Ethereal Ascendance: A Journey of Transformation

When I woke up again, I found myself back at the base near H-country's Shine Metropolitan City. But Adrian said it had been three days since I stopped the nuke high in the sky.

"What? Three days? Are you kidding me?"

I almost jumped out of bed. I remembered talking to the "Holy Ones" for only about 10 minutes in the higher dimension. How did so much time pass in the real world?

"It's true," Adrian said calmly, sitting by the bed. "I followed where you fell after the explosion and finally found you knocked out in a pile of rocks. You were completely naked, almost all your clothes were gone except for a few bits of fabric. But luckily, you didn't have any injuries. Then Luke Channing quickly called for backup troops. While M-country was in chaos because of the sudden explosion in their airspace, they picked up us and the other mission teams from the other side of the Earth and brought us all back."

"Oh, I see... Haha..."

Since there weren't many teleport scrolls, we had to come back using normal military transport. But right now I wasn't really thinking about that. When I heard that Adrian found me without any clothes on, I felt really embarrassed.

My relationship with Adrian wasn't at the "seeing each other naked" stage yet. This was the first time it happened after I changed, so of course I felt shy.

"Um..."

Adrian was smart and quickly realized what I was worried about. But he was too embarrassed to say anything, so he just turned his head away with a red face. The room suddenly felt super awkward.

But in the end, this kind of thing couldn't be helped. Of course I didn't want to make a big deal out of it. Thinking about our relationship, I just sighed a little and waved my hand to tell him:

"It's okay... Keep going!"

The rest wasn't very interesting. Just some celebration parties that already happened, and how Reed and the H-country military doctors at the base tried to figure out why I wasn't waking up and how to treat me.

It's actually really easy to tell if an angel is dead. As long as the body doesn't turn into light and disappear, it means they're not dead and can still be saved.

The main problem was they couldn't find anything wrong with my body, so Reed thought my long coma might be related to my soul. And Earth people's medical skills are even worse, so the base could only give me basic care, keeping me in the room and just giving me some IV fluids.

"Now everything's calm again. The space portal is confirmed to be working normally again, and we've finally made contact with the base in the other world. Earlier today, Cyra came to visit you. General Lee even said he'd ask his superiors for a special reward for you..."

As I listened to Adrian, I pulled out the needles from my hand and stood up from the bed. But when I tried to open my wings, he suddenly stopped talking and froze.

"You've leveled up?! So fast?"

Yes, when I looked back and saw I had ten wings now, even I was surprised for a moment.

"Could this be the extra reward they gave me?" I mumbled quietly to myself.

They say after I understood the rules of water elements changing matter, I was already close to leveling up.

The "Holy Ones" kept their word! And it's not just leveling up. The reason I could survive a close-range nuclear explosion and fall from 10,000 meters without any injury was probably thanks to them!

"Who? Who gave you a reward?" Adrian caught what I said. He quickly asked, very confused.

"It's like this. When I was unconscious, my soul really did leave my body and went to a place they said was another dimension..."

I didn't want to hide anything from Adrian. I told him about my doubts about Cyra's Divine Revelation, why I chose to stop the nuke with my body, and everything I remembered about meeting the "Holy Ones".

"...So there really are gods in this world? Even though they're not the kind the True Church talks about, they still sound pretty powerful. But if they were guiding this whole thing from behind... that's just unbelievable!"

After hearing about what happened to me, Adrian of course believed me without question. But it still shocked him mentally. He came closer and asked uncertainly, "Do we need to pray to them every day like Cyra or other True Church followers? If we don't, will they hold a grudge and cause trouble for us?"

Adrian was a non-believer like me at first, but now it looks like he's pretty good at accepting these supernatural things. As expected of a human from a world full of god and demon stories.

"I don't think we need to. These 'Holy Ones' might not really be gods in the true sense. You know, even they said they won't interfere in our world, and they admitted they can make mistakes too. We can even think of them as creatures living in a higher dimension in another form of life..."

I still stuck to my view that there are no real gods in the world. But even though I said this, I found that I couldn't remember some parts of the second half of the meeting, like I'd forgotten something.

"Oh yeah, did Number 14 Feliciana come back? Have you seen her?"

I shook my head to get rid of some confused thoughts. Now that I was awake, the most important thing was to meet the person who helped me most in the fight with Camille.

All the signs showed that Number 14 Feliciana probably had a very close connection with the "Holy Ones". I couldn't wait to ask her for more information about them.

"Uh, Feliciana from the 14th world?"

But when Adrian heard what I said, he was surprised for a moment. Then he explained what happened:

"At first, they said everyone came back safely. But later, when the base had a celebration party, they found that only the people from the 14th world didn't show up. You know what happened next - no one could find her anywhere in the base. Because number 14 Feliciana did so well in the mission, the H-country higher-ups finally started to pay attention to this. Some people think she ran away from the base alone, others think she might have sneaked into the fixed space portal and gone to the Eldoria Continent. But they haven't found real proof for either guess yet. You know, the whole base area is watched closely, in the air and underground. General Lee is ordering his people to check all the surveillance carefully, to find out how she really disappeared!"

Basically, she's not in the base!

Of course I knew that with number 14 Feliciana's abilities, she could come and go easily. Earth people had no chance of finding her with their technology.

But my plan to visit Number 14 Feliciana failed. Then the after-effects of waking up from a long coma finally showed up -

I felt my empty stomach growling. For the first time since becoming an angel, I felt really hungry.

But Adrian said the celebration party was already over. In that moment, I felt like I missed out on a fortune! Without another word, I grabbed Adrian's hand and ran towards the base cafeteria.

"Cyra?"

We hadn't gone far, not even out of the living area, when we turned a corner and ran into Cyra coming the other way. I saw from her badge that she was the Cyra from our world.

I said hello, then suddenly remembered I'd also learned some news about Raydwin from the "Holy Ones". So I quickly went up to talk to her.

"Feliciana, you're awake? That's great! Are you okay?"

Cyra, who I hadn't seen for a long time, was happy to see me.

"About Raydwin, I mainly want to talk to you about him..."

I was about to get straight to the point, but as soon as she heard me say "Raydwin", she suddenly cut me off like she was having a reaction. She shouted like she was out of control.

"I've said many times, Raydwin isn't dead! Why won't you all listen..."

After saying this, Cyra turned and ran back to her room. She slammed the door shut. It all happened so fast.

"This..."

Everything was quiet again. I turned to look at Adrian, confused.

"Can't be helped. These days, the H-country military leaders are talking about giving Raydwin a title, and how to hold his funeral, tell his family, and so on. Cyra feels like no one is listening to her opinion. And she keeps talking about how her 'Lord' saved him in time and took his soul to heaven, but there's no proof for any of that. So when this keeps coming up, she gets a bit crazy about it."

Adrian was also surprised by her reaction. But he already knew the news about Raydwin that I brought back from the "Holy Ones", so he shrugged and explained.