Chapter 173
He was no longer observing Aldraya as a figure, but the battlefield raging violently within the being's inner self.
He understood clearly that what Aldraya was grieving was not mere sadness from being scolded or punished.
This was an existential grief, far deeper and far stronger than any suffering from her past reincarnations.
It was the lamentation over the collapse of an entire world.
Her entire identity, her purpose, the meaning of her existence—all had been built upon a foundation of dogma she crafted herself for Quil-Hasa.
A dogma of unwavering faith, unquestioning devotion, and self-denial as the highest form of love.
To break such a dogma from the outside was impossible.
Only one source could do it: the very source that had given her that dogma, or at least the object that triggered it.
And now that source was speaking, with words that shattered every brick of that towering structure.
Quil-Hasa Himself was doubting the purity and truth of Aldraya's entire "devotion."
For Aldraya, this was no longer punishment.
This was annulment.
As though the Creator Himself were saying that her entire life, her entire love, her immeasurable sacrifices, had all been founded on a foolish misunderstanding.
The grief consuming her was the grief of someone who realizes the holy scripture she memorized and lived by her entire life had been written wrong from the start.
The storm of despair was so overwhelming it could no longer be expressed by tears or screams.
It could only remain silent, trembling through clenched hands and barely visible shakes of her bowed head.
"Erasing you from history is My final way of forgiving you—an act of liberation so you may be freed from all your errors."
Fhhhh!
"And you must know, all the sacrifices and loyalty you glorified were nothing more than cheap, romanticized affection without meaning.
By any measure, feelings like that are worthless.
Nothing more than emotional trash that clouds judgment and makes all your actions laughable to behold."
'Everything Aldraya had done—her self-imprisonment since the age of four, her devotion guarded like her own lifeline—had never once increased her value in Quil-Hasa's eyes.
And from the harshest perspective, ever since their first encounter, Quil-Hasa had viewed that first love as an irreparable flaw.
Quite a pity.'
Aldraya struggled to find her voice.
Her lips, once trained to deliver heavenly doctrine, now only quivered in small, formless jerks, like a broken mechanism trying to weave words out of thin air.
Her legs, once steadfast through ages, began showing faint tremors—subtle shivers running from her calves to her thighs, signaling a physical foundation beginning to crumble under the pressure of an inner storm.
Her hands moved in a chaotic rhythm.
One clenched as if to crush the painful truth, the other opened, then half-clenched again, seeking a shape that could hold together her collapsing self.
Her attempt to answer was a heartbreaking sight, a futile struggle to protect something already shattered beyond repair before her.
But Quil-Hasa gave her no room to breathe, let alone speak.
The Creator's voice pressed forth, firm and decisive, striking Aldraya at the deepest point of her ruin.
The declaration came like the final hammer blow.
The decision to erase her from cosmic history—a punishment Aldraya had always thought of as the cruelest curse—was instead pronounced as the highest form of mercy.
This meant that nonexistence, being forgotten forever, erased from the memory of the universe, was the gift being offered to her.
The concept struck Aldraya with a force beyond comprehension.
Her devotion, her ascetic path, her self-denial since the age of four—everything she built with blood and tears across thousands of lives—was reduced to one bitter sentence.
It was nothing more than petty love.
To Quil-Hasa, such a feeling—the driving force of Aldraya's entire existence—was trash.
Those two words hung in the air, sharper and colder than any blade meant to take a life.
The Almighty did not merely reject Aldraya's actions; He degraded the very essence of the feelings behind them.
From behind the shrubs, Theo Vkytor heard every syllable with absolute clarity.
His heart felt heavy.
With great reluctance, he nodded slightly.
His observations had reached their bitterest confirmation.
Everything Aldraya had done, all the suffering she endured with blind conviction, had never once made her valuable in the eyes of the Creator.
Such extreme dedication was not a virtue—it was a revolting mistake.
The harsh conclusion forming in Theo's mind was even more devastating.
If traced back to the very beginning—to the first meeting between young Aldraya and the magnificence of Quil-Hasa—then Aldraya's awe and infatuation, which she had carried through life and death, might never have been seen as anything noble by the Creator.
It was not a beautiful beginning, but a flaw.
A failure in perception, a deviation in understanding, one that could never be undone, and had instead been allowed to grow into a tumor that gnawed at Aldraya's soul for thousands of years.
Aldraya was not a misunderstood student.
She was a design flaw in the relationship between Creator and creation, a tragic case now being cleansed in the most final manner.
A total erasure from the memory of the cosmos.
This is the fracture—the silent split that does not burst, but erodes from within, quiet and lethal.
A non-human cry, without drama, without display, and precisely for that reason it feels like the most honest destruction.
This was the moment Theo had been waiting for—the peak of all his careful observations of Aldraya's transformation into "The Ghastly One," the mid-boss of the first arc.
This was not a loud, triumphant climax, but a quiet and perfect collapse.
Here, the Angel did not weep like a human, nor release any sky-shattering lament.
This was pure consequence, an emotional overflow so broken it could no longer be shaped into any recognizable expression.
First, the crying happened beyond Aldraya's consciousness.
No hand lifted to wipe the wetness from her cheeks.
No blink attempted to hold back the flow.
Her expression remained frozen in a shattered mask of indifference—flat and cold as ever.
The only change was the presence of two thin streams leaking from the corners of her eyes, as though her body, unable to contain more suffering, chose to vent it through the smallest channels without permission from her mind or will.
The tears fell as the final betrayal of her own physiology.
Second, the crying barely moved.
Aldraya's breathing remained steady, flat, without gasps or shudders.
Her chest did not rise and fall in sobs.
Her tightly closed lips did not tremble.
Only her eyelids remained half-lowered, and the pupils behind them unfocused, staring into the void before her.
Her jaw tightened, grinding unspoken words, containing the entire storm within the cage of her bones.
She was a statue that leaked.
Third, her tears fell with an unnaturally slow pace—clear droplets moving like frozen dew across leaves.
They must have felt cold, like morning mist brushing skin, leaving a wet trace that evaporated before reaching her jawline.
Each drop seemed reluctant to fall, hesitant to admit its existence, disappearing in shame and leaving only faint moisture absorbed instantly by the false heavenly air.
To be continued…