Chapter 8: I am a relationship guru.

“Lord Joshua, what are you talking about…”

CocoLiss looked at the golden-haired Hero who kept pressing closer in front of her.

They had already been quite close, but now he was almost pressed right up against her face.

Heaven and earth as witness, she really didn’t have any abyssal creations on her.
The pitch-black stick-like object from the town church earlier had already been thrown away by her.
Her repeated attempts to evade the guards’ inspection at the gate were only to prevent her abyssal kin identity from being discovered.

“I don’t want to repeat myself a second time.”
The youth’s eyes carried a trace of coldness. “Don’t think your identity as the Saintess will bring you much protection. As long as it’s someone entangled with the Abyss, I don’t mind executing a future traitor for the royal capital right here and now.”

“Lord Joshua…”

“Tch…”
The youth’s right hand glowed, and then the golden light spread across CocoLiss’s entire body.

It felt like slowly sinking into a bathtub, the sensation of being fully immersed from head to toe.

It was very warm, very comfortable.

Except for one anomaly.

From the pocket of her inner garment, a black notebook floated out.
The black aura swirling around it prevented the warm yellow light from advancing even an inch.

“What is this?”
He asked, but his hands had already opened the small notebook that looked like a diary.

The girl’s heart rose to her throat.

That was the item left behind by her pre-amnesia self—the thing that had informed her of her current abyssal kin identity.

If this thing could be destroyed, if the writing on it could be erased, and if it didn’t even bear her own signature, how could she possibly have kept it hidden and carried it with her?

Even her attempt to reach out and snatch it back was restrained in place by the warm yellow light.

She couldn’t even mobilize a single trace of magic power.

It seemed her abyssal kin identity was about to be exposed.

From what the Hero had just said, it wasn’t hard to imagine what her future outcome would be.

It looked like CocoLiss was about to die for real.

“It’s clearly an empty notebook, yet it carries the aura of the Abyss…”
Joshua frowned. “Why are you carrying this thing with you?”

Hm?

Empty?

CocoLiss raised her head. The restraints on her limbs did not stop her from looking at the open pages in front of her.

There were clearly words on it, and they were in her own familiar handwriting.

So now that the Hero said there were no words, there were two possibilities.

One was that the Hero had defected to the enemy.

That possibility was ruled out first.

Therefore, the words on this notebook could only be seen by her.

It wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t discovered this earlier. How could she have dared to show this thing to anyone other than herself before?

What needed to be explained now was only why she was carrying something that clearly carried abyssal aura on her person.

She didn’t need just any reasonable lie. She needed a lie that the golden-haired Hero in front of her would believe.

“This is… the last thing my mother left me…”

CocoLiss remembered clearly that the youth in front of her had said almost all the important people in his life had died at the hands of the Abyss. She might as well start from there.

She paused, letting a belated choked sob catch up with her ethereal voice.

“My mother was… by the Abyss…”

The more one spoke, the more mistakes one made, so CocoLiss stopped there. But the information conveyed was already enough.

As expected, the golden-haired Hero’s expression turned nearly dazed, then shifted several times.

“I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to doubt you.”
It was obvious that for this young youth, comforting a girl with a choked voice was quite difficult.

It would have been easier for him to face an enemy.

After apologizing for quite a while, he hurriedly tried to return the black notebook in his hands to her. Only then did he remember to release the restraints on her body.

A glint flashed in CocoLiss’s eyes. The moment the restraints were lifted, she collapsed weakly to the ground.

She lowered her head. The hanging white hair covered the girl’s face, while her hands also shielded a pair of eyes that were clearly bright and lively despite being slightly reddened.

“Here, take it back.”
Joshua knelt on one knee and handed the black notebook to the girl. “Really… I’m sorry…”

“It’s alright, Lord Joshua.”
The girl gently shook her head.

Her originally ethereal voice, now hoarse with sobs, sounded like a fragile, shattered porcelain vase—pitiful enough to arouse sympathy.

When she raised her head, amid the snow-white complexion, there was a touch of red—swollen, reddened eye sockets that seemed to still hold back tears ready to spill out.

“I just remembered what my mother looked like before… and lost control for a moment.”
As she spoke, she lowered her eyes like a young girl missing her family.

Seeing this scene, the guilt in Joshua’s eyes clearly deepened.

Although the Saintess who had descended from nowhere had, during their first meeting, been attempting wild acts with a self-made abyssal creation.

But she was still human after all. Having desires was normal and did not prove that her heart was filthy.

On the contrary, she, like him, harbored a towering hatred toward the Abyss.

No matter what, he should not have doubted her, nor should he have torn open her scars.

At the root of it all, she was just a kind little girl who had lost her family because of the Abyss, who had endured who knows how many hardships alone to reach this point, and who still maintained such goodness.

“If there is anything you need from me, feel free to ask.”

He couldn’t give anything concrete, so he could only make this promise as compensation. This promise carried enough weight, or perhaps it was because he saw the girl in front of him as sharing the same misfortune.

Although she had violated who knows how many rules of conduct for church nuns, although she wore a mask of dignity and virtue, although he always felt she had some hidden thoughts.

But that did not mean she had made any principled error leaning toward the Abyss.

She was simply a girl who was good at using a mask to cover her fragility and sadness, and whose scars had now been torn open by him.

“Lord Joshua…”
CocoLiss stood up and bowed to the golden-haired Hero in front of her. “Thank you very much, but I still want to rely on my own efforts to fulfill the role of Saintess.”

The guilt in the golden-haired Hero’s eyes grew even deeper.

The lowered beautiful hair concealed the girl’s swollen, reddened eyes.

It also concealed the slight arc at the corner of her mouth.

Yes, exactly like this.

What Hero? With two lifetimes of experience plus this pitiable, delicate body, even she herself was afraid of what she was capable of. She felt she could become the kind of bad woman who would deceive the youth in front of her completely and leave him with lifelong regret.

Unfortunately, right now she only wanted to avoid exposing her abyssal kin identity and being executed on the spot.

“I’ll take you to your residence.”

At this moment, the Hero finally seemed to notice that being alone with a young woman in a room was definitely not a good thing to spread around, especially for the kind girl in front of him.

The Saintess’s residence had already been prepared.

CocoLiss nodded gently and only then accepted the black notebook from Joshua’s hands.

She was about to follow the golden-haired Hero’s steps under the moonlight when she suddenly froze just as she was about to put the notebook away.

Why was there an extra page?

Originally there had only been a single simple page explaining her identity. Now there was an additional page that could be opened.

It was still in the familiar handwriting, but the content was different.

[I decided to start my diary from today, because today I picked up a pitiful little guy who had been abandoned by the roadside with no one to care for him. As his current guardian, the first thing I should do is give him a good name to match his beautiful golden hair. Let’s call him……]

It was cut off.

No matter what, the next page could not be opened, just like the previous single page of identity explanation.

CocoLiss had never hated her own cliffhanger-writing self so much.