The Amnesiac Princess Has Returned Home

"Lisdia?" Yaxiu's lips trembled faintly. He wanted to praise it as a lovely name, but the words caught in his throat and refused to emerge. Instead, it felt like a sponge draining all his strength, choking off his voice. "That's impossible. Your name is clearly Lisi. Stop joking... And you're not some innocent, naive girl. You're suspicious and mischievous—how could you possibly, how could you possibly..." "How could you possibly be the First Gospel!" The final sentence tore from Yaxiu almost as a roar. It was the first time he had ever screamed at the little girl before him. When he took a deep breath to steady himself, the biting morning air irritated his nasal passages, and he couldn't help coughing a couple of times until tears welled in his eyes. He wiped the tracks of tears from the corners of his eyes with his palm, but his face only grew dirtier and more smeared. He had tumbled through the rain for so long last night. The bridge before the parking apron had been nearly demolished by the shockwaves of his battle against the Sanctuary Sorcerers, flinging up endless grit and mud, after which he had sped back to the imperial palace on a near-wrecked Raven flying motorcycle. His face had long been caked in grime, and rubbing it now naturally smeared it into an unsightly mess. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry you have to see me like this." Yaxiu tried to wipe his face clean with his sleeve, the corners of his mouth curling upward bit by bit while the light in his eyes slowly dimmed. "Covered in dirt, hadn't even bathed, and then falling asleep right here sitting down... I'm really sorry..." "I'm sorry..." Toward the end, he could no longer hold back his choked sobs. He buried his face in his hands and bent forward, as though terrified to face the person before him. "Deep devotion is a comedy: though it cannot cross mountains or level oceans, it can bring you happiness. Cleverness is a drama: though it reveals the darkness of human nature, it also lets you hear humanity's paean. Only deep devotion paired with cleverness is a tragedy..." Lisdia pulled Yaxiu's head into her embrace. "Because you are clever enough to already know the truth, yet devoted enough that you cannot deceive yourself." Yaxiu took ragged, shuddering breaths and forced himself to look up at her, but the moment he saw Lisdia's face, he broke down once more, suffocating as if his heart had split open. He had originally thought he would escape this fate. The first time he lost Lisi, he had opened his mind to let Yayin invade not only for revenge, but also to protect himself. When in pain, treat yourself as someone else, and it won't hurt anymore. Yet this time there was no Yayin to serve as a stand-in. Yaxiu had to swallow this banquet dished out by fate with his own mouth and witness with his own eyes how cruel reality was to him. Only now did Yaxiu realize how terribly he had treated Igola and Harvey—what right had he ever had to think he was more normal than the two of them? The only difference between them was that Yaxiu was only now experiencing his own worst day. Yes. From the moment he saw that the First Gospel had changed, from the moment he saw her appear before him unharmed, from the moment he saw that familiar yet foreign face, Yaxiu had already guessed everything. Lisi had taken his place as the sacrifice for the god. "Where is Lisi?" Yaxiu's voice was hoarse. "Is she gone?" "She's still here, only asleep," Lisdia said. "She wants to see you very much too, but she can't. Because Gospel will clear away all excess noise until only the voice that perfectly harmonizes with it remains in the vessel." "Then why do you still have self-awareness?" Yaxiu regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. "No, I mean—" "You don't need to apologize. I know Lisi is the only one you care about. To you, I'm just a stranger who shares Lisi's appearance." Lisdia smiled. "If it were possible, I would rather she stayed instead of me. But only I fully meet Gospel's requirements. Even if I yielded it to her, her consciousness would still be worn away by the new Diyin... You wouldn't want that to happen." Of course Yaxiu didn't want that, because he had experienced it firsthand. His mental self had been battered by 'Gospel Yaxiu,' his soul forcibly invaded by Yayin. Bit by bit, he had lost sovereignty over his soul, watching helplessly as he marched toward oblivion... He never wanted to taste