The people raised their heads to look, and thus beheld the starry night sky.” Inside the moonlit orphanage, a pink-haired girl stood atop a stool.
Children of all ages sat in a circle below, listening intently as she told her story.
“She loved this world deeply, and She loved all the people in it.
She was the daughter of flowers and birds, the holy maiden of stars and night.
She rose from among a sea of blossoms, with the boundless stars above Her head, and stepped into the mortal world.
And later, She encountered many, many interesting things.” The pink-haired girl closed the storybook and smiled at the children below.
“As for what happened next, you’ll have to wait until next time.” “Sis Elysia, tell us a little more!” “That wasn’t enough!” “Please, Sis Elysia!” “Onegai, without Sis Elysia’s stories, watashi…!” Something strange seemed to have slipped in there…
“Ahem.
Leaving enough suspense is part of listening to a story.
Big Sis will continue tomorrow.” The girl known as Elysia clapped her hands.
The children reluctantly dispersed.
Director Celia, who had been sitting at the back of the crowd, stood and applauded.
“Today’s story was wonderful too, little Ely.” “Thank you, Director Celia!
But I read these stories from a book too.” Elysia hopped down from the stool.
“Then can little Ely tell me which book it is?” “Oh my, that’s a secret.
If I tell you, Elysia won’t be able to read those stories anymore, and then I won’t be able to share them with everyone.” Elysia blinked her pinkish-blue eyes with feigned innocence.
Director Celia did not press her.
She merely smiled and patted Elysia’s head.
“It’s getting late.
Little Ely should go to bed now.” “Okay~” After saying goodnight to the director, Elysia went upstairs to her room, flopped onto her bed, hugged her pillow, and rolled over to stare blankly at the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.
She seemed to have been thoroughly steeped in the role by now.
Strictly speaking, she was not that elf-like, mysterious girl, nor that dazzling maiden like a blossom dancing through the air.
She was a transmigrator.
In fact, she might have even taken the place that originally belonged to Elysia in this era.
As for her previous life…
Former male university student.
Suddenly flattened by Truck-kun.
Reincarnated into the Previous Era.
Utterly tragic.
Honestly, when he first realized that he had been reincarnated from birth as Elysia, he had felt a flash of delight.
Afterward, however, melancholy had set in.
In his previous life, he had parents who loved him and a group of friends he could walk alongside.
He had been a top student on the verge of graduation, with a job already lined up.
Then, while crossing the road, he had accidentally run into Truck-kun and lost the chance to care for his parents in their old age or see them through their final days.
His parents must have been devastated after his accident.
Given the chance, he still wanted to go back and see them.
However, there were infinite worlds within the Sea of Quanta and the Imaginary Tree.
Even with the Cosmic Juggernaut, finding his original world would be as difficult as reaching the heavens.
Besides, whether his world even existed within that cosmological system was unknown.
“Sigh…
When the time comes, I’ll ask Su to help me look,” Elysia murmured, resting her chin in her hands.
After arriving here, she had been adopted by Director Celia just as in the original story.
Incidentally, she had chosen the name Elysia herself.
Unlike the original Elysia, however, she had awakened twenty years’ worth of memories from her previous life as soon as she became aware of the world.
There was no way she could pretend to be an ignorant child.
Attending those elementary lessons every day felt like torture, and after enough time, she could practically feel her brain beginning to rust.
Eventually, she used the allowance the director gave her to order a mountain of textbooks online, shut herself in her room, and began reconstructing the knowledge from her previous life.
For once, she truly admired Shinichi Kudo.
The guy had spent thirty consecutive years in first grade.
While reviewing her knowledge, she discovered something unusual about this body.
Perhaps because she had known from the very beginning that she was the Herrscher of Origin, she had also gained some of the physical enhancements expected of a Herrscher.
Her memory and learning ability had improved significantly compared to her previous life.
She still could not compare to monsters like Vill-V or Mobius, but she was already quite exceptional.
So how exactly had the original Elysia become such a little piggy…?
Oh.
She had not known she was a Herrscher at first.
Never mind, then.
At first, Director Celia thought Elysia was merely shy.
She entered Elysia’s room intending to take her outside to play with the other children.
The moment she opened the door and saw draft papers scattered all over the floor, along with Elysia wrestling with advanced mathematics at her desk, her brain promptly crashed.
“Uh…
This is a talent unique to beautiful girls,” declared six-year-old Elysia, who was actually twenty-eight, after speedrunning advanced mathematics.
Later, Elysia did promise the director that she would go out and play more often.
Unfortunately, to be perfectly honest, she simply could not play together with the children.
All she could do was take books she had found in the library and sit beneath a tree to read.
Occasionally, she would raise her head and watch the children playing happily, and their joy would brighten her mood as well.
Later, some of the more outgoing children noticed how many books Elysia had read and pestered her to tell them stories.
Elysia had no objection, so she began recounting famous works from her previous life, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Little Prince.
Gradually, more and more children gathered around her.
In this peaceful little town where nothing much ever happened, fantastical stories were always highly appealing.
