Deceitful Bloom stormed off.

Before leaving, she somehow produced a carrot from who knew where and hurled it at BS Rita with all her strength.

Ash Inspector: [You were talking about me.]

StarseaPrisoner: "Stop exposing everything. And stop analyzing everything."

Ash Inspector: [I can stop exposing things. But analysis is my nature.]

Fair enough.

Rita wasn’t really in a position to set rules for a B80 she’d only known for nine days.

Holding the carrot, she fell into thought.

A serious question had occurred to her.

Why did B80 remember absolutely nothing about the past?

Or had it divided all of its programs apart and lost those memories in the process?

Either way, it pointed to the same conclusion.

Ash Inspector had forgotten her.

And Rita was certain that the stories between B80 and herself were not insignificant fragments from some distant past.

If each prison had eventually been transformed into a world.

If the prison keys had become the worlds’ moons.

If each cell had become the starter room of Divine Game.

If Starsea had become the PvP zone and Quiet Mountain the PvE zone.

Then what about all those countless Mechanoids?

Those little robots that maintained every Divine Game...

Did they all originate from Ash Inspector?

StarseaPrisoner: "Whenever a Prisoner enters an Inspector Game, is the inspector they meet a part of you?"

Ash Inspector: [Yes.]

Ash Inspector: [Other than the Prisoners, I am the only one here.]

Then...

Why did all those little robots end up abandoned in the Wasteland?

Why was the system designed that way?

Why were some programs discarded simply because they developed emotions?

Why were they thrown into the Wasteland to pile up into Scrap Heaps?

Why were they left staring at Moon No. 1 for year after year, fighting boredom and loneliness with nothing but thought?

Ash Inspector: [You are analyzing me.]

StarseaPrisoner: "There you go exposing things again."

"And this is called thinking."

Ash Inspector: [You are thinking about me.]

Ash Inspector: [What are you thinking about?]

StarseaPrisoner: "The place where I met B80."

"And why you don’t remember me."

"Did splitting the Law Program make it impossible to preserve certain data?"

Ash Inspector: [I do not know the answer.]

Ash Inspector: [When I calculate it, I will tell you.]

Rita didn’t press further.

She wanted to find the answer herself.

Day 12 of the Adjudicator Game.

The number of conquered prisons had reached ninety-nine.

The prisons floated throughout Starsea like scattered sections of a dismantled Rubik’s Cube.

Bridges made of platinum white pages connected them all.

Rita now controlled over a hundred million points of soul fire.

The presence radiating from World Sigh had become increasingly vast and imposing.

Whenever she summoned the book, many beings could no longer approach her at all.

This time, Rita intended to invade fifty prisons simultaneously.

Fortunately, she had plenty of pages.

The opening Sigh pages from every world had once formed the Bridge of Sighs connecting the Twelfth Epoch to the Third Epoch.

Now, those stories had become bridges connecting prison to prison throughout the Third Epoch.

Without them, many players who couldn’t fly would have had no way to reach other prisons.

While Rita was busy building bridges, Mistblade suddenly sighed.

Then she turned toward BS Rita.

"You know, back when you snuck into my library to steal books, I told you to grab one from a shelf."

"You had to cling to the bookshelf and climb your way up just to reach it."

Rita’s face immediately heated up.

She glanced left and right.

There were people everywhere.

Lightchaser.

Cinders.

Maple Syrup.

All of them were looking at her with suspiciously amused expressions.

Instantly embarrassed, she snapped:

"Why would you bring that up?!"

Mistblade looked completely justified.

"What’s wrong with saying it?"

"We’re all friends here."

"There aren’t any outsiders around."

"Who here doesn’t already know your embarrassing history?"

Lightchaser nodded.

"I know the most."

Rita replied with a dry laugh.

"That’s completely false."

"My record is spotless."

Lightchaser spoke with absolute seriousness.

"The child raised on fresh blood."

Cinders suddenly looked enlightened, as though recalling an ancient legend.

"Ah."

"The legendary Undying Phoenix."

Rita: "..."

"That was all the Oak Owl’s fault!"

She immediately threw a handful of pages forward, spun the ship’s wheel, and vanished from this horrifying prison cell.

"???" Maple Syrup, who had somehow become collateral damage, looked offended.

"I didn’t even get to say, ’May neither of us ever regret our choices.’"

Mistblade rubbed her chin.

For a moment she felt she might have lost.

Then she suddenly remembered something.

"Wait."

"Besides turning into a Moonfox and fooling me, she also disguised herself as a goblin and tricked me into handing over gem recipes."

"Do you have pictures?"

"The wanted posters in Lania Kaia do."

"When we get back, I’m finding them and sharing them."

"Everyone should get a copy."

"Absolutely."

"Agreed."

...

Rita was still sulking while conquering cells when one of the Flower Crown Murders tucked above her ear suddenly lit up.

Before leaving, she had given another Flower Crown Murder petal to Undead Wildfire.

Now that petal was transmitting a message.

Apparently, Undead Wildfire had something important to tell her.

Rita immediately finished her battle as quickly as possible.

After defeating the Prisoner, she answered the call.

The softly glowing petal rested between her fingers.

Undead Wildfire’s voice emerged from within.

"I don’t know how long it’ll take for this message to reach you."

"But just now, on the ninth day after Adjudicator started the game..."

"B80’s voice echoed across the skies of every world on my side."

"It was shouting, ’BS Rita!’"

"What exactly did you do to it?"

The recording sounded distorted.

The speech was slightly slowed.

This message had clearly come from some unknown point in time.

The fact that it had traveled across such a vast stretch of history through the path Rita left behind was already remarkable.

Undead Wildfire likely understood how difficult it was to send messages through time.

So she got straight to the point.

After only a few short sentences, the glow faded from the petal.

B80?

Shouting?

What?

Rita immediately recalled the strange palpitation she had felt on Day Nine.

What exactly had happened?

StarseaPrisoner: "Did you do something?"

Ash Inspector: [What?]

StarseaPrisoner: "Did you do something to B80?"

Ash Inspector: [Stop exposing everything.]

Ash Inspector: [And stop analyzing everything.]