"Me...?"
Hearing your wooden yet certain answer, the woman knitted her brows tightly, murmuring that word under her breath.
Her deeply experienced eyes fixed on you like blades, searching for a flaw in your microexpressions, your breathing, even the trembling of your muscles.
But with her terrifying powers of observation, she could sense with absolute clarity that you did not seem to be lying.
And from a rational standpoint, she could not yet think of any reason for you to deliberately fake a line of stitches on your forehead to deceive her in such a life-or-death predicament.
Such a petty trick would do nothing for the battle.
The woman surveyed her surroundings, silently running through possibilities at speed. Could this domain called "Ālaya Consciousness" not be a conventional sure-hit domain that opened with a lethal strike?
Was it instead a special domain like those of the old era, one that required both sides to fulfill certain compulsory conditions or established certain rules before taking effect?
What sent a slight chill down her spine was that your answer had not merely acknowledged that these stitches were connected to her. Between the lines, it even suggested that you had known the true meaning of the stitches on her forehead from the very beginning, from the moment you met in this sewer!
Otherwise, there was no explaining everything happening now, no explaining why you had shown such almost prophetic composure toward her existence.
Yet this rigorous chain of reasoning ultimately circled back to the same dead end.
What exactly was all this?
And what exactly were you?
If everything you said was true, if she really had left that scar on you, then why... did her otherwise near-perfect memory of those long years contain no recollection of ever occupying your body, let alone