Harvest Orchard.
The one receiving Sonia today was, naturally, Mifa, a senior member of the Paw Stretching Club.
After finishing the sale of her spoils from the Void Realm over the past few days, Sonia suddenly fell silent.
Mifa was in no hurry, quietly savoring this moment alone together.
After a long while, Sonia let out a soft sigh and said, "I'd like to purchase the 'Heart Pen' miracle... Are there any promotions or discounts going on right now?"
Although Mifa dearly wanted to give the Sword Princess a free pass, she lacked the authority. "None. It can only be purchased at the full price of fifteen gold coins. Perhaps you could wait until the Intercollegiate League begins; the university usually rolls out special promotions during that period..."
"Then full price it is." Sonia sighed, her face full of reluctance.
Just as Mifa was preparing the knowledge spirit vessel, they suddenly heard a continuous popping and cracking sound.
It sounded like something splitting open.
Sonia turned her head and saw a fruit drop from a fruit tree behind her. Its transparent crystal shell shattered with a snap. The sorcery spirit stored inside opened its bleary, sleepy eyes, then abruptly dissolved into a wisp of mist and dispersed.
It was not the first, nor was it the last.
*Crack. Snap. Crack.*
One sorcery spirit fruit after another plummeted; one after another shattered and vanished.
Although the fallen fruits were not numerous, the situation clearly exceeded what female college students could take in stride. This was the Harvest Orchard of Sword Flower University, a prominent trading center for sorcery spirits in Jialesi, and the fruit trees were miraculous installations created by legendary sorcerers. How could a sudden runaway incident of sorcery spirits possibly happen here?
Soon, however, they had no leisure to care about such a minor matter.
Because they realized they were covered by a colossal shadow.
As mentioned before, Harvest Orchard had exterior walls made entirely of glass, taking in one hundred percent of the light from the outside world. And so, the young women looked up, facing the celestial bodies in the sky.
The stars were falling.
Thousands, tens of thousands of stars were plunging downward. Among them were the three radiant stars that everyone knew, the moon star that shone brightest at night, and the seventy-two constellations so beloved by female college students.
Yet they did not fall completely.
Because the sky caught them.
Like balls striking a net, they dented and pocked the sky tens of thousands of li above. The sky resembled an intensely elastic membrane that blocked all the falling meteors; it was also like a colossal bubble enveloping the entire world.
Countless questions surfaced in the minds of the observers like bursting bubbles, densely packed enough to make one's head boil.
There was no uproar, no chaos, no screaming.
Jialesi, Yabakulei, Maji, Meite, Misi, Aifeng... The entire Starry Country ground to a halt. Countless people stared up at the heavens, undergoing a reconstruction of their worldview.
And then—
*Click.*
Perhaps there was such a sound, or perhaps there was not, but afterward, everyone believed there had been.
Because there was always a sound when the lights were turned off.
And when the heavens turned off their lights, how could there possibly be silence?
At this moment, all the stars were extinguished, taking away every trace of light. The entire world plunged into darkness, strangling the screams of all living beings in their throats.
Yet this dark tranquility had barely lasted a moment when the people in Jialesi saw a sliver of blue light emerge within the blackness.
It was a female sorcerer in a hooded robe. Deep blue runes danced around her, and every step she took sent ripples across the air.
Any noble with a shred of common knowledge could recognize her as a member of the clergy who appeared during festivals.
She walked upon stairs of darkness, drawing the gazes of tens of millions of citizens, ascending toward the sky step by step.
Upon reaching a certain platform, she knelt down, bringing her hands together in prayer. The deep blue upon her flared like blazing fire, igniting the darkness and spreading like a prairie blaze across all of Jialesi, and even across all of the Starry Country.
Sonia could not escape it either; the blue flames clung to her, shaping themselves into something resembling a suit of armor. She looked around and saw that the shapes of most people's blue flames were a chaotic mass, not yet reaching a level that could be described as form. Only a few people had blue flames with defined shapes, and they looked quite familiar... just like the Star Swordsmen and Star Archers she had seen before.
Meanwhile, Sonia's blue flame armor looked a bit like a Star Swordsman, and a bit like the Star Flinger Warrior that the Watcher had worn.
