Accompanied by a soothing instrumental track, the scenes shifted in succession.
Under the setting sun, the interior of Little Fish Clinic was peaceful and serene.
The gray-haired girl was treating a patient while opening her mouth to accept a bite of food from the white-coated beauty standing beside her.
Her cheeks puffed up like a hamster’s, a warm and happy smile on her face.
In the dim underground laboratory.
Lin Zhen sat cross-legged, countless parts floating around him as they rapidly assembled into a humanoid mech before his eyes.
The mech’s face lit up with a red glow, and it moved like a living person, giving Lin Zhen a thumbs-up.
Lin Zhen wiped away his sweat, a hint of pride in his expression.
Next, the camera cut to Zi Jiu, Kaos, Yun Che, and Anvil.
Every major character who had appeared in the second season had a segment in the OP showing their peaceful daily lives.
These segments together took up more than half the OP’s runtime.
Seeing this.
The audience roughly understood what the OP was trying to convey and muttered to themselves.
“There’s gotta be a twist, right?”
As a battle anime with a rather dark and “healing” plot, the second season OP of Starfall couldn’t possibly be this plain.
They were right.
In the latter half of the OP, the BGM’s drumbeats grew denser.
A pitch-black girl whose face was indistinguishable floated in the night sky, arms spread wide, a grim smile curling at the corners of her mouth as she unleashed endless darkness upon the city below.
This city’s bird’s-eye view had just appeared in the third episode, and though it looked a bit different from the OP, most viewers recognized it as Small Luoding City before it turned into the Dark Corruption Swamp HF.
“Damn, so you’re the one who did all this!”
“She doesn’t even have a face—kinda like the men in black from Conan.”
“Bet they’re afraid the audience will guess her identity.”
The endless darkness dripped like viscous liquid, dragging the entire city into hell.
The city’s residents were also corrupted by the darkness, losing their sanity.
But just as they were about to mutate.
A white-haired girl with crimson eyes, barefoot, holding a faint glimmer of light, appeared in the center of the city.
The glimmer dispelled the darkness and healed the contaminated citizens.
But the darkness, provoked by the light, became even more terrifying, surging into a towering black tide that lunged at the girl.
The camera cut again, focusing on an unfamiliar ceiling.
A pale, slender arm waved frantically in the frame, and a gray-haired girl with a single cowlick sat up in terror from her bed.
She turned her head.
Looked at the patients already waiting for her outside the window, as if realizing it was just a nightmare, and patted her chest.
She stood up.
Took off her pajamas, changed into her clothes, walked out the door, with Lucas in a white coat waiting quietly outside.
The camera passed over their shoulders, focusing on the window.
In the crowd.
Lin Zhen, Zi Jiu, Anvil, and Aili were all present…
By now the OP was nearing its end, but the final few seconds of footage still cut again.
Deep inside the completely corrupted Small Luoding City, a pair of bloodshot emerald-green eyes snapped open.
“Whoa, an OP this info-packed? Did the production team get replaced?”
“The higher-ups snatched the credit (doge).”
“From the OP, does that mean a barefoot little loli with white hair and red eyes is about to show up?”
“Slobber, slobber—I’m already ready to simp.”
“Not just that—there’s also a pitch-black little loli.”
“Probably just one person; I bet these two are the same person as Leng Xiaoyu’s alternate identity, otherwise her connection to Small Luoding City doesn’t make sense.”
Info-packed?
Exactly!
Yun Ruoxi looked at the barrage on the screen and let out a slight sigh of relief.
Just like in the first season.
At the end of the second season’s third episode, the anime conducted its first popularity settlement of the second season.
This determined each character’s screen time in the OP.
And the foundation she had laid in the first season was simply too deep.
So after the third episode, even though the Evil Beast only appeared for nine minutes in her place, the character popularity ranking for the first three episodes still pushed “Yun Ruoxi” to first place.
Though the gap with second-place Lin Zhen was razor-thin.
Still, there was no denying it—the doppelganger’s looks were just too authoritative, layered with the moe points Yun Ruoxi intentionally added.
“Leng Xiaoyu,” who had only appeared for less than five minutes in the third episode, actually made the list.
And even clinched sixth place.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Yun Ruoxi had originally planned to build her alternate identity into the female lead of the main cast, thereby using it to absorb the popularity that her original body, being a villain, couldn’t easily gain.
So she simply used her first-place authority to shift the screentime that should have belonged to “Yun Ruoxi” as a character onto Leng Xiaoyu.
After all, at the current level of fame and recognition for the character Yun Ruoxi, the popularity boost from OP exposure was no longer significant.
As long as she didn’t actually exit the stage or fall off the meta, Yun Ruoxi’s very existence was a symbol of Starfall.
Just like seeing an arm makes you think of Jormungandr, seeing Starfall immediately makes most audiences think of her.
“Episode 4 is starting—time to leave the system space.”
Yun Ruoxi stood up from her chair and stretched.
Because the OP had to be completed before the start of Episode 4, the system had actually linked the time flow of the system space to the alternate dimension, giving her an entire seven days of rest.
A nice little bonus.
But…
Yun Ruoxi narrowed her eyes.
This was the first time she knew that the system could adjust the time flow of the system space to match the alternate dimension.
Was this a further increase in the system’s interference with the alternate dimension, or was it the system’s own great power?
The moment she exited the system space.
Yun Ruoxi could clearly sense her consciousness passing through a layer of stretchy plastic wrap before successfully returning to the Starfall world, which was reality to her.
“Is this because of the time flow adjustment? I never felt this when returning from the system space before. Looks like this is…”
Yun Ruoxi knew she wouldn’t get an answer anytime soon, so she didn’t force herself, quickly shelving the question and focusing all her attention on the battle before her.
That guy Lin Zhen, driven by guilt, had forced himself into becoming a master of microexpressions and psychology.
Plus, he was the protagonist after all.
So even with her Ultimate Acting skill, she was still worried that her zoning out might be noticed by Lin Zhen.
Wait—she was wearing a mask. No matter how good Lin Zhen was at reading expressions, there was no way he could see through it…
The gray-haired girl suddenly touched her face and laughed at herself.
Projecting emotions onto the doppelganger while keeping the original body cold and detached—this kind of dual-threading was exhausting even for her, to the point where she made such an awkward little mistake.
“Better not dual-thread during a fight. That Lin Zhen guy’s been obsessing over dealing with the Saints’ hand Society and came up with such extreme lethal weapons. If I don’t focus and end up capsizing, we’re all done for.”
Yun Ruoxi rubbed her face and withdrew most of her brain domain computation from Leng Xiaoyu.
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