–+–
“All right, Sandrone.”
Columbina answered with almost no pause, then drifted over and sat down beside Sandrone.
Sandrone was just about to speak when Columbina bent her legs and placed her bandaged feet on Sandrone’s neatly pressed thighs.
“Sandrone,” she said, tilting her head.
Her voice carried a faint, matter-of-fact tone.
“Can you undo them? They’ve been wrapped for too long. It feels uncomfortable.”
Sandrone froze at the sudden touch, then lowered her eyes to her own lap.
The bandages wound from Columbina’s ankles to the tops of her feet, neat and tight, leaving only a thin sliver of pale calf exposed at the edges.
She stayed silent for a few seconds.
In the end, she still reached out and found the loose end of the bandage with her fingertips.
One layer.
Then another.
She moved slowly, with great care.
Now and then, her fingers brushed the warm skin beneath the bandages.
As she worked, the bandages loosened ring by ring.
Pale feet came into view, soft in the dim light.
At last, the final loop slipped from Columbina’s rounded ankle and came free, falling in a loose pile on the floor beside her.
The line of the ankle bone was clear and fine.
The arch of her foot curved in a lovely, fragile line, and faint blue veins traced beneath the thin skin over the top of her foot.
They still rested on Sandrone’s knees, bare and unguarded.
“Sandrone,” Columbina said with a soft laugh.
Her voice was very close.
“Why do you look so serious?”
She paused, then looked at her with clear eyes.
“Where does the last scene in your memory stop? The Moon-Prayer Night? Or the final battle with the Doctor?”
Sandrone didn’t answer right away.
Her gaze drifted, as if she were searching through something.
Without thinking, her fingers followed the delicate curve of Columbina’s arch and stroked it.
The touch was cool at first, but the skin beneath was warm, smooth as jade.
A faint blush crept over the tips of Columbina’s ears in silence.
For a breath, she seemed to hold still.
Yet she didn’t pull her foot away.
Her toes only curled a little, then relaxed, pressing that sensitive skin closer into Sandrone’s palm.
“It’s…” Sandrone finally spoke, her voice a little tight.
Her fingers, however, still hadn’t stopped that thoughtless, soothing motion.
“My clear memories end on the Moon-Prayer Night…”
She lifted her eyes, her gaze heavy with thought.
“After that, there are only broken fragments. Moon Marrow. Dottore. But… I don’t think you were there?”
“Sandrone?” Columbina called softly.
Sandrone didn’t answer at once.
That voice seemed to come through a layer of fog.
She raised her head without thinking, her eyes still a bit unfocused as she stared blankly at Columbina, as if she had not yet pulled herself free from those shattered memories.
Following the young girl’s smiling pink eyes, her gaze moved down in a slow daze, until it landed on her own hand.
Her fingertips were tracing Columbina’s rounded ankle bone with almost intimate ease.
The pads of her fingers were still rubbing over that soft, warm skin without her knowing it.
The movement was so practiced it felt as though she had done it a thousand times, carrying a shameful kind of reluctance to let go.
“…”
Somewhere in her mind, gears seemed to grind to a dead stop.
Both her hands froze at once.
The next second, as if she had been shocked, Sandrone snatched her hands back in a panic and leaned hard away, putting distance between them.
“If Sandrone likes it…”
Columbina tilted her head.
Her voice was light and soft, with a natural hint of temptation.
“You can keep going. I don’t mind.”
“Who—who likes it!?”
Sandrone felt her cheeks burn hot enough to smoke.
The heat ran down her neck and all the way to her ears.
“Who wants to touch your feet!? You shameless dove!”
Flustered and angry, she reached out to push away the pair of feet on her knees.
“Enough! Talk business! Get your feet down!”
She pushed once, but they didn’t move.
Or perhaps she hadn’t used any real force.
Columbina only lowered her feet a little with the motion, the tips resting close against the outside of Sandrone’s thigh.
She didn’t go any further, but she didn’t pull away either.
She curled up on the sofa, arms around her knees, chin resting on top of them.
Her pink eyes looked deep in the dim light.
“It seems you really have forgotten many things, Sandrone.”
Columbina’s voice softened as she began to tell her all the things she had lost.
“After the Moon-Prayer Night ended, everyone gathered at the Phantom of the Sanctuary. Back in the Hyperborean era, it was the place where people spoke with the moon. I was supposed to take the road back to the moon that night.”
