Having successfully reached an agreement with the principal, Shigure Kira pushed Li Mo out of the school campus. On the way back, Li Mo stared at the endless stream of vehicles on the road, lost in thought.
"What's wrong? Is there a problem?" Shigure Kira asked curiously.
Logically speaking, the communication with the principal went very smoothly. Perhaps because of the Schicksal Overseer, the principal readily agreed to Seele and Bronya's admission procedures. After Li Mo paid the tuition and book fees, the principal personally went to get books for Seele and Bronya.
There was no problem with the whole process, at least Shigure Kira didn't see any.
Li Mo was silent. He stretched out his hand, looking at his dry palm with a cold expression. He took out his phone. In the dark screen, his pupils were slightly unfocused.
"I have a bad feeling, but I can't put my finger on it."
"Cocolia basically won't adopt any more orphans. She doesn't have any extra time. Even if she does, they most likely won't be sent to my orphanage, but will be arranged to be in her lab."
"While ensuring the children's health, she'll continue her meaningless human experiments."
"So Seele and Bronya should be the last batch of children to enter the orphanage."
Li Mo lowered his head, his voice slightly deep. He was thinking, thinking about where this sense of incongruity came from.
Shigure Kira asked, "Are you worried about money? With two more children, the pressure is indeed great. Our savings are already zero. I'll go take on commissions to earn money today."
Li Mo shook his head, denying Shigure Kira's view, "No, I've long expected our savings to be tight. That's not the problem. If the timeline is correct, something must have happened to the orphanage to turn it into a nondescript, no-return haunted house."
"But I haven't noticed anything at all. I even feel that everything is very normal."
"Kira, I'll go home by myself. You go confirm if the Bizarre Cave exists. I want to verify the authenticity of this world."
Li Mo turned back to Shigure Kira and said, then took out the remote control, signaling Shigure Kira to leave and go to the Bizarre Cave in this world. If the Bizarre Cave existed, it would prove that this world was real, and there would definitely be Bizarre.
Li Mo and Shigure Kira had returned to the past with the power of the Bizarre. The Bizarre would not disappear, so the tragedy of this world could not disappear out of thin air.
"Okay, be careful by yourself. I'll be back by your side soon."
With that, Shigure Kira turned and left, quickly running in the direction of the Bizarre Cave in her memory.
Li Mo returned to the manor alone, entering the still-intact house. Li Mo looked at the clean and tidy room, not knowing where to start his search.
"Everything has gone too smoothly. What exactly happened in the future to turn the orphanage into a haunted house and kill so many people?"
"The life-taking ghost that Kanagawa Yume saw in her dream was definitely not a coincidence. Perhaps Kanagawa Yume really killed them."
"But I asked Shigure Kira to help me check. There is currently no one named Kanagawa Yume in Japan. Has she not transferred here yet? Or is it for some other reason..."
"I have to be more careful."
Li Mo operated the wheelchair into the elevator and selected the fourth floor. The fourth floor was the only floor that hadn't been renovated, retaining the original simple and ancient appearance of the house, without any modern style.
Li Mo slid the wheelchair from the end of the corridor towards the fourth-floor landing. Along the way, Li Mo only felt cold, but it was not the bone-chilling cold unique to the Bizarre.
In the haunted house, the fourth floor was a never-ending passage; in reality, it was just an ordinary floor, with nothing remarkable about it. The only thing that could be called strange was that there were many landscape photos hanging on the walls of the fourth floor.
These landscape photos all depicted the mansion in the center of the manor, which was the original appearance of the haunted house.
"I came here with Shigure Kira before and cleaned the entire fourth floor. How long has it been? How did it become so messy again, as if no one has lived here for decades."
Li Mo was a little confused. Due to his physical condition, he couldn't bend down to touch the floor, and could only observe the cleanliness of the floor with his naked eyes.
The wheels of the wheelchair turned, picking up a thick layer of dust, leaving two scratches on the floor. There were many cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. In the dark and narrow space, only the flashlight of Li Mo's phone was lit.
