Ethereal.

—

"Rita, this is Nenio, and this here is Ember," Richard introduced them. "They come from the same universe. Nenio is a Kitsune taken over by cognitive anomalies, and Ember is a girl who fell victim to Radovid's torture." Seeing Margarita's face slowly twist in anger, he continued, "She took Radovid's vengeance upon herself so that Bella, Stacy, and Cindy didn't suffer further."

Bang!

Noticing Ember's missing right wrist, fingers, and toes, Margarita's rage flared. She wanted to materialize Radovid and his teacher to torture them again, but she took a deep breath to calm herself. Falling into a rage would only please that bastard, knowing he had succeeded in disturbing their minds even though his life was essentially in her hands to do as she pleased. Taking another deep breath to calm herself again, Margarita then looked at the elven girl as if she were her own daughter.

Waving her hand to clear away the destroyed desk from her Water Breathing punch, Margarita walked to Ember, placed her hand on the girl's cheek, and examined her closely. Noticing one of Ember's ears was missing, recently bitten, Margarita smiled gently, sat on the sofa, and hugged Ember tightly in silence.

"You have a nice aroma, Lady Rita. Is it jasmine and raspberries?" Ember asked.

Breaking the hug to place her hands on Ember's face again, Margarita saw no resentment in the elven girl's eyes. Almost choking up, not knowing how she could endure the torment yet still hold not even a sliver of animosity toward this world full of suffering, Margarita quickly composed herself and answered, "Y-yes. I mean, yes. Do you like it?"

"Yup. It feels refreshing and sunny."

Glancing at Ember's stumps, missing fingers, bitten ear, and imagining the torture she endured before the healing made her appear with no visible injuries, Margarita chose to focus on Ember's sunny and warmhearted mood. "Really? Then do you want some perfume as well? We could have a matching set, just you and me. How does that sound?"

"Are you sure? It will be so expensive, Lady Rita. I don't know if I can afford it. The only thing valuable I had was the bread I brought when I arrived in this world, but it was destroyed by that necromancer."

Looking into Ember's no hatred eyes, Margarita chuckled and said, "No, silly child. You are valuable. Far more valuable than anything in this world." Standing up, she continued, "Come, let me dress you properly. This blanket is not suited for a princess like you."

"Princess? I am not a princess, Lady Rita. I am just a beggar from Kenabres. As far as I know, my mother and father left me…"

As both of them left the room hand in hand, leaving Nenio behind, Richard turned to her and said, "Go and aid Margarita. She needs an assistant to help her with everything. Maybe then another Herald won't have a reason to do anything extreme to you."

"Yippity yap yap, boss! Thanks a lot!"

Sighing and seeing Margarita's reaction, which mirrored his own when he arrived in Tretogor, Richard looked at Moraine and asked, "Do you think we could heal her? It disturbs me that she can still smile despite losing most of her body and harboring no resentment toward her torturer."

"We can't. Radovid tormented her in body and soul. He destroyed not only her physical atoms but also the ethereal atoms of her soul," Moraine paused before continuing, "However, if we can find those destroyed parts of her ethereal atoms, we might have a chance. According to your new theory about Realmatics, nothing in this world can be completely destroyed into nothingness or created out of nothing. So, somewhere out there, her atomic parts are still floating around. If we can attract or even copy them, we could essentially heal her completely to a perfect state."

Seeing that Moraine had read his thesis, which he uploaded at midnight when he created a reincarnation program and had an enlightenment that everything in the multiverse follows the law of conversion, changing state from one realm to another, Richard just nodded and sighed in lamentation, knowing he is not yet wise enough to use his tools effectively despite having the power to go beyond merely destroying the multiverse.

Flipping his watch to see the very large chunk of Mana that was growing endlessly inside Huginn and Muninn, composed of many energies like Elder Blood, Aetherial, and Pattern, Richard then focused his attention on the energy he had copied from Ember when she arrived on the archipelago.

He took this energy from the storage database and placed it inside three Sa'angreal perpetual machine systems so that it could start reproducing more and more. This energy comprised the elven girl's Order body chemical energy, neuron electrical energy, and heart thermal energy, including even the Chaos part of her energy, made up of positive energy, arcane energy, planar energy, and temporal energy.

Richard then created a program to intentionally release this energy from his translucent watch, similar to what Ciri did to the King of Beggars, essentially aiming to lure Ember's ethereal atoms to be drawn to this set of leaked energy.

Hoping it would work no matter how long it took, Richard suddenly remembered that he had not yet finished saving Tretogor from the tainted necromancy energy created by Mannimarco. Turning to Moraine, who was lazily lounging on the sofa, he asked, "Is everything alright in Tretogor? Is the necromancy miasma still there in the city?"

"The miasma that turned everyone near it into undead after they were killed?"

Seeing Richard nod, acknowledging that he could notice it even though his mind was unstable at the time, Moraine smiled in satisfaction at the perceived improvement and answered, "Everything is cleared. After you focused on creating your program, I went back there to finish everything up: saving survivors still alive in the city and relocating them to Oxenfurt, clearing the tainted land that was draining the vitality of the province, ferrying the souls to be reborn on the earth as Ciri wished, and so on."

Pausing, she continued, "But there is one thing I couldn't do properly—collecting the data. Unlike you, I don't have a comprehensive spell to accomplish that, so I'm unsure what I might have missed when gathering the data on my own."

Realizing that his decision to make her an assistant was the right one, Richard sighed in relief. Producing another translucent watch, he placed it on the table toward her and said, "Here, Seon OS. And… thank you."

After staying silent for a while, watching Moraine twitch her eyebrows from time to time as she fiddled with the feature, Richard stood up and said, "Come, let's go to Tretogor to collect the data first. After that, we can see what Ciri is up to."

—