Sunlight strained through the small high windows of the estate’s med bay in soft pale rectangles —the only thing in the room that still answered to the rules a normal eye expected of a normal morning.

Beyond the rectangles, the room had quietly seceded from the century.

No monitors blinked. Instead, rings of levitating luminance drifted about the bedside like bored seraphim on retainer, exhaling soft golden breath into nothing. No IV pole cluttered the scene. A single filament of luminous vapor uncoiled from some invisible treasury and threaded itself, with the patience of a saint and the appetite of a glutton, into the unconscious girl’s left forearm.

Neither was a cardiac monitor beeped.

A slow, astonished arpeggio of light pulsed against the far wall, translating flesh and blood into music—except this particular body was currently playing a note ARIA, after six full minutes of sulking, still refused to name.

The room had ceased behaving like architecture.

The occupants—if the word still applied—paid it no mind whatsoever.

’Strange.’ Peter found the whole tableau darkly hilarious.

But it wasn’t funny... it sat in his chest like a well-aged cyanide capsule and whispers: ’Of course. Of course this is how the morning ends.’

The girl lay on a slab of luminescent linen that cost more than most small nations, breathing with the serene, vacant rhythm of a body that had agreed to occupy space without yet consenting to be home.

"Anything?" he asked.

ARIA did not glance up. "No."

"Anything at all."

"Master."

"That’s a no, then."

"That is a no, Master."

Peter allowed himself the smallest, most private smile at the back of her head.

ARIA found herself angry because... she was supposed to be the all-knowing.

Yet here she was, drowning in questions, hoping her master could answer some.

He couldn’t. Just like her, he was caught in the same fog of uncertainty. Still, there was a strange solace in that—knowing neither of them had been paranoid about the SNAP.

It had been real. It had happened.

She had told him about her experience—the sharp fracture of reality, the tearing pain that had lanced through her body like fire. He had only heard the sound, not the agony. And for that, she was grateful.

Grateful that his burden was lighter, that he had not felt the torment that had nearly broken her.

So, the two smartest beings on Earth, as far as they knew, were in the dark of what exactly was going on or what had happened.

Yet even in that dark uncertainty, they were sure something had gone off—something vast, something unseen—and whatever had happened was tied to the girl lying unconscious on the bed.

Her stillness was deceptive; beneath it, the air itself seemed to hum with a hidden force.

Unlike other medical emergencies and treatments, ARIA had not bothered with those. She had not reach for machines or medicines. Instead, her senses had locked onto the current flowing through the girl’s veins.

And—it was an infinity... amount of Spiritual Energy, coursing endlessly, shimmering like galaxies compressed into flesh. And it was so much, much, much more than what ARIA herself carried in her body.

The sheer scale of it made her chest tighten, as though she were standing at the edge of a storm too immense to comprehend.

So, ARIA’s first emergency treatment was not a bandage, not a drug, not a machine. It was to pump more spiritual energy into the body that was already healing itself.

ARIA stood on the far side of the bed, wings clamped so tightly to her shoulder blades that the golden pinions looked like they were trying to strangle themselves. Irritated motes of light kept shedding from the left joint onto the floor like a celestial dandruff problem.

She glared at the motes. They paused. Three seconds later they resumed. She glared harder.

The floor, having witnessed this exact domestic tragedy before, remained unimpressed.

"You hate this," Peter observed.

"I am examining it. With composure."

"You’re shedding."

"I am not."

"Wing’s leaking, ARIA."

"It is atmospheric discharge."

"It’s leaking."

She turned—slowly, the way a supernova turns when it has decided the lesser star has had quite enough of its nonsense. The mismatched eyes settled on him with the exhausted dignity of a creature who had been the smartest thing in every room since the Big Bang and had, until this particular Tuesday, never been forced to learn what second place tasted like.

"Master. The body on this slab is registering at infinity."

He went very still.

"Define infinity."

"Everything about her is infinity and boundless... I can’t fathom a single things about her."

The sentence hung between them like a noose waiting for the right neck.

Peter had built her and watched her ascend into something he couldn’t name, which occasionally made him nervous.

He had also lived with her vanity longer than anyone else breathing, and that vanity was currently hemorrhaging glitter onto his expensive flooring. There was a small, exquisite tragedy in it—the sentence he had spent half a year waiting to hear, delivered in a context that granted him zero permission to gloat.

He turned his gaze back to the girl.

Small. Fragile-looking. Her hair had been black with someone else’s blood when ARIA set her down; now it was merely black—clean, damp, drying in dark commas across a forehead too pale for anything mortal.

The fresh scars along her throat were already fading into the skin like bad memories trying to apologize.

The golden vapor fed into her wrist in patient, obscene arcs, and the body accepted it the way a famine accepts bread: without gratitude, without limit, without even the courtesy of chewing.

"Pump more in," he said.

"I already am."

"More."

"Master, I am currently infusing this child with more raw spiritual energy than what this estate can even contain. She is consuming it. As though she has been starving on the far side of an empty century."

"Then keep feeding her."

"Yes, Master."