Kaka’s face was filled with despair as she collapsed onto Rane’s head, looking utterly done with life. [TL: It is unclear whether Kaka has a gender, but I’ll make her female due to the maid outfit and protagonist harem likelihood.]

Once a pixie signs a covenant, it cannot unilaterally terminate it until the covenantor dies.

Thinking about having to start from zero and grind points together with a ten-point stray dog in the future, that bleak outlook made Kaka dizzy with despair.

‘I’d rather rot to death in the Pixie Hall than deal with this crap!’

Rane, on the other hand, was much happier. He hadn’t expected things to go this smoothly. Kaka had practically thrown herself at him, saving him a lot of talking.

Although Kaka’s personality had taken a sharp turn and she’d become completely unmotivated, these were minor issues. What Rane wanted was her ability. Whether she herself had motivation didn’t really matter.

‘Once you’re on the ride, it’s not up to you anymore.’

Rane closed his eyes and activated the mark Kaka had left in his sea of consciousness.

In an instant, all his memories spread out before him like strips of film. He could even pinpoint memories down to the second.

‘Enhanced memory really is convenient!’

With a single thought, a segment of the memory film surfaced before his eyes—the exact information he needed right now.

The Calamity—Goshimt.

Among the five Calamities, it was the only one without a physical body, often appearing as a dark green shadow.

In essence, Goshimt was a being similar to the pixie race, able to freely enter and exit the spirit realm and interfere with people’s thoughts through it.

Most importantly, Goshimt was a Calamity with a stance. It had secretly defected to the Divine Authority Angel and pledged loyalty to the Church.

Goshimt’s attack on the Pixie Hall should originally have happened half a year later, when Rita was drawn into the royal assassination incident.

In order to seize the faith of the royal nobles, the archbishop of the Royal Capital Church had ordered Goshimt to corrupt the Pixie Covenant, attempting to control the power of the nobles who had signed covenants with the Pixie King and thereby undermine royal authority.

There were six Pixie Covenants in total. Four belonged to royal nobles and two belonged to the Church.

If Goshimt succeeded, the Church would immediately gain control over the lifelines of the four great noble families, securing absolute dominance in the future struggle over faith.

Of course, this plan ultimately failed. The Divine Authority Angel’s side responded quickly, sending an envoy to contact Rita, who had been swept into the turmoil, selecting her as a saint’s proxy and sending her to the Pixie Hall to assist the Pixie King in repelling Goshimt.

In the game, this was also the first formal clash between the two angels in their contest for faith, fully unfolding the world’s overarching narrative from that point onward.

Rita also benefited from the disaster. She underwent a pixie power baptism within the Pixie Hall, drastically increasing her strength.

She even earned the Pixie King’s gratitude, granting her free access to the Pixie Hall from then on.

This plot point was the first critical turning point in Rita’s rise and shouldn’t have appeared this early.

At present, Rita hadn’t received the saint’s blessing, nor did she have support from royal companions.

Right now, she was just a novice mage whose internal magic source hadn’t even stabilized yet.

Moreover, Goshimt appearing here at this time was fundamentally unreasonable. Without guidance from a covenant, how could it possibly locate the Pixie Hall?

A Pixie Covenant couldn’t just be corrupted at will. The Church would have had to destroy at least one covenant first, then trace the self-destruction process to find the Pixie Hall hidden within the spirit realm.

‘Destroying a covenant!?’

A bolt of lightning flashed through Rane’s mind.

“In fact, your family once also had a covenant with the Pixie King, but that covenant was deliberately destroyed in your father’s generation…”

Claude’s words echoed in his head and Rane suddenly realized something.

‘The ones who destroyed the covenant were people from the Church? Goshimt came through a covenant tied to my family?’

When traveling between the spirit realm and the real world, there is some temporal discrepancy.

‘Accounting for that discrepancy, the timing of Goshimt’s arrival roughly coincided with when I entered the spirit-realm teleportation array. Did I trigger another spirit-realm teleportation array that the Church had sabotaged during my transfer, giving Goshimt an opening?’

This was the only explanation Rane could currently think of that made sense.

‘So the plot really did change because of my intervention…’

Now wasn’t the time for regret. Rane calmly considered countermeasures within the river of memories.

In the original story, Rita had come together with Stella, a royal princess who also possessed a Pixie Covenant. With the saint’s blessing and royal authority, Rita was able to draw upon the power within the jade platform at the center of the Pixie Hall to briefly contend with the Calamity.

That jade platform was the key.

The jade platform was the core of the Pixie Hall, capable of borrowing the combined abilities of the entire pixie race.

Quantitative change leads to qualitative change. The stacked abilities of countless pixies forcibly elevated Rita to Calamity-tier combat power.

Under normal circumstances, such a massive infusion of power would instantly rupture Rita’s magic source.

However, due to the saint’s blessing, the blessing left within Rita by the Divine Authority Angel protected her magic source, allowing her to safely accept that power.

And to activate the jade platform, one had to use a covenant held by the royal family.

The saint’s blessing and royal authority were the two indispensable elements for surviving this crisis.

But Rane had neither of them right now.

And the severity of the current situation differed from that of the original story!

Rane opened his eyes in despair, once again connected with Kaka’s mark to activate spirit-realm vision and looked upward…

Milky-white celestial light abruptly twisted across the dome, as if the sky itself had been torn open.

Within the rift, the Pixie King—transformed into a transparent orb of light—hovered at the highest point of the hall’s dome. Pure silver-white radiance flowed around him, like condensed moonlight granted life.

He had no physical body. At the center of the light orb pulsed a warm point of brilliance—his core origin. The sacred aura it emitted intertwined with the hall’s milky glow, forming an invisible barrier that separated the dome from the Pixie Hall below.

From the surface of the barrier surged thick, dark green shadows, their edges roiling with countless inky tendrils.

This was exactly the Calamity from Rane’s memory—Goshimt.

It didn’t choose a direct collision. Instead, it formed a massive net of shadow that slowly descended from outside the dome. Dark green tendrils twisted along the seams of the barrier, attempting to seep into this isolated sanctuary.

The Pixie King’s light orb suddenly expanded. Silver-white radiance transformed into countless slender threads of light that surged toward the shadow net.

The instant the silver threads touched the dark green tendrils, faint black smoke rose as the tendrils melted slightly, like ice meeting fire.

But more shadowy tendrils surged forward from behind, filling the gaps.

Meanwhile, the Pixie King’s light threads grew dim under the erosion and the bright point at the core of the light orb trembled faintly, as if it had reached its limit.

In a single glance, Rane judged that the Pixie King was on the verge of losing the ability to resist the corruption, while Goshimt still had strength to spare.

Suddenly, a faint crack echoed through the vast hall.

The halo barrier woven from silver-white light threads finally gave way.

The sky… split open!