Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 152: Questionable Existence

"If that woman didn’t leave that day... what would’ve happened to you?"

The question was a key, offered to a lock she had refused to acknowledge.

The room fell silent. Angela’s sharp eyes darted between them, the political ramifications momentarily forgotten in the face of this personal archaeology. Eastiel and Arkai stood still, sensing a revelation more intimate and fundamental than any prophecy.

Cecilia’s breath hitched. Her mind, so adept at strategizing about futures and pasts, was forced to turn inward, to that specific, pivotal moment.

What would have happened?

She wouldn’t have been crowned. She would have remained simply Cecilia, the orphan from the small town clinic, the girl who was a little too observant, who saw the cracks in the world before she knew their names. She would have watched Ruby ascend, bathed in sanctity, and she would have thought, perhaps, that she was... free?

No.

She would not exist.

The system had answered that already.

A Saintess candidate, once presented and then passed over, was given a choice for the sake of decorum and mercy. They could be returned, with a generous pension, to the obscurity of their old life. Or they could choose devotion, entering the Temple as a priestess-in-training, a lifetime of silent service.

Cecilia, the orphan with no family and a strong aversion to being a burden, would never have chosen to return to that clinic. She would have taken the robes.

She would have chosen to become a priestess.

And then... what?

She would not have been content in the quiet scriptoriums or the echoing prayer halls. That restless intellect, that compulsion to fix, to solve, to heal, it would have demanded an outlet.

She would have volunteered for the hardest duties. She would have joined the itinerant priests, the ones who traveled the hinterlands, bringing alms and blessings to the forgotten.

She would have roamed the world. Helping people. Solving problems. Putting bandages on wounds that ran much, much deeper.

And somewhere, early along that dusty, righteous road... she would have ceased to exist.

Because she knew.

Even as that younger, robed version of herself, she would have known. If she lived, if she grew to the woman she was today, with the skills she would inevitably hone and the connections she would forge, she would still be able to save the ones she had saved.

The Lion King, cursing the wretched world. The Wolf King, marching to a volcanic pyre. And perhaps... perhaps even the Dragon Lord, bleeding out in a ditch.

She would have found a way. She would have heard the rumors, pieced together the fragments, and she would have moved heaven and earth to reach them.

But she didn’t.

So—

She had ceased to exist, much, much early on.

But Oathran didn’t know that it wasn’t just her choice who shaped the world as they know today.

It was his choice too.

His choice to believe an oath made by an eight-year-old.

"System, begin the scenario now."

***

RIRIRIRIRING!

The clangor of the bell was a physical thing, a brass fist punching through the membrane of one reality and into another. Cecilia’s senses lurched, the vertigo of transition a familiar, unwelcome friend.

Her vision cleared onto a landscape of worn wood and dusty light.

She was in a classroom. The classroom. The one at Scholomance Athenaeum.

She was at her desk, by the window.

The world outside the leaded glass was the school’s central quadrangle, a tapestry of grey flagstones, meticulously manicured hedges shaped into mythical beasts, and the distant, mist-shrouded silhouette of the main clock tower.

The light was different today. It was the pale, watery gold of mid-morning. And the quad was alive with movement. Clusters of students hurrying to their morning period, their black and grey uniforms like a flock of starlings against the stone.

Eastiel was not present.

Where... was this in the school days scenario timeline? Before Eastiel’s scenario? After?

Or... had that scenario with Eastiel simply never happened in this iteration?

CLICK—creak...

The sound of the heavy classroom door swinging inward cut through her thoughts. The ambient chatter of the room, the rustle of pages, the scrape of a chair, the low murmur of conversation, died in an instant.

The homeroom teacher, Professor Hargrave, a man built like a retired wardrobe with a beard to match, entered with his customary, ground-eating stride. But he was not alone.

Behind him, moving with a silence that seemed to absorb the very sound from the air, was a young man. He was tall, though he held himself with a slight, almost scholarly stoop, accustomed to ducking under low doorways.

His hair was the first thing anyone noticed. A shock of mist-white, not the pale blond of age or albinism, but a pure, stark white, like a misty waterfall. It was cut short and sharp at the sides, neatly parted, quite at odds with the artfully messy styles favored by the other boys.

He wore the standard Athenaeum uniform, charcoal grey tunic, trousers, the silver crow-and-key crest over his heart. But on him, it looked... like something else. The fabric seemed to hang differently, the lines sharper.

His features were... beautiful in a way that was almost unsettling. Fine-boned, aristocratic, with a pale, flawless complexion. But it was the eyes that held the room captive.

A clear, piercing grey, the color of a winter sky just before a storm. They swept across the class once, a calm, assessing glance that made several students instinctively sit up straighter and look down at their desks.

"Settle down," Professor Hargrave boomed, though the room was already a tomb. He placed his ledger on the desk with a thump. "Today, we’ve got ourselves a new transfer student."

A muted ripple of surprise went through the class.

"What? Now? We’re seniors, though...?" someone whispered, the confusion audible.

"Strange..." came another murmur.

"Silence!" Hargrave snapped, his beard bristling. The whispers cut off. He gestured to the white-haired youth. "Mr. Alicei..."

"Please introduce yourself."