[Rewrite] Chapter 3: Promised Wish

Tavja froze, plate in hand, the smile dying at the corners of her mouth.

‘Fuck! That’s right! I’m in a devil temple…’

Not from a union birth. But a ritual bowl. The old method. From essence gathered from the lower races desires; condensed, refined, offered up until a supreme infant surfaces from the black sleep.And of course… the temple’s owner would be watching a successful spawn.

‘S-she saw the stars on my back. If she tries to collar me with a contract-’

Memory corrected her panic. Her encounter was Gula, The Queen of Feasts. In every account she could remember, she was peculiar rather than cruel. She didn’t bind devils without cause, she didn’t care to kill her own, and conflict ranked below appetizers on her list of priorities. If a problem did not taste like something, she would set her eyes past it.

So Tavja concluded.

Comfort and inconvenience arrived together. Not kindness, Tavja reminded herself, just priorities. If gluttony was satisfied, the rest of the world could be ignored. Most likely, Gula wouldn’t harm her. But she wouldn’t help her either. No backer today it seemed. Only an audience.

So the gaze fixed on her now was not malice, only hunger killing time.

A dinner show more than anything else.

Tavja set the plate down and turned to face the statue.

The statue’s head was forward again, crown centered, eyes on the bowl. Tavja narrowed her eyes. Had she imagined the tilt? No, the energy lingering in the air was proof enough.

Her body had already adjusted, her devilish awareness widened, subtle filaments in her nerves tugging whenever this new energy brushed close. A sixth sense she hadn’t possessed an hour ago.

Mana.

And the idol was full of it. The whole chamber breathed with it. She felt the flow like a new sense coming online, warm air on skin that had never known wind until now.

‘Magic,’ she thought, oddly sure. ‘Familiar. Like heat from a stove you never touched but always knew.’

The apex of devils was not an empty title. As a six-star, her adaptation had already begun. She didn’t need proof to know the statue was alive. Perception rose and refined. She could not explain how she knew it was alive, only that certainty gathered cleanly with her instincts.

She walked closer and looked up. The angle should have set their eyes to meet. Yet they didn’t. The eyes looked down into the bowl, not at her.

“…”

“…”

“Maybe I imagined it.”

She chose to feign ignorance and ignore the voyeur. She knew how to read a room. If the Archdevil wanted to play ornament, she would let her.

‘Fine. Keep pretending then.’ 

She turned away, filing the knowledge down. She ignored the partial perception of a triumphant smirk on the statue's face. She wouldn’t get baited, there would be time for Gula later. 

Information first. Everything else later. The habits of a shut-in who had spent her life consuming web novels became her sharpest weapon here. She adjusted quickly, faster than fear wanted her to. The panic of being born again was gone; what remained was curiosity, calculation, and a dark thrill she didn’t dare name. 

Years of reading, arguing, and fantasizing had trained her psyche into one of an isekai super soldier! Her subconscious could feel it. 

Or perhaps… 

She was always like this…

Her pink irises tilted another degree. She smiled and refocused her thoughts.

Since there seemed to be no immediate blade coming down on her. That meant the optimal path could be drawn now, not after.

‘Now for the obvious, the initial checks.’

Her golden finger. The rite of every transmigrated soul.

‘System.’ She thought.

…Silence.

‘Status!’ A little louder in her mind.

… Nothing.

‘O-options?’ She threw out.

…Pointless.

“Tch!” She clicked her tongue. ‘So the gift was being a devil.’

It wasn’t a complaint. She liked the body, liked the stars on her back, liked the new edges in her sharp senses. But in her new perfect fantasy life, Tavja planned to be greedy. If the heroes in the story received systems as standard kit, why should she not demand one too? If they cheated, she would cheat harder.

She caught the statue in her periphery and almost laughed. In the story, few pure devils were allowed stage time and none played a main role. They appeared, drew attention, then exited to rowdy applause or to bitter ash, often because a protagonist read their traits and built a trap with the help of a status screen. Tavja found that the most annoying. A superior race constantly defeated by the lower realm because of some MC reading their stats and knowing their skills.

In fact, the amount of losses sustained from the devils by such methods led to most of them retreating back to the gates of Hellnia directly after its showy reopening.

She shook her head, Ironic. So many devils got played like a damn fiddle.

And Gula, Lilith rest her soul, had been played the hardest, one of the worst casualties. Baited. Exploited. Reduced to a cautionary tale because someone else had read the script first.

Even without being a ‘malicious entity’, Gula died rather pitifully in the story. All because an MC took advantage of knowing her special abilities.

“Another victim of Damien and his racist lovers.” Tavja murmured.

Hatred folded neatly inside her tone. His name was static in her mind. He and his harem, avatars of arrogance wearing righteousness like perfume. They would not ruin her path.

She found a large soup bowl, inspected it, weighed the clay, nodded, and carried it back to the altar. Without missing a beat, she dipped it into the golden bowl’s black mirror-like lake. Under Gula’s hidden yet curious gaze, Tavja filled the bowl in the black liquid, Essence of Desire clinging to the rim and her wrist like oil with opinions.

She then turned, pouring it onto the stone before the altar and spreading it around. The statue’s lips almost twitched. 

Tavja ignored that as her hands moved with the steadiness of someone copying from a page only she could see. Lines nested in circles, circles in bands, bands in sentences. Strokes with no wasted flourish, a language of concentric truth.

