Blue Realm
Ruins.
In games, they were just about the thing that interested me most.
Exploring ruins, searching for treasure, unearthing stories buried deep in the past, looking for traces left behind by people of ancient times—all of that was the part of every kind of RPG that interested me most.
As a NEET, if it was inside a game, it was impossible not to know ruins, labyrinths, and dungeons.
I was even familiar enough to tell at a glance what kind of setting a game had, and what kind of story that ruin was probably telling.
But in the end… that was inside a game.
“Does Alice mean you want to explore the ruins?” I asked weakly, for the time being, and even stopped walking without meaning to.
“Doesn’t Yulin-chan think it would be interesting? There are lots of good things in ruins, you know.”
Seeing me stop, Alice stopped as well and looked back at me.
So I more or less understood.
The reason I had met Alice here was probably the same as with the Hero’s party.
They had all been drawn here by this ruin.
But the Hero’s party…
I couldn’t help remembering myself as I had been when I met them.
“Um, Alice…”
“Hm?”
The sky had already gone completely dark.
Moonlight left a smear of silver on my bangs.
I lifted my upper eyelids and looked at her.
“Ruins might not only have treasure. They might also have very dangerous things in them…”
I can’t control my own combat ability…
Or rather, I have never even tried it under my own will.
Sure enough, Alice instead looked easy and cheerful as she said to me,
“But isn’t Yulin-chan an angel?”
“Angels are beings who command miracles…”
Auw…
Should I tell her the truth?
I really should have told her the truth from the beginning.
When it comes down to it, I don’t even know whether I am an angel or not.
How am I supposed to explain that to her clearly…
Can even a Fallen Angel still be called an angel…?
Perhaps I was only drunk on the title “angel,” because it always made me feel one step closer to Lingyin.
Perhaps it was only that, in this vast world, this feeling of complete solitude had made me fragile.
If—if I told Alice the truth, would she abandon me?
Would that small warmth slip out of my hands?
Just like Lingyin, leaving my side.
“I…”
After a moment of silence, I opened my mouth.
Alice was still smiling as she looked at me, then said,
“It’s all right. If it’s inconvenient for Yulin-chan to fight, then when we run into danger we’ll just run away at once~”
“Don’t look at me like this. I’m still pretty confident when it comes to running away.”
“Ah… yeah.”
The words that had reached my lips were swallowed back down.
Or rather, I still couldn’t say them.
A Fallen Angel is still an angel, right…
From the time I can remember, my eyes have been full of the figures of angels.
Blue sky, yellow sand, sunlight that is always glaring.
I should have been born into a noble family, just like the children of distant lords, going to the great city to study, to live, then marrying another noble son, bearing a child, and living a quiet, gentle life.
But when I was about to be born, the gods played a joke on me.
I did not live the life of a noble young lady as a matter of course.
When I woke, the one holding me was the church priest, and the one smiling at me was the church nun.
Of course, I no longer remember how it truly looked.
I am only thinking it was so.
This is a tiny sandbar.
There is not even a subway with a route that leads here.
But this little corner of the desert has already become my home, the place I love deeply.
When I learned of my origins, I felt no hatred and no regret.
Because I am the me who lives here.
From the time I can remember, my eyes have been full of the figures of angels.
When sunlight painted the patterns from the church glass onto the floor, when the rag in my hand gently wiped the sand from a stone statue, when I opened an old book and read those gentle words.
Angels were right beside me…
Chapter Four: Eden
Moonlight hung high at the peak of the vault of heaven.
The night was, as expected, still a little cold.
A cold wind passed through buildings collapsed in the sea of sand, raising gusts of dust.
A moment’s inattention and it stung the eyes.
The afternoon rain had washed away some of the sand and stone, exposing a corner of a road surface that had been buried under yellow sand for who knew how many years, glittering faintly in the moonlight.
Ever since we drew near this hillside full of ruined houses, a faint sense of familiarity had welled up in my heart, making me unconsciously quicken my steps toward the foot of the slope.
An asphalt road was, indeed, one of the few things that still carried a little familiarity in this strange world.
Among rolling dunes that rose and fell like waves, this tiny corner soothed the heart that had been uneasy all along.
I wondered where this road had once led.
“Yulin-chan?”
