"Then, see you in the New World."
After dinner, I said goodbye to my family.
Then I lay down on the couch with Barbara in my arms. The little sapling weighed so little, and she wanted to stay in my embrace until the Old World's final moment.
Breathing in the scent of plants wafting from her green hair, I let my consciousness sink. Guided by Terra, I returned to that Consciousness Sea filled with radiance...
The light flows here had begun moving again. Like little streams, they continually converged into rivers. With the Great Will's attacks halted, the Earth Crystal finally had the capacity to process this information, extracting people's positive emotions and turning them into its own radiance...
"Welcome back."
Terra-the real one-said this, and despite my reluctance, I answered her.
"Yeah, I'm back."
Without giving me any time to rest, a huge mass of black mud surged into this radiant space, looking utterly out of place against the stark divide between light and dark.
The Earth Crystal's radiance worked with me, extending countless tentacles of light from every direction in the Consciousness Sea to dismember, purify, and eat away at the struggling mass of darkness.
Perhaps out of some obsession with cleanliness, all the converted darkness ultimately went to me. The Earth Crystal absorbed none of it...
As a result, my consciousness form now wore a halo, too.
"Are Ceruno and Mi Xue still talking?"
"For now, she's keeping the Great Will at the negotiating table, buying time and fighting for more permissions. But as you know, unless we can put both sides on equal footing in terms of strength, we have no say."
What we couldn't win on the battlefield, we couldn't win at the negotiating table either.
More than anything, Ceruno was buying time for me