Her memory felt brighter than it used to be, sharper. Not like learning. Like remembering where she had left something she always owned. Everything was there, as clear as the day she filed it away. She simply retrieved it now, without the hazy stroll of finding a memory of a memory to remind her what she had once remembered.

If she had spared the statue a glance, she would have seen Gula tilt her head, curiosity overtaking hunger. Few infants drew like this. Fewer still understood what they were writing. Fewer than few had any business using temple essence as ink.

~~~

Gula watched the girl draw with a bit of wonder.

‘Has this child already awakened her ancestral knowledge?’

A pulse had disturbed her old dining hall, so she had looked in, ready to swat a rat from Greed if they had breached her ward and siphoned essence to spawn a clutch of petty accountants. Instead, a pink-haired devil girl had hauled herself out of the bowl and blinked at the world like it owed her a second try.

Not a Greeder. Thank the palate. No greed devils had pink hair and eyes, and typically a greed devils facial appearance was rather… well, below average compared to others of the devil race. But this little one would be extraordinary even among her own kin. Beauty in devils did not shock Gula, but this was not the common heat of Luxuria or the cold clarity of Superbia. This was symmetry with an otherworldly edge, a face that would draw worship whether it wanted it or not.

Quite pretty indeed.

Gula could easily tell that when she became older, her appearance would most likely have no rival. She felt a pang of jealousy thinking that, but she also couldn’t help but admire such a doll-like face.

‘Luxuria branch?’ Maybe. Then she slapped herself like an Invidia with mental compulsions. Then she examined herself like a Superbia logging assets. Then she wrote like an Acedia when Acedia forgot to pretend to be lazy.

An odd little thing.

The more she watched, the more intrigued… and confused she became. She had heard of only a handful of devils that deviated from the norms of newborns. She remembered hearing of another in particular, hundreds of years ago, that baffled Superbia in her temple in a similar fashion, but she never had the chance to meet him before both his and Superbia’s death.

But further than odd, The six-star ring on her back had been the hook that held Gula here longer than dessert. A Supreme, unclaimed. No family sigils, no faction scent. An open future. A knife held by no hand.

‘Like I was.’ Gula thought, soft for a second.

She considered revealing herself. She liked pretty things. She liked rare wines. She liked warning interesting children before the world chewed them up. She opened her mouth to speak.

Then the child clapped her hands together. Her voice slid backward through a sentence like water poured uphill.

“[Promised Wish:] esicrexe ym thgir ot na ecneidua htiw eht revresbo, rossessop fo lla egdelwonk.”

The words vibrated and sank into the air, like a message sent through a mirror; gaining the attention of the listener from the other side. 

Black chaos energy began to surge to the sigil like a tide obeying the gods of the deep. The floor groaned. The chamber shook. Gula tasted danger and leaned forward within her medium.

‘Too much,’ she judged at once. ‘Her vessel will rupture.’

She moved to cancel the strange wish.

But the world stopped.

Not slowed. Completely Stopped. Breath ended, muscle locked, even the temple’s dust decided to hang in place and contemplate its own meaning. Gula discovered how fear felt in a body that couldn’t shiver. She could only watch.

And watch she did, as the void peeled open with tenderness and introduced a single, enormous, black eye to the room.

The child bowed in front of the eye and spoke.

“This one requests a name from the Observer. Also, I wish to make a deal with the left eye.”

The eye considered her, flicked an amused glance toward Gula, and spoke in a tone that wore no humor.

“The first request is recognized and accepted. The Master has already chosen your names. Left Direction will consider your second request. What do you offer him.”

“Time.” the girl said. Calm and clean.

The eye curved, amused. “He has readily agreed. You are quite generous, by the way. Most devils would lock a secret like this away. Hoarding the information, a free audience is nothing to scoff at.”

She answered with a small, infuriating truth. “Does it even matter if she knows?”

The eye measured her. It saw far more than most. It saw the tremor in her heart, the tension in her shoulders, the small, tense static of her soul deep down. 

‘Quite good at hiding it.’ he thought.

“True, rules are rules,” he answered. “Those who should know, know. Those who don’t, don’t.”

The eye blinked.

A black gate then opened beneath the child like a promise that kept itself.

Gula was incensed, her mind asked too many questions at once. What was the spell the child cast? What was that gigantic eye hovering in her temple? Why is its presence so overwhelming? Aren't entities that directly change supreme laws like this banned from entering planes of Neel? None reached her mouth before motion returned to her body. By then, both visitor and entity had gone.

~~~

The Observer’s plane. Somewhere in between.

The ground was metal by temperature and not by sight. The horizon was white by habit and not by light. A table and two chairs waited like an arrangement someone maintained with pride even if no one came.

A single golden iris hovered above a chair at the far side. It looked at her. She returned the courtesy.

‘Less unsettling than the other,’ she decided.

The eye dipped, the bow of someone who had read every etiquette book in existence and found the same sentence in all of them. “Welcome, young devil. I am Left Direction, head among the Observer’s eyes that gaze past, present, and future. Call me Left.”

“Hello, Left.”

She took the seat opposite, slid closer, folded her hands. The voice arrived where a mouth would have, which made more sense than telepathy that positioned itself everywhere. She liked rules that picked a place and stayed there.

Fear sat beneath her ribs like a trained animal. Excitement coiled right beside it. A true name. A contract with an eye that held calendars in its pupil. Foundations. Leverage. The road ahead clearing in her thoughts.

‘Play the cards right,’ she thought, petal eyes bright. ‘The world becomes my playground.’

Her smile deepened.