“Saintess?”
Ain froze.
Belinda seemed to have mentioned this as well.
And from the woman's expression, she didn't seem to be lying.
Ain instinctively reached into his pocket, only to suddenly remember that he had already dispelled the magical effect of the Cards of Canal earlier.
So his pocket should have been completely empty.
Just as he was about to chant the incantation to summon the cards again, Ain suddenly froze.
He felt like his fingers had brushed against something.
Pulling the object out of his pocket, Ain was shocked to find that it was indeed a Card of Canal.
Ain's pupils instantly contracted to the size of pinpricks, as if he had laid eyes on something terrifying.
【9】 The Banshee
It felt as if a main power switch had been forcefully flipped in the depths of his brain. All his thoughts, perceptions, and even his breath were completely stripped away in an instant, leaving only a suffocating, dead silence.
Didn't I already...?!
“Impossible. How is this possible...?”
Ain muttered, staring at The Banshee card in utter disbelief.
“Fato (Fate)...”
“...gvidas min (guide me).”
As the incantation was uttered, a deck of the Cards of Canal materialized in Ain's left hand.
Taking the deck with both hands, his fingertips quickly flipped through the cards, and he soon drew that familiar card from the pile.
Ain casually waved the remaining cards away, letting them dissolve into specks of deep blue magical dust that completely dissipated into the air.
He lowered his eyes, his gaze locked onto his hands.
There lay two identical, mysterious cards, looking like mirror images of each other.
【9】 The Banshee
“Two cards...”
Ain was absolutely certain that the one he had just summoned was his own divination card!
Then where did the Banshee card in his pocket come from?
It was impossible for anyone's Divination Magic to summon two decks of the Cards of Canal!
In his knowledge, the number of people who could wield this mysterious Divination Magic was extremely small, and most of them only appeared in the late game.
And the only one he knew of right now was that one person.
Lola of the Eye of the Astral Splendor!
Did she slip it onto him?
But when?
“No, wait, none of that is the main point...”
Ain shook his head slightly, trying to clear his mind.
“Why does it have to be...”
“...The Banshee?”
The Banshee was the ninth sequence among the Spirit Cards of the divination deck.
Upright represented an impending crisis that needed to be dealt with.
While Reversed represented warnings being ignored, which could also be understood as a crisis that had already occurred.
This was supposed to be a card of revelation, one that unveiled the direction of fate and provided clues to the current predicament.
But why had it been appearing so frequently lately?
Even Belinda had pointed to this card in the end, yet she shouldn't have known anything about Divination Magic!
Could she have done it to interfere with his judgment?
If that were the case, she could have easily pointed to any random card to brush him off. Why did it have to be The Banshee?
Could all of this just be a coincidence of fate?
No!
If Belinda knew nothing about the divination cards, then there was only one reason she could have pointed to The Banshee.
She recognized the illustration on it!
On the card, the banshee was clutching a heavy clay pot tightly, her withered lips holding a mottled, rusty brass horn. She held her head high, playing the prelude to death without restraint.
The Cards of Canal were reflections of reality; each card corresponded to a concrete entity in the mortal realm.
Whether it was the previous God of Light, or The Star from the Mortal Cards, all of them existed in this world.
Then the banshee in this card...
Just as Ain's gaze swept over the strange woman nearby, an extremely jarring detail suddenly struck him.
Almost reflexively, he reached out and grabbed her collar, dragging her in front of him. His sharp gaze pinned her down like a physical blade.
This sudden action genuinely startled the strange woman.
“You!”
“Shut up!”
Ain's voice carried an irresistible authority as he unceremoniously glared at the woman's neck.
To be precise, he was looking at the pattern on her collar.
It was a splash of glaring scarlet. When he had looked from afar earlier, Ain had dismissed it as a minor embellishment on her clothing. But now that he was up close, he realized it was no simple decoration—it was a distorted and eerie depiction of a banshee!
Although it lacked the clay pot and horn, Ain recognized at a single glance that this banshee and the one on the card were the exact same entity!
“What is this?”
Ain grabbed the emblem and questioned the woman, but she merely sneered without any reservation.
“Don't you know everything already? Our secrets, our plans, all of it—aren't you supposed to be completely aware of everything?”
Ain clicked his tongue, his eyes blazing with fury.
“You're nothing but a bunch of madmen trying to harm innocent people. Even the Soul-Shattering Howl came from your hands, all just to turn Lillian...”
“Absurd!”
“How could a filthy thing like that ever touch the Saintess!”
The woman glared back at Ain with equal rage.
“We long for the descent of the Saintess more than any of you! How could we bear to watch her turn into nothingness once again!”
Hearing these words, Ain was utterly stunned.
“The Saintess... refers to Lillian?”
The woman let out a cold snort and did not reply.
With a slight shift in his thoughts, Ain softly chanted an incantation to summon the Cards of Canal once more.
He had to perform a divination immediately to confirm whether what the woman had just said was true or false.
As the other cards vanished, only a single card remained in his hand.
【17】 The Star
Upright Meaning: Filled with hope and opportunity, the correct path.
What she had just said was actually true!
No wonder something had felt off whenever he heard her speak earlier!
The massive influx of information poured down like a torrential rain, causing Ain's brain to explode in confusion as he spiraled into complete chaos.
If the Nightingale Secret Order had no intention of harming Lillian, then in Act Two, the one who caused Lillian's death...
Who was it?
Originally, Belinda's appearance was merely the fuse. Lillian was supposed to have completely lost control after falling into witchification because of the Nightingale Secret Order, leading her to willingly accept execution by others.
But now, it didn't align with the original plot of the game at all!
The Saintess, Lillian, witchification...
The frequently appearing Banshee, and Sevis making an early appearance...
And Lola of the Eye of the Astral Splendor...
Recalling the series of anomalies that had occurred since he transmigrated, an unrealistic idea suddenly bloomed in Ain's mind.
Even though it was an extremely absurd, almost fantastical conjecture, his reason told him that it might not be false.
Ain's legs gave out completely, and he fell to his knees, trembling.
Nausea and sickness washed over him.
Ain clutched his chest tightly. A powerful sensation of suffocation made him dry-heave uncontrollably, but his throat felt as if it were stuffed with wet cotton. Aside from the tearing spasms, he couldn't even bring up a drop of stomach acid.
The crowd behind him cast astonished and peculiar looks his way, and a wave of whispered murmurs swept through them.
They had absolutely no idea what was happening.
Seeing this, Rosalind's heart tightened. Without hesitation, she quickly stepped forward and dropped to one knee. Supporting Ain's back with one hand, she tried to help him up from the ground with the other.
“Are you alright?”
Rosalind turned her head slightly, her eyes filled with deep, lingering worry and concern. However, the moment her gaze brushed past Ain's face, her heart suddenly sank.
Those eyes, which were usually full of laughter, were now churning with a suffocating, deep-seated terror. He kept murmuring words that baffled her.
“Impossible. It can't be, right?”
“How could this possibly be true...?”
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