But did she really still have a choice?
In the tide of the age, fate drove people inexorably forward. This supposedly right path stretched from the distant past all the way to the present, and at last, it had reached that final leap.
Just like the last words that figure had spoken to her before leaving.
"You can think it over, and you can keep grieving, but time will wait for no one. Every minute you delay pushes your fate closer to the Abyss."
Feather Pen raised her head in a daze.
The boundless starlight seemed like freedom scattered across the heavens.
But you had clearly gained your freedom...
She reached out, trying to grasp something, but in the end, it slipped through her fingers, intangible and elusive.
Her eyelids sank heavily. Her vision blurred, and at last, beneath that immense burden, her body collapsed in the starry sky.
"Feather Pen!"
She had fallen ill.
But how could a god fall ill?
Yet for more than ten days, she remained delirious. Her fever burned fiercely, as though she had suddenly become a mortal too weak to truss a chicken.
When she woke again, the girl named Miao Miao was looking after her.
They had come to a planet inhabited by mortals.
When she opened the door, sunlight spilled down from above.
The streets bustled with people. Children passed her, laughing and playing, and everyone went about their own business. The smiles on their faces hardly seemed to belong to a world on the brink of its end.
Dazed, she wandered aimlessly onward.
Only when she reached a square did she stop. She raised her head and gazed at the enormous golden statue standing at its center.
That face was so familiar.
It was as though she had suddenly returned