Chapter 214: No wonder it felt so real.

“You clearly knew I had already arrived, so why keep pretending to stare out the window?”

Perletti lightly closed the door behind her and walked familiarly to the opposite side of the small table, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

Only then did Fluye slowly turn her head back.

She maintained the appearance of a young girl. Her brown hair looked as though it was rarely properly cared for, with many strands hanging loosely across her cheeks and forehead, nearly obscuring half her vision, yet she seemed completely unconcerned by it.

Under the sunlight, those strands carried the warm sheen of aged amber.

She did not immediately answer Perletti’s question.

Instead, she simply gazed quietly at her through eyes half-concealed by her hair — eyes slightly darker than the color of her hair itself.

There was no obvious hostility within that gaze.

But neither was there any familiar warmth.

It was more like she was observing an intricate yet dangerous piece of porcelain.

“The Witch of Gluttony… no, I should say, the Witch of Light, Perletti.”

Her slow voice finally broke the silence.

“Very impressive. You deceived me… deceived everyone.”

“Are you afraid?”

Meeting her gaze directly, Perletti took the initiative to shatter the silence, her tone so calm that even she herself found it surprising.

“Afraid you might not be able to stop yourself from attacking me?”

The air in the room seemed to freeze for an instant.

Clearly, Perletti should have been the sensitive outsider — the “visitor” who might not be accepted.

Yet somehow, the tension between their posture and words subtly felt reversed.

“…Mm.”

After a long while, Fluye let out an extremely soft sound of acknowledgment from her throat.

“Why?”

Perletti pressed further, leaning slightly forward.

Fluye’s gaze drifted away from Perletti’s face and returned to the sunlight outside the window — to the air filled with drifting dust motes — as though the answer were hidden there.

“Perletti… I remember…”

Her voice carried its usual slow, slightly sluggish cadence, as though every single word needed careful thought before being spoken.

“You’re afraid of fire… aren’t you?”

Perletti had long since grown used to Fluye’s unique way of speaking.

Rather than making communication difficult, it instead made the weight behind her words feel clearer.

“Yes.”

Perletti nodded without hiding anything.

“Because I once witnessed a great fire… devour my family.”

That memory, scorched by flames, remained a nightmare buried deep within her heart even now.

Fluye’s fingertips trembled almost imperceptibly as they brushed lightly across nonexistent dust atop the table.

“I also once…”

Her speaking pace slowed further, the pauses between words becoming even more obvious, as though she were struggling to dredge something unbearably heavy from the depths of memory.

“…personally witnessed a spear of light… pierce through my closest friend’s body.”

Her gaze turned back toward Perletti.

Through the strands of hair falling before her eyes, she stared fixedly at her.

Within those perpetually hazy eyes now surged a cold and piercing pain that had settled there for centuries.

“Do you know…”

She gave a tiny shake of her head, correcting herself with near-cruel certainty.

“…what that was.”

Silence filled the room.

Only the dust within the pillars of sunlight continued drifting soundlessly.

“A witch’s life… is too long.”

Fluye continued speaking, every word sounding as though it were being forced from cracks in stone.

“The enemy… has long since… turned to dust within the passage of time.”

“But hatred… does not.”

“It settles there… like the finest dust… seeping into everything.”

Once again, she looked directly at Perletti.

This time her gaze was more straightforward, carrying a desire for confirmation — perhaps even a sense of shared suffering.

“Perletti… tell me…”

“If you were to meet… the one who started that fire…”

“…what would you do?”

Within that sea of profound pain, she seemed to see another self imprisoned by the past.

Perletti answered clearly, word by word:

“I’d kill him.”

Three simple words.

Without embellishment.

Yet carrying the resolve to sever everything.

That answer seemed like an invisible yet powerful hand lifting part of the immense burden Fluye had carried for untold years from her shoulders.

The tension in her body relaxed by the slightest fraction.

Time had passed.

It had already been over a thousand years since she left the human capital.

For humans, whose lifespans barely reached a century, a thousand years was an unimaginably vast stretch of time — enough to completely alter everything Fluye had once known, including values and worldviews.

She had always feared that humanity had changed into something unrecognizable over those thousand years.

Faced with this newcomer separated from her by a millennium-wide cultural gap, she had no idea what Perletti truly thought.

Nor did she know whether Perletti’s way of seeing the world resembled her own.

A faint curve — so slight it was nearly impossible to notice — appeared at the corner of her lips hidden beneath her hair.

It was not a smile.

Rather, it was an emotion woven from sorrow and relief.

“Yes…”

She sighed softly, the sound nearly dissolving into the dust-filled light.

“Only death… is the end.”

The spear of light — and the wounds and hatred brought by the long-deceased Witch of Light it represented — had never disappeared.

They had merely transformed into finer grains of dust, settling into every corner of Fluye’s long life, constantly reminding her of that agonizing past.

And now, this new, living Witch of Light before her…

inevitably became the focal point where that dust gathered.

“I believe many witches within the Tower still feel nothing but hatred toward humanity.”

Perletti spoke calmly.

“The reason you all question my existence, in the end, is fear.”

“Fluye… do you want to know what humans are like now?”

“Why… bring that up?”

Fluye tilted her head slightly.

Her hair slid across her cheek, revealing a somewhat puzzled gaze.

Yet she did not stop Perletti.

In fact, her body unconsciously leaned slightly forward.

On one hand, she wanted to hear what this girl — who always managed to surprise others — intended to say.

On the other…

deep within her heart, she had never truly been able to completely let go of that human world she had deliberately distanced herself from for centuries.

Perletti slowly recounted everything she knew:

The vast yet decaying Empire.

The Church of Gluttony secretly growing in the shadows.

The wars sweeping across nations.

And…

the girl named Yinuo, along with her ambition to completely overturn the current divine order and establish a new system founded upon faith in Gluttony.

“If Yinuo succeeds…”

“Then humanity in the future will no longer worship false light, but instead turn toward the God of Gluttony.”

“And when that happens…”

“The obsession and hatred your generation of witches holds toward ‘light’ may truly… lose its concrete target.”

As she spoke, Perletti carefully observed Fluye’s reaction.

Dust drifted slowly through the pillars of light.

Time itself seemed stretched thin.

“…I see.”

Only after a long silence did Fluye finally speak softly.

Her voice carried a trace of realization and complicated sighing emotion.

“No wonder…”

“Your power felt so real.”

“So it was… Gluttony.”

At last, she understood the key behind the confusion she had previously felt.

The power Perletti displayed had not been fake.

It originated from the authority of another god.

This child…

had cleverly exploited the witches’ ignorance regarding the nature of divine power and disguised herself as the “Witch of Gluttony.”

“…Your mind works rather quickly.”

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