In the evening, the town twinkled with golden candlelight. The fresh snow blanketed the cobblestone paths and the trees. There was the dark sky, and the crowd in the streets, and the two of us.

We had exited the rebuilt Combat Institute campus through the side gate. From there, we'd have a quick walk home through Silvercreek's market street. It had been a long day, hadn't it? We had worked hard. We had gotten a lot done today, hadn't we?

The sweet scent of baked goods near the town square warmed us. I surveyed the sea of faces.

Mornings and evenings had passed, and spring and autumn, and mosaics of small and happy moments. And like before, Hei, you took my hand.

It had been almost a year since we defeated Alice. Tomorrow would be Christmas.

We walked through the inner parts of town, on a road flanked with buildings on both sides. There was an office, an armory, and a bookshop. Pedestrians bustled loudly about, and many stopped by the open-air grocery stalls set up by the roadside. Wagons threaded carefully, slowed by the crowds. We heard caroling from an adjacent street. In the markets, we found and bought baked ham, a bean casserole, and a pine-melon pie.

Almost no one knew me to be the world administrator. To the public, I was just another citizen. Professor Sophia, of the Research Division of the Combat Institute. And research was what I spent most of my time on nowadays.

Over the course of the year, I had come to understand the Boundary of Miracles better.

The Boundary was not a powerful world.

For example, no new human life could emerge from the Boundary of Miracles. Pregnancy was beyond the capacity of this world.

With its own powers, it couldn't support multiple, vast subworlds as it once did. But during Alice's reign, the Boundary had confiscated the life forces of deceased players, converted them into magic, and used that to fuel its realms. Now that I had stopped the death games, I was forced to make changes to the world.

First, the subworld of Bronze no longer existed. Nor did the foggy suburbs of Gold, or the metropolis of Platinum. Silver remained as the only place, as the limit of what the Boundary could sustain now. I had transported all remaining players here.

Second, I stopped the magic that had been in place to prevent aging. People would be allowed to grow old once more. What remained, though, was the magic that prevented diseases.

Third, I capped the maximum player level at 8 to reduce magic usage.

Lastly, since player abilities heavily taxed the Boundary's magic, I had to cut down MP regeneration by half. But no more than that. Despite Silvercreek's population boom, we've had no shortage of food or housing. That was thanks to our guilds, and their members with superhuman strength and stamina, and their ferromancy and geomancy and plant magic. We needed a place where people were free to find happiness.

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This was what we fought for, what we persevered for. What we died for.

Out of the 3,800 players that remained in Silvercreek, 1,600 wanted to go back to Earth. I adopted Hei's idea to keep the Seasonal Challenge. Participation was now voluntary for those who wanted to return to Earth; winning challenges allowed you to return earlier.

I was also researching the pistols Doublerift left behind. The world-train could currently make 52 trips a year, carrying one player back to Earth each time – but what if we let a player use Doublerift's guns, to carry two more players along in pocket dimensions? We'd be able to send back all queued returnees in 10 years, rather than 30. I had conducted experiments all but confirming the feasibility of this trick, though I needed an actual run to ensure it works…

But, ah, that was a problem for another day.

We arrived at the front porch of our house in Ring Two of Silvercreek. We had harvested wreaths of holly to decorate our door and windows.

We were home.

Lamplight came from inside. I opened the door.

"Hey, we're home," I announced.

And came a now-familiar echo, "Welcome back," in Mr. Atlas's voice.

He emerged from his room with metallic clanks. He now wore a suit of golden plate armor, befitting his station now as the captain of the Guards' guild.

"Did you find Tanin and Reens?" Mr. Atlas asked.

After I left Gold, Mr. Atlas had worked closely with those two. He had been extra busy arranging security for the past few days, so he tasked me with helping him deliver presents to them.

"Tanin's gone on vacation," I told him. "I left your present on his office desk."

It was a gift wrapped in paper, tied with a ribbon, and shaped exactly like Mr. Atlas' bottles of liquor. I wondered what could possibly be inside.

"Not sure where Reens is," I continued.

"You still have the Seekflower?" Mr. Atlas asked.

I puffed my cheek. "We're not using that to track friends down…"

I hung my mage hat by the entryway. Hei patted the snowflakes off it.

"She might be in the Winter Challenge," Hei remarked. "One of the combat trainees has her as a teammate."

"Your trainee's lucky," Mr. Atlas said. He took the foodstuff from us and laid them out on the dining table, which had already been set. He grabbed his kitchen-axe and began to carve the ham.

Mr. Atlas was right; whoever had teamed up with Reens was indeed lucky. She would downplay her own prowess, but her might was widely acclaimed as an ex-leader of the Bounty Hall. Hei would've been subjected to the same infamy, had he not gone by the moniker Truck-kun in Platinum. Like Reens, I think he didn't care for the public eye. Sometimes it was hard to tell what he wanted. I think he didn't exactly know himself.

We had all been struggling to survive for so long, that now with our lives back, it wasn't easy knowing what to do with it. Mr. Atlas kept himself busy with the logistics of running the city. I had my research, not to mention my duties of piloting the Boundary of Miracles. Hei, who once fought and brought down Legends, now worked as a coach at the Combat Institute. Between the three of us, he probably had the biggest adjustments to make.

"Any wishes for the coming year?" I asked Hei.

He shrugged. "I might adopt a cat."

The three of us ate dinner together. I stuffed myself with food. We drank wine by the hearth for warmth, and watched the snow fall outside, and talked late into the night, and treaded through old memories. We lit a red candle to celebrate. The candlelight would illuminate us through the night. And it would still be there in the morning.