Before she could observe any further, the world underwent another cataclysmic shift. As if answering the burning earth, the sky began to dance. A fallen star suddenly erupted with deep blue radiance resembling web-like fissures, and then all the bent elastic potential energy of the heavens detonated, snapping that star right back above the firmament!
Then came the second, the third, the fourth... The stars were like elementary school children crowding by the window to watch a commotion, now caught red-handed by their homeroom teacher, scuttling back to their seats to sit properly, not daring to step out of line in the slightest.
When the radiant stars also returned to their class-monitor thrones, the sky finally brightened.
The morning's radiant stars, the bright sunshine, the lazy clouds, the clear, azure sky... That brief turning off of the lights and the falling stars seemed like nothing more than a magnificent hallucination.
Yet when Sonia turned her head to look east, she saw a white giant tower several hundred meters high, which had not existed before but had now abruptly materialized. The position corresponding to the peak of the tower was precisely where the female sorcerer had knelt in prayer in the darkness.
Undoubtedly, that female sorcerer was still praying for all living beings at this very moment, and the white giant tower was a stairway to heaven prepared for her by legendary sorcerers in a matter of seconds.
For some reason, a term suddenly surfaced in Sonia's mind:
*Star Prayerer.*
"Mifa."
"Huh?" The work-study female college student had still not completed the reconstruction of her worldview.
"Do you know what that fallen sorcery spirit was?" Sonia pointed to the shattered crystal fruit behind her.
Though a bit puzzled, Mifa naturally would not refuse Sonia's inquiry. After a brief lookup, she said, "That's the two-winged sorcery spirit 'Meteor.'"
"Meteor? Which faction does it belong to?"
"The light sorcery faction. However..."
"However what?"
"Meteor's manifestation is not light, but a physical entity," Mifa said, looking at the description. "Still, because a meteor looks similar to starlight, and 'Starlight' belongs to the light sorcery faction, Meteor is also classified under the light sorcery faction."
Not all sorcery spirits had clear faction classifications. In the end, sorcery factions were merely labels arbitrarily used by sorcerers to categorize sorcery spirits, and had always been relative and one-sided. To say nothing of the many sorcery spirits that possessed traits of multiple factions, some could not be categorized into any faction at all—such as the Watcher's Substitute sorcery spirit.
Sorcery spirits came first, followed by sorcery factions; the construction of theoretical frameworks had always lagged behind practice, and could even lag far behind. Take the prophecy and destiny factions, for instance: from antiquity to the present, all sorcerers felt these two factions definitely existed, and relevant sorcery spirits had been discovered, yet no one had ever been able to construct a complete systemic framework.
Sonia fell into contemplation. "So, Meteor should actually belong to a 'star sorcery' faction, right?"
"There is no such sorcery faction as star sorcery right now." Mifa found it rather amusing. "The stars are so far away. How could sorcerers ever utilize them?"
Sonia tilted her head and glanced at the sky.
"They don't seem that far away," she murmured.
The falling stars.
The Star Prayerer.
The shattered star sorcery spirit.
The Avatar of the Stars snatched by the Heroic Spirit.
The Secret Incarnation obtained by the Watcher.
No wonder the Heroic Spirit commander hadn't dared to kill the Watcher...
No wonder she would rather use a cumbersome method like a Contract just to ensure she could smoothly seize the Watcher's Soul Summoning sorcery spirit...
So that was what an 'incarnation' really was—
Suddenly, Sonia felt a wave of nausea. Everything in her field of vision began to deconstruct itself.
Mifa turned inside out, exposing her ventricles; the sunlight refracted and collapsed into cubes; the fruit trees twisted into gravestones stacked with text; the sky transformed into a pitch-black abyss; and countless eyes and mouths sprouted on the radiant stars, with bright, slender threads extending upward from their bodies like fishing bait dropped into the sea...
Yet the moment she blinked, the world returned to its original state, unchanged in every detail.
The world truly had not changed.
What had changed was merely Sonia's perception.
She knew very well the cause of this aberration: spending time around a fickle, half-hearted insect like the Watcher made it all too easy to run into this sort of thing.
As the world once again shed its makeup to reveal a multicolored blackness, Sonia received an answer from the Void Realm through her perception—
*Concept Secret Poison.*
Chapter 321