Perhaps because I had lingered here a little while, Alice, standing below the sand slope, cast a puzzled look toward me.
A broken length of metal pole stuck out of the sand by her feet, looking like the base of a streetlamp or something of the sort.
Had this land once been a city?
I couldn’t help producing a string of fancies, imagining what this ruin, abandoned for who knew how long, had once looked like.
This world really was very different from the fantasy other worlds depicted in games, novels, and anime.
I had once imagined that one day I too would cross into another world and start an otherworld unmatched story like the ones in games, novels, and anime, a science student crushing outdated thinking with modern ideas in a technologically backward setting.
That kind of plot probably would not happen here.
If the protagonist was me, it would be a little too miserable.
“It’s nothing.”
I looked back at the hillside that soared into the clouds not far away and started walking again.
“I just saw something a little familiar.”
“Eh? Here?”
“Yeah. It’s fine. Let’s go.”
The buildings on the hillside were already dilapidated, lying every which way in the sand and dust.
But from some broken walls that still stood on the slope, it was not hard to see that these buildings had been constructed perpendicular to the hillside.
That felt a little strange, because being perpendicular to the slope meant the buildings had not been built with the ground as their horizontal line.
Perhaps this mountain had once been flat, at least level with the ground.
It might have collapsed for some reason such as an earthquake, and so become a hillside.
Only when we reached the foot of the slope did I notice that its grade was rather steep.
From a human point of view, it would be hard to climb without tools if you were not a professional climber.
Looking up at the peak lit by moonlight, Alice couldn’t help letting out a sigh.
“Uweh… so high…”
I thought the pair of wings on my back could bear both my weight and Alice’s.
But my stomach, which had already begun to growl, told me I probably did not have the strength to fly the two of us together.
Angels, besides feeling heat and cold, besides feeling pain, also feel hunger.
***
Circumstellar Railway:
A transport network constructed beneath the surface.
The trunk lines lie 20,000 meters below ground, buried deep in tunnels.
A special force field exists inside the tunnels to keep the gravitational environment inside the trains comfortable at high speed.
Branches spread across every part of the stellar ring, with a coverage of 89%.
It is the main transport network of the Ideal Ring.
In theory, it can guarantee arrival at any point on the stellar ring within one to two circumstellar periods (one to two days).
Circumstellar Transport Network:
At present, due to faults in the stellar-ring drives (StarDrive), some trunk lines of the transport network are in an uninitialized-calibration state.
Some are unavailable due to power-supply failures.
Some Construction Towers have not been corrected and activated, or have already been damaged, leaving the lines in disrepair.
Path efficiency has therefore dropped sharply.
The time required to circle the stellar ring once has stretched from the former one to two days to one to two years (Tianji cycles).
Tianji Bureau: A circumstellar structure with independent power supply and drive systems.
Aside from the power-supply section and master control (including communications), the main body is composed of primordial gold.
Under the action of an electric field it can change the light transmittance of the ring belt, and is used to simulate the changes in illumination of day and night on the stellar ring, as well as the succession of the four seasons.
The power-supply section uses a plasma thermoelectric conversion system of the same technology as the Superstructure.
Therefore the portion of the stellar ring directly behind the power-supply system receives no sunlight from the star at all, and lies in a dark-night region that does not even have moonlight.
(From this it can be known that a total lunar eclipse occurs at every midnight on the stellar ring.)
In terms of function, the Tianji Bureau also bears responsibility for providing Ipsiss with a communications network, time service, remote sensing and monitoring, auxiliary ecological regulation, and other roles that will not be expanded on for now.
Circumstellar Period: The Tianji Bureau controls the length of day and night by changing its own rotational speed.
Under normal conditions it monitors gravitational acceleration on the stellar ring to calculate the ring’s speed, then adjusts its own speed in order to keep the period of one relative circuit around the stellar ring fixed, and to adjust changes in the length of day and night.
This period is exactly 24 hours, that is, one circumstellar period.
Tianji Cycle: Because the Tianji Bureau simulates the succession of the four seasons, it also completes the simulation of a year’s calendar.
Therefore the time the Tianji Bureau takes to finish one simulation is called a Tianji cycle.
That cycle equals 367 circumstellar periods, meaning one year equals 367 days.
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