Elrhain had one predominant thought.

‘Brainstorming is like, super hard!’

This usually smug little boy used to scoff at people like some know-it-all whenever someone complained that fiction writing was challenging. That talented or not, it drained the bloody lifeblood out of proper people faster than vampires.

‘Well, duh! That’s why you needed plans! Structures! Frameworks!’

Regarding wordsmithing, Elrhain’s mantra was simple.

Get a protagonist, describe a series of events taking place, and drop in some action, drama, romance, and sensory information for good measure.

There, one entire 367-page novel done.

All he had to do now was wait for all the fantastic publisher deals to come rolling in. Or, in this case, accolades of non-suspicion from his family.

He was dead wrong.

Agwyn made sure that his body and mind would never forget that fact.

For a few weeks straight, the little girl scrunched up her nose, tussling with one scenario after another, arguing with her inner muse and editor. She bounced, no, ricocheted off ideas between them and Elrhain until even the tiniest speck of information was not out of place.

She challenged every choice of how and why things happened in their story cum excuse, the narration they would offer to the adults. In general, she made Elrhain’s toddler brain feel miserable day in, day out.

It wasn’t like Elrhain felt physical pain throughout the ordeal. But there was no doubt that he was as stuffy as a mouldering potato. Because some might say, pain would have been better for his current situation.

Brainstorming for weeks, as it turned out, was just so damn boring!

Not the type of boring where he could spend the entire day lazing around, doing nothing. That was the satisfactory type of boring.

This was not it.

This was the type where he had to do something repeatedly without an option to quit, just to do the same thing the next day, week, and month. The type where he opened his game library full of video games but closed it again, thinking there was nothing to play.

Story writing, in general, was the wrong kind of boring.

Finally, after one death and thirty years in a new world, Elrhain could admit to the toxic netizens of Earth that becoming a fiction writer was just not for him.

Now he understood why writers were always so cranky near deadlines. The sheer will it took to slog on to write just five pages of consistent narrative was too much for a newbie like him. The old Alex Fischer might be able to bear it, but a toddler brained Elrhain could not.

Apparently, Agwyn could.

Ever since the noble gathering at the grand hall that day, the girl had become weird.

She was still her usual cute self, of course, playing and living the role of a sugar-brained little dumpling. But something about her words, her gestures, and her gaze cut deeper.

…. ever since the talk about suspicions and lies and deception they had in the grand hall that day.

With their minds linked inexplicably, Elrhain could feel the incongruity. He could make out a few of the reasons for the girl’s sudden shift in demeanour through her telepathic mood swings too. But whenever he tried to delve further into her psyche, the answers would twist, blend, and mix up into a mess of anxious terror.

People said writing fiction was good for the mind. But after much rumination, Elrhain decided that Agwyn’s strangely until-death-be-done drive to perfect this excuse was anything but healthy. It was the very culprit behind why her mental state was so turbid that even Elrhain could not force himself to spelunk it. Because even if he could not thoroughly read her mind word for word, her dark emotions were telling enough of the dangers that lurked within.

Agwyn needed a change of pace.

Thus, after the seventh time she had utterly revamped what their excuse would be based on, Elrhain, as tactfully as he could, suggested that the current story was good enough.

It wasn’t malicious deception, he meekly argued.

For their purpose, Agwyn and Elrhain didn’t need anything more ‘perfect’. They should stop for now and move on to more exciting things to explore in this brand-new life.

They had the time; they could mend every minor detail in their long-awaited future. The time to brood and anguish on the same thing for such a long time did not have to be now.

Agwyn snapped like hell had tickled her wrath.

***

「That part should be fine, right? You’ll just describe some experience you had in nuclear wasted settlements. They cannot possibly vet that.」

「No.」

「Come on! I really don’t see any reason to refine every dialogue ever uttered by the locals to such extremes when you, or rather, the you in the vision, visited their homes. That’s an unimportant detail, and I am a hundred percent sure no one will interrogate you on it. Gloss it over, ad-lib, or play cute and say you can’t remember for Collective’s sake.」

「That’s treachery!」

「Annie… remember when you said that occasionally, a white lie is better?」

Elrhain huffed, then plopped onto the bed while wiping his temples. The night full of dark yet gentle clouds hanging low in the atmosphere outside the window barred the starlight from coming in. A soft drizzle blanketed the auras of the day, and only the bite of a fresh breeze remained.

Maybe that’s why Elrhain didn’t realize something had gone wrong. He thought it was just the cold from the wind, the otherwise refreshing draft of the monsoon’s nature giving him a nervous shiver.

It wasn’t.

「…. Was it also a white lie when you say you wouldn’t mind marrying me?」

「Huh?」 Elrhain’s eyes popped open. He sat up with an unknown urgency he could not put his finger on, only to discover a fuming Agwyn with a face so violet it looked like she was asphyxiating. Her eyes stretched wider than any human possibly could, and the vine-like beautiful markings on her body seemed to wreath in rage.

