Chapter 274: Brother and Sister |
Penny’s massive butterfly wings were now covered in wounds.
Her little face was tightly scrunched as she struggled to flap them once.
Saul was momentarily dazed, as if he’d nodded off during a bout of exhaustion, only to jolt awake a second later.
“Could the Nightmare Butterfly see into a person’s memories?” He instantly focused his mental power, growing tense.
“I saw it. It really came back to life,” Penny muttered, somewhat dazed. “Why is there a sign of the Death Cocoon starting to hatch on your body?”
“That’s none of your concern.” In truth, Saul had no idea either, “But are you still planning to die here with me? If I don’t make it back, your child will fall into someone else’s hands. And they won’t know how to hatch a Nightmare Butterfly.”
“No need to say more. I believe you.” Penny looked at Saul, who no longer acted like a child, “I’ll open the real exit for you. But be careful of the wizard waiting outside. I don’t know what he wants, but I know for sure—he’s no good man.”
Penny then asked, “After entering the town, were you touched by the red water at all?”
Saul thought carefully and then shook his head with certainty.
Her voice gradually faded, as if she were hesitating.
“I originally planned to die here with him.”
Him?
Saul’s mind immediately conjured up the image of that slightly silly, hot-tempered man.
“You mean Ada?”
“Yes, my brother.” Penny’s mental state seemed off, “I’ve been in this body for far too long.”
She sighed and suddenly walked to the window.
The red sea of blood immediately surged like wailing soul, reaching out hands toward Penny, trying to drag her into the waters.
But Penny beat her wings and took off, shaking off the bloodied limbs.
She barely maintained her balance in midair and said to Saul, “Wait here a moment.”
As soon as she spoke, her figure vanished.
A silver butterfly appeared in her place, flapped its tattered wings a few times, then vanished in a flash, flying off into the distance at incredible speed.
“Milord…”
Just as Saul was staring after Penny’s disappearance, a voice suddenly called out from behind him.
He turned around and saw a transparent hand crawling across the ground like a spider.
The hand was slender, with a small frame—it clearly belonged to a woman.
“Milord,” the voice came from the disembodied limb, “please take me with you as well. I am willing to become your servant and obey your every command.”
“You’re the wraith that was hiding in Angela’s left hand?”
“Yes, milord. But I never intended you any disrespect. I even urged Angela to help you, but she was too timid to act.”
Saul wasn’t particularly interested in this fragment of a wraith and planned to feed it to the diary.
Then suddenly, something occurred to him.
Angela had never left the Wizard Tower—so where had this wraith come from?
Was it “cargo” brought back by other apprentices? Or a byproduct of the tower itself?
“Did you come from the interlayer?” Saul decided to test it.
At the mention of the word “interlayer,” the hand clearly trembled, then flopped to the ground in a full prostration.
“Y-yes, milord. I came from inside the Bronze Gate. During an accident, my arm was severed and I escaped. I’ve been hiding in the candle ducts ever since. Eventually, I crawled out through Mentor Kaz’s lab trash can and finally attached myself to Angela nearby.”
The wraith hand had intended to win Saul’s sympathy with a tragic tale, but just then, the blood tide began to pour in through the window, nearing the limb. Alarmed, it quickened its speech and blurted everything out in one go.
It actually came from inside the Bronze Gate!
Saul’s interest was piqued. Knowing time was short, he stopped questioning and reached out toward the wraith hand.
“Come here.”
The hand was overjoyed and jumped with its fingers in delight. “Milord, I will stay obediently in your arm. You can command me however you wish.”
Stay in his arm… to serve his needs?
A strange thought suddenly popped into Saul’s head, and he twitched his mouth. “No need. I’ve got a better place for you.”
As he spoke, the diary unfolded on its own, responding to his will and devoured the wraith hand.
But unexpectedly, the diary didn’t give the hand its own black page. Instead, it absorbed it into a previously incomplete black page—only two-thirds full before.
In Saul’s eyes, the damaged page rapidly restored itself and became a full black page.
“What the… Did this hand become part of that lunatic?”
Just as he finished stowing away the wraith hand, Saul heard someone approaching.
He quickly turned and was shocked to see a palm-sized silver butterfly tugging at an old man’s collar with its tiny feelers.
She flew with difficulty, nearly dropping the man into the blood sea several times.
Yet she persisted, eventually managing to hurl the man into the clock tower—right into Saul’s arms.
Saul caught him, flipped him over, and was stunned—
The mad old man?
By now, the Nightmare Butterfly Penny was extremely weak, unable even to maintain her human form.
The blood tide had flooded into the room and was now flowing toward the center. It quickly reached Angela’s corpse, hungrily devouring it.
And it was Angela’s body that had bought Saul a few precious minutes.
“I’ll open the gate now. Please take my brother with you.”
“Brother?” Saul was shocked. He looked at the madman and suddenly understood. “He’s Ada?”
“Yes.”
“Then the Ada I met before…”
“Was merely someone I implanted with my brother’s memories,” Penny said casually.
“Ada… My brother took care of me for far too long. The radiation he suffered already exceeded normal limits. But to escape that wizard’s pursuit, I had to stay inside Penny’s body and follow him.”
“Once I regained some power, I found someone else to take his place—just kept my brother nearby. But his mental state kept deteriorating. He always returned to the night our village was destroyed. The night he left you behind.”
“So the village the old madman kept muttering about being destroyed by barbarians… was actually Saul’s original home.” Though Saul hadn’t lived through that painful night, the realization left him heavy-hearted.
“Please take him out of here. I’ll erase his most painful memories. You don’t need to care for him. Just give him some money, enough to live a quiet life in an ordinary town.”
The butterfly hovered weakly in the air, facing Saul, though her gaze never left the old man.
This madman—no, Ada—was truly the village’s only survivor. Everyone he thought of as his sister, his fellow villagers, had long perished in distant corners, rotting away.
“Sure enough, you really can’t stay too long in someone else’s body… Feelings like this—how did they even appear in me? I must’ve been corrupted.”
Saul heard Penny mutter softly.
By now, having finished devouring Angela, the blood tide surged once more toward the room’s center.
Knowing she had no time left, Penny suddenly beat her wings and turned, charging with all her strength at the crystal sphere above.
“Haha! Kismet, even though you’ve captured me for so long and chased me for so many years, I still won’t let you win!”
The seemingly indestructible crystal sphere shattered with a single strike from the frail butterfly, scattering fragments in all directions.
As it shattered, the silver butterfly also broke apart like crystal, fragment by fragment.
The key to the cursed city’s only escape route… turned out to be Penny’s very life.
In that brief instant, Saul thought he saw a faint, lovely girl smiling at him from across the room.
“Ridiculous fate, a power to peer into the past… and it ends up in the hands of a mere apprentice who hasn’t even become a True Wizard.”
“Once you leave, run. Don’t let Kismet catch you. Don’t ever mention anything about me. Otherwise… you’ll be the shortest-serving History Watcher in history.”
(End of Chapter)
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