Chapter 50: The Witch (8) |
The employer was dead, so the promised payment was naturally out of reach.
Everyone had gathered here originally for the high reward promised by the Kingsley family. Now, not only was the money gone, they might also have angered a powerful witch who had just been resurrected. Fearing trouble, most of the psychics present immediately fled.
The few exorcists from the church didn’t leave. The witch had carried out her plan so ruthlessly that it was practically an insult to the church. Although their morals had been corrupted by money, they still retained some basic sense of decency.
The ones who stayed behind were Wester and Rebecca.
Wester was furious because the witch had tricked him, while Rebecca stayed because she was a local college student.
The group gathered together to review the situation. The church’s exorcists believed the problem lay in the step of guiding the soul. They had indeed expelled the witch from Kelly’s body, but whether the soul that awakened in Olivia’s body was truly her own remained questionable. In their discussion, there was an undertone of shifting blame onto others.
Rebecca was extremely angry about this because she was also one of the mediums responsible for guiding the soul. Although she wasn’t highly professional, she felt confident in her own judgment—and having others doubt it was a completely different matter. When her professional competence was questioned, Rebecca immediately exploded.
“The compatibility between a body and its soul can’t be faked. I can assure you, when she opened her eyes, it was truly her own soul inside Olivia!”
“Then you must have been mistaken.”
Seeing Rebecca clench her fists, about to start a fight with the church exorcists, Wester suddenly spoke, stopping both sides from clashing.
“There’s something I’ve always wondered,” he said. “When Olivia’s body was retrieved, the seal on her was completely intact. In that case, how did her soul break through the seal and respond to Kelly’s summoning?”
“Perhaps it’s some kind of bloodline witchcraft,” Rebecca suggested, voicing the collective speculation of the psychics present. “Witches with close bloodlines naturally share a strong connection. In South America, there’s a pair of twin witches who can even swap bodies at any time. Maybe Kelly and Olivia are related by blood, allowing Olivia to break free from the constraints of her body and answer Kelly’s call.”
But Wester immediately dismissed her theory.
“These are Kelly Davis’s life records. She’s a local of Micano City; both her father and mother grew up in Dwight State, and their life trajectories are fully traceable. After reviewing both parents’ records, it’s clear that on her father’s side, for five generations, there’s nothing unusual. Kelly’s witch lineage must have been inherited from her mother, Lyra, who died young. Tracing Lyra’s ancestry further back, it’s easy to see that Lyra’s grandmother was a practitioner of the Earth Goddess, an Emara witch-healer, who was an immigrant from South America.
“As for Olivia, though her records are partially lost due to the passage of time, the information I’ve gathered shows that she and her daughter’s ancestral home is in France. It’s obvious that they belong to two entirely separate lines of inheritance that do not intersect.”
As he spoke, Wester pulled out a manila envelope and dumped a thick stack of documents onto the table for everyone to review.
Having worked with him for so long, everyone present had already witnessed Wester’s formidable ability to gather and analyze information. No one reached out to flip through the stack, and no one dared to question him.
Everyone was simply left puzzled: if the two were unrelated, how did Olivia manage to break the seal and respond to Kelly?
Wester offered another hypothesis: “Have you ever considered that the witch in Kelly’s body back then wasn’t Olivia at all?”
“That’s impossible! I saw with my own eyes the spirit leaving Kelly and entering Olivia’s body!” Rebecca shot back.
“That was most likely an illusion—a simple visual trick. In just a few seconds, no one had time to verify what was real or fake…” Wester said, a cold smile tugging at the corner of his handsome face. “We were all deceived by that cunning witch. She borrowed Olivia’s name—the ‘Cursed Witch’—to commit her crimes, and made us mistake her for Olivia. In fact, Olivia’s soul has always been trapped in her own body; it never left. What we purified was nothing more than a witch completely unrelated to the case.”
Everyone froze at this speculation.
“Th-then… who is that witch, really…”
They gaped, staring blankly at the exorcist before them.
Indeed—if it wasn’t Olivia, then who could that witch possibly be?
—
At the gas station, Everly put away her phone and stood by the window, gazing down at the black lily that had suddenly appeared on her windowsill.
In the brief moment she lowered her eyes, it had suddenly appeared—had Kelly been here?
Everly thought for a moment, then stepped forward. She parted the leaves at the base of the plant and found a small bulge in the flower soil.
