Transmigrated as the Villainess Princess - Chapter 273

Chapter 273: Seal (13)
The morning after the convergence, a golden hush blanketed the lands. It was not silence, but the sacred pause after a grand symphony—a breath taken by the universe before the next note. Across the world, people began to awaken with remnants of dreams they couldn’t explain. In the southern villages, farmers recalled lullabies sung by voices they had never heard. In the northern peaks, sentinels swore they heard the mountains hum. In the depths of the sea, sirens blinked in surprise as echoes danced along their coral reefs like promises remembered.

And far in the east, under the canopy of the living forest of Myrielle, a girl named Lys knelt beneath a weeping tree whose sap dripped in harmonious rhythm. Her eyes shimmered violet—a shade that didn’t exist in nature until the Pulse began. Born moments after Mira’s final sacrifice, Lys had been different from the moment she cried her first breath. Instead of wailing, she had sung.

Not a song in words, but a resonance—deep, true, and utterly ancient.

The elders, frightened and in awe, had secluded her in the forest. But nature did not reject her. The trees bent toward her. The river curved to her path. And every animal that had once feared fire now gathered in gentle herds when she passed, as if drawn by a lullaby they remembered from the womb of the world.

Lys did not speak often. She listened.

That morning, she heard a name ripple through the wind, not spoken, not shouted—but breathed.

“Mira.”

It curled around her like a memory not her own. Her heartbeat quickened. She reached out her hand and the weeping tree’s sap halted, floating in midair as golden droplets. They pulsed like stars, each one a memory. She touched one gently—and in a flash, she saw the mirrored temple, saw Mira’s sacrifice, and felt the fracturing of her essence.

And then Lys understood.

She was not merely a girl.

She was one of the fragments. A shard of Mira’s soul, born with a purpose buried beneath her skin.

The realization did not frighten her. It filled her with song.

Within minutes, the entire forest vibrated. Not in fear, but in anticipation.

The others were awakening.

•

Far west, beyond the salt plains of Varric, an old woman named Nolla stirred from her slumber with tears streaming down her face. Her hut had no windows, no visitors, and no warmth—only silence and bones. Yet that morning, she woke with a melody on her lips that she had not sung since childhood.

She did not know where it came from, only that it belonged to someone she had lost.

She lit the fire, stirred herbs into a pot, and sat cross-legged, humming.

The walls of her hut began to dissolve—not in destruction, but in transformation. Dust became light. Stone became sky. And before her appeared a younger version of herself—barefoot, bright-eyed, and holding a lyre carved from bone and starlight.

“Do you remember?” the young version asked.

“I had forgotten,” Nolla whispered.

“Then let us sing,” said the girl.

Together, youth and age, memory and flesh, voice and echo—they did. The song summoned the lost. From every realm they came, some as shadows, some as light, all with open hands and hearts trembling. It was not resurrection. It was reclamation. They were not returning to the world. They were returning to themselves.

•

At the edge of the frozen expanse, where no sun had ever warmed, a boy named Kelen blinked open his eyes beneath a glacier of black crystal. He had no memory of his name or why he was buried in ice. Only that he had dreamed of fire, and a woman who wept stardust, whispering:

“You are the last.”

He had no voice. Not yet. But as the ice began to crack, so too did something inside him.

A pulse.

First faint, then strong.

As the glacier shattered, so too did the silence. The song did not come from his mouth. It erupted from his chest in concentric rings of blue flame that thawed the land in seconds. Creatures once frozen crawled from the earth, their eyes aglow. They bowed to him—not in reverence, but recognition.

They remembered his lullaby.

They had waited an age for it.

And now the world knew: Kelen was not merely the last shard.

He was the Keeper of Dissonance.

The balance Mira had hidden within the final note.

And his journey had only just begun.

•

Back in the Archipelago of Aurin, the boy who had once stood on the cliff and summoned the sky’s response had changed. His name was Ardyn, and he now wandered with a small band of singers, each of them carrying pieces of ancient songs in their blood. The world called them The Resonants.

Wherever they walked, sound returned to dead places. Graves bloomed. Forgotten languages returned on the tongues of children. Music no longer belonged only to bards or the gifted—it was in everyone.

But not all welcomed it.

In the shadowed corners of the continent, old powers stirred. The Cult of the Hollow Silence, long thought extinguished, reawakened. They were led by a woman with no shadow and a voice like void—Serra Vane, once a priestess of harmony, now the Voice of the Null.

She claimed Mira had broken the world.

“Song is not salvation,” she cried. “It is decay.”

And she promised to remake it in true silence.

With her rose the Obscured—those who had never heard the Pulse, those whose hearts remained closed. They carried instruments not to play, but to absorb sound, to drain it. Cities fell to hush. Rivers stilled. And across the land, a battle deeper than swords or fire began.

It was a war of frequency.

Resonants vs. Obscured.

Memory vs. erasure.

And at the heart of it, a question that only the shards of Mira could answer: Was the world ready to become a chorus? Or would it always divide into those who listen and those who close their ears?

Lys, now seventeen and traveling north, met Kelen atop the singing dunes of Nahr.

She touched his hand, and the desert ceased its song for the first time in a thousand years.

“Your fire,” she said, “burns where mine heals.”

“Yours is melody,” he replied. “Mine is harmony’s shadow.”