Currently, there were no ghosts in the house, so Li Mo felt safe lighting up the darkness. For countless nights, he had lit up the light in his room without any Bizarre incidents.
"A newspaper? It looks familiar."
Li Mo saw a newspaper sandwiched in the middle of the bookshelf in the living room. He operated the wheelchair to the front of the bookshelf and took the newspaper.
Suddenly, Li Mo smelled a pungent, rusty smell. The dust on the newspaper flew everywhere, very choking.
"Cough, cough!! Cough!"
Li Mo pinched his nose and coughed heavily a few times. By the time he reacted, he had already coughed up blood, which dripped onto the center of the newspaper. It was bright red blood, just like the words that had appeared on the bloody newspaper he had seen before.
The same color, the same luster, even the spreading smell of blood was exactly the same.
"..."
Li Mo was silent. He began to feel uneasy.
"The blood on the bloody newspaper, did I give it to it? No, I'm just a human now. I don't have any corruption. Even if I did, that amount is not enough to turn a newspaper into a Bizarre item."
Li Mo was very sure of his condition. His blood currently had almost no corruption. If it did, his body would have given feedback long ago, and he wouldn't be getting weaker day by day like this. So there must be another reason why the newspaper turned into a bloody newspaper.
But... Li Mo couldn't be sure.
Li Mo stared at the bookshelf, reached out, and touched the two books that had been sandwiching the newspaper. He took them down and observed them.
"Strange, both books are covered in dust, but why... isn't there any on my hands?"
Something that deviated from Li Mo's common sense happened. He took down the two dusty books, but his fingers were not stained with any extra dust. It was as if... the place he had just touched had been touched by someone else in advance.
"Someone came here, took these two books, then put them back in their original place, and sandwiched a dusty newspaper in between."
Li Mo made a bold guess, but who was that person? Shigure Kira would never do such a thing, and besides, she was rarely at home. It was even more impossible for the children in the orphanage. The fourth floor was a place Li Mo had forbidden them to enter. The children were very obedient and shouldn't disobey his orders.
After ruling out all possibilities, there was only one person left.
"Myself."
"..."
Li Mo found the answer absurd. He had indeed taken the books from the bookshelf a long time ago, but that was a long time ago. And he hadn't sandwiched a newspaper between the two books.
"No... wait a minute."
Li Mo quickly opened one of the books. On the title page of this book was a very bizarre name that should never have appeared here—
「Seele Vollerei」
"How is this possible? I asked. Seele was with Bronya and Sin the whole time. They even went to the bathroom together. They never went to the fourth floor."
"Even if she came to the fourth floor while everyone was asleep, why would she do such a thing?"
"There's no reason. I didn't see any man-made footprints on the floor when I left the elevator just now. If someone had entered the fourth floor, they would have definitely left footprints in the dust, unless... the one who entered the fourth floor wasn't a person, but a ghost. Ghosts can float in the air."
The Knocking Ghost was an exception. Other ghosts could float and move. Although they would still follow their habits from when they were alive and lift their feet to walk like humans.
Suddenly, Li Mo felt a sense of terror, and cold sweat broke out on his back.
"When did the ghost come in?"
"I... didn't notice at all..."
Li Mo immediately turned back, only to see pictures of the haunted house hanging coldly on the wall. But as the distance increased, Li Mo vaguely saw human shadows in the pictures, flickering, constantly twisting and slanting. But when Li Mo focused his gaze, they disappeared.
To verify that the pictures were normal, Li Mo brought his phone light closer to the pictures and examined them carefully.
"No change. Am I hallucinating?"
"Observing things in a dim environment can easily cause visual hallucinations. My eyes have been in contact with strong light for too long."
Li Mo silently dimmed the light of his phone's flashlight and rubbed his tired eyes. The bad thing about being human was that the body tired easily, and then some uncontrollable negative effects would appear. Hallucinations and illusions were very common.
Li Mo looked down at the newspaper and casually said, "Who are you?"
The newspaper did not respond, the blood on it almost dry.