「Annie?」

「… No, no. It’s fine. I actually acknowledged this then and there. But I didn’t intend to let my thoughts slip like that. Ahaha, of course, so stupid of me.」

「… Hello? Anyone there?」 Elrhain cautiously crept to her side despite his horror and waved a palm before her eyes.

Agwyn didn’t even blink. But her head jerked towards him like a robot, as if she was a surveillance camera zooming in on a pesky thief.

「Ellie.」 Her eyes returned to normal, and her voice gradually thawed. 「White lies… are fine between us. I won’t delude myself thinking you are suddenly head over heels for me, okay? We have time to forgive. It was… silly of me to get mad when I felt you compared the memory of that day when I finally landed a kiss on you with the inconsequential dilemma we face now.」

Elrhain gulped.

Indeed, he realized he had been a bit too liberal with the phrase ‘White lie’. The promise he made to trust in Agwyn that they would make this relationship work, to be with each other forever, was undoubtedly no lie, white or otherwise.

They were the only two souls who could talk about Late Night Collective Comedy and George Orwell in this vast world of desolation.

Books, movies, memories. Fun happenings from the four nations and the tragic states of the areas yet to be recovered from radioactivity.

The newest research, the latest drama before they were blown to smithereens.

For Elrhain, separating from Agwyn would be no better than death.

But was that feeling really love? Certainly, Elrhain loved her. He always did for the three decades before their death and the three cycles after.

As a friend, that is.

Whether romantic love can bloom in his heart is a matter of chance, will, and trial. And Elrhain could say for sure that he wished for it to blossom spectacularly with all his soul. No. He would make sure it will.

But that’s a story for the future.

Right now, at this moment, could Elrhain really look Agwyn in the eye and say he loved her as much as she loved him?

Saying yes would be a nasty, terrible, white lie.

It was an unpleasant thought. An answer to a question both Elrhain and Agwyn, as adult humans, knew very well. One Agwyn let slip in a moment of neglect because of her toddler body’s uncontrollable emotions.

Annamaria could keep things to herself despite her feelings. Agwyn was only three. Elrhain realized that the dark malevolence that he felt when reading her mind recently was nothing more than the chaotic thoughts of a toddler brain struggling to cope with the reality of an adult soul.

‘Wait, is this why she had been so frenzied about truth and deception recently?’ Elrhain wondered as his gaze on the little girl became complicated.

「It’s okay.」 The girl suddenly chuckled. But her expression was melancholic. 「It’s okay for us to try things, take chances and blindly trust. Annamaria has Alex, and I have you. But Ellie…. We are us, and we are not dhionne. Will… the clan be as forgiving? 」

Elrhain shook his head. With the memories of their past life and a telepathic connection, not to mention the depth of understanding they had built for each other through and beyond death, Elrhain and Agwyn were a unit of one.

Between the two of them, there were no secrets. But if they told someone else about their transmigration, then it was no longer a secret.

「Exactly.」 Agwyn nodded, reading his thoughts. 「That’s why we have to make this right. We have to explain the source of our esoteric knowledge in a way that our family won’t ever suspect us of soul possession or reincarnation. B-but then, the only way to do that is to lie!」

The girl tapped her cheeks while tilting her head.「 What a conundrum, Ellie. What to do, Ellie?」

She smiled, then touched Elrhain’s nose. The sight reminded him of a time before she had been betrayed, before being hurt by Naomi.

「But I don’t want to lie.」 Agwyn muttered. She looked down and positioned a cushion under her. Her voice was a low whisper; the overlayed Uorian conversation they were having on the outside was also no louder than a murmur.

None of them wanted to wake up the sleeping Cyra.

「Ellie, I love the clan. I love mommy, daddy, grandpa, Eluned, Dofnald and Auntie Lilian and Alleigh and Everyone! I don’t want to leave chances with them. Even if we lie and deceive, I don’t want to do a half-arsed job.」

「….」

「Hence, we correlate! We make our deception one that will turn into the truth as we live and grow on Earthloch. We tell them we saw lifelike, mystical, other-worldly lucid dreams of many things similar to what we read in the forgotten scrolls. Because that is true, the lucid dreams are true, and that we only saw ‘similar’, analogous events in our dreams is also true.

We tell them of so many unquantifiable events in our dreams that one single Dhionne, Faediaga, Naeman, Faediaval, or Abugan living on Fanas Diosca, unless she was a godlike Beyonder beyond the sky realm, cannot possibly encounter in her limited cycles of lifespan.

Moving pictures and fuzzy images from civilizations so foreign from each other all in one place, it is inconceivable to an average dweller of Fanas Diosca.

It’s as if we are dreaming through the eyes of not one person but many hundreds, thousands, and even millions. We just don’t tell them what virtual reality is, what the internet is. So that they can never suspect that the souls of their babies’ bodies are foreigners to this world.」