that powerless despair of waiting for death a second time. "As for why I can still retain my consciousness, it's because I am so similar to Gospel, and combined with a few fortuitous encounters, I was able to halt the process when Gospel was just one step away from merging with me completely." Lisdia explained, "If we compare ourselves to clothes: when Gospel wore you, it felt uncomfortable immediately, so it had to resize you into 'Yayin size' before it could fit. But when Gospel wears me, the fit is nearly perfect. So even if I intentionally leave a button undone, Gospel doesn't feel uncomfortable, and naturally it isn't in a hurry to reshape me into 'Diyin size.' "That's why I was able to retain my self-awareness while wielding part of Gospel's authority to save Annan and the others. However, this is only Gospel's benevolence." Seeing what Yaxiu wanted to say, she cut in ahead of him: "Twelve hours after the Gospel Board updates, the rankings will be finalized completely. No matter how well-suited or tailored I am, it will smooth out every wrinkle in the fabric and scour away the last traces of noise in my mind. From then on, there will be no Lisdia—only Diyin." "How much time is left?" "Ninety-three minutes," Lisdia said. "More than enough time." Yaxiu had no spare thought for her subtext, racking his brains for any other way out. "Don't you still have Sister Nina? Could she—" "That was a lie," Lisdia said. "Sister Nina was never a candidate for the Gospel Board. She was actually someone on the List of the Unconnected, and my sacrifice. "To ensure that the princess of each generation becomes the First Gospel, the Isu royal family finds a way to place another highly compatible princess onto the List of the Unconnected, forging the glory of the former by sacrificing the fate of the latter. "Sister Nina really did live in the high tower before. The fact that you couldn't find her means she has already departed as an unconnected." Yaxiu recalled that Lisi's wish had been to 'cancel the List of the Unconnected.' He hadn't pressed her at the time; after all, he wanted to abolish that list as well. But if he had asked a little more then, thought a little deeper, could he have seen through Lisi's lie? Could he have... "No matter what you did, she would have let me out to save you," Lisdia said. "Someone has to grieve. She didn't want it to be her." Yaxiu's lips twitched, as if attempting a smile. "I looked after her for so long, spent so much time with her, supervised her studies, played games with her, was so, so good to her... and yet..." "...she could bear to make me grieve?" Lisdia: "Please forgive her final bit of willfulness." "Then what about you?" Yaxiu suddenly asked. "Who are you? Why were you able to replace Lisi and push me off the top of the Gospel Board?" "I am Lisdia." She repeated, "I am the true princess raised by the Isu royal family, the perfect candidate for the First Gospel. The Lisi you know is the younger sister born while I was asleep." Yaxiu froze, then pressed his lips together with a bitter smile. "No wonder. I always thought she didn't look like a princess at all... Turns out she really wasn't." "She was," Lisdia said. "The time she spent with you was the happiest period of her life. She wasn't Isu's princess, but she felt she was your princess." "Running all over the place with a bunch of fugitives, displaced and drifting—can that really be called happiness?" Yaxiu looked down at the ground. "She hasn't grown up yet. She hasn't gone to school, hasn't fallen in love, hasn't made friends her own age, hasn't entered the Void Realm, hasn't properly explored Nabistin, hasn't visited Happy World a second time, hasn't..." Watching his trembling shoulders and listening to him recount the plans he had for the future, Lisdia reached out and patted Yaxiu's head. "You don't need to punish yourself like this. It isn't your fault." Yaxiu was silent for a good while before suddenly asking, "Will Lisi really disappear completely? I mean, is there any way... Right, the divine wish!" Yaxiu roughly wiped the grime from his face and gripped Lisdia's arms. "You can use the divine wish to create a new body for Lisi! No—directly reject the god's possession! Or maybe—" Lisdia shook her head. "The divine wish does belong to the First Gospel, but only after the Gospel Board is completely finalized and I have become Diyin entirely. By that time, there will be neither joy nor sorrow, nor any selfish desires left in my