Letter from an Unknown Woman is a celebrated novel.
In it, Austrian author Stefan Zweig tells the story of a passionate, anguished, and undying unrequited love.
Near the end of the novel, Zweig describes the male protagonist's inner world like this:
"He felt as though an invisible door had swung open somewhere, and a cold draft was blowing in from another world into his silent room.
He felt death. He felt undying love.
A thousand tangled emotions surged through him at once, and he thought he could dimly make out the shape of that unseen woman — drifting and elusive, yet blazing with passion, like a strain of music carried in from somewhere far away."
And this — this was precisely what Caelus felt in that moment.
Because Stelle was among the fusion materials that formed Star-Kafka, the body of Star-Kafka shared the clearest and most complete empathic resonance with Caelus — a perfect, wordless synchrony that came alive at the slightest touch.
Kafka had been born on a world called Tianyi-V, a planet tainted by a Stellaron.
A Stellaron meant catastrophe. Every world it touched was brought to ruin in a different way — Jarilo-VI had the Eternal Freeze, the Xianzhou had the Mara disaster — but one thing was always the same: the emergence of a dimensional rift.
The particular disaster the Stellaron visited upon Tianyi-V was this: it erased the concept of fear from every living soul on that world.
Without fear, every person carried a hollow at the center of their being. Fall into it, and you would be consumed by desire and pleasure — transformed into something purely demonic.
To do as you pleased without restraint. To drown in slaughter, in greed, in the most primal and savage brutality.
Some refused that future for themselves — people who refused to become slaves to their desires. They banded together to fight back against the demons.
These were the so-called demon hunters.
Kafka was one of them.
It was the abilities Kafka displayed while hunting demons — and more importantly, a certain longing she let slip — that caught Elio's eye and led him to invite her into the Stellaron Hunters.
That longing was the wish to fill the emptiness in her soul, to repair the incompleteness of her self.
The Stellaron's corruption had taken root before she was even born — its influence had reached her in the womb. It could only be called a congenital deficiency.
Mending that void was never going to be simple.
The Potara Earrings — capable of fusing beings at the level of Supreme Kais and gods of destruction — carried a weight, a standing, a priority that transcended Stellarons entirely.
Fuse one soul with another complete soul, and the emotions of that complete soul would pour into the hollow and fill it.
The theory was sound. And in practice, it proved correct — but...
Caelus had overlooked one thing.
Both Stelle and himself were narcissists of a rather spectacular order — not ordinary vanity, but a narcissism so potent it was practically viral.
Anyone who fused with Stelle's or Caelus's female forms would, during the fusion state, be imprinted with that narcissism like a brand burned into the mind.
In a sense, Kafka was an exception — not exempt, but the opposite: rather than resisting even a fraction of it, she had actively drawn on that narcissistic energy to fill the hollow in her soul.
The result was that the synthesized Star-Kafka had narcissistic energy in such abundance it practically overflowed.
The kiss itself hadn't been long — yet the wordless resonance that came with physical contact made Caelus feel, over the course of barely two minutes, as if he were utterly, helplessly submerged.
The emotions stirring in him now were eerily like that moment in the novel when the girl first encounters the writer she has secretly loved for so long.
At the beginning of the story, the heroine says: "My life began on the day I first knew you."
It is a love that runs all the way to the bone.
The instant Kafka became Star-Kafka, the hollow in her soul was filled. For the first time, her self was complete.
It was the feeling of truly being alive. When Star-Kafka opened her eyes and found Caelus before her, it was the same as when Stelle had first opened her eyes on the Herta Space Station and found Kafka.
Her life — truly and genuinely — had begun on the day she met Kafka.
Enveloped in that tender, aching devotion that felt as though it could dissolve both body and soul, Caelus responded without meaning to.
Blade stared blankly at the man and woman before him. His mouth began to tremble. His jaw slowly, shakily unhinged — like Teacher Tom receiving a devastating shock — and fell with a clang. His entire mind went blank.
What in the actual hell are you doing?!
What — you two are for REAL?!
