Hearing Xiang Yujie call out that dinner was ready, the two lolis responded in perfect unison.
“Coming!” ×2
After saying that, the two lolis jumped off the bed and headed to the dining table, ready to eat.
Xiang Yujie brought out plate after plate of dishes and placed them on the table.
Lastly, she handed a boxed meal to Huimengyi.
Huimengyi understood her mother’s intent.
She took the meal box, got down from her chair, and entered the room Hui Feng had just gone into.
Inside the room, she quietly placed the box beside Hui Feng, then tiptoed back out.
Xiang Yujie handed the freshly made strawberry cake to Ye Jinyi, just as Huimengyi returned to the table for dinner.
“Eat.”
With that, Xiang Yujie picked up her chopsticks and began eating.
Ye Jinyi carefully took small bites of the strawberry cake she had scored for free.
Wasting food is shameful, after all.
The sweet cake filled her heart with warmth—maybe, just maybe, her bitter future could melt away along with this sweetness?
Meanwhile, in a pizza restaurant somewhere in the city—
A woman stepped through the door, looked around, and followed the scent of a certain girl before walking over.
“What do you want from me?”
The woman sat down at the table across from the girl and casually took a sip of grape juice from the glass.
“I’ve long admired your reputation, Senior. Have you finished recording the new calamity data?”
With that, the girl took a chip from her pocket, entangled with vines.
“What’s this?”
The woman looked curious but could already guess the general idea.
“The true body of the calamity from the earlier mall incident—it was that headless plush bunny.”
“So you called me here just to show me this?”
The woman replied irritably—she still had plenty of work waiting.
“Of course not, Senior. I wouldn’t trouble you for something so trivial.”
The girl said as she handed over a ketchup-covered French fry.
The woman accepted it knowingly and continued listening to her pitch.
“Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Xing Wei, codename Weiguang, a light-element magical girl. I was the one who released the initial intel on the Flame That Burns the World. I wonder if that’s enough to earn your trust, Senior?”
“No need for meaningless chatter. Just tell me what I don’t already know.”
The woman wasn’t interested in anything she could have guessed herself.
What she wanted was real information—things she hadn’t heard yet.
“Alright, I figured as much. A true senior is open-minded and knows how to recognize talent~”
As Xing Wei spoke, she picked up a pizza cutter and sliced away the vines on the chip.
Then she took out a 3D projector and inserted the chip into it.
In the next instant, a beam of light shot out, and a video began to play.
Xing Wei adjusted the projector to skip forward quickly to the section she needed.
When two little girls appeared on screen, she stopped.
Pointing to the white-haired girl, Xing Wei analyzed, “This one is likely a magical girl. Judging by her abilities, she seems to be a creator-type magical girl.”
Then she pointed to the black-haired girl who had pulled the white-haired one to her feet.
“This girl used a lighter to set fire to all the corpses in the mall, cutting off the calamity’s ability to recover using the blood inside the bodies.”
“Even though she looks like the most ordinary little girl imaginable, I hope Senior will focus more attention on her.”
Hearing Xing Wei’s suggestion, the woman had no choice but to fix her gaze on the black-haired girl.
But from what she could see, there was nothing particularly remarkable.
She wasn’t here to watch some clichéd tale of a hero saving a damsel in distress.
Xing Wei pointed at the girl still on-screen and said:
“To be honest, I’m really curious why someone would wrap themselves up so tightly in the middle of a fire.”
“Sure, it’s winter and dressing warmly is normal, but to stay that bundled up in a fire? Any regular person would’ve either suffocated or been roasted alive.”
“But somehow, this girl acted like it was nothing.”
Xing Wei pointed out the first abnormality in the footage.
“Of course, things like that can be forced into explanations—willpower, adrenaline, whatever. But what happens next… Senior, I hope you’ll watch carefully.”
The woman said nothing and kept her eyes on the black-haired girl in the footage.
They saw the girl pick up a bell from the white-haired girl’s body, give it a shake—and in the next moment, the flames across the entire mall vanished instantly.
Even the recording itself seemed to flinch and pull back.
Xing Wei stopped the video there and removed the chip from the projector.
“There’s no point showing the rest—it’s just me and a few magical girls defeating the remaining disaster. Nothing critical.”
“I believe Senior has already figured out the key point I was trying to make?”
The woman swallowed her bite of pizza, adjusted her glasses, and said slowly.
“First: the ability to extinguish fire on that scale clearly didn’t belong to the magical girl.”
“Second: with the bell’s chime, the calamity suddenly displayed something akin to fear. And the thing it feared—was that black-haired girl.”
“If I’m not mistaken, the calamity didn’t exhibit any emotional fluctuations before that moment.”
“Exactly,” Xing Wei nodded.
“So, Senior, what kind of existence do you think could cause something completely emotionless to feel fear in an instant?”
“At minimum, something capable of giving it emotions.”
The woman answered without hesitation.
“I thought the same.”
“I believe Senior is also aware that consciousness itself isn’t some miraculous thing. When matter is structured a certain way, consciousness can arise.”
“In other words, anything in this world could potentially possess consciousness.”
“Of course, having consciousness doesn’t mean having emotions. Feelings like maternal and paternal love only emerged after the largest extinction event in biological history—animals that learned to care for their young survived; those that didn’t, went extinct.”
The woman understood what Xing Wei was getting at.
“You’re saying the calamity learned fear in that moment?”
“Exactly. Emotions are something that can be learned. Over time, learning becomes habit, habit becomes genetics, and eventually, emotions become instinct.”
The woman took a sip of her tea.
She had to admit—she was a bit impressed by this girl’s wild thinking.
But when it came to understanding calamities, those incomprehensible things, this was exactly the kind of mind they needed.
All theories must be rooted in philosophy—and right now, this girl clearly had a philosophy of her own.
