Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 150: To Be a Saintess

Cecilia lay alone on the vast bed, back in Eastiel’s main chamber. Her husbands were not with her. She had asked for a moment.

From the next room, the low, vehement murmur of Angela’s voice filtered through the heavy door. It was a relentless, grounding stream of reality.

The gritty details of her intelligence network laid bare. Dates, locations, witness accounts, the cold logistics of sacrilege. A clinical autopsy of a crime not yet committed. Cecilia didn’t need to hear the words. She already knew the corpse.

She lay on her side, staring at nothing. Sleep would be unreachable across a sea of wretched images. The ditch, dragon bones gleaming under a thief’s torch, Oathran’s grey eyes forever closed.

Her own eyes were dry now, wide open and unseeing, reflecting the faint glow of the single sconce left burning.

The door opened without a sound, a sliver of warmer light from the adjoining room cutting across the floor before it was swallowed by the gloom.

Footsteps, silent on the thick rug, approached the bed. The mattress dipped gently behind her. A large, warm body settled close. A strong arm slid around her waist, pulling her back against a solid, familiar chest that smelled of cold pine, iron, and the crisp, clean scent of the northern snows.

Gentle fingers brushed the stray, sweat-damp strands of golden hair away from her temple and cheek, tucking them behind her ear.

It was Arkai.

He was silent for more than ten minutes. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely more than a vibration against her spine. "Elder Brother sent me," he murmured. "He is... very worried." A pause. "He doesn’t seem alright."

Cecilia gave a nod against the pillow. She knew. Who wouldn’t?

Arkai’s arm tightened around her, just a fraction. His next words were softer. "He thought... you might be angry with him."

The silence stretched.

"I... kinda am."

She admitted.

"Why won’t you tell him?" Arkai asked.

Cecilia shook her head slowly against the pillow. "Because."

This poisonous feelings. Some part of her wanted to spare Oathran the taste of it, even as another, angrier part wanted him to choke on it.

"Yeah," Arkai nodded, his chin brushing her hair. He understood the ’because’. It was the same ’because’ that lived in the space between knowing a truth and being able to speak it into the world where it could do irreversible damage.

In the other timeline, their paths had never crossed. Oathran had never met her at her coronation, never received her oath. He had never laid with her in a forest clearing, sharing a final moment.

The ditch he died in was a lonely gouge in the earth in the Cassia Kingdom, not the one in Iondora where they had met and she had saved him from a mortal wound.

In that other world, he had drawn his last breath truly alone. No witness. No hand to hold. His magnificent body left to the elements and the scavengers until time or a greedy opportunist found it.

And Cecilia was certain, if Ruby could propose turning his remains into weapons now, with such specific, vile clarity, the idea had a source. It had precedent.

In that timeline, Oathran’s body must have been desecrated. His bones had been mined, his scales stripped, his heartstone carved out. It wasn’t a hypothetical atrocity, but a historical fact in a branch of reality that had actually happened.

Of course, it didn’t have to be Arzhen and Ruby who did it in that original tragedy. But it had been done.

And now, armed with the knowledge of that future-past, Ruby wasn’t trying to prevent the sacrilege. She was trying to orchestrate it. To control it. To use it for her own benefit, draping her ambition in the sanctimonious robes of ’divine guidance’ and ’proper reverence.’

Fine. Let’s accept the premise. Let’s say Oathran had already died as prophesied. Let’s say, in some twisted logic, he had even given some form of permission. Let’s say the potential power was immeasurable, and that anyone else in a position to seize it would have.

But what kind of Saintess would do that?

What kind of woman, blessed by the gods, gifted with a second chance at life after her own death... would look at the corpse of a being like Oathran Alicei and see a resource?

The blasphemy of it...

And the way Ruby was trying to frame it, as holy sanction, as divine will, as honoring his legacy by turning him into a legendary thing...

And Oathran just—

"Why hadn’t he destroyed this world already?" Cecilia whispered. "And he still somehow must die for things to keep going?"

He accepted a death that would lead to this?

Arkai smiled in sorrow. He let out a weary sigh. "You’re mad... because he would still want to die, despite all of it?"

"Mm—" She hadn’t realized she still had tears left, but a hot, fresh trickle escaped, tracing a path down her nose and onto the pillow.

After that desecration in the other timeline, the dragons’ wrath would have been biblical. She could envision the apocalyptic war that would follow. Continents scorched, cities toppled by draconic fury, gods stirred from slumber.

And Ruby, in her shortsightedness or her monstrous ambition, was inviting that exact cataclysm into this world.

Even gilded in the language of honor and legacy, a weapon was a weapon. Who was to say Oathran, a being who had once saved the world from a secret peril and was now prepared to die for some greater, unknown purpose, would ever consent to the uses his own bones would be put to?

"Weapons were made from legendary beings all the time," Arkai sighed. "Most tales say they volunteered before their death. And a great many were forged from the remains of vanquished evils."

He held her tighter. "But how many of them never consented, while the people were fed the lie that they did? And how many of those ’evils’ were just... good individuals, slandered after the fact to justify the theft?"

Cecilia’s voice was a dry rasp. "A weapon is made to be bathed in blood."

Arkai’s eyes faltered, closing briefly. An vision flashed behind his lids. Oathran’s noble, lifeless form, not resting in peace, but being plunged into a vat of crimson, his divine essence forced to drink deep of slaughter.

"God of War Caledfwlch," Cecilia whispered, invoking one of the Temple’s foundational myths, her voice taking on the cadence of a sacred elegy, "ate an evil merfolk god who terrorized the seas, and a lustful unicorn god who preyed on young women’s virginity for a wish fulfilled. He consumed them."

"And he would have died if he didn’t," Arkai finished, knowing the story. A bitter smile touched his lips. "His soul would have been torn from his body. Consuming them was his only remedy. His survival."

"Was he evil?" Cecilia asked, her gaze fixed on some invisible point in the darkness. "Was he just like them...?"

She was trying, even now, to rationalize. To understand the moral mechanics of power and survival, even when applied to her enemies.

Arkai considered. "He consumed them. Made them a part of his own being, his own essence. It was absorption. He didn’t turn them into a sword that could be dropped, stolen, or wielded by another’s hand."

He paused, his voice dropping to a reverent whisper. "And Caledfwlch... he never took credit for it. Never boasted. Never proud."

He pressed a gentle kiss to her temple. "He consumed evil to absolve it. To end its harm. It was an act of mercy... and of a terrible, necessary kindness."

One was an act of desperate, holistic integration to survive and neutralize a threat. The other was a post-mortem disassembly for profit and power, disguised as piety.

"Cecilia..." Arkai whispered against her temple. "If you’re angry... just tell Elder Brother."

"You can stop being the saintess. Stop being wise for just a moment."

Sometimes, the deepest truths were not found in careful words or measured silence. Sometimes, a love so vast and terrified needed to erupt. It needed to be messy, and unfair, and brutal in its honesty. It needed to scorch the earth so something new could grow.

Sometimes, a man needed to be destroyed by love before he could truly comprehend what it meant to be loved.

"And say something you can’t take back."