When Director Celia learned about it, she arranged for Elysia to spend two hours telling stories before the children went to bed.
Elysia would write outlines of the stories she planned to tell in her storybook.
Before she knew it, she had filled an entire volume.
The day after every storytelling session, children would always come to share their thoughts with her.
Elysia would listen quietly from the side, occasionally offering a few comments.
Because she behaved far too maturely, even children older than her began calling her Big Sis Elysia.
Strictly speaking, they were not wrong.
‘Before I knew it, I’d already been here for so long,’ Elysia realized.
…
It was another bright and sunny morning, and a refreshing Sunday at that.
Elysia got out of bed and went for a stroll through town.
After living here for so long, she had already become familiar with all the townsfolk.
Life here might have been uneventful, but it was warm and comforting.
Everyone was friendly and took good care of her.
She often helped them in return and learned many things along the way.
While talking with them, Elysia had unconsciously adopted the original Elysia’s manner of speaking.
After using it for so long, it had become a habit.
In other words, she had fallen completely into the Elysia persona.
“Little Ely, look at the huge fish I caught last night.” From afar, Elysia spotted a muscular man in an apron.
A one-meter-long black carp dangled from the hook in his hand.
“It’s Uncle Ivan the fishmonger.
Good morning!
That fish is enormous!” Elysia flashed a brilliant smile.
“I’ll butcher it later and make fish soup for lunch.
You can take some back to the orphanage for the children.
Remember to give the director an extra serving.” “Thank you, Uncle Ivan!” “Little Ely, these tulips bloomed this morning.
Here, take a bouquet.” Miss Jeanne from the flower shop was as warmhearted as ever.
“Thank you, Big Sis Jeanne!” “Little Ely, this bread just came out of the oven.
Take some back with you.” Lady Irene from the bakery filled an entire bag with steaming bread that carried the fragrance of caramel.
Elysia thanked her and accepted it, her pink hair bobbing with every movement.
“Oh, it’s Elysia.
A new batch of books arrived from outside today.
Come see whether there’s anything you want.” Uncle Mai, the town librarian, approached while pulling a small cart.
Elysia hurried to his side to help, only for Uncle Mai to lift her up and place her on the cart.
“What kind of little girl pulls a cart?” He gave a hearty laugh.
“Little Ely can sit there and choose books.
Pulling the cart is an adult’s job.” Elysia set the bread aside and sat on the cart reading.
From time to time, she raised her head to take in the town around her.
The morning light was gentle, the breeze brushed against her face, white doves flew across the horizon, and thin trails of cooking smoke curled into the sky.
The townspeople had begun yet another busy but fulfilling day.
She enthusiastically greeted everyone she met along the road, and they responded with equal warmth.
Today was another peaceful day.
It reminded her of the countryside from her previous life.
Every household kept its doors open, and the neighbors visited one another regularly.
During holidays and festivals, everyone would gather in the village square and set up enormous pots to cook communal meals.
Children would play and chase one another while the adults worked together, chopping meat, rolling dough, and wrapping dumplings.
White steam mingled with the rich aroma of broth, and just like that, the year would draw to a close.
May everything in this world remain this beautiful.
…
That night, Elysia quietly climbed out through her window and slipped into the nearby woods.
Daily evening lesson, begin!
Since she already knew she was the Herrscher of Origin, there was no reason not to hone her authority.
To prevent anyone from potentially developing Honkai Sickness, she always chose an uninhabited place to practice.
The moon was bright and pale that night, coating the lake in silver light.
Wind swept through the trees with a soft rustle.
Elysia sat beside the lake and focused her mind.
A pink crystalline flower gradually appeared above her palm.
She activated her authority, and the petals unfolded layer by layer as though the flower were truly blooming.
At last, the fully blossomed flower refracted the moonlight into a dazzling radiance.
Elysia placed it in her palm and examined it carefully for a while before waving her hand and dispersing it.
Her precision had improved greatly compared to before, but it still needed refinement.
Elysia repeated the exercise dozens more times.
Once she had preserved the feeling, she entered a cave to begin the next stage of her training.
It was not as though Elysia had never considered developing her authority further.
Both the story she remembered from her previous life and her current instincts told her that Elysia’s authority could not possibly be limited to creating crystals.
At first, based on the events of the final chapter, she had guessed that it was some form of wishcraft.
Yet when she tried to develop it in that direction, she ran into an extremely awkward problem.
She knew too much.
The original Elysia had infused her most beautiful and sincere feelings toward the world into her authority, thereby creating her magnificent elf magic.
In truth, however, the magic she had invented had no coherent system whatsoever.
Everything arose naturally from her emotions.
Only because the original Elysia was sufficiently sentimental—and, on top of that, practically illiterate—could she ignore rational thought and construct such techniques.
But this Elysia could not.
Every time she tried to imitate one of the original Elysia’s moves, she would instinctively begin analyzing it, breaking down the logic behind its activation layer by layer.
The conclusion she eventually reached was that these abilities had almost no logic at all, and many of their absurdly elaborate flourishes existed purely because they looked pretty.
