"What exactly does 'stand-in' mean?"
Although Shiraori had her suspicions, she could not help asking.
"Hadn't you already noticed and guessed as much?"
Wakaba Hiiro showed little reaction to Shiraori's response. Having watched Shiraori all along, she knew Shiraori had discovered something long ago.
"So it really was just as I guessed... The memories and everything else were fake. I'm not Wakaba Hiiro at all."
Now that D had said so, no matter how unwilling Shiraori was to accept it, she had to face reality. In truth, after Shiraori became a god, she had noticed that something was wrong.
Her deification had transformed Shiraori's soul. At the time, she noticed something attached to her soul, something that existed at her very root—in the realm of divinity.
Rather than existing there, it would be more accurate to say that thing had devoured her and become the being known as Wakaba Hiiro.
That was... Wakaba Hiiro's memories.
Wakaba Hiiro's memories had overwritten the original her and eventually replaced her.
Fake. It was all fake.
She was not Wakaba Hiiro at all. She was an impostor who possessed Wakaba Hiiro's memories and had been misled into believing she was Wakaba Hiiro—merely another being with Wakaba Hiiro's memories.
After discovering this truth, all the doubts and feelings of incongruity she had experienced in the past finally fell into place.
Thinking carefully, there were many contradictions and blank spaces in her memories that could not be ignored.
She did not even remember what her parents looked like.
Parents had never existed in the first place. Wakaba Hiiro was an identity fabricated by the evil god D to disguise herself, so naturally, there would be no parents.
Only she herself knew the reason behind it, so she found those memories reasonable. But to Kumoko, who did