heart." "That doesn't matter! There's a contract between us!" Yaxiu said. "Just like Annan could control Yayin to abolish Gospel, I can control you to make the wish!" Lisdia shook her head again. "It won't work." "Why not?" "Because you don't have a contract with me." "How could I not have—" Yaxiu stopped as realization dawned on him. "Could it be..." "Your contract was only with Lisi. If Lisi had become the First Gospel, you truly could have controlled her through the contract," Lisdia said. "However, the First Gospel is me, and you have no contract with me. Even if I switched back to Lisi, her personality would make it impossible for her to become the First Gospel, and the title of First Gospel would merely transfer back to you." The fact that Lisi's contract with Yaxiu operated independently was not fate's cruel jest, but rather a calculation they had made long ago—allowing them to switch personalities at critical moments to act free of the contract's constraints. Only back then, no one could have imagined there would come a day when this contract would play such a monumental role, and now this 'single-account binding' ironically rendered the contract useless. "Then let me become Yayin!" Yaxiu said immediately. "When the time comes, Lisi can control me to make the wish!" Lisdia suddenly asked a strange question: "Yaxiu, do you remember the first nine lists of the Weaving Ceremony? Do you consider yourself the kind of person willing to throw away your own life just to save a country?" Yaxiu was silent for a moment. "Sacrificing myself just to see strangers applaud me... I probably couldn't do that. Especially when I still have people I want to see." Lisdia nodded. "Exactly. Then why would the Weaving Ceremony weave a future where you, Mr. Harvey, and Mr. Bogin work together to save the Gospel Country? Even if the catastrophe was caused by Miss Annan, and even if you might end up together with Annan in the future, would you really feel it was your responsibility to make up for Annan's mistakes? Besides, Miss Annan might not even think she did anything wrong. "The Weaving Ceremony already provided the answer to your anomaly: the one who wanted to save the Gospel Country wasn't you, but Yayin. In other words, although Annan controlled you to cancel the Gospel system, the god still resided within your soul." Yaxiu's heart sank deeper and deeper, yet Lisdia continued: "Miss Annan harbored extreme hatred toward Gospel. Regardless of her feelings for you, her first wish would undoubtedly be to destroy, banish, or seal the god—not merely abolish the Gospel system so lightly. After all, so long as the god remained, there was always the possibility that Gospel would be reconstructed. "Not to mention, she certainly wouldn't want you to become the god's vessel. If there were even the slightest possibility, she would never have let you set out with Mr. Harvey and Mr. Bogin to save Gospel. "Therefore, Yaxiu, your idea is impossible to realize. Someone must become the First Gospel; not even a divine wish can cancel that." Yaxiu: "Then what about wishing to coexist with the god? Not destroying the god, but merely requiring that my self-awareness be preserved?" Lisdia pondered for a moment and actually nodded. "There is a possibility of success with that." Yaxiu was overjoyed. "Then—" "And so, that explains why Gospel wove your illicit relationships with Qinna, Nona, Evalin, and the others, as well as why Mr. Bogin and the rest followed you," Lisdia said. "In the worldline where you became Yayin, Annan must have wished for you to coexist with the god. But in the end, you still merged into one with Yayin, and Yayin's will to save the world constantly held the upper hand. The rare moments you surfaced were just to play out those plots woven by the lists. "Therefore, I will not do that," she said. "That is merely a dead end that lets you drag out an agonizing existence." "This won't work, that won't work either..." Yaxiu nearly bit through his teeth, his body trembling. "Then let me—" "Don't you still have people you want to see?" Lisdia said. "Without Lisi, you still have many people who need you. But without you, there is no one who needs Lisi. She could bear to make you grieve; could you bear to leave her to live on alone? "Nikonaru was Lisdia's unconnected; Lisi is Yaxiu's unconnected." She smiled. "Take her fate with you, and leave this place." Yaxiu murmured, "Leave?" "Yes." Lisdia said, "Within eighty-nine minutes, you must leave Gospel."