“But the Doctor… he used forged Moon Marrow to mislead the spell’s senses…”
Sandrone’s eyes went cold at once.
“Dottore… What did that madman do this time?”
“The ‘false moon’ he created looked even more like the moon than the Frost Moon beyond the sky. That gate sent me to the location of the ‘false moon.’ In other words, to the Doctor.”
“He imprisoned me,” Columbina said in a calm tone, as if she were talking about something unimportant.
“He took the Moon Marrow of the Eternal Moon and the Iridescent Moon. He wanted to seize the trilune authority for himself and complete his so-called ‘god-making’ experiment.”
Sandrone’s breath caught.
“To stop him…”
Columbina raised her head a little.
“I entered the ‘Moon Gate,’ which was the moon’s reflection. It was a prison left behind by Nibelung, a cage outside Teyvat’s time, built to imprison the Three Moon Goddesses.”
“I went against the flow there, passed through the cracks in time, and returned to the past to leave clues for all of you. In the end, with the help of the Three Moon Goddesses, I left my divinity in the prison, turned my body into moonlight, and scattered it over Nod-Krai. I hid the authority of the Three Moons inside the Frost Moon…”
“Then, with your help, I was reborn in the future.”
“So much happened?” Sandrone murmured.
Columbina’s voice grew lighter and lighter.
At the end, it carried a trace of apology.
“But you… to ensure the calculations of the ‘World Formula,’ you hid the computation core inside Pulonia. And you… were pierced through the chest by the Doctor…”
For some reason, there wasn’t much worry in her tone.
“Mm.” Columbina nodded.
“Arlecchino once told me you said to her, if a mission ever failed in the end, you hoped she would send both you and Pulonia’s core back to the Fontaine Research Institute.”
Sandrone nodded.
She had indeed given those instructions.
“…And after that? Why did we end up here?”
“I don’t know.” Columbina’s gaze drifted faintly into the air, as if she were recalling a blank space.
“At first, I was asleep in the Silvermoon Hall. When I woke up, I was already beside you, surrounded by that endless pure white.”
“I hadn’t been repaired at the time?” Sandrone frowned a little, finding it strange.
“Repaired? What do you mean repaired?” Columbina tilted her head.
Pure confusion showed in her pink eyes.
“…Nothing.” Sandrone waved it off, skipping past a question she couldn’t make sense of herself.
“So, that ‘Aha’ thing. You don’t know what it is at all?”
“I don’t.” Columbina answered at once.
Sandrone let out a near-silent sigh and turned to look out the window.
The sunlight was bright, and the streets were unfamiliar.
This was a brand-new world, yet also a complete unknown.
“Forget it,” she said, as if speaking to herself.
“We’ll take it one step at a time…”
After a short silence, she spoke again, her tone carrying a trace of inquiry.
“Then, right now… would you count as the complete ‘Goddess of the Three Moons’?”
“Not completely.”
Columbina shook her head.
“I left the Eternal Moon’s Moon Marrow to Lauma, and I gave the Iridescent Moon’s Moon Marrow to Arlecchino. But I still retained some of the abilities.”
Sandrone had no interest in the exact ownership of those pieces of “Moon Marrow,” but learning that Columbina still retained some of her authority put her more at ease.
At the very least, in this strange world, even without Pulonia, their safety had some protection.
But the thought had only just settled when her mind took a sharp turn.
She suddenly remembered a detail she had overlooked earlier.
She whipped her head around and stared hard at Columbina.
“Wait. Since you have authority, and your power has recovered… back in that Hollow, did you already sense the spatial disorder?”
“Mm.” Columbina nodded.
There was even a hint of admiration in her tone.
“The spatial structure there was quite interesting, like a puzzle that had been broken apart.”
“You understood the logic behind that chaos?” Sandrone’s brows drew together.
“Yes.” Columbina’s voice was calm and gentle, as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world.
“It’s like putting a puzzle together while walking through a maze. It’s a little winding, but you can still see the exit.”
“In other words…” Sandrone’s voice sank.
“You didn’t need that Bangboo to lead the way at all. You could’ve walked out on your own?”
“Yes.” Columbina gave a clear and sure answer without any hesitation.
The air seemed to freeze for three seconds.
“Then why didn’t you say so!?”
Columbina tilted her head slightly, her face full of innocence.
“Sandrone, you didn’t ask.”
“I…”
“And, Sandrone.” Columbina raised one finger and placed it lightly against her lips.
“When we ran into Billy and Anby, didn’t you tell me to ‘talk less’?”
