The next morning, Dema was still not feeling better. In fact, she had gotten even worse, barely managing to speak coherently.

Theora came to the conclusion that they had to stay here for a while and wait until the regeneration Skills came back. Dema was in no condition to travel, and it was also not like there was a place to get help at. Healer Classes existed, though most of them were probably in some way reliant on the System for their quests, so taking the Ancient Evil of all beings to them could backfire tremendously in several different ways. Not that Theora actually had any idea of how to find one in the first place.

So, instead, she’d do her best to make Dema get through this, whatever it took.

In the early morning hours of the next day, she tucked Dema away inside the house they slept on. They couldn’t stay there specifically; the house was in desperate disrepair, with plants seeping through the broken walls and the roof with numerous holes.

“Dema, is it alright to leave you here for a moment while I find us a better place to stay?”

“Abandoning meeee,” Dema whined, eyes still closed.

“I’m not abandoning you. I will be right back.”

“Gonna,” she started, then coughed a bit of blood, “hug me when you come back?”

Theora faintly shook her head, and it quite broke her heart. “You are in no condition to be hugged.”

“Gah. Then, sing for me?”

Theora took a deep breath. She crouched down, almost reaching over to pet Dema’s head, but pulled away at the last moment. Touching her was too much, wasn’t it?

“Yes,” she hummed instead. “I’ll sing for you all night. Then, see you later?”

Dema gurgled approvingly, and then Theora set out to take a look around the village. Almost every house was in no condition to stay in, until she passed through the main street and saw a hill a little outside the settlement, completely coated in lavender flowers. On it stood a large building, at least large in comparison to the others. It looked much less weathered by time.

As she made her way up, Theora also took note of a little river running down the other side of the hill. Having access to a constant flow of water was good. Also, by walking through the town reclaimed by nature, she’d remembered the fact that this settlement had been known for its many healing herbs and water and air quality. Perhaps that would help.

Theora would need to gather firewood. Maybe she could find and clean a porcelain cup from one of the houses. And then, she could try to brew some herbal tea for Dema. 

Entering that house on the hill, she found that there was dust inside, but it hadn’t broken down. Otherwise, it was completely empty. There was just a single large room, so overall, it appeared to be a well-built shed. The ground was made of long dark wood planks. Even the windows were still intact, except for a single one on the opposite side of the entry door. She thought this village had been evacuated a hundred years ago, with nobody coming back ever since, but maybe that assessment had been slightly inaccurate.

This was good. Theora didn’t waste any more time here and immediately made her way back to Dema. Meanwhile, she mentally prepared a list of things she needed. As already decided, gathering firewood and herbs, as well as finding a cup, were important, but perhaps didn’t make the very top of priorities.

Maybe she could find clothes somewhere in the village that were still usable. Theora also had some of her own casual clothes stored away in her layered coat. Then, she needed to look for blankets, or gather hay and twigs for a makeshift bed. Dema always slept on the ground. Rock was her favourite, actually.

But the ground and rocks were cold, and Theora did not want her to be cold right now.

Maybe she’d find a larger bowl to keep water in to wash her. And, maybe she’d find some food, like berries or roots. Dema had always been lazy about eating, because her regeneration solved her hunger problems for her, but those Skills were gone for now, so getting her food might be important.

She’d reached Dema in the meantime, and got a weak nod in reply to whether she could carry her. As she picked her up, Dema mumbled “Always” into her ear, and Theora couldn’t help but blush the tiniest amount.

After getting her up the hill and leaning her against the outside of the house, Theora left for her errands. She’d run them all over the village, so she’d positioned Dema in a way where she could oversee her walking from place to place. Perhaps that would make the little demon feel a bit better. After all, Dema had claimed once that she’d feel lonely without Theora.

While walking from house to house to find anything useful at all, Theora still tried her best to ignore that red notification dot staring at her from the edge of her vision.

And it wasn’t a notification related to her [Stargazer] Class. Concerning that, she had decided on how to go about it — and her decision was that she wouldn’t finalise a choice either way without first properly talking to Dema. It was unclear to Theora what exactly that talk would look like, or what she’d ask, but it felt somehow wrong to just go and do it. She still wasn’t sure whether she deserved it, but a selfish part of her wanted to take the Class, if only in the hopes of receiving more Skills to pad her sheet and eventually push out the glitches.

Only Skills usable in fights ended up merging into [Obliterate], and it wasn’t clear what types of Skills [Stargazer] would grant. It didn’t necessarily sound like a fighting Class from the description, but such things could be misleading. Either way, there was a chance changing her Class would help her receive new pretty and wonderful Skills like [Tea Brewing] and [Flower Language], so that gave her a reason to not outright dismiss it.

She’d have to give up on her current [Hero] Class in return, but that didn’t really matter to her whatsoever. She had long-since received all that was to gain from that Class.

The notification dot in her vision was about something else, though. It had nothing to do with her new Class, and everything to do with her quest rewards for slaying the Devil of Truth. For some reason, the System really, really wanted her to look at and obtain them. Why? It wasn’t very reasonable.

These rewards depended on one’s performance during the quests’ completion. And Theora had delivered an atrocious performance, quantifiably so. She’d slept almost the entire time the quest had been active, and then cleared it at the very last second. It was going to be a very bad reward either way, so why was the System being so adamant?

Still, she finally relented, and mentally opened the notification area while going through some old cupboards and collecting promising contents in a pouch of her coat.

She realised she was starting to get annoyed at the System again, so she just wanted to get this over with quickly. Why couldn’t it leave her alone with this? She didn’t care about the rewards.

The moment she saw her notification log, Theora stopped rummaging around and frowned. 

You have killed the Devil of Truth.

You have completed a Side Quest.

Rolling rewards…

Result: [Mythical Tier Reward Box]!

Do you wish to open?

That really did not make any sense.

Mythical was the highest possible reward tier. Even the highest Level side quests only rarely awarded those, and they definitely didn’t do it with poor performance. This was suspicious.

Of course, there was always a very slim chance to roll for a high reward even with poor performance or low level quests, but Theora had come to realise that when it came to her, just about nothing the System did was random. It seemed to allow itself some undue special treatment in this specific case. That kind of attention was very unnerving and uncomfortable, and it had blossomed further and further with Theora’s continued refusal to acknowledge her Main Quest.

In other words, this type of reward box was not a coincidence at all. She refused to believe it. The notification dot had been so obnoxious precisely because she was going to receive whatever was inside that box.

And thus, she opened it, and as the contents spilled out in the log in front of her, she realised what was going on.

You have received 25.000 Credits!

You have received 17.000 Points of Renown!

You have received 15 Skill Points!

Rolling final quest reward…

You have received an Orb of Seven Wishes!

An Orb of Seven Wishes. She’d used her last one a hundred years ago to gain the ability to fly for one day. With that, she’d rescued that young [Mage] who’d gotten trapped fighting Afterthoughts during the System outage she had caused back then.

The world came crashing down on Theora. It was like the System’s plan was unravelling itself in front of her mind’s eye.

This was awful. This was terrifying. She rushed out of the house. This really was not a coincidence at all. She needed to get back to Dema as quickly as she could. There was only one possible explanation as to why the quest rewards would contain an Orb of Seven Wishes, of all things.

The System was still trying to kill Dema.