Is this a Mara-struck hallucination or is this actually happening?
I can't tell! I genuinely cannot tell!
Just as Blade was considering drawing his blade on himself or on the two of them — anything to jolt someone back to reality — the beautiful woman with pale violet hair parted her vermilion lips.
"[Spirit Whisper] — Bladie, go keep watch outside for me. Don't let anyone come near."
That gentle voice carried an inexplicable authority. Blade's eyes flew wide open. He watched as the pale-violet-haired beauty's deep, dark-jade eyes lit up like torches, burning molten gold, carrying in them the breath of ancient, immemorial years.
Blade knew: this was Kafka's Spirit Whisper.
In the past, every time he had slipped into a Mara-struck state, Kafka would use her Spirit Whisper to help him suppress it.
But this Spirit Whisper was entirely different from those. It wasn't a psychic compulsion that hounded the mind toward death — it felt as though it had transformed into a power of an entirely different order. He could offer no resistance at all.
With something in his heart that felt like Imbibitor Lunae had been visited upon him, Blade — expression utterly blank, Shard Sword cradled in his arms — walked out of the courtyard that smelled so thoroughly of ordinary life.
Snap—!
Star-Kafka snapped her fingers.
Pale violet light bloomed and spread like a spider's web, draping over the entire courtyard.
The surroundings blurred — for less than a second — then returned to normal.
"There. No one will disturb us now."
The smile at the corner of the pale-violet-haired beauty's lips was full and warm.
"Uh — what exactly are we about to do?"
Caelus had the inexplicable sense he had become a Tang Monk dragged back into the Spider Cave by a spider demoness — webs in every direction, those dark eyes winding around him like bindings.
"Why, give me a better experience, of course. [Spirit Whisper] — Caelus — fill me up~"
Stelle's playful mischief and cherubic cheek blended perfectly with Kafka's elegance and enchantment.
The Spirit Whisper fell on his ear like a breath. Caelus's feelings were rather complicated — but there was no time to sort them out. His body moved on its own, no longer entirely his to command.
Arms wrapped around the beauty. He kissed her, deeply.
Shimmering silver threads swayed in the air. The door of the small room swung shut.
Star-Kafka, carrying Stelle's memories, was well aware of the mechanism: the earring fusion could only last one hour.
And so, in the pursuit of filling a certain expandable bag-shaped container to capacity within that limited window of time, Star-Kafka resorted to every means available — including, without the slightest scruple, her Spirit Whisper.
Such as: "Caelus, [Spirit Whisper] — your body's senses will be ten times more sensitive."
"[Spirit Whisper] — ■ it out!"
"[Spirit Whisper] — give it to me, now~"
Fortunately, Caelus's body had been purpose-built to house a Stellaron — even without one inside, it was beyond the reach of any ordinary human's constitution.
A normal person put through this regimen would almost certainly expire.
This was no longer a matter of wringing someone dry.
This was squeezing from the outside in.
Star-Kafka and Caelus shared complete physical empathy — with Caelus's sensitivity amplified tenfold, she felt every echo of it, riding doubled pleasure at every peak.
It was well past ordinary intoxication.
Caelus felt that one hour stretch longer and more exhausting than an entire ordinary night — though naturally, the pleasure it held was an equal match.
With loading and firing at such relentless frequency, the vanishingly unlikely event of a critical timing overlap was stretched wide — and in the instant Star-Kafka dissolved, it replicated a variation on the double-slit experiment, just as it had when March-Stelle had dissolved before.
Caelus lay on the bed, breathing hard, with the purple-haired beauty and the silver-haired girl resting against him on either side after their dissolution.
The tall, breathtakingly lovely woman pressed her slender body directly against his, her lips parting slightly, a languid and bewitching warmth exhaled with every breath.
"Hey — are you... okay?"
Stelle rolled over, indifferent to the way the softness at her chest pressed and deformed against Caelus's. She had long since built up an immunity.
Barring exceptional circumstances, it was genuinely difficult for her to feel anything as banal as embarrassment around Caelus-cub.
