Rieren wasn’t sure what prompted the realization. So far, Batcat consuming memories were about increasing her strength via its memory-warping ability, the one that allowed Rieren to assume a past form of herself with greater prowess, albeit at a greatly limited rate and efficacy.

To increase that abilities effectiveness, she was required to feed Batcat specific Beast Cores. Corrupted ones wouldn’t do. As such, she had to find and obtain those of Anachrons, perhaps Aetherians as well when she met any down the line. Since consuming Beast Cores increased the might of its skill, Rieren had thought that it grew in strength the same way.

Apparently, that wasn’t the case. She hadn’t yet paid attention to how the little Spirit Beast might grow, though she supposed it made sense that it involved memories in some form.

They couldn’t sit in the middle of a battlefield and go about their business, though. In fact, Rieren wasn’t certain they’d be safe anywhere in the entire area. Who knew when some group of Abyssals would come upon them in some vulnerable time.

It was a good thing the dungeons were near the middle levels of the mountains. That meant all Rieren had to do was climb higher towards the peak. As the Abyssals had little reason to expect some sort of assault come flying down at them from the heavens, their patrols higher up were only cursory and thus, easy to avoid.

There was thankfully no Anachron to deal with at the peak either. As such, Rieren could focus entirely on Batcat without worrying.

“Am I correct in assuming you want my memories?” Rieren asked.

She shrugged off the strangeness about talking to a tiny kitten. Batcat had proven time and again that it was highly intelligent and more than capable of understanding human speech, even if it couldn’t reply in the same manner.

Right now, though, it only looked at her expectantly. She knew it could nod and was capable of other non-verbal means of communication.

Rieren sighed. She supposed she was going to take its expectancy as an affirmative.

Since she always absorbed memories through the cat by channeling Essence through it while drawing it in, she decided to emit Essence this time, while still focusing on keeping it flowing through Batcat. She couldn’t sense anything coming onto her. Maybe Batcat truly was the one receiving memories.

Of course, Rieren would have to select memories for the cat to consume. She pored over all the recollections of her past life. Since the cat had indicated wings, what would help were memories about flying.

Rieren had quite a few of those. Most involved soaring over the Elderlands upon various clouds, one of her Domain-summons. They were great for traversing over great distances, at least, once she got to a point where she could infuse the Domain with rain. She’d had a lot of fun trying to replicate the various shapes she had seen in the heavens.

There were the towering storm clouds, each big as a mountain. Puffy ones that resembled balls of cotton, except they were bigger than palaces and sometimes prettier to boot. Others that looked streaks of light running across the sky’s blue canvas. Some that disappeared if they were breathed on, others that refused to dissipate until they had lashed the world below with roaring thunder, relentless rain, and virulent lightning.

All of which Batcat seemed to absorb entirely.

Rieren blinked, pulling herself away from the cat and pausing her cultivation. The memories… Something was wrong. She had come here to share some of her memories with Batcat for it had seemed to her that the kitten needed them to grow stronger.

Except… she couldn’t recall why she had paused, and that made her swallow. A rather scary idea took root in the back of her mind. Had she been remembering something, only for Batcat to pull it from her head and devour it instantly, to the point that she could no longer access the memory? To the point where she essentially no longer had the recollection?

In other words, Batcat had eradicated a piece of her past.

A coldness crept over her. The little winged kitten didn’t even look like it had done anything. It was licking its paws placidly, ignoring the growing turmoil in her head.

What had she been reviewing in her head? It couldn’t be anything important could it? Well, likely something to do with raising Batcat’s prowess. More specifically, something to do with its wings, since that’s what it had indicated, from what she did remember.

So… flying? Rieren couldn’t recall if she’d actually ever experienced—

Ah. If she’d had recollections about once being able to fly, she would no longer remember them, having surrendered them to Batcat.

“Kitten,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “Did you happen to eat my memories?”

Batcat slowly looked up. It afforded her one, slow blink, then went back to licking itself all over.

Rieren sighed and decided to cultivate to regain her inner harmony. A mistake. She thought she would be a free of silly errors now that she had the wealth of her past experiences to rely upon, but then, she had never experienced having a Spirit Beast close by for so long. And she couldn’t even fault the cat for, from its perspective, she had offered the memories as food.

Well, from this point forward, she was going to have to be more circumspect. No more stray thoughts when connected via Essence.

If she wanted Batcat to grow even stronger, she would have to pick out some memories she could discard beforehand. Though, if her selections were limited in some way, as it might have been this time with the way Batcat had indicated its wings, she would need to think long and hard.

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Rieren decided to focus on cultivating her worries away. She purchased several pills through the System Shop with her new Credits, got some water to dissolve them in, and periodically ingested them to boost her Essence-channelling capabilities.

Her cultivation was certainly faster than it had been over the past month, but that didn’t end up mattering as much as she would have wished. Now that she was past the Awakened realm, the time taken to cultivate had risen even higher exponentially. Rieren would need to draw in a tremendous amount of Essence, far more than she’d had to so far.

For the moment, she was focusing on furthering her elixir field. One of the benefits of the Enlightened realm was that she could expand her elixir field beyond her body, all the way to the outer reaches of her Domain. An expanded elixir field was going to allow her to perform far more powerful techniques than she could currently use.

As elixir fields existed in a spiritual sense, they weren’t constricted by the physical limits that might feel apparent in the Mortal Realm. As such, Rieren was only limited in its expansion by the limits of her current cultivation realm.

It was going to take a long while. Rieren ran out of the resources she needed to speed up her cultivating within a few days, and she had used up a great deal of the Credits she had acquired too. There was a good deal she still had left, but she was keeping them in reserve.