Li Mo was a little disappointed and sighed, "Sure enough, I was just overreacting. At this time, it's not a haunted house. The house is not corrupted."
"I'll ask Seele when she comes back tonight."
Li Mo put the newspaper, with its almost dry blood, back into the empty space where he had taken the books.
At this moment, the blood on the newspaper dried up, and a line of words appeared: [As you thought.]
The book with Seele's name on it, Li Mo had briefly glanced at the contents. It roughly told a fairy tale. The protagonists were still the unchanging prince and princess. And the big villain, the witch.
The witch controlled the king and ordered the princess to drink poison. To protect the princess, countless kingdom citizens took the initiative to sacrifice themselves and drink the poison for the princess.
In the end, the prince rushed to the witch, overcame all obstacles, and killed the witch with one sword, saving the kingdom.
Just like the ending of all fairy tales, the prince married the princess, and the two lived happily ever after.
"It's a pretty good romantic story, with the tragic color of sacrifice, and the expectation and satisfaction of a happy ending after hardship. Although the story is very cliché, as a children's book, it's passable."
Li Mo gave a fair evaluation.
Then he opened another book, but when he saw the name on the title page, he was instantly stunned, his eyes fixed on the name that was even more impossible to appear on the title page of a book.
"No... impossible."
"The house... a ghost has come in?"
Li Mo felt a wave of fear. He looked up and once again found that there seemed to be flickering human shadows in the pictures, and they had become even more bizarre.
At this moment, the gate of the haunted house in the pictures seemed to have been opened. All the pictures were very similar. The gate was opened, and a thin, dark figure walked out from inside. Its deep eyes stared outside the picture, as if... it was looking at him.
Li Mo immediately turned off the light of his phone, took the book, and operated the wheelchair to quickly leave the fourth-floor hall. Back in the corridor, Li Mo came to the elevator, hastily entered, and quickly pressed the button for the fifth floor, wanting to leave this bizarre place.
Soon, he arrived safely on the fifth floor, still feeling the lingering fear, his heart beating fast and erratically.
"Wait... when I entered the elevator just now... I don't think I saw any traces of wheels on the floor..."
Li Mo tried hard to recall the scene when he left. Because he was too nervous and left in a hurry, he had overlooked many details. Having lost the power of the Bizarre, Li Mo had also lost his photographic memory and couldn't recall the scene at that time.
"This is impossible. I just passed by. The wheelchair would have definitely left a conspicuous mark on the floor."
"What happened? What did I miss?"
Li Mo turned his gaze to the second book. Perhaps the answer was hidden in this book.
"「Kanagawa Yume」."
Li Mo said this name seriously. The signature on the title page of the second book was "Kanagawa Yume."
Let alone entering the fourth floor of the house and signing the book, Li Mo couldn't possibly not know if Kanagawa Yume had entered Japan. Shigure Kira had already asked Cecilia and the Japanese government to pay attention to the name Kanagawa Yume.
Kanagawa Yume should still be an ordinary person when she transferred schools and couldn't possibly have slipped through modern immigration procedures.
With questions and worries, Li Mo opened the second book.
Like the first book, it also told a fairy tale. But... this fairy tale didn't seem as beautiful and perfect as the previous one.
Again, it was a prince, a princess, and a witch. The background of the story was still a kingdom. But this time, the witch did not control the king, nor did she ask the princess to drink poison. In fact, there was no witch in the early stages at all.
Li Mo found this setting very novel, because the princess and the witch were the same person... One was well-behaved and clever, loved by all, beautiful and charming; the other was evil and treacherous, despised by all, and ugly.
According to the description in the story, the witch was like an old crone, her body hunched, her hooked nose long and large, hanging down to her mouth, almost covering her lips. Her eyes were gloomy, her eye sockets were full of wrinkles, and her eyeballs were swollen, as if they were about to fall to the ground at any moment.
Sharp nails, yellow and rotten teeth... According to the setting of this book, the princess was beautiful and charming before the age of eighteen, unparalleled in her beauty. Once she approached eighteen, she would gradually become an incredibly ugly witch.