He was herself, after all. Why would doing something comfortable with herself be a reason for embarrassment? (Chest out. Proud. jpg)
"...Give me a moment to collect myself."
She could feel warmth pooling at the junction of her thighs. Kafka felt completely, utterly numb.
Never in her life had she experienced an emotional upheaval of this magnitude.
It was the accumulation of so many factors at once, she supposed.
As for the result — she had no regrets. In the past hour, she had genuinely, truly experienced the feeling of being filled. Yes — in every sense of the word.
Fullness. Wholeness. Vividness. Heat...
That was exactly what she had joined the Stellaron Hunters to find.
This was good. Very good.
Only the price of it was somewhat... difficult to measure.
One other thing that made Kafka's brain boil was the sheer fluency with which Stelle and Caelus handled this kind of thing. Just how many times had you two done this?!
You two are the same person, aren't you?
Why would you do this kind of thing — with yourself?!
Even by the standards of the demons on Tianyi-V, who had abandoned all restraint to the rule of desire, this was an act far ahead of its time. Even Kafka's famously unflappable composure was shaken to the core.
If she had learned this under ordinary circumstances, Kafka thought, the hollow in her soul would very likely have grown wider.
But in the end — returning to herself.
A fractured soul and a fractured self did not mean Kafka was without feeling — that she knew nothing of love or liking, that she was a stranger to joy or sorrow. Her emotions were simply far more muted than a normal person's.
Stelle, to her, was something different.
The Stellaron Hunters followed Elio's script with absolute fidelity. Every detail written in it had to be enacted exactly as prescribed. Everything the script did not address was, by definition, inconsequential.
Yet when she had gone to awaken Stelle on the Herta Space Station — with the script explicitly stating she must not make contact with the Astral Express — she had still, on one of the rare occasions it had ever happened, acted on a small, willful impulse. She had talked with Stelle. For a long, long time.
She didn't know why Stelle had split off a Caelus — but once she understood the two were one and the same, Kafka treated them with exactly the same regard.
She thought of them often.
In the middle of missions.
When she accidentally got a stain on her coat.
The only thing she wanted Stelle and Caelus to remember was this: no matter where they went, no matter which corner of the Galaxy they found themselves in — there would always be a shelter waiting for them here, with her.
Her patience was not limitless. But for these two, she would never begrudge a single drop of it.
At the very beginning, when Elio had entrusted Stelle to her, he had said: if they continued along the course of the future he had foreseen, Stelle would eventually change her — and she would change Stelle.
In other words, she and Stelle were each other's fate.
And now, the future that had once been fixed was being disturbed by something unknown.
But...
Her head resting on Caelus's chest, Kafka turned her gaze slowly and looked out through the glass at the world beyond the window.
The tiny, delicate petals on the osmanthus tree. The wisps of cloud drifting overhead. The old green flagstones of the lane. The gourd ornament hanging on the wall. A fashion magazine lying half-open. A coat sleeve caught and lifted by the wind...
One word, to sum it all up.
Realness.
The fusion had dissolved — but something that had flowed into her soul during the merged state seemed to linger still.
Faint as a trick of the imagination.
Like luggage left behind somewhere along a journey. Like ice dissolving in a fizzing drink — seemingly beyond recovery, yet somehow still within reach.
The tumbling, wind-tossed current of her thoughts went still. Kafka gradually came back to herself. She looked up at the two pairs of golden eyes gazing at her with quiet concern — violet in layered gradients, like fine glass, shimmering softly with every shift of emotion.
"I am grateful..."
She raised one slender arm, and pulled Stelle and Caelus close — the way you would hold something precious, something rare.
In ordinary circumstances, even without a stitch of clothing between them, even pressed skin to skin, Kafka felt none of a young girl's shyness. It wasn't so much that she lacked desire — it was more accurate to say that she had long since trained herself to suppress it by reflex.
To keep from becoming a demon.
"...That I have you both."
His chest pressed against her fullness, Caelus could feel it — Kafka's heartbeat was quiet and unhurried. But in this particular moment, it was beating with an uncommon, undeniable strength.
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