Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 270: Secrets of the Past

With her disguise dispelled, Yvette—who had not shown her true face in a very long time—sat straight-backed in the ebony chair. Her silver hair fell over her shoulders like pouring moonlight, and in her dark red eyes, the swirling snowfall above was reflected, as if tiny stars were drifting within them.She calmly watched Shuanghua, waiting for her reaction, a faint, almost imperceptible smile on her lips.

Of the two disciples-of-a-disciple she had so far, compared to Tertia—who liked to throw her weight around the moment she showed up and had an overbearing personality—Yvette still preferred Shuanghua, who was gentler at heart and looked easier to handle, even if in terms of raw power, Shuanghua seemed to be far more than a step behind Tertia.

She remembered Shuanghua had always wanted to meet her. Now that the wish had finally come true, what kind of reaction would she have?

Yvette picked up the mint tea on the ebony table and took a small sip, feeling a little expectant.

Then she realized Shuanghua had no reaction at all.

The girl just stared at her blankly, face expressionless, those lake-blue eyes still empty and unfocused, like an ice sculpture that time had forgotten. She didn’t even seem to be breathing.

Yvette raised her hand and lightly waved it in front of Shuanghua’s eyes.

Seeing that the snow-headed girl still didn’t respond, she picked up a lump of snow from beside her and tossed it at Shuanghua’s forehead, just like when they’d first met.

With a soft “ah,” snowflakes scattered, and Shuanghua finally snapped out of that “dead” state.

Whether from being too happy or for some other reason, her body was trembling faintly. In the end she suddenly shot to her feet, walked up to Yvette, dropped to one knee right in front of her, and bowed her head as if putting all her strength into it. “Shuanghua pays her respects to you, Honored Grandmaster!”

“Rise,” Yvette said.

Shuanghua stood up at once, but stayed where she was, head lowered, like a child at a loss before an unfamiliar elder, not even knowing where to put her eyes. Only when Yvette said “Sit,” did she hesitantly sit back down on the opposite side of the ebony table, as if she were the guest here instead.

“Don’t be nervous. Whatever you want to say, you can speak frankly,” Yvette reassured her.

Shuanghua answered with a soft hum, hesitated for a moment, then said, “Honored Grandmaster, could you let me see your tentacles?”

It was obviously a second attempt to confirm her identity. Yvette didn’t mind in the slightest. She immediately stretched out a strand of her hair; its tip gradually turned into a shadowy black tendril which, like a living creature, gently coiled around Shuanghua’s extended, faintly trembling, slender fingers.

She added an explanation, “When I was teaching Rosalyn, these tentacles were still white. It’s been a few hundred years now, and they’ve evolved a bit in terms of abilities. The color’s changed, so they probably won’t look quite like what you were told.”

“I believe you,” Shuanghua said with unusual seriousness.

Head bowed, she stroked the black tendril in her hand. The texture was strange—like elastic gel, yet carrying the warmth of a living being. She was a little curious about its defensive power, whether it was as indestructible and peerless as her teacher had described back then. But she didn’t dare squeeze too hard, worried she might cause pain and that her grandmaster would think she was being disrespectful on purpose.

The air atop the snow peak fell quiet once more. Snowflakes whirled down like goose feathers. Aside from that, all was still.

Shuanghua focused intently on playing with the Shadowtouch in her hand. Part of it was because the bizarre creation truly was fascinating, and part of it was a way to cover up her inner confusion, so she wouldn’t have to take the initiative to start a conversation.

She still far preferred being on the passive end of a dialogue.

Yvette, meanwhile, had so many questions she wanted to ask that she didn’t know where to begin for a moment. Then, seeing how fascinated Shuanghua was with her Shadowtouch, she put in a tiny bit of Aberrant Mana and activated its mimicry function. The tip of the tentacle suddenly transformed into a head exactly like Yvette’s own, giving Shuanghua quite a fright.

After teasing her grand-disciple enough, Yvette cleared her throat lightly and said in a more serious tone, “I have a lot of questions for you.”

Shuanghua replied respectfully and tensely, “Please ask.”

“I need to know the true story of Rosalyn’s fall,” Yvette said, “including your guesses.”

Shuanghua answered solemnly, “Alright.”

Over the time that followed, Yvette and Shuanghua went back and forth many times about the causes and consequences of the War of Divine Judgment.

Since Shuanghua’s words were always brief and to the point, it didn’t take long before Yvette had learned everything she knew.

