If worse comes to worst, I could even be your Emotional Support Ferret, you know?”
Despite her usual brash and casual attitude, Dean Silver now spoke with care and caution.
As the holder of the Unique Sequence of the Higher Sequence Tiers, “Moon”, sensing the emotional and spiritual fluctuations of others had practically become her instinct.
Thus, she could clearly perceive the surge of emotions brewing within the long silence of the young man before her.
She had known Rast for quite some time and deeply understood the weight that the title of “Shoreguard” carried in his heart.
To become a Shoreguard, to become an Ally of Justice… this had been his unwavering ideal since childhood.
Within the three-hundred-year time loop of Deep Blue Port, this ideal had become his Spiritual Pillar.
Just like a drowning man instinctively clutching at a straw for salvation… Rast had clung to this childhood ideal as his lifeline in the hellscape that was Deep Blue Port.
It was his Faith Anchor, his everything.
It was thanks to his unyielding grip on that ideal, his obsession with the title of “Shoreguard”, that Rast had been able to crawl out from the abyss of Deep Blue Port—without falling into depravity, without self-destruction.
By now, it had evolved into something deeper than ideals or beliefs—more like an obsession.
The human named Rast was a machine sustained solely by the ideal of “Shoreguard”. That ideal had become his entire existence… beyond it, there was nothing left in his ruined body and spirit.
And at this moment, the truth that Grey had laid bare carried a painfully clear implication—
The ideal that Rast had held as his Spiritual Pillar and purpose of life… was, in fact, a lie.
…
From Rast’s past perspective, it was that woman—who smiled so genuinely after picking him up from the blazing ruins of the small town of Canaan—who had bestowed upon him the ideal known as the “Shoreguard”.
The smile that woman had shown at that time was so beautiful…
So beautiful that even though Rast had fallen into the hell of Deep Blue Port, and even after centuries of erosion by time, with most of his childhood memories completely worn away and forgotten—he still remembered that beautiful smile.
It was precisely because of his yearning for that smile that Rast had been inspired to form the wish of becoming a “Shoreguard” himself.
But now, it was clear that the ideal called “Shoreguard” was nothing more than an outright falsehood.
The woman who had picked up young Rast from the burning ruins of Canaan was none other than Grey herself.
And had Grey not mistakenly made the second wish, leading to the disastrous consequence of Temporal Collapse… then the great fire in Canaan, the Fran Explosion that occurred two hundred years ago in the Present World timeline, would never have happened.
Rast and Xiao Ai should have continued to live peaceful, ordinary lives in that border town of Canaan, spending countless tranquil days.
Maybe one day they would have traveled afar, stepped into the extraordinary world, and become true Transcendents… or maybe they would have lived their whole lives as ordinary people, getting married and having children, spending their days in that remote yet scenic small town.
But the one who had triggered it all—was Grey herself.
And that so-called ideal of becoming a “Shoreguard”… was merely a coincidence born from a series of errors and the mockery of Fate.
A falsehood borrowed from others.
Yet, faced with Dean Silver’s cautious inquiry, Rast simply smiled.
“Don’t worry, Dean Silver.”
“I’m not as fragile as you imagine.”
He lifted his head and gazed at the glass dome above, at the small patch of sky shining down into the Watchtower.
“It’s true that at the beginning, my ideal of the Shoreguard was born from admiration… admiration for the smile of the woman who saved me from the fire, which led me to desire to become a Shoreguard—this wish then gradually distorted in the endless time loop, becoming a lingering obsession.”
“If it had been the me who just escaped Deep Blue Port, and learned that all of this was just a coincidence, a cruel joke of Fate, I might have truly broken down… denied the very meaning of my life.”
“But the me now… is no longer like that.”
He fixed his gaze on a patch of azure sky.
“Perhaps it began with admiration, but in the end, it was still a wish born from the depths of my heart.”
“A wish to deny that hellish despair… a desire to help those I could help, a dream where people no longer weep.”
“A dream to put an end to the generations of Shoreguards who charged forward like moths to the flame, one after another…”
After leaving Deep Blue Port, and joining Starfall University.
After meeting so many people and events as the Black Night Traveler…
Rast’s ideals were no longer something so fragile that they would shatter at the slightest storm.
“By the way…”
His voice paused slightly. “If I didn’t hear wrong just now, Dean Silver, did you say you’d be my Emotional Support Ferret?”
“Get lost… did I say that? I didn’t say that.”