Chapter 331: Little Butterfly |
"The Nightmare Butterfly… hatched?" Saul forced himself to calm down, trying to recall the dream he’d just had.
"If that Nightmare Butterfly really hatched inside my dream… then its ending wasn’t very good. But it called me Brother Saul—why would it call me that? Penny clearly died in Grind Sail Town."
He remembered that at the end of the dream, Penny had seemed to be calling out to him for help. He had originally intended to observe his own history—he must have glimpsed something astonishing.
After that, everything went blank. When he opened his eyes, he thought it had all just been a long, beautiful dream.
"Could that really have been Penny in my dream?" Saul took a test tube from the shelf.
The glass was completely intact.
His fingers unconsciously tightened around it, until a groaning creak came from the glass—then he abruptly loosened his grip.
"Maybe… it’s time to take a look at the notes I got from Heywood."
Back then, in exchange for retrieving Heidi—the curse parasitizing Heywood, or rather, his sister—Saul had obtained Heywood’s research on the Nightmare Butterfly.
Now that the cocoon was missing—very likely already hatched—he could wait no longer.
Gripping the test tube, he walked straight to the other end of the storage room and retrieved Heywood’s Nightmare Butterfly research notes.
But once he had them in hand, he didn’t open them immediately. Instead, he returned to the lab bench and performed a round of meditation to check his mental state.
"Looking back now… when I tried to examine my own history, I must’ve been contaminated somehow. I even heard the sound of pages flipping—must have been the diary trying to warn me."
"And I didn’t even react at the time… so that’s what it means to go beyond the safety range of the locator?"
Like stepping beyond the platform extended by the glass window.
After meditating for an hour, Saul confirmed his mental body was stable. The contamination he’d suffered in the dream hadn’t passed into his waking self.
When he opened his eyes, his expression was strange. "It seems… all the influence I suffered in the dream was absorbed by the Nightmare Butterfly."
"Did it… die directly in my dream?"
But speculating wouldn’t help. Saul solemnly opened the notebook before him.
A single sentence was written on the title page:
“This is a dream one can never wake from.”
Ten minutes later, Saul closed the book.
"The Nightmare Butterfly… really does hatch in dreams. But this ‘historical reenactment’ Heywood mentioned—something about that feels off."
He hadn’t finished reading the entire notebook.
Because after just a few pages, Saul began to feel drowsy.
It was unnatural—he had just woken up, and his mental energy had been fully restored after a solid hour of meditation.
So he immediately set the book down and meditated again to stabilize himself.
"Just as I thought—reading this requires extreme caution."
Saul carefully put the notebook away.
If what the book said was true, then the Nightmare Butterfly egg had indeed hatched inside his dream.
"I sealed the egg. It showed no signs of hatching before. Why did it suddenly hatch right after I came back? Did Penny do something to me?"
The Nightmare Butterfly’s power had clearly grown beyond Saul’s ability to control.
But because of the sudden shift in the dream’s ending, Saul didn’t immediately report the matter to the Tower Master.
And the diary hadn’t issued a warning either.
"Wait—the diary?"
The dark red hardcover book responded immediately.
Its pages flipped past lavish golden sheets, then white ones, then mottled black ones, all the way to the back cover.
"This is…?" Saul stared in surprise at what had appeared in the book.
It wasn’t a page anymore—it was a bookmark.
A silver, hollow-carved butterfly bookmark.
Just as Saul reached out with his consciousness to touch it, the bookmark suddenly vanished.
"What?" Before Saul could search for it, he suddenly saw a silver butterfly appear in his field of vision.
As if the bookmark had come alive.
But when he reached out to touch it, he felt only empty air.
He frowned at once, a faint black light rising from his palm. With a flick, it shot toward the butterfly.
It was one of Saul’s First Rank spells—Ray of Negative Energy.
But the ray passed right through the butterfly and dissipated halfway, lest it hit anything else.
The silver butterfly remained in Saul’s field of view, even circling his head twice.
"Little Algae!"
Saul summoned his pet.
The creature appeared at once.
And the moment it did, it too saw the butterfly.
Perhaps it had never seen anything quite like it—a silver, metallic, hollow-carved butterfly—because it immediately pounced.
The butterfly sprang upward and landed atop Little Algae’s head.
Little Algae twisted its neck around, trying to look but no matter how it turned, it couldn’t see the butterfly on its own head.
Panicking, Little Algae stuck out its black tongue and licked its own forehead.
But its tongue also passed right through, brushing only air.
"Visible, but untouchable… like a 3D projection, or something that exists only on the retina."
A thought occurred to Saul, and he cast another First Rank spell—Lightless Radiance.
This spell produced a special darkness that could not be seen through, though one’s vision within it remained unaffected.
But even when the butterfly was enveloped by the Lightless Radiance, Saul could still see it clearly.
"It’s not a light-based image," Saul murmured, recalling how the butterfly had hidden in his left eye before breaking out of the cocoon.
He slowly closed his left eye.
The butterfly vanished. In front of him, Little Algae was still twisting about wildly.
"Does it only exist in my left eye’s vision? But then why could Little Algae see it?"
Just then, Little Algae suddenly froze, turning its head toward Saul’s left shoulder.
At the same moment, Saul felt a slight chill there—like something had appeared.
He opened his left eye again, and sure enough, the silver butterfly had landed on his left shoulder.
He reached out again, gently trying to stroke its wings but still couldn’t touch it.
"Right—Little Algae doesn’t see with eyes. It can’t. It senses death… but the Nightmare Butterfly isn’t a spirit of the dead."
"Don’t stick your tongue out at me! Just because you can’t touch me doesn’t mean it’s not uncomfortable!"
A young girl’s voice rang out from the Nightmare Butterfly, scolding Little Algae as it crept closer.
Saul wasn’t surprised that the butterfly could speak. "Penny?"
The butterfly lifted slightly and came to rest again. "Brother Saul."
The voice was somewhat like Penny’s, but younger—like a four or five-year-old child.
"Brother Saul."
It called again.
"You’re not Penny. Who are you really?" Saul’s face grew cold. "I know you have awareness. If you won’t speak, I’ll seal you away forever."
Now that it had become a bookmark in the diary, Saul had control. He believed that no living thing—no matter its form—would want to remain a bookmark forever.
"Brother Saul."
Still, the butterfly only said that one thing.
"Little Algae—lick her!"
"Ahhh! I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong!"
The butterfly shrieked and nimbly dodged.
Then it fluttered slowly, hovering beside Saul’s left ear. "Brother Saul, I’m not Penny. I was supposed to be, but now I’m not."
"I lost part of my history… inside you."
(End of Chapter)