Shattered Bubble

"Excuse me, miss, but who are you?" The prince's question, laced with doubt, pierced the Mermaid Princess's heart. She had abandoned so much and done so much for him, only to be met with such a sentence—what kind of joke was this!

"No, William, you recognize me. We looked into each other's eyes; you recognize my eyes, don't you? I am the one who saved you! The princess of the neighboring kingdom is nothing but a liar!" The Mermaid Princess's mental power surged out in agitation. Everyone around them clutched their heads, feeling dizzy and nauseated as if they were hearing low-frequency waves.

The old wizard frowned and released his own mental power to neutralize the fluctuations radiating from the Mermaid Princess. Hearing the soul-deep resonance of her voice, the prince looked stunned. He moved his lips, then offered a bitter smile: "I don't know if you truly saved me, miss, or if you have fallen into some kind of delusion, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that the princess of the neighboring kingdom I am to marry did indeed save me. Of that, I am certain."

"You must be controlled by that woman's witchcraft; I will save you..." Before the Mermaid Princess could finish, the old wizard let out a cold snort: "Young lady with the impure aura, although I do not care for that neighboring princess either, I swear on my honor as a Royal Wizard that His Highness the Prince has not been manipulated or bewitched by anything. Furthermore, I witnessed with my own eyes that the neighboring princess was the one who rescued him."

"Impossible! It was I who pulled you from the water and brought you to the shore! I saved you!" The Mermaid Princess was becoming frantic, her mental power radiating continuously, reflecting her crumbling psyche. That time, she had carried the severely wounded prince, who was slowly sinking into the depths, to the nearest shore. Before she could treat him, she heard people approaching, so she hid in the water and watched from the surface as they took him away, only then feeling at ease enough to return.

"So it was you who brought me from the seabed to the shore? No wonder you looked familiar. I truly thank you." The prince looked at the Mermaid Princess with concern, his expression apologetic: "I think you have misunderstood. You saved me, and Sally saved me, but I am sorry—it is Sally I love, and she is the one I wish to marry."

About a year ago, while the prince was sailing, he was attacked by great pirates and fell into the sea, going missing. The King sent most of his men to search the ocean. The wizard Allen, relying on his witchcraft, led a party to find Prince William, who had drifted to a fishing village. The prince's condition was dire at the time; it was the neighboring princess who had nursed him back to health, ensuring his survival. During that period, the prince had moments of lucidity and remembered clearly who had saved him, and subsequent examinations showed no signs of memory tampering.

Once the prince spoke, the matter became clear. The rumors circulating in the kingdom about the prince marrying the princess who saved him were never about the Mermaid Princess from the start. She had merely been wishing for it to be her; she was just a young girl trapped in a romantic fantasy, mixing in too much of her own subjective projection. Only when this bubble, named "Dream," was pricked did she realize what she had done wrong.

"Love is blind, love is foolish, especially this kind of unrequited infatuation." Lu Li recalled how, before his own transformation, he had been secretly in love with the class beauty. But once his mindset shifted, many things looked different in his eyes. That girl was just an ordinary person with various strengths and weaknesses, not some high-and-mighty goddess; she had become just another member of the boring crowd in Lu Li's eyes.

"So, what now? Crash the wedding? Force them to consummate the marriage?" Lu Li asked from the side. The scene was so awkward that his "cringe reflex" was about to trigger if he stayed any longer.

Meanwhile, on the altar nearby, the Witch looked at Xu Haoran, who was fixed in place, and said: "When we observe things, we judge them based on our knowledge, experience, feelings, and concepts. In truth, the things in your eyes are different from the things in mine. We all judge the larger world outside like blind men touching an elephant, confined to our own small circles. Unless we are omniscient and omnipotent, everything we perceive deviates from the truth."

"Take me, for example—the 'me' before and the 'me' now. Both inside and out, everything has changed, and the way I view things has changed entirely. As for you, under the restriction of a personality that centers everything on me, the things you see are, I imagine, distorted from my perspective as well."

"When you keep changing, you will find that everything is actually in flux." The Witch said with a cryptic smile: "When everything about you becomes something else, you are a different existence, aren't you?"

"Are you willing to die for me?" The Witch walked up to Xu Haoran and whispered. Xu Haoran responded with total infatuation. The next moment, the ritual began. Several pre-collected items were scattered around the altar, and a vast, surging magical power erupted, communicating with some unknown existence through the altar.

The magical items scattered around emitted multicolored spiritual light, pulsing with a mysterious rhythm. The Dream Rift that Lu Li had visited before was opened in reality. The two ancient Ghouls guarding the entrance shed their stone forms, opening pairs of blood-red eyes. A sound as urgent as weeping echoed out, and the Witch began to communicate in an ancient wizard tongue, offering the sacrifice—herself.

According to the origins of wizardry, the Gate of Slumber was meant to be a door balancing the dream world and reality. For something to come out, something else must go in. The ancestors of the Witch's lineage had entered the gate in ancient times, and shortly after, they transmitted a prophecy: When the stars align, offer a body that is not one's own from the Dream Realm; the shattered bubble shall awaken the ancient existence, and the formless servant shall usher in the arrival of the Dominator.

Just as Lu Li and the others were awkwardly preparing to crash the wedding, the Mermaid Princess pulled out a dagger made of fish bone. She remembered what the Witch had said that day: species transformation is, in most cases, irreversible, but not absolutely so. The Witch had fashioned this dagger from the tailbone of her fish tail; as long as she used it to stab the "cause" of her transformation, she could turn back into a mermaid.

Looking at the prince right before her, the Mermaid Princess shed tears that fell to the ground as pearls. If she killed the prince, she could turn back. Otherwise, as a human, where could she go? She had given up too much for him; reclaiming a part of it to set things back to the way they were shouldn't be wrong, even if the prince was innocent.

"I'm sorry... I can't do it..." The Mermaid Princess wept, a faint smile appearing on her face. She plunged the dagger into her own heart, collapsed to the ground, and her body reverted to its mermaid form. The bubble of love had shattered.