All eight of them had died?
Charlotte's mind briefly went blank.
She knew there had been eight sacrifices at the time. That was the conclusion Viève and the other Purification-ers had drawn from the scene, yet they had ultimately found only seven bodies. This meant one of the sacrifices had survived, preventing the sacrificial ritual from fully succeeding.
As for the surviving sacrifice, it was undoubtedly Charlotte, who had appeared deep in an alley in the Old District, stained with blood and missing part of her memories. Not only did Viève believe this, but the cultists seemed to believe it as well.
Of course, Charlotte had a deeper theory of her own: perhaps the original owner of her body had narrowly escaped the sacrificial site, only to die from the ritual's power afterward. Gao Linyuan had then crossed over from another world, taken possession of that freshly deceased body, and become the present Charlotte Sauron.
On one hand, this was a reasonable inference based on the available information. On the other, she always felt that she would not-and should not-take over the body of a girl who was still alive. Otherwise, where had the original Charlotte gone?
Yet now, Tres was telling her that all eight sacrifices sent to the underground ritual site had died...
Either this black-haired Tamara's sources were unreliable-after all, those cult members responsible for peripheral affairs who had survived the two churches' joint crackdown were most likely not personally involved in the sacrifice. Perhaps they had simply assumed all the sacrifices had died underground without confirming it themselves.
Or the original Charlotte's memories were mistaken. She had not escaped the scene, but had truly died in the sacrifice. The one who escaped was the present Charlotte, after crossing over. The two people's memories had merely become