In the Sevi family’s master bedroom, Sonia was fast asleep in Martha’s arms. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, the tip of her nose flushed as well. The tear tracks on her cheeks had long since dried, but the sneeze welling up inside her, she instinctively sucked back. Now she slowly blew out a transparent snot bubble, like a little piglet.

Martha felt both heartache and amusement. She wiped her daughter’s face clean with her sleeve, tucked the blanket snugly around her, and tiptoed out of the room. After a while she came back, carrying a basin of hot water and a thermos. The new towel grew scalding and water‑swollen in the hot water; wrung dry, it was warm and toasty, as if it carried the weight of a mother’s love.

When the hot towel lightly covered her face, the sleeping Sonia suddenly opened her eyes and asked, "What’s wrong?"

Martha shook her head on reflex, but immediately realized the worry and turmoil on her face could never fool her daughter. All along, it had only ever been her daughter who cooperated with her lies; she herself had never once managed to deceive her daughter.

"He’s gone. I can’t find him anywhere in the yard." Martha gripped the hot towel, and asked very carefully, "Could it be that he’s—"

"If he were willing to abandon me of his own accord, I might actually feel a bit more relaxed. But there’s no such good fortune in this world." Sonia chuckled softly. "He will absolutely never let go of me... just like I will absolutely never let go of him."

Talking about something involving her lover with her mother felt a bit embarrassing. A faint peach‑pink flush crept over Sonia’s cheeks. She pulled the blanket up to cover the lower half of her face and mumbled, "Don’t worry. It’s just a little accident. Once he’s handled it, he’ll come back."

But instead of being reassured, Martha only grew more anxious. "What happened? Is it because you and Linda came back, and someone’s come to catch you? I—"

"Mom."

Sonia caught her mother’s hand, her eyes half‑lidded, her voice lazy and drawn out like melted sugar, yet her tone allowed for no argument: "I said it’s fine, so it’s fine. Stop bothering me." 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Martha shut her mouth at once, opened the thermos and poured half a cup of water, then held it to Sonia’s lips. Sonia sipped it in small swallows. Only then did Martha cautiously ask, "He won’t be in danger, will he?"

Sonia opened her eyes and, seeing the genuine worry on her mother’s face, finally said slowly, "Nothing will happen to him. On earth there’s no one who can hurt him, except..."

"...me."

Mid‑sentence, she drifted back into deep sleep. Martha wiped her daughter’s face clean with the hot towel, and while rinsing the towel, she noticed the corners of the girl’s mouth curving faintly upward, as if she were immersed in a beautiful dream.

A sleeping child ought to be a mother’s treasure, yet Martha felt a faint chill creep over her heart.

The last time Martha had seen Sonia smile this sweetly was when, at five years old, she’d come back from apologizing—after letting the whole village know that an eight‑year‑old big kid had been beaten to tears by a five‑year‑old little girl. Back then she even hummed songs at the dinner table, as if what she was chewing wasn’t bread but her enemy’s humiliation. Her smile had been sweet and brisk, like sea wind blowing through a rusted barbed‑wire fence.

A kind of cruel beauty.

...

...

As the stardust pouring from the sky flooded into his body, the Sword Law Angel’s wounds instantly healed good as new. Even with the blessing of the Supreme Tail Feather, Vermilion Water Moon’s power far surpassed Demigod Rank and reached the six‑winged level, faintly tinged with a thread of Fate’s profundity, almost able to ignore all defenses and kill an enemy outright. But the Sword Law Angel’s "Sorrowful Curtain" was, in the end, an Eternal Wonder, enough to weaken Vermilion Water Moon to a level where its damage could be endured.

This made clear the gap between a Main Battle Angel and a Divine Lord: in the Battle of Senluo, neither Ash’s nor Sonia’s Vermilion Water Moon had been able to injure the Divine Lords in the slightest.

"These stardust fragments can be used for healing? ...No, that’s not right."

Ash immediately sensed something off. "Although Vermilion Water Moon isn’t exactly a complicated offensive curse, it still shouldn’t be healed this quickly. Is this an Eternal Wonder that can heal all injuries?"

Ash had suffered too many losses because he lacked healing methods—two months of convalescence after Senluo, half a month of delay with the Gospel—each time, his inability to treat his injuries had forced him to seek other solutions or simply wait for Self-healing. So he knew very well how precious any means that could heal all wounds would be—aside from ’Illusory Promise,’ he had never seen another Wonder or Wonder‑like divine miracle of that sort.

Even his recently constructed time Wonder, "Jump," could only heal injuries within a certain time frame, and Ash had to have previously touched the target’s normal Status in order to jump them back to a healthy past. If the other party had already been injured from the first moment they met, or if it had been too long since Ash last saw them, then "Jump" would be useless.

If the Law Angels’ healing methods could handle all injuries, then it would mean that so long as Ash couldn’t settle them in a single move, they could rapidly recover again.

"You could call this a small trait of the Law Angels." The Sword Law Angel, like a headhunter trying to recruit a general manager, smiled as he introduced their benefits. "Once the ’Immortal Star Mark’ has existed for a thousand years, it will transform our soul bodies into ’quasi‑stars.’ Any Star Magic that lands on us will replace our damaged parts. So this isn’t healing, it’s renewal."

Ash understood at once: the reason a Demigod’s soul body was so hard to heal lay in the fact that a soul body no longer metabolized, no longer renewed or regenerated. This granted Demigods an eternal lifespan, but also forced them to cling to an unchanging soul body... A Demigod didn’t even have the option of ’cutting away rotten flesh,’ because a soul body could not regenerate—if you cut, it’s truly gone!

Even if one didn’t care about being crippled, the soul body was tightly linked to the Magic Temple; cutting away parts of the soul body would damage the Magic Temple as well, leaving endless hidden dangers. Thus the healing methods of ordinary Demigods all focused on reverting rotten flesh back into sound flesh as much as possible.