Chapter 1011: 1011 Divine Game: Player Relic 14

Above Shadow.Q, on the upper right, sat Avery.

She rested in a tall chair, scepter in hand, half her face and half her body swallowed by darkness.

That silhouette alone was enough.

To Rita, no one embodied the symbol of Eclipse Vanguard more completely than Avery.

These five figures occupied most of the central-left region of the canvas.

Rita left a narrow strip of empty space above them—no wider than a hand—and a vast expanse of blank canvas beneath them, taking up nearly one-third of the page.

She rinsed her brush, mixed new pigment, and returned to Shadow.Q and Avery’s side.

On Avery’s right, she painted the alchemy shop.

Apache sat by the window, looking outward.

Worry and regret dimmed her gaze.

A glass of Ice Snow Windbell sat untouched on her desk.

Through another window inside the shop, little Kayden stood behind the counter, holding a cluster of falling-star motes in both hands, marveling at their shimmer.

She was speaking to someone standing across from her—someone the partition wall conveniently concealed.

The alchemy shop perched atop a tree, and beneath it sat Maple Syrup, Maple Cang, and Maple Burn.

The three had gathered around a wooden table, drinking butterbeer and crunching warm biscuits.

Young Maple Syrup and Maple Cang looked toward the far left of the canvas—toward Zoey’s rebirth.

Only Maple Burn rested her chin on her hand, eyes lifted heavenward, gazing at the undead mentor above.

Rita dipped her brush again and returned to the shop’s doorway.

A moon-fox stepped outside, right hand holding a book titled Four Seasons Moon & Potionry, Volume Two, left hand gently twirling a single mahjong tile.

Mistblade.

If Rita had been able to reach World Graveyard and the Divine Game at all, it was inseparable from this fox of fortune.

Because of the angle she walked out from, Mistblade stood naturally closer to "the viewer," and her nine tails—difficult to render even with Rita’s boosted talent—spread wide, taking up most of the central space of the painting.

Only a small pocket of empty canvas remained between her figure and the blank space below.

From her potion book drifted tiny crimson dandelions.

They fell into that small gap of space.

Within the field of Crimson Dandelion, Rita painted Thorn of Spite and Winter Sea · Frenzied Shark.

Without their involvement, she would never have reached this point.

And Frenzied Shark—

that was the greatest setback of her new life.

But rather than paint him in the moment he truly wounded her, she chose a different version—

the one seated at the table inside GodDraw77, the moment he whispered, "I was betrayed by my own kind."

His posture slumped, face blurred with sorrow.

Though the two of them occupied only a small portion of the lower canvas, the sweeping breadth of Thorn of Spite and Frenzied Shark stretched horizontally, wider even than Mistblade.

And so a river of time slanted across the center of the canvas.

She painted the moon crown sinking at the riverbed.

Painted a bruublue-spotted fish bursting from the current.

Painted an empty little boat drifting in silence.

The boat glided downriver—

to the farthest edge—

and someone stepped off.

A black cloak billowed behind her, blown by the rushing wind.

It drifted to the prow.

Following the cloak upward, an elf woman with long ash-white hair turned her head as if someone had called out to her.

Her gray-blue eyes were cold, impatient, unwelcoming.

Two of her fingers pinched a crumpled letter.

She was the hardest figure to draw, and also the largest in the entire painting.

To capture the precise emotion in her eyes—to portray an elf’s beauty accurately—Nivalis paced in circles, chasing her own tail repeatedly.

Ahead of her walked Ash Cinders, dark hair flowing, gaze gentle as she glanced toward the viewer.

Well... she was difficult to paint too.

Further ahead waited Wail, hands tucked behind her back.

Their destination was a colossal tree that seemed to shade the entire sky.

Beneath it sat five Moonlight Marsh backpacks and four young apprentices—

Maple Syrup, Mistblade, Fat Goose, Motorcycle.

All of them looked upward at the enormous tree canopy, as though speaking to someone hiding inside.

Unlike Fat Goose and Motorcycle, Maple Syrup and Mistblade stood farther back, weapons in hand.

Faded Homeland circled Maple Syrup.

Mistblade’s long blade shimmered with red light.

From the branches above, a pale hand dangled downward, holding a wine glass filled with shimmering golden liquid—like drifting sand.

In the blank space to the right, Rita painted the lake of Moonlight Marsh.

Into the water she tossed every player she had no place for earlier:

MarmangCrab, MarmangCub, TingoJE—

Snow Crabs, Sea Horses, Whales.

By the lakeshore sat Pine Bloom and Lidian, back-to-back.

Beside them sat Nivalis, hugging her tail, and B8017913 standing with arms crossed, both staring at Rita with accelerating impatience.

Rita lowered her eyes and smiled.

In the upper-left corner of the canvas, she painted a white-gold helm—Cat’s Ideal.

The golden filigree shone brightly like sunlight.

One helm spoke curled into a white-boned serpent tail.

Black Jade’s skeletal body stretched across the sky, emerging from the clouds, heading toward the upper-right corner.

Was she important?

Very.

Everyone on this canvas, saint or monster, had moved her in some way—even Black Jade.

In the upper-right corner she inked Wrathful Moon, its lantern-like vessel glowing with soft moonlight.

At last, her brush descended into the vast remaining blank space below.

From the far-right, she began painting a dragon.

Nivalis sprawled below it—her sweeping blue tail curling across almost the entire width of the canvas, reaching the far-left side.

Her serpentine body passed Moonlight Marsh, the river of time, Crimson Dandelion, High Tower, BS.

Her tail ended at a small Scrap Heap in the bottom-left corner.

Atop the heap sat two small robots—B80234615 and L12185511.

At the foot of the heap rested a smaller robot hugging a pouch of broken capsule shells—L175246.

Along the dragon’s tail ran a White Bear with a capsule machine strapped to its back, chasing an Orchid Mantis.

They treated the tail like a 1-Bamboo path.

And at the end of that path, beneath Nivalis’ wings, stood a tiny human silhouette with her back turned.

She wore a white-gold coat, long hair loose, left hand hanging down—

and in that hand, gripped a white-gold revolver wreathed in crimson mist.

Despite her fierce attire, she was tiptoeing, stretching her arm upward, reaching toward the elf’s crumpled letter.

Her fingertip was only a breath away.

A butterfly woven entirely from golden light spiraled around her outstretched fingers—

its glowing trails unmistakably coming from the gun in her hand.

With that, the final major figure was finished.

She spent the rest of her time tracing star paths and cosmic dust—patterns she had glimpsed in the river of time—across the remaining sky.

When she finally set down her brush, her hand fell limp, the handle slipping from her fingers.

To finish within the time limit she had invoked time-stop seven times, endured multiple exclusive penalties, and survived several bizarre moments where every stroke drained her life and mana simultaneously.

Nivalis and B8017913 stared, wide-eyed and breathless before the canvas.

Minutes passed in stillness.

At last Nivalis whispered, "What’s it called?"

Rita smiled faintly.

"Falling Starry Sky."