After all, she couldn’t be sure when she might need another Temporal Retriever.

Of course, there was the fact that Batcat could perform the same ability that the item could. But the level of Batcat’s ability wasn’t as high as she needed it to be just yet. Rieren had received good proof of that against Essalina just before she had begun her journey. If she relied on the little Spirit Beast, she would still be wiped out by any Banishedborn she came across.

In other words, Rieren couldn’t excuse herself from all the farming that she would need to do. As such, she had to pause channelling Essence for a day or two and focus entirely on killing monsters again.

She had to admit to herself that it was getting somewhat rote. Most of the monsters didn’t pose enough of a challenge to keep her on her toes.

One would have thought that would allow her to obtain what she needed rather quickly and then go back to her main task. Unfortunately, their weakness meant that their rewards were comparatively minimal. As such, Rieren was forced to do a lot of killing in order to get the number of Credits she thought was a good level to keep up.

In fact, she ran out of Abyssals to murder before she had finished her latest round of Credit-farming. She had no wish to invade the dungeons themselves and root out the monsters, but there were no more Abyssals pouring out of them in a murderous rage.

She supposed she could jump into the Abyss Rents and fight the Abyssals there. But aside from the risk of coming across a creature she couldn’t handle—in the Mortal Realm, Rieren would always hold the ability to get away if the odds no longer looked favourable—it just sounded like a giant pain. Fate really needed to throw her a veritable army of Armistice Enforcers.

That night, Rieren’s thoughts about what to do to earn more Credits faster were interrupted by Batcat’s arrival. It had brought news.

Now that it had empowered itself by consuming her memories, something Rieren still felt rather unsure about, it had once again ranged far and wide. She appreciated the little tidbits that it brought her. This time, though, the tidbit was anything but little.

Over the last few days, Rieren had spotted a great deal of interesting things. The world was huge and filled with all sorts of people, and in the end, she was but a small cog in its mechanism. It moved on, with or without her. Her self-imposed sabbatical of improvement away from the centre of the all chaos didn’t mean everything was paused just because of her absence.

Batcat’s scouting was limited to the Shatterlands, mostly. Through the kitten’s own eyes, Rieren had spotted how the populated region had shrunk by a tremendous amount as everyone gathered together to ward off the monsters and safeguard themselves in numbers.

But she was relieved to note that it wasn’t as bad as it had been last time. With the fact that everyone had access to the system, there were much more instances of resistance against the irrepressible tide of Abyssals.

Pockets of growing power had sprung up all over. Those who had taken the plunge to properly figuring out their classes and skills were empowering their families, friends, and neighbours as well. As such, the number of people capable of fighting back was several times more than it had been last time.

No longer was strength reserved only for those who licked the boots the gods chose to offer a few mortals here and there. No longer would civilization perish if everyone failed to kneel to the Divine.

Rieren grinned fiercely. It was wondrous seeing the effects of her efforts bear such fruit.

But while all that was an excellent reminder and a welcome injection of positivity to her spirit, Batcat’s latest report had her forgetting a lot of it. It had brought news of the Banishedborn.

This was the same one she had encountered atop Lionshard mountain, the same one that had been fought by the corrupted Avatar.

The same one that had caused the death of Elder Olg.

Just the sight of the red lightning suddenly made her mind go blank. He was alive. The Abyss-cursed bastard of a red-haired, monkey’s balls gargling—

Rieren tried to breathe. Even that was proving to be difficult. She pulled herself from the memory offered up by Batcat, and the little kitten stared up at her with an expression that might have been concern. She barely paid attention to it.

Pain, rage, grief. Distantly, she recognized that the emotions claiming all her headspace were far too stormy, that she needed to pause and think things out. But the immediate reaction was nearly insurmountable to get over. How, in all the worlds and realms was that—

Rieren bit down on a scream. Her rage at the revelation was bad, but so was the frustration that her anger was still there. That despite all the time, despite all her experiences, she was still so maddeningly, so incessantly influenced by the sheer, endless, overwhelming ocean of fury that resided within her.

Wasn’t her long life supposed to have tempered her? Wasn’t she supposed to have found a new lease of life in this timeline, where she could discard the anger and live differently?

But maybe that was it. Maybe it was the fact that her efforts hadn’t granted her the things she had so desired that frustrated her to this degree. She had never really actualized it, never dealt with it thanks to all the tangible and potentially deadly things that had been thrust upon her.

Batcat meowed plaintively, clearly agitated by her reaction.

Rieren took several deep, calming breaths. That little meow was a reminder. A plea to remember everything else the winged kitten had shown her.

Maybe things hadn’t turned out as well for her as she would have preferred or had hoped for, but things were better than before. Especially once she considered them from an overarching perspective. People were fighting better now. Far more capable of resisting. Had a far greater chance of beating back this apocalypse and reclaiming their lives.

All thanks to her efforts to restart the apocalypse.

Perhaps that didn’t make things right. No. Of course, it didn’t. Her wishes about herself mattered too, no matter how selfish they seemed.

But Rieren needed to remember that her efforts in her previous life, whether rage-fuelled or otherwise, mattered. They had accomplished a great deal.

“I apologize,” she told Batcat.

She didn’t try for a smile. It would no doubt come out awkward and broken, and besides, she didn’t feel much like smiling. Rieren might not wish to be bound to her anger as before, but the fact that she had been able to pull herself from the brink of giving in to it was proof that she wasn’t.

Rieren nodded at the cat. “Show it all to me once more. I want to see what that bastard is up to.”