Unlike the timeline of the previous story, the prince came to the princess's side very early and proposed to the king's daughter. The king gladly agreed and set three trials, which the prince passed perfectly. The two soon lived together, leading a sweet daily life.
This seemed to be the end of the first fairy tale. But for the second fairy tale, the nightmare was just beginning...
The prince married the princess when she was twelve. For the next five years, the prince doted on the princess, giving all his love to his wife. She didn't have to do any housework, and he wouldn't tolerate any rumors or slander from the common people.
The princess was like a flower on a high mountain, nurtured by the prince to be healthy and even more beautiful, transcendent and pure.
The turning point of the story occurred on the princess's seventeenth birthday.
A case of missing persons appeared in the kingdom. Every day, citizens disappeared. At first, no one paid attention. The families of the missing just put up a few missing person notices and that was it. In a large kingdom with a million people, it was very normal for one or two people to go missing.
Even the relevant officials didn't take this matter seriously. After all, human trafficking had always existed.
They could only file a case but would not deal with it as a priority. Until the number of missing people grew larger and larger.
From one or two at the beginning, to ten, and then to nearly a hundred disappearing in one night!
In the kingdom, all the citizens were worried, afraid that the next one to disappear would be them. Because among the missing, some disappeared suddenly at home, with their families in the next room.
There were also adult men, and even the kingdom's knights with superb martial arts disappeared without a trace, no different from all the ordinary people.
This matter gradually spread throughout the kingdom and even reached the king's ears. The king was furious and sent the resourceful prince to deal with this matter.
Sure enough, the resourceful prince found the culprit on the first day, but due to his lack of strength, he couldn't catch the other party. However, he drew a portrait of the culprit and revealed the truth of the missing person case.
Suddenly, the citizens of the kingdom praised the prince for his resourcefulness and decisiveness, finding the culprit in just one day—the ugly witch. The witch roamed the night, catching lone people, brutally dismembering them and then reassembling them, and finally eating them into her bloated belly.
The prince immediately ordered that the citizens of the kingdom should not be alone. He also drew a picture of the witch and offered a thousand gold pieces as a reward, letting the knights and the brave adventurers in the kingdom form teams to capture the witch, vowing to give the families of the deceased an explanation!
The second night, the citizens of the kingdom were not alone. Most people did not go to bed, waiting to see the evil witch caught in the act. But the knights and adventurers did not find any trace of the witch.
That night, thousands of people in the kingdom died... But the knights and adventurers didn't even find a shadow of the witch.
The king was furious and ordered the prince to solve the case and catch the culprit within five days. The resourceful prince was also in a difficult situation. He had no idea how the witch killed people.
He went to the streets of the kingdom, looking for clues at the places where the deceased had died. Finally, he found a clue: a person who was not completely dead.
The person's face was unrecognizable. His hands were like they had been torn by a wild beast, leaving only bones. His feet were broken. There were also human handprints on his face. When he took off his shirt, a stench of decay came over him. In the rolling flesh, the prince found a dry, pale hand. It was the witch's.
The person told the prince that the witch killed in dreams! Once you fell asleep, you would be found and killed by the witch and the people she controlled. After killing one, she would go to the next. And he, if he hadn't woken up from his sleep in the morning, would have probably died at the hands of the witch and her servants.
The prince's eyes widened in disbelief. Killing in dreams... unless you didn't sleep, you could never escape the witch's clutches. But fortunately, he had discovered some rules.
The prince once again ordered, calling on all the citizens of the country to stay awake at night and absolutely not fall asleep. The witch, unable to kill in dreams, would surely appear in reality.
The king also came forward and mobilized the entire nation to bring the witch to justice tonight, to be killed on the spot!
Soon, night fell, and the third night arrived as scheduled. Just as all the citizens of the kingdom were filled with anger, something strange happened. Those who had already died appeared everywhere in the kingdom. They smiled at everyone they saw, their mouths torn, their smiles particularly creepy.