“…”
The boomerang struck her with perfect aim.
Sandrone opened her mouth, but in the end, no words came out.
She only raised a hand to her forehead in defeat.
So this was the so-called Goddess of the Three Moons?
Where had she learned this natural dark streak from?
“…Forget it.”
Sandrone let out a long sigh and decided to spare herself.
“What’s past is past. We won’t be returning to Teyvat anytime soon, so we should think about how to live in this world…”
She picked up the phone again and lit the screen.
Columbina leaned in, resting her chin lightly on Sandrone’s shoulder.
“Should we ask that person named Nicole from earlier? She seems to know a lot.”
“Information, at its core, is a gap in knowledge. Many things that count as ‘common sense’ in this world would make us look very suspicious if we asked about them.”
Sandrone rejected the idea at once.
“From what I saw on the way here, almost everyone in this place has a phone. Their use of it and reliance on it aren’t any less than Sumeru’s Akasha Terminal. We’ll figure out the basic rules ourselves first. If we run into something we truly can’t understand… then we’ll think about it.”
Columbina said no more and nodded in silence.
–+–
While Sandrone and Columbina sorted through their situation indoors, dusk had already begun to fall over the far end of Sixth Street.
In the parking lot behind Random Play.
Nicole held up a tooth-shaped accessory with charred edges, her face full of the thrill of having struck gold.
“This is a small storage device. It belongs to Miguel Silver. I picked it up in the building before I fought my way out of Fourteenth Street! I looked into it before. That smelly old man always kept this data drive on him, so there has to be something important inside! I’m sure it has something to do with the safe’s password!”
Anby stood to the side and added in a blank tone, “However, it appears to have suffered some damage.”
“Oh, right!” Billy leaned in for a look.
“The body of the drive is all burned! Can this thing still be read?”
Nicole looked at the siblings standing nearby with an expectant face.
“Phaethon! Can you think of something? Maybe use that complicated computer in your store?”
Wise took the burned data drive and examined it.
“The HDD’s performance is mostly used to process Hollow data, but if it’s just exporting the contents of the drive…”
He looked at the girl beside him.
“Belle, I might be able to use the Inter-Knot’s computing power to repair it.”
“Great! Then it’s settled!”
Nicole didn’t give them any chance to refuse.
She clapped her hands together.
“We’ll first try to investigate where the safe is inside the Hollow. Once we have a lead, we’ll come find you! Until I contact you for the recovery operation, you can handle your own business as usual! Oh, right—”
Her tone shifted, and a flattering smile appeared on her face.
She rubbed her hands together.
“Phaethon, I have another important matter to discuss!”
Belle raised a brow, as if she had already seen through everything.
“No discount on the commission fee.”
Billy muttered from the side, “Manager, you know her too well…”
“Hey!”
Nicole shot Billy a glare, then quickly put on that “sincere” face again.
“Don’t reject me so fast! I’m not trying to mess with Phaethon’s official rates. Just like before, open a small Inter-Knot alt for me and let me take the discount price…” You are reading on novelping . com, the official source.
Belle looked at her with suspicion.
“What about Columbina and Sandrone?”
During their escape from the Hollow, Belle had heard their names through Eous, the Bangboo she controlled.
“Nicole, didn’t you just do a ‘big job’ with them? You rescued two young ladies who looked rich and noble at first glance. So why are you still coming here to cry poor?”
“Oh…” Nicole let out a heavy sigh, wearing a helpless look.
“They did pay me. It’s just that thing… It’ll take some work to exchange it for Dennies. If I run into someone who doesn’t know its value, I might even lose money!”
Wise grew curious.
“They didn’t pay with a check?”
Belle added with cool precision, “Looking at Nicole, definitely not. If it were a check, she’d have marched in here with her nose in the air to pay off her old tab.”
“Oh, stop teasing me! They didn’t give me a check. They gave me this—”
As Nicole spoke, she took a gem that gave off a faint silver glow from the waist pouch close to her body with great care.
“Look. This.”
Under the setting sun, the piece of Moonfall Silver lay quietly in Nicole’s palm.
A hazy ring of moonlight seemed to surround it, out of place against the rough concrete of the parking lot.
Wise paused.
“Hm? Is this… a gem? But its texture doesn’t really seem like a normal mineral.”
Belle leaned closer too, curiosity shining in her large eyes.