To reproduce these techniques, she had to use scientific reasoning to recreate the whimsical ideas of an Elysia whose education had barely surpassed prenatal tutoring.
The difficulty could well be imagined.
Take this, for example.
Elysia found a sufficiently spacious underground hall within the cave, took a deep breath, and summoned the Flawless Dome.
Countless pink crystals intersected and fitted together, forming a hemisphere that emitted a gentle pink glow.
Yet as Elysia stared at it, her eyes turned lifeless.
This thing was the greatest nightmare of both her lives combined.
The Flawless Dome she had redesigned possessed two modes: area coverage and focused bombardment.
The former evenly attacked every region within the dome, while the latter reflected every fired arrow into a small area, creating concentrated firepower.
Area coverage had been manageable.
She had adjusted the parameters for three days and completed it.
Focused bombardment was the true nightmare, though admittedly, most of the suffering had been self-inflicted.
Her design for focused bombardment was based on an ellipsoid.
As long as she stood at one focal point, every arrow she fired would inevitably reflect toward the other.
Even if the opponent moved, she would only need to adjust the shape of the ellipsoid and shift the focal point accordingly.
But there was one fatal problem: the Flawless Dome was no longer round.
The Flawless Dome absolutely had to be round, just as the second floor of a building absolutely had to be constructed above the first!
What followed was an enormous amount of parameter tuning.
To make light reflecting inside a hemisphere approximate the properties of an ellipsoid, Elysia locked herself in her room day and night, apart from eating, sleeping, telling stories, and attending her inviolable evening lessons.
She adjusted and calculated without rest.
To achieve dynamic tracking, she also had to develop a system for monitoring and altering the angles of the reflective surfaces.
The orphanage’s computer was so underpowered that it could not even run engineering software, forcing her to calculate everything by hand.
The anguish involved was not something outsiders could ever understand.
At last, after three full months of revisions, she finally completed the Flawless Dome.
“The truths of the world have been revealed to me!
Hahahahahahaha!” She had actually shouted that in front of the children.
Director Celia had nearly dragged her to see a doctor.
And how had the original Elysia done it?
“A beautiful maiden can do anything~” And then it had simply worked.
I’m terribly sorry for embarrassing Miss Pink Elf.
With a sigh, Elysia slowly stepped into the dome.
After adjusting it to area coverage mode, she raised a hand and condensed a crystalline longbow.
She casually fired several arrows in different directions.
The bolts of light trailed radiant streams as they reflected back and forth through the dome at tremendous speed.
Elysia closed her eyes and dodged them with practiced ease, like a butterfly dancing through the air.
It certainly looked elegant.
After all, that elegance had cost her more than a year of practice and countless arrows to the body.
Next came archery practice.
She accumulated five thousand points every day.
By now, she could hit the bullseye with her eyes closed, and she could fire her bow as rapidly as a repeating crossbow.
Finally, she monitored the Cocoon of Finality.
Although this world was almost identical to the Previous Era of Honkai Impact 3rd, blindly treating the game’s plot as the standard answer would be a disastrous mistake.
She remembered reading a novel in her previous life where the protagonist transmigrated into an anime world and acted based on preconceived notions from the original series.
In the end, he mistook the heroes for villains, killed them, and lost everything.
The same logic applied here.
Suppose she assumed, based on the plot she remembered, that the final calamity before the Herrscher of Finality would be Corruption and prepared an entire plan to counter it, only for the Will of Ruler to descend instead.
At that point, she might as well lie down and wait to die.
That was why, on the very night she first became aware of the world, she had attempted to monitor the Cocoon of Finality.
She did not dare establish a connection and could only observe it from afar.
To her relief, she discovered that it was still dormant and could, at most, passively induce small-scale Honkai outbreaks.
Furthermore, by observing its projection, she discovered that the initial conditions were the same as those in the story she remembered, sparing her from the tragedy of having her foreknowledge torn apart and thrown into the trash.
However, from that night onward, she had carried a powerful premonition that if she ventured out early and began uniting factions, the Honkai Eruptions would also occur several years ahead of schedule.
At that time, she had still been unfamiliar with her authority and would have been almost useless in a direct confrontation.
Humanity’s casualties would undoubtedly have been horrific.
Her strategy was therefore to remain in the town and grind away at her authority like a max-level swordsman camping in the beginner village.
When the time came, she would go out and cut down Herrschers one by one, showing everyone the true might of Miss Pink Elf.
What?
The Cocoon of Finality will raise the difficulty along with me?
Then she truly had no solution.
If she did not train, she would have even less hope.
By the time Elysia withdrew from her monitoring state, her entire body was covered in fragrant sweat.
She first used Honkai energy to cleanse herself, then condensed the escaped energy into crystals and stored them within the Pelagic Primaevality before beginning the journey back to the orphanage.
She still could not create a Reality Marble like the Herrscher of Human: Ego’s Stars of the Past.
For now, she could only use it as portable storage.
Afterward, she secretly climbed over the wall, scaled the building along a drainpipe, slipped through her window, quietly crawled back into bed, pulled up the covers, and went to sleep.
And that was a day in Elysia’s life.
Well then, here we go!