Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 183: Re-Exist

Professor Suna was having a very confusing afternoon.

She had left the Athenaeum on official business for a couple of days, her mind occupied with academic conferences and dry administrative reports. She’d returned expecting the usual rhythm of finals-week tension, perhaps a few minor disciplinary issues to address.

She was not expecting to find a tall, starkly handsome, and decidedly half-naked transfer student standing frozen in the middle of a main hallway, looking like a lost, frostbitten god who had misplaced his robes.

But then, the boy’s reaction was even stranger than his state of undress. He didn’t look chastised or embarrassed. He looked... bewildered. His grey eyes, wide with a shock that seemed to go beyond mere social awkwardness, locked onto hers.

"You... can see me?"

Professor Suna’s patience, already thin from travel, snapped. "You think you’re invisible or something?" she retorted, her voice sharp. "Well, I’m sorry, lad, your invisibility spell doesn’t work. Don’t prank people when your magic is still half-baked."

Deciding this required immediate and private rectification, she frog-marched the shivering boy to his supposed dorm room, intent on making him dress properly and then assigning a suitably tedious detention.

The scene at the dorm only deepened the mystery. The door to his room was blasted inward, the lock a mess of splintered wood and melted metal. And inside...

It was empty. Not ’messy’ or ’lived-in’. It was a sterile, vacant shell, identical to every other unassigned room in the hall. No bed, no desk, no personal effects. Not a sock, not a book, not a hint that anyone had ever existed there.

"Where are your things, Oathran Alicei?" she demanded, turning to him, her suspicion now fully ignited. This was beyond a prank. This was vandalism and potentially theft.

Oathran stood in the doorway, frowning against the cold, his expression confused and slowly hopeful. Could he say, ’Professor, my belongings were Thanos-snapped out of existence because I was erased from reality, but now you can see me, which is a fascinating ontological paradox’? No.

He was spared having to concoct an answer by a new commotion. His dorm neighbors, drawn by the professor’s presence, crowded the hallway. Their faces, upon seeing Oathran, morphed from curiosity to collective horror.

"Yo, Oathran! Man—wha—" one stammered, pointing a trembling finger. "Man... this morning, you were just... gone from my mind. And suddenly, everything returned. What happened?"

"Oh, but Cecilia didn’t forget, though!" another chimed in, eyes wide. "She ran around the school looking for you like a madwoman!"

"Yeah, oh that’s so weird, what’s wrong with our mind?"

"Is this mass hallucination or something?"

Professor Suna listened, her stern demeanor cracking under the weight of their unanimous, panicked testimony. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

A memory wipe event? She hadn’t noticed anything amiss because she’d been away, and frankly, she hadn’t been thinking about the new transfer student at all.

But the consistency of their stories was undeniable. And it explained the blasted door, the frantic girl...

Her thoughts were violently interrupted.

Right before their eyes, in the empty room, reality... stitched itself back together. With a series of soft, materializing creaks and faint shimmerings of light, objects rematerialized.

The plain bed frame solidified into being. The wardrobe filled out against the wall. A simple desk and chair snapped into place. It wasn’t decorated, it bore no personal marks, but it was unmistakably furnished. A room that was lived in.

"This—?!" Professor Suna gasped, taking an involuntary step back. She was a master of magical theory, and she felt nothing. No surge of mana, no casting signature, no spell matrix. This was reality itself being edited, live.

Oathran didn’t share her academic shock. The how didn’t matter, the chance did. He strode into the now-furnished room, yanked a coat from the wardrobe, and shrugged into it. He snatched some money from the desk drawer.

"Professor," he said, his voice low and urgent, cutting off her spluttering. "I will explain to you later. I need to find someone. Urgently."

"Where are you going?" she demanded, her teacher’s instinct overriding her cosmic disorientation. Something was deeply, dangerously wrong, and this boy was at the center of it. "I’m coming with you."

It was her responsibility.

But they didn’t need to go far. As they hurried back into the main building, a rising wave of commotion rolled towards them.

"Cecilia, he’s here!"

"There’s him!"

The tension that had been coiling in Oathran’s body since the first snow shattered and loosened at the sound. Cecilia. She was here. She was looking for him, and people were acknowledging it.

Then he saw her.

Still in her nightgown, a borrowed pair of shoes on her feet, her coat hanging open. Her golden hair was loose and wild around a face pale with exhaustion and etched with trails of dried tears. And there, across the slender column of her throat, was a thin, perfectly horizontal line.

A fresh, pink scar.

His eyes dropped to that mark, and his heart stopped.

So it was her.

She had done something.

Something irreversible, something that had drawn blood from her very soul, to claw him back from oblivion.

The moment her eyes found his, the dam broke. A ragged, soul-deep sob wrenched from her chest, and she was running, the distance between them vanishing. She crashed into him, her arms locking around his waist with a strength that belied her frame, her face burying against the now-warm fabric of his coat.

He held her, his own arms coming around her, his face pressing into her wind-tangled hair. From behind her, the others emerged.

Baswara, his face full of relief and grief, Serayu, her violet eyes shining, Lazuardi, looking solemn, and a green-haired man he recognized immediately. Professor Jenggala.

Baswara didn’t hesitate. He barreled forward and wrapped his massive arms around both of them, a bear hug that squeezed the air from Oathran’s lungs.

"My boy!" the old man choked out.

But beneath the overwhelming relief, something snagged on his brain like a metal hook against flesh. The scar on her neck. The returned memory of everyone. The refurnished room. The impossible reversal of a cosmic law.

What did they do to bring him back...?

What did they—

"—sacrificed...?" The word left his lips as a horrified whisper, meant only for the woman in his arms.

Cecilia pulled back just enough to glare up at him, her blue-green-grey eyes blazing through the tears. She didn’t need the full question. She knew. "You don’t get to complain about what I did to bring you back."

A wave of pure anger surged through him. How could she be so... reckless? At the danger, at the sheer, stupid audacity of it?

But for the life of him, why did that anger feel so thin? Why was it instantly drowned under a tsunami of such overwhelming, heartbreaking joy that it made his knees weak?

She was here. She was warm. She was alive, and she remembered him.

"What god did you threaten this time, my love...?" he hissed, the words a tangled knot of fear and fury.

Cecilia’s glare didn’t soften. "A god," she said, her voice clear and cutting, "who hadn’t disclosed to me what he needed his elementary school headmaster’s signature for."

Oathran stared.

"Huh...?" he managed.

Then it burst out of him. A loud, ragged, completely undignified bark of laughter that shook his whole frame.

"Pff—BWAHAHAWHAHAHHAHAH!"

He threw his head back and laughed, a release of centuries of fatalistic tension, all because his saintess had bargained with deities and then immediately blackmailed him with a childhood embarrassment.

Cecilia looked up at him, tears falling violently yet silently from her eyes.

It was the first time ever since they entered this scenario... that he laughed like that.

.

.

.

.

-----------------------

Rate/Review count:

7

3 more Rate/Reviews and we’ll have our mass release!!!

OMG! I didn’t think we’ll get so close this quickly!