“Yeah… It has such a pretty luster. And it feels like more than that. The feeling it gives off is… quiet and peaceful. It doesn’t have the restlessness of an Ether crystal at all.”
“This is what they paid for the ride.”
Nicole handed the Moonfall Silver to Belle.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, but my years of wandering the streets tell me one thing—this stuff is definitely not simple! Speaking of which, you two are legendary Proxies. You’ve seen a lot. Have you ever seen anything like this in a Hollow?”
Belle took the Moonfall Silver, and she and Wise studied it closely.
It felt cold in the hand, like holding a beam of frozen moonlight.
Wise shook his head.
“I haven’t seen it either. There’s no record of this kind of ore in the database.”
Belle also shook her head.
“Me neither. It’s amazing…”
“Tsk, even you two haven’t seen it…” Nicole took the ore back in disappointment.
“Fine. I’ll ask a friend at the HIA to appraise it later. I hope it’s worth something, or else I’ll have lost money on gas for this trip!”
Belle teased her with a soft laugh.
“That’s rare, Nicole. With how much you love money, you actually accepted something with an unknown price as payment? Was it because those two pretty ladies were good-looking?”
“Don’t slander me!”
Nicole looked like someone had stepped on her tail.
“I only love Dennies, okay!? Can good looks be eaten? …Though they were pretty good-looking.”
She cleared her throat, then raised one finger with a serious face.
“The main reason was my instinct! My instinct told me those two aren’t simple! And this thing isn’t simple either! I trust my instinct!”
“Does this thing have a name?” Wise asked.
“They said it’s called… Moonfall Silver,” Nicole answered after thinking for a moment.
“Moonfall Silver…” Belle repeated softly, a touch of appreciation rising in her eyes.
“That’s such a pretty name.”
The name itself seemed to carry a romantic air.
“So! Proxy! Dear manager!”
Nicole struck while the iron was hot, leaning forward and pressing her hands together.
“Since I showed you such a rare treasure, about the commission fee! Please, really, give me the discount price! Pretty please? This is the request of my lifetime!”
As she spoke, she kept sending frantic looks at Anby behind her.
Anby received the signal and read out in a flat voice:
“Proxy, please give us a discount. Otherwise, Nicole won’t give me food. Cry here.”
The air went quiet for a second.
Nicole nearly lost her mind.
“Don’t read the words in brackets out loud, Anby!”
Then she turned back with that familiar pitiful look.
“We really need this discount! This little price difference is nothing but pocket change to Phaethon, right?”
Belle held her forehead in defeat and sighed.
“I really can’t do anything with you people…”
“Thank you, Belle!”
Nicole’s face cleared up at once.
She happily pulled Anby and Billy away, turning to leave before Belle could change her mind.
“Ah!” Nicole suddenly turned back to remind them.
“Don’t forget about exporting the data! Contact me anytime if there’s news!”
“Thank you so much, Manager!!! See you, Manager!” Billy waved with a grateful face and followed Nicole out.
“See you, Manager.” Anby nodded slightly.
Wise and Belle watched the three members of the Cunning Hares leave in their usual noisy way, then exchanged a look.
“Moonfall Silver…” Wise repeated in a low voice.
“Looks like Sixth Street has gained two interesting new neighbors.”
The setting sun sank fully below the horizon, and the lights of Sixth Street came on one by one.
–+–
Meanwhile, in the newly lit two-story building across from 141 Convenience Store…
Sandrone was studying the map app on her phone when she suddenly seemed to remember something.
She turned to look at Columbina, who was spacing out beside her.
“Speaking of which, Columbina.”
“Mm?” Columbina came back to herself and blinked her pink eyes.
“Why do you carry Moonfall Silver with you?”
Sandrone couldn’t quite understand it.
She remembered that this kind of ore was quite common in Nod-Krai.
You could even say it was everywhere among the Frostmoon Scions.
“Ah, that.”
Columbina lightly closed her fingers in the air.
Like a magic trick, a piece of Moonfall Silver giving off a hazy silver glow appeared in her hand, and she toyed with it between her fingertips.
“Because every time Lumine came to the Silvermoon Hall to play with me, she always liked to take a few with her.”
Columbina recalled it with a faint smile in her voice.
“She seems to really like collecting shiny things…”
“So before I knew it, I started picking some up too.”
“Some? How many is some?” Sandrone asked, curious.
Columbina tilted her head and thought for a moment, then gave a vague number.
“Mm… probably only a few thousand?”
“…You used the Frost Moon’s authority for this kind of thing?”