"Lighthouse." What a hateful world. What an awful name for a world.
Dawn Cicada gazed at the receding World Dock, now no more than the outline of Flower Branch, unable to move for a long time. She had once thought she no longer cared about that world at all.
She always seized every opportunity to emphasize her reasons for not reshaping "Lighthouse."
"Lighthouse was a failure I will never forgive myself for as long as I live. Why would I recreate the evidence of my failure?"
"'Dawn' is Fragrant Branch's spoils of war. I don't want to interrupt Fragrant Branch's revelry."
She had given answers like these to Zai Jiu Xunge, and to every player who asked her why she did not reshape "Lighthouse."
Only when answering the former, she also had to feign surprise and satisfaction as she remarked that she had thought Qihua would be displeased, yet Qihua had actually tacitly accepted her choice.
But neither was the truest answer. She said these things merely because those answers sounded stronger, more logical.
The real answer was far too cowardly: she hated the name "Lighthouse."
It was that simple and ridiculous.
Every time she heard the word "Lighthouse," every time she thought of how there had once been a world called "Lighthouse," she remembered the sight of "Lighthouse" lit by the corpses of her own kind before it shattered.
That pain tormented her until she could not sleep.
She would never reshape "Lighthouse," but... she so wanted to know what "Lighthouse" sighed over and regretted. Did it regret that she had failed to protect "Lighthouse"? Or did it resent her for never having thought of reshaping Fragrant Branch's world, even after she had become so powerful...
There was no denying that getting paid really did make a difference.