The knights and adventurers took out their weapons and killed them, who had become walking corpses. But no matter how much damage they inflicted on them, the wounds would slowly heal. Then, all the dead floated in the air and walked to the gate of the kingdom palace.
They lowered their heads, then raised their heads, and pointed their index fingers at the palace. The witch did not appear, and the third night ended without any result...
The people in the kingdom were uneasy and worried. Everyone was guessing why the dead were pointing at the palace. The king was even more on pins and needles, ordering the prince to find the witch tonight and bring her to justice, to prevent the forbidden witchcraft from harming the citizens of the kingdom.
The prince returned to his palace and saw the beautiful princess. He couldn't help but hug the princess and cry. The princess felt sorry for the prince. She kissed his forehead, pried open his lips, intertwined her tongue with his, and untied his sash...
In the bath, she sang and danced with the prince, sharing a night of passion...
The prince was very moved and swore to kill the witch, protect the kingdom, protect the people, and protect his beloved.
The fourth night had not yet arrived, it was still dusk. The prince speculated that the witch would use forbidden witchcraft to revive her servants to attack the princess.
So he held the princess's hand and stood on the wall of the palace, looking down at the forbidden servants constantly walking towards the gate.
The knights rushed forward to fight with the forbidden servants, and the adventurers also joined in. But the forbidden servants seemed to have transcended life and death. Ordinary swords and soldiers could not cause them effective damage.
On the other hand, on the kingdom's side, the forbidden servants seemed to have awakened a killing rule. As long as they touched a living person, they could kill them, and the dead would be revived as the next forbidden servant.
Back and forth, when night fell, the kingdom's side was already in disarray. Hundreds of thousands of forbidden servants stopped at the palace gate.
The prince's heart was like dead ashes, and he held the princess's hand tightly. He understood that this country was hopeless. He had failed the king's expectations, disappointed the people's worship, and had no face to face his beloved princess.
Just as the prince took out his sword, preparing to protect the princess and fight the forbidden servants to the death, the beauty beside him... suddenly let out a sinister and strange "cackle." The prince remembered that it was the sharp cry that the witch had made when he first saw her on the first night.
The prince trembled, turned his body with difficulty, and found that the beautiful princess had become incredibly ugly, becoming... the image he hated most in his heart—the witch.
"Aaaaaah—!"
The prince broke down, wanting to shake off the hand that was holding the princess... no, the witch's hand. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't shake it off. The prince swung his sword and kept hacking at the witch's arm.
The moment the sword cut open the witch's arm, the witch's arm would be restored to its original state.
Finally, the prince cut off his own arm, glared at the witch with a ferocious expression, and kept hacking with his sword. He cut off his lover's head, pierced her heart, cut off her limbs, and crushed her internal organs.
But... but... every time the prince inflicted a fatal wound on the witch, the witch would return to the appearance of the princess.
So pure, so beautiful... as if she were a daughter given by God, beautiful beyond words.
But the prince already knew that the princess was the evil witch. He killed his favorite wife over and over again, killing the lover he had sworn to protect for a lifetime. Looking at the witch turning into a princess, the prince kept repeating the process of killing her.
Because the prince knew that once he stopped, the princess would turn back into the ugly witch. Out of guilt, out of anger, out of hatred, out of love...
The prince was in a frenzy. The princess showed a painful expression and moaned miserably. She didn't understand why her lover was turning his sword against her, why he was so cruel? Cutting her body over and over again.
The princess called the prince's name over and over again, trying to awaken the last bit of compassion in his heart. But all the prince could do was to kill the princess over and over again with the sword in his hand.
Only in this way could that beauty and purity be briefly retained in the world, and only in this way could he protect the remaining citizens...
He didn't know how long had passed. Long enough for the best sword in the world to break, leaving only a broken sword with fresh blood; long enough for the princess's body to be covered in wounds, her voice hoarse and raw; long enough for the prince to be heartbroken, his sorrow unbearable.
The prince couldn't accept that his lover had become a witch. After learning that he couldn't kill the princess, the prince jumped from the palace wall, his brains splattered, blood everywhere. The prince committed suicide.