Five hundred years ago, when the Day of Finality arrived, Shuanghua had only just become the youngest of Rosalyn’s accepted students, her level barely at the threshold of high-level mage. There was no way she could have participated in a battle on the True God level, so all of her information had been painstakingly gathered later, with Tertia’s help.

As for the Legendary Mage’s fall, she and Tertia shared the same view—that there had to be something unspeakable and shady behind it.

Because the level was too high, in that War of Divine Judgment, aside from the four True Gods, there had only been a handful of god-tier participants.

The Legendary Mage was of course at their head.

Next came the two greatest pillars of the dragon race—the Blaze Dragon King and the Flame Dragon King.

After that were the demon race’s Demon Marshal, the First Demon General, and the Elven King.

It was said that the two beast kings of the Mortal Realm, the North Sea Giant Kraken and the Sky-Curtain Behemoth Leviathan, had also taken part, but that had never been confirmed.

And the outcome of that battle was that, aside from the four True Gods, every other participant fell. If the North Sea Kraken and the Sky-Curtain Behemoth really had been involved, then they would be the only survivors below the True God level—but those two monsters had no true sapience and could not speak. Even if someone found them, it was unlikely they would still remember events from five hundred years ago, let alone be able to share them.

So all paths pointed to a single result: whatever had happened in the War of Divine Judgment, whatever the truth was, the four True Gods held the final right of interpretation.

If They were willing to honor the Legendary Mage as a hero, then she was a hero. If They chose to declare that the Legendary Mage had been nothing but worthless cannon fodder, then the Legendary Mage’s place in history would be rewritten from that moment on.

Even the fact that the Legendary Mage had ascended during the War of Divine Judgment, becoming the God of Truth and Magic, had been something announced by the True Gods’ own churches.

Unable to accept that her teacher had truly fallen, during the long years that followed—especially after she herself broke through to the god-tier—Tertia had repeatedly ventured deep into the Snowfields in search of the truth, often bringing Shuanghua along.

With her senior sister’s full assistance, Shuanghua had finally been able to see for herself the site of the War of Divine Judgment, shrouded in boundless cold mist.

It was a band of cold fog which, at a glance, looked very similar to the chill mist spewed out by snow mites, but in essence, it was something completely different. This was a barrier woven from the boundless divine power of the True Gods. Even someone like Tertia, a super god-tier who had nearly reached the pinnacle of the Eastern Continent, was unable to break into it.

Because of that, Tertia had told Shuanghua with great certainty that their teacher had to have been locked inside by the True Gods for some reason. It was even possible that the Witch of Finality had been sealed in along with her.

If they could just break through that cold mist, they would be able to see their teacher again.

That conjecture was what made Shuanghua resolve to stay in this bitterly cold land. Over the next four hundred years, she became like a lonely watcher, cultivating from a high-level mage all the way up to the god-tier, going from a foreigner to the Snowfields’ own Snow Emperor, revered by its people.

Even so, she had never managed to break through the barrier set by the True Gods, and had never gotten to see the day when her teacher emerged from the mist.

Listening to Shuanghua speak of those four hundred years of watching and waiting, her tone utterly calm, even understated, still sent ripples spreading across the surface of Yvette’s heart. She couldn’t help using a tentacle to ruffle the girl’s snowy hair.

“You’ve had a hard time,” she said.

Shuanghua shook her head, her little face not showing much expression.

“In a while, take me to the War of Divine Judgment’s ruins,” Yvette said. “I might be able to get you inside.”

At those words, strong emotion showed in Shuanghua’s eyes for the first time. She nodded hard. “Yes, Grandmaster!”

After digesting and absorbing some of the information about the War of Divine Judgment, Yvette asked, “Before the Day of Finality arrived, was there any information about the Witch of Finality? Did she appear out of nowhere, or come from the Land of Finality?”

At that question, Yvette saw rare signs of wavering and hesitation appear on Shuanghua’s little face.

She didn’t press, just waited quietly. At last, Shuanghua said softly, “The Witch of Finality was released by Teacher.”

The peak fell into utter silence.

Yvette had never imagined she would hear such an answer.

“Released” made it sound as if Rosalyn had been the one behind the Day of Finality itself.

“Forty years before the Day of Finality arrived, Teacher used a remnant rift to travel to the Land of Finality, searching for you,” Shuanghua said.

Yvette didn’t speak. She suddenly recalled her first meeting with Ice Rain many years ago. That had been in Agasha’s Kingdom of Puppets. When she’d taken out Rosalyn’s projected portrait, Ice Rain had said that over thirty

years ago, she’d seen a golden-haired girl who looked just like the one in the picture.

