In the beginning, there was chaos.
Consciousness was a brief light in eternal darkness, but now, even that light had dimmed.
She should have been dead. At least, that was what she thought.
There was once a claim that when your brain believed you were dead, it would cause your death even if everything in your body was functioning normally.
In a dream, that was indeed the case, so she should have died.
Unfortunately, the Difference Engine disagreed.
It adjudicated skills. If it judged that something could succeed, then "success" became the outcome, and the world supplied the process.
No matter how absurd or impossible something was, the intermediate steps could be skipped and the outcome achieved directly.
Just like Maeve at that moment: she had been crushed entirely into meat paste by [Primordial Blood], yet had activated [Shadow of the Lunar Eclipse] at the very last instant. The overwhelming gap in their strength should have caused her ability check to fail and killed her.
But because of the Difference Engine's stubbornness, her consciousness, which had already begun to dissipate, was gathered together again.
The Difference Engine's priority actually ranked above the laws of the world.
Maeve knew none of this. She had simply done everything she could with all her strength, then discovered, to her surprise, that it had actually worked.
"Who am I? Where am I? Why am I so hungry?"
Her hazy consciousness had yet to fully awaken, but her body's instincts drove her to act.
She wanted something to eat.
Anything would do. If there was nothing else, eating herself was an option too.
But she discovered that she apparently couldn't.
Her current body didn't seem to obey her.
At last, her consciousness gradually began to clear, and she voiced her first question:
"What are you