“The flower carriage rolls and sways, Nahida opens her eyes…”
“World, forget me…”
…
Sitting in front of his computer, Eve felt like cursing a blue streak after finishing the latest update quest.
“What on earth is this?!'”
“Shame on you, Akademiya!
Shame on you, Scaramouche!
Shame on you, Dottore!
You lot commit every evil under the sun, and you just had to bully my little girl, didn’t you?!”
Looking at Nahida, the little Dendro Archon who had been imprisoned for five hundred years, Eve felt a sharp ache in her heart.
“Sigh, my girl is just too responsible.
Even after being locked away for all those years, she was still thinking about the people of Sumeru first.”
Eve sighed heavily.
“And Greater Lord Rukkhadevata—she sacrificed herself to save Irminsul and the world, making everyone forget her existence.
She was simply too great.”
In Eve’s eyes, Greater Lord Rukkhadevata’s selflessness was nothing short of magnificent.
Yet, looking at those bastards from the Sumeru Akademiya five hundred years later, she couldn’t help but feel that the sacrifice had been utterly wasted on them.
The people Greater Lord Rukkhadevata had risked her life to protect turned out to be a bunch of scoundrels, led by that wretched Grand Sage.
“It’s just not worth it.”
Eve sat before the monitor, burning with righteous indignation.
“If *I* were Greater Lord Rukkhadevata, I would definitely…”
Before he could finish his sentence, his eyelids suddenly fluttered, his eyes rolled back, and he passed out cold on the spot.
When she finally regained consciousness, Eve blinked to find herself suspended within an ethereal green space.
Lifting her gaze, she saw a woman standing right before her—an absolute beauty with waist-length white hair, pure white vestments, and an otherworldly grace.
She possessed a pair of luminous emerald eyes, the pupils intricately patterned with the shape of a cross-shaped four-leaf clover.
Taking in those striking features, Eve instantly recognized who she was.
*Greater Lord Rukkhadevata?!*
She was Greater Lord Rukkhadevata!
Eve’s brain short-circuited completely.
*How could I possibly be seeing Greater Lord Rukkhadevata?
Am I hallucinating from staying up all night grinding quests?* she thought, panic spiraling in her mind.
*No wait, I’ve transmigrated!* The realization hit her like a bolt of lightning.
At that moment, Greater Lord Rukkhadevata looked at her with infinite gentleness and spoke softly:
“Everything is up to you now…”
With those words, the goddess opened her arms and pulled Eve into a gentle embrace.
The very instant Greater Lord Rukkhadevata’s arms wrapped around her, the two figures melted together into a single, seamless existence.
“This is…”
A completely unfamiliar sensation washed over her.
It was a feeling of profound clarity, a purity she had never experienced in her life before.
At the same time, she could feel dramatic changes rippling through her new physique.
Instinctively, Eve opened her eyes and lifted her hands to inspect them.
Her hands were flawless and immaculate, glistening like polished white jade.
“Wait a minute, these aren’t my hands,” Eve muttered in bewilderment.
As a full-grown man, there was no way he would ever possess hands like these.
Her gaze drifted downward, falling upon a pair of voluptuous curves that certainly did not belong to her previous gender.
A magnificent swell of soft abundance.
Eve was instantly dumbfounded.
She hurriedly looked lower still.
*Gone…
It’s really gone…*
Trembling, Eve reached up to touch her face.
“Wait, did I actually turn into Greater Lord Rukkhadevata?” she blurted out in sheer shock.
As soon as the words left her lips, she realized even her voice had changed.
It was a soft, melodious tone that radiated a gentle, reassuring warmth—the voice of a mature, elegant woman.
That left zero room for doubt.
She really had transformed into Greater Lord Rukkhadevata.
“Hang on, that means…
I’ve become the Little Lord’s mother?
Nahida is actually my daughter now?!” Joy bubbled up inside her chest.
Sure, she might have lost her little brother down there, but Nahida genuinely became her daughter.
*Well, honestly?
This trade is an absolute win!*
Right then, a sudden memory flashed through her mind—the final words she had shouted right before blacking out at her desk:
*”If I were Greater Lord Rukkhadevata, I would definitely…”*
*”Could it be because of that?”* Eve racked her brain, replaying the sequence of events.
It certainly seemed like it.
“Still, what a ridiculously hard-mode start.
Now that I’m Greater Lord Rukkhadevata, just watch me beat the pulp out of Scaramouche and Dottore, and kick the Akademiya to the curb…”
Before she could finish her grandiose daydream, a sudden wave of pressure surged through her mind, causing her to instinctively squeeze her eyes shut and clutch her head in agony.
Memories.
Greater Lord Rukkhadevata’s memories.
A massive flood of information poured straight into her consciousness.
The sensation felt as though her skull was about to split apart from the sheer volume.
After a few breathless moments, Eve finally opened her eyes again.
The aura surrounding her had undergone a staggering transformation.
Gone was the lingering trace of mortal hesitation; in its place bloomed a profound, divine majesty.
She had fully absorbed every single memory of Greater Lord Rukkhadevata.
In other words, she was Greater Lord Rukkhadevata now, and Greater Lord Rukkhadevata was her.
The two had fused into an indivisible whole.
Scouring the inherited memories, she quickly pieced together the context and the current state of affairs.
“Greater Lord Rukkhadevata’s name is Eve.”
“The current timeline is five hundred years before the Traveler’s awakening, right after Greater Lord Rukkhadevata exhausted her remaining power to purify Irminsul.”
“Once the purification was complete, she snapped off the purest branch of Irminsul to create the Lesser Lord.”
“But right as Greater Lord Rukkhadevata was about to dissipate completely, I was summoned here.”
“The fusion with Greater Lord Rukkhadevata prevented my soul from scattering into the wind.”
Faced with her current predicament, Eve let out a wry, helpless chuckle.
“I take back what I said earlier.
This is easily the worst starting hand in history…”
Eve knew that while the fusion had kept her from vanishing entirely, she was still in a half-dead, severely weakened state.
Which meant she couldn’t afford to do anything rash right now.
Worse still, she could sense that she was about to plummet into a deep slumber.
Due to a catastrophic lack of divine power, her body was forcing her into hibernation just to preserve her remaining life force.
“Tch, damn it.
What a start…” A flicker of despair crossed Eve’s face.
Prizing open a tiny window before the exhaustion claimed her, Eve hurriedly reached out with her perception to check on Irminsul.
Fragile.
Terrifyingly fragile, just like her.
Worse yet, she could sense that the contamination corrupting Irminsul had not been entirely eradicated.
“Tch, this is getting complicated…”
Her mind raced, desperately formulating countermeasures.
“To completely clear out the corruption in Irminsul and restore my own power, I’ll need at least three…
no, four Gnoses.”
Relying on her vast divine wisdom, Eve swiftly pinpointed the sole viable solution.
Yet the conditions for this plan were brutally demanding.
Four Gnoses—that was not something one could simply pick off the street.
As she rapidly calculated her next moves, a flash of inspiration struck her.
“Right!
Five hundred years from now…
as long as I stick close to *him* or *her*, there will be a chance to get my hands on those four Gnoses.”
A plan began to take shape.
“I wonder…
will the Traveler of this world turn out to be Aether, or Lumine…?”
With that final thought, Eve willingly yielded to the encroaching darkness and drifted into a deep slumber.
Her scheduled duration of sleep: five hundred years.
She needed to rest, recuperate, and lay the groundwork for the Traveler’s arrival half a millennium later.