Back then, Ice Rain had come across as a bit of an airhead, clearly not the most reliable, but looking at it now, as a God of Machinery, there was no way she would make things up for no reason.

So it had been true.

Rosalyn had really returned to the Land of Finality.

But she hadn’t gone back to Ish Island. Instead, she had released the Witch of Finality—and even brought her to the Mortal Realm.

What had happened in between?

“In that place, the Witch of Finality took on your appearance and tricked Teacher. And because the timing of that remnant rift’s appearance was too coincidental, Teacher didn’t have the chance to verify it before bringing the witch back to the Mortal Realm. After that, Teacher never found another aurora, and the witch became the root of all disasters in the world.” When Shuanghua spoke to this point, her tone was thick with sorrow.

Yvette stayed silent, but her sense of dissonance only sharpened.

This isn’t right, she thought.

This really isn’t right.

From the time she’d woken on Ish Island, to when she’d met Rosalyn, then parted, and after that, set out to wander the continents two hundred years later—throughout that long span, there should have been no way for anyone else to know what she truly looked like.

How had the Witch of Finality just “happened” to take on her face and successfully fool Rosalyn?

Unless the Witch of Finality looked exactly like her.

Unless the Witch of Finality was, by chance, her.

She closed her eyes, and the image of Ice Rain’s troubled expression surfaced in her mind, along with her earlier conjecture that there might have been aberrant factors present during the Ultra-ancient Civilization ten thousand years ago, and her lingering doubts about the Land of Finality’s timeline not matching up at all.

Time. Time.

Everything seemed to circle back to time.

If the flow of time between the two worlds had a huge but fixed offset, it could explain everything. The Land of Finality would represent the present, while the Mortal Realm existed as both the past and the future.

When the two were linked by the aurora, two ageless witches had come to exist at once—one the Silver Witch, one the Witch of Finality. And because both were real, Rosalyn had mistaken one for the other, and Ice Rain had been torn.

Yet even if she set aside the Witch of Finality’s motives for destroying the world, there were still countless questions with no answers.

How had a low-magic planet become a high-magic one? Was a magicless era actually reversible? Could it even be cyclical, like a tide?

Why did the Mortal Realm just happen to have beings like dragonkind, Leviathan, and the Kraken, while the Origin Civilization had just so happened to excavate dragon, whale, and giant squid fossils?

In the archaeology of the Origin Civilization, the ancient civilization from thirty thousand years ago had also been wiped out without clear cause, vanishing along with the high-magic environment—so in the end, all they could do was resort to the world-ending demon gods of various continental myths to explain it, such as the “Lord of Dusk” in the mainstream myths, or “Source of Ruin,” “God of Finality,” “Dirge of the End,” and so forth in others.

And in the Greenlight Tower in Garde City on the Jadeite Continent, Lingman Corporation’s CEO Imogen Ashford had once said that her tentacles came from the power of Demon Gods.

Who were the Demon Gods?

The Witch of Finality?

At that thought, for an instant, Yvette felt as if the worlds on both sides of the aurora had suddenly joined together into a single, enormous Möbius strip.

The Land of Finality represented the present, while the Mortal Realm existed both before and after.

She pondered for a long time without speaking. Nervous about this topic, Shuanghua hesitated for a while, then cautiously added, “Tertia and I both believe you’re not the Witch of Finality, and we believe you’re the perfectly good God of Serendipity. But to the True Gods, the Righteous Gods, and some ancient powerhouses, your existence may become…dangerous, if word of it gets out.”

Yvette pulled herself out of her thoughts, mulled it over, then asked, “If that’s the case, why is the Silver Witch, in the teachings of the True Gods and Righteous Gods, treated as an incarnation of the True Gods?”

Previously, she’d thought the True Gods all wanting to fold the Silver Witch into their doctrines was just because the Silver Witch had been the Legendary Mage’s teacher, and they could ride on that fame a little.

But looking at it now, in the eyes of the gods, the Silver Witch and the Witch of Finality could practically be equated.

Why would They still do that?

Shuanghua shook her head. “Tertia said the True Gods want to locate you through that method, but I don’t know how. She said it’s a method only the divine race has.”

A method only the divine race has? Yvette blinked, and a spark seemed to flash through her mind.

The direction of faith’s flow is the direction of the god’s location!

The reason the True Gods preserved—and even encouraged—the Silver Witch to become a kind of universal, cross-faith object of worship could only be one thing: They were using the flow of faith to pinpoint her position.

And to avoid that flow, the only options would be to hide inside a divine realm, or to use holy relics, holy emblems, or holy icons to split and divert it.