This was everything she had experienced.
And perhaps it was precisely these experiences that had shaped her contradictory, complicated personality. On one hand, she cared so deeply about her only Older Brother; on the other, she had embraced a faith entirely different from his.
She had to work hard to maintain that deception so that everything could remain as it should have been.
But the price?
A thousand years of pain and torment.
Messiah and the others all fell silent.
Yet Azephala's expression remained calm. It was as though she were recounting an experience that had nothing to do with her, as though those memories belonged to another world.
"But that deception was finally shattered after the Flesh God Cult entered this world. Or rather, the seal within the Hermitage began to stir again a century or two ago. At first, we didn't understand what was happening. Only recently did I realize that the Flesh Dominator's gaze had stirred my god."
Just like two thousand years ago.
The arrival of that Seraphim had stirred, for the first time, the Old Days that had slumbered in this world for countless years.
It was like some kind of mechanism.
And recently, that balance had been broken once again.
The resulting upheavals had continued from over a hundred years ago to the present.
"Messiah, do you remember the tsunami in the Pacific Ocean over a decade ago?"
She calmly turned to look at Messiah.
Messiah's face instantly went pale, almost entirely drained of color.
Of course she remembered.
It was in that unprecedented tsunami that her father and mother had lost their lives. She had been very young then, and overnight, she had lost both her parents.
Only later had she learned that her father and mother had both been Apostles of the