Without the prince's torture, the beautiful and enchanting princess became ugly again, letting out a sinister and strange cry. Thus, on the fourth night, the kingdom fell, and all the living were dead.
Perhaps too many people had died, and the souls couldn't help but line up, walking step by step towards the underworld. But then, dawn came, and the light of dawn appeared. Daybreak had arrived.
The witch gradually turned back into a princess, but what she saw was only the prince who had jumped to his death, and the reality of a broken country and dead people.
The princess ran to the bottom of the city wall and hugged the prince's body tightly. Even though she had been tortured and killed by the prince countless times, she still loved him deeply.
But the next second, the witch's memories gradually revived in the princess's mind.
She remembered how she had caught and killed a lone person on the first night; how she had brought her servants into the dreams of sleeping people and killed them on the second night; how she had manipulated her servants to expose themselves to the public on the third night; and how she had killed everyone on the fourth night...
The princess broke down. She took the weapon on the ground and pierced her heart, cutting her own neck. After countless attempts, she found that she could not die. At this moment, the princess finally understood why the prince kept crying and trying to kill her with his weapon.
She was the murderer who had killed everyone... The broken princess knelt in front of the prince's body, her eyes vacant. The rich blood stained her long, black-blue hair, and the mud stained her beautiful face.
A heavy rain began to fall from the sky, soaking the princess's desperate soul and extinguishing the last wisp of the flame of hope.
On the fifth night, only the princess survived. She was trapped in the darkness. That night, the princess walked into a rain-sheltered church, chained herself to a cross, and surrounded herself with dry grass.
Amidst her mournful sobs, the princess lit a fire, and fell into a cycle of life and death in endless pain and torment. The flames devoured her flesh, and her flesh would regenerate after being burned. Without the interference of rain, she would die endlessly, be reborn, die again, and be reborn again.
Only in this way could she atone for her sins, atone for... the prince's pain.
In countless deaths and rebirths, how long had passed? The princess couldn't remember. Thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years... maybe even longer.
She always murmured the prince's name, expressing her love and her remorseful apologies. If she could do it all over again, she only hoped that the prince would not be so good to her, because she, who had killed everyone, was not worthy of his noble love.
In one memory after another, reality was gradually distorted. In one death after another, the world was repeatedly restarted.
One morning, the princess woke up in her bed in the palace. Everything seemed to be just a dream, a dream that was too real...
The princess quickly got dressed and rushed out of the palace, wanting to find her lover.
However, she met the king and learned from him that she was about to be sent to a foreign country to marry the prince of that country.
With mixed feelings, the princess came to the foreign country. Here, she saw the prince she had been longing for! But this time, the prince had become very strange...
He was no longer gentle, no longer amiable, and even, no longer loved her. The princess was assigned the most difficult work, working day and night, enduring the prince's scolding and abuse every day.
The princess was ordered around like a servant, bullied and humiliated by her colleagues. Whenever the princess went to the prince to complain, she would always be hurt by the prince's cold attitude. The prince didn't care about her miserable situation at all, and would often say sarcastic and harsh words.
Just like this, from the age of twelve to seventeen, she was bullied by countless people, exiled to the stinking market, and had to live with despicable people with filthy mouths every day.
Due to her status, no one dared to touch her, but it seemed that everyone knew that the prince would not pay attention to the princess.
As long as they didn't cross that bottom line, it was allowed for the princess to be bullied, have her food stolen, and be scolded.
Day by day, in order to protect herself, the princess became no longer weak. She began to swear, and used harsh, delinquent, and vulgar behavior to disguise herself.
On her eighteenth birthday, the prince unexpectedly came to her. He took out his sword and pierced her heart. And this time, the princess seemed to be really dead. Her consciousness gradually blurred, and the temperature of her body was rapidly lost. There was only boundless cold, piercing to the bone.
Thus, the story came to an end.
"..."
Li Mo was stunned for a moment, and once again turned the book back to the first title page.