Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 181: Loopholes

Cecilia had pieced the timeline together from the journal’s notations.

The predicted date of the first snow, the meticulous, almost obsessive logging of atmospheric pressure shifts, temperature gradients, and cloud formations over the northern mountain ranges, all of it was there, in Baswara’s own hand, a scientific countdown to a mythological event.

In the real world, weather prediction was a fantasy. It belonged to prophets and seers, to the divine touch of the true Saintess, Ruby Vaiva.

Here, in this fabricated reality, it was a branch of advanced thaumaturgical meteorology. Another piece of the world’s terrifying, logical coherence. It was also thanks to the more developed magic technology here.

"It wasn’t supposed to be accurate to the hour," Baswara was saying, rubbing his beard. "But if what you say is true, and we predicted it to be another two to three days out... it should have been the earliest the snow could have come."

"Yes," Serayu added, her voice thoughtful. "Especially if we truly had loved and cherished this... boy for his entire life. We would have been monitoring it with excruciating care."

The statement held a strange grief for a loss she couldn’t personally remember.

Lazuardi was cross-referencing his own dense research papers, his finger tracing a line of text. "So... he’s truly a white-haired boy with light eyes... possessing a ground-breaking, innate talent in all aspects of magical study? Able to wield power without formal instruction, as if it were ingrained in his bones from birth?"

Cecilia tilted her head. She genuinely hadn’t known that last detail. Was that the tell, the anomaly that had convinced these scholars their myth was flesh and blood before they forgot everything? The sign that made a lost child not just a ward, but a living subject of their life’s work?

"I see," Baswara muttered, a shadow passing over his face. "That’s why I retired early and homeschooled him instead. A boy like that... he would’ve been a monster compared to other children in a standard classroom."

Monster.

She turned to look at the old professor, a sharp ache in her chest. She knew, with every fiber of her being, that if his memory were intact... if he remembered the boy he’d raised, the solemn, ancient-eyed child who loved meat pies and was terrified of library ghosts, he would never, ever use that word.

The disconnect was too painful. She couldn’t dwell in this space of their hollowed-out curiosity any longer. Her gaze shifted, latching onto the new variable, the man who had burst in with the energy of a solution.

She turned to Jenggala. "You said you found the possibility that it could have been lifted?" Her voice was urgent, cutting through the academic murmur. "The curse?"

Jenggala blinked, pulled from his observation of the strange, intense girl. He hummed, his earlier excitement tempered by circumstance. "The theoretical possibility, yes. But I don’t think it’ll work now that we’re too late. The event has triggered. The erasure is complete."

"Please," Cecilia insisted, leaning forward, her hands flat on the table. "Just tell me how to break the curse." Her mind was already racing ahead of this room, this world. Perhaps... it could be a clue. A fragment of logic from this constructed universe that might translate, somehow, to the real one.

Jenggala sighed, but obliged, slipping into the familiar rhythm of scholarly explanation. "The key bound itself to someone’s soul, correct?" He waited for her nod. "Then, in theory, to remove it, one would need to pry the key away from the soul’s very fabric. Not just cut it out, but... separate its fate."

"So, in theory," Lazuardi picked up the thread, his eyes narrowing in thought, "we would need a counter-curse of equal or greater metaphysical potency. Something that could also alter the fundamental state of a soul."

"That entering the realm of the forbidden," Serayu interjected, her violet eyes sharp with warning. "Soul-alteration. It’s black magic. The kind that twists and corrupts."

"There’s one that isn’t black magic, though," Baswara said, his voice a low rumble.

All eyes turned to him. Cecilia’s gaze locked onto the old professor, a spark of desperate hope igniting in her chest.

Baswara met her stare squarely, a teacher challenging his best pupil. "You should know it too, lass. Don’t you study the scriptures of Caledfwlch and Morgen extensively?"

He didn’t wait for an answer. "They performed the ultimate soul-binding. They wove their very essences together, sharing the weight of life and death, of time..."

Cecilia’s breath caught. The words began to spill from her lips, a sacred text recited by rote. "...and rebirth, memory and oblivion—"

She slowly pushed herself up from her chair, the world narrowing to the old man’s face. But in the real world, that was just scripture. There was no spell attached, no incantation, no practical thaumaturgical blueprint.

"Tell me how to do the spell," she breathed, the command barely a whisper. "Please. Teach me."

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait," Jenggala interjected, holding up his hands. "You know this is just a theoretical extrapolation from a crumbling artifact, right? You sound like you’re trying to do it now."

"What if it’s not too late?" Cecilia whirled to face him, her composure cracking to reveal the frantic engine beneath. "What if the reason it failed for whoever researched it originally, as recorded in your artifact, wasn’t because the spell was wrong, but because they forgot the person they were trying to save?"

The logic was circular, desperate, and brutally compelling. "You can’t anchor a soul-binding to a theory if that’s how you remember it. You need memory. You need a connection."

Her eyes snapped back to Baswara. "And the snowfall. If it should have happened in two days at the earliest, could it mean your prediction was based not on this region, but on... wherever the boy was born?"

The room went still. Baswara’s bushy eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.

"Are you implying that..." Baswara began, his voice hushed, "...if we go to a place where snow is destined to fall, but has not yet fallen... we could try to reach him? To pull him back from the brink of erasure?"

Cecilia stood straight, her small frame seeming to fill the space. The tears were gone, replaced by a scorching resolve.

"I’m saying that we should try something," she stated. "Anything."

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