Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 165: ‘Good’ Different

"I’m poor."

Cecilia sighed.

"I’m so poor that if not for the scholarship and the school’s cafeteria, I won’t be able to eat," she continued, poking disconsolately at her mutton wrap.

Angela, sitting across from her in the sun-dappled courtyard, stared with the exasperated disbelief of someone to whom ’poverty’ was a sociological concept, not a lived reality.

"This is why you should’ve received the empire’s sponsorship," she said, her tone pointed. "I promise we won’t try to ask for anything in return!"

Cecilia returned the glare, her blue-green-grey eyes sharp. Knowing it would be stupid to believe that. An empire’s ’gift’ always came with strings, usually made of unbreakable political steel.

Her independence, hard-won and precious, wasn’t for sale, not even for three square meals a day and teleportation fare.

Ah, the teleportation gates. The logistical cornerstone of her insane remote initiation plan. And as expected, they were ruinously expensive.

A quick mental calculation using this world’s ’Cecilia’s’ meager savings, scraped together from summers spent shelving books and organizing charity drives, had been a sobering experience. It wouldn’t cover two weeks of daily magical commuting.

’Forgive me, AU!Cecilia... for spending the fruit of your hard work...’ she offered a silent apology to the ghost of this diligent, orphaned girl whose life she was currently inhabiting (and whose savings she was about to obliterate).

She bit into her mutton wrap with sudden, savage intensity, savoring the rich, spiced meat. After all, it might be her last decent meal before financial destitution.

"Or," Angela said, a mischievous glint entering her eye as she took a delicate bite of her grilled cheese, "just make use of your boyfriend and tell him to pay for your expenses."

It was a joke, a teasing nudge from the princess who viewed romantic entanglements as another form of strategic alliance. Except her own. Yes, Stevan was choked on his tea in the background somewhere.

Cecilia froze. Then, slowly, she placed her half-eaten wrap back on her plate with ceremonial care. She looked up, her expression transforming from despair to radiant, beatific epiphany. She gasped, a hand flying to her chest. "Right! Of course hubby will help!"

The word ’hubby,’ delivered with such shameless, gleeful possession, had the effect of a small detonation. Angela flinched so hard she nearly dropped her sandwich.

"WHO ARE YOU? WHERE IS MY BEST FRIEND?!" Angela yelled. She pointed her grilled cheese at Cecilia like a holy symbol against a demon.

This... this was not her Cecilia. Her Cecilia was proud, stubbornly self-reliant, the top mage who would rather eat plain bread for a month than be seen as dependent. Using a man for money? Unthinkable!

Cecilia merely leaned back, a low, wicked cackle bubbling up from her throat. "Heheheheheheheh..." It was the sound of someone gleefully abandoning a cherished principle. "Your best friend is a slut."

"NOOOO—RETURN TO THE LIGHT, CECILIA—" Angela wailed, clutching her chest in a theatrical swoon of despair.

"Heheheheheheheheheheheheheh..." Cecilia’s laughter trailed off into a satisfied sigh.

Money acquired!

Meanwhile, Professor Baswara’s ’wandering crystal’, a polished orb about the size of a large apple, was currently floating serenely about six inches above her head, rotating slowly to capture a full 360-degree view. It was her initiation proctor, her magical babysitter.

And to her immense relief, its controls were bilateral.

She could turn the live image feed on and off. She could mute the audio from her end. She could even, to a degree, suggest its positioning. It was a marvel of privacy-respecting monitoring. Right now, it was set to ’visual on, audio muted (her end), stationary hover.’

The reason she kept the visual feed active, even during this absurd lunchtime melodrama, was simple. The initiation task was happening right now.

Task 1: Demonstrate fine mana control and multi-tasking awareness. Make an origami crane using ambient mana alone. Without looking.

While she and Angela performed their comedy of poverty and moral decay, a completely separate drama was unfolding in the air behind Cecilia’s back.

A single sheet of paper, lifted from her notebook, hovered there. Unseen by her physical eyes, it was the sole focus of a vast portion of her mental landscape.

Thin tendrils of ambient mana, guided by her will pressed, creased, folded, and flipped the paper. It rustled with quiet intent, a square of off-white transforming in mid-air, guided by invisible hands.

On the table beside her mutton wrap plate, acting as her ’cheat sheet,’ lay a neatly printed instruction sheet for a paper crane, complete with step-by-step diagrams.

Yes, it was like an open book exam, but this was still on the next level.

Later, once she’d successfully brute-forced her way through with the instructions, she’d try it from memory. After all, she already knew how to fold a crane. The pictures were just a visual guide, like... to help her visualize what she was doing behind her back.

"Ah, but, how’s it about the other boy now? Do we get some... updates?" Angela’s voice dropped into a purr, her earlier despair forgotten in the face of fresh gossip.

The ’mysterious transfer student’ was the new, shiny variable in the Cecilia Equation, and Angela, as both friend and imperial intelligence asset, needed data.

Cecilia didn’t take the bait with fluster or denial. Instead, she offered a smile that was all warm, gentle light. It was a saint’s smile, serene and unrevealing. "I don’t know," she said, her voice a soft sigh of pleasant ignorance. "Let’s hope for the best."

Ahh, this again. The answer acknowledged the question, refused engagement, and projected an air of benign, almost spiritual detachment. It was the kind of thing the real, 25-year-old Cecilia had learned to deploy in temple politics when she wanted a conversation to die a quiet, respectful death.

Angela’s teasing smirk faded, replaced by a flicker of genuine and quiet concern. Her best friend seemed... different.

Not ’bad’ different. Just...

The Cecilia she’d known for years had been mature, yes. Grounded and assured. But there had always been a taut wire of expectation running through her.

She was a careful perfectionist in every word and action. She walked a straight, narrow road she herself had paved with discipline and sacrifice. She never gambled. She never deviated.

This Cecilia, though...

She was sharper, yes. Her mind seemed to move faster, her calculations more complex. But there was a new... pliability to her. A moral flexibility that reminded Angela of herself.

She was willing to play dirtier, to consider unsavory shortcuts (like shamelessly fleecing a hypothetical ’hubby’), to wear her intelligence not just as armor for defense, but as a slick, unpredictable blade. She was more wild. The straight road had developed intriguing, possibly dangerous, curves.

Was it just because she had finally, truly moved on from Arzhen? 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

Perhaps.

But it also felt like... a possession. As if someone else, someone older and far more weathered, had slipped into her friend’s skin and was now piloting the body with terrifying competence and alien motives.

Little did Angela know, Cecilia was no longer an 18-year-old schoolgirl. She was a 25-year-old version of herself from a completely different, harsher world.

But that impossible truth didn’t matter to Angela’s heart. Her friend, while strange, seemed... lighter. There was a glint of dark amusement in her eyes that hadn’t been there before, a willingness to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

She seemed, against all logic and in the midst of apparent financial ruin and romantic chaos, to be happier. And for all her princessly scheming, Angela just wanted that for her.

"Pardon me."

Both girls turned. Oathran stood a respectful distance from their table, a leather-bound book tucked under his arm. The late afternoon sun caught the stark white of his hair, turning it into a halo of cloud.

He wore a small, polite smile, but his mist-grey eyes were fixed on Cecilia.

"May I borrow a moment of your time, Miss Araceli?"