The soil was still fresh, with a faint dampness. Lifting the top layer with her fingertips, she revealed a familiar transparent plastic bag—half a month ago, Everly had placed a reminder note into this very bag and buried it in the flower soil.
And now, the bag was still the same one—but what it contained had changed. Inside the plastic bag was no longer a note, but a small white crystal pendant. Everly examined it through the plastic: the crystal was teardrop-shaped, about the size of her pinky finger, with a rounded, blunt bottom containing a tiny bubble that looked naturally formed. Inside the bubble floated a droplet of pale blue water, smaller than a dewdrop. Remarkably, it seemed completely unaffected by gravity, hovering quietly at the center. Sunlight passed through the crystal and struck the droplet, scattering dazzling reflections around it.
What is this…
Years of instinctive caution kept Everly from touching unknown objects lightly. Yet her intuition told her that a “return gift” from Kelly in this form was unlikely to be harmful.
After a brief hesitation, Everly retrieved several protective and detection tools Rebecca had given her and tested the pendant with each. As she suspected, it was indeed harmless.
Taking a deep breath, she opened the plastic bag and lifted out the pendant.
The moment her fingertips touched it, the ground seemed to vanish beneath her, and she fell into a yellowed memory.
In the memory, she was no longer Everly Minas, but a tiny six-year-old girl.
It was many, many years ago. During the Great Depression, unemployment surged, countless people lost their jobs, and to reduce living costs, her mother, Olivia Salaman, took her on a long journey away from the bustling metropolis to the remote city of Micano. With lower salary demands and stronger work ethic than most men, her mother quickly found employment as a factory worker.
The job often required overtime. Worried that her daughter would be alone at home, her mother enrolled her in a local public elementary school.
That decision marked the beginning of all nightmares.
Because of her strong Eastern accent, she was b*llied by several students at school. If it had been Everly, she would have thrown punches and fiercely fought back, but the owner of this memory was only a small, timid girl. She was shy, weak, and fearful; no matter how she was tormented, she didn’t dare summon the courage to resist. Worried about affecting her mother’s job, she even deliberately hid the bruises and wounds on her body—until one day it could no longer be concealed.
Seeing the countless injuries on her daughter broke Olivia’s heart. Angrily, she stormed into the school, demanding that the teachers and principal take responsibility and punish the b*llies. But as a poor woman of humble means, she was not given the respect she deserved.
In a moment of desperation, Olivia spoke words she did not filter, casting a vicious curse upon the bllies. She cursed them to suffer tenfold, even a hundredfold, the pain inflicted upon her daughter, and she cursed those who had allowed the bllying to continue to face their just punishment.
It was only an emotional outburst—Olivia had no real intent to curse anyone. She was a white witch, skilled in dispelling evil and healing, not in black magic.
Yet the curses came true, one by one. The children who had b*llied her daughter died under strange circumstances, and even those who had turned a blind eye suffered one accident after another… By the time Olivia realized that all of this stemmed from her daughter’s magical outburst, it was already too late to reverse.
In the memory, as Olivia’s daughter, she was a black witch.
Normally, a young witch would begin to awaken her powers gradually after turning twelve. But perhaps the trauma of the b*llying was too severe, or perhaps her talent was too great. At just six years old, she experienced a violent surge of magic, unconsciously putting her mother’s curse into effect.
Angry townspeople stormed her home. They discovered her mother’s identity as a witch and mistakenly blamed her for the curses. No one realized that the true culprit was the six-year-old girl herself—not even she understood what had truly happened.
Her mother, Olivia, was arrested by the church’s exorcists, while she was taken away by a man named York Kingsley and imprisoned in a pitch-dark attic.
She spent the next two years in a daze. Being protected so thoroughly by her mother, the six-year-old didn’t understand much—only that her mother seemed to have gone far away to work. She had to eat properly, grow up well, and be a good child so that her mother would come back to see her…
But she had been so obedient, so very obedient. Why hadn’t her mother returned yet? Mama, mama, mama… she missed her mother so much. When would her mother come back?
She waited and waited—from age six to eight. One day, by chance, she overheard her caretaker revealing the truth: her mother hadn’t gone away to work at all—she had been captured.
“Hehe… York’s got some plan. Don’t think you can fool me… hic… letting me take care of you, the ‘hostage,’ and giving me such a tiny hush fee… while he himself… using the witch’s power… hic… made so much…”
The babysitter was drunk, muttering complaints, and when she looked up and saw the girl standing there in shock, she didn’t stop. In fact, she only got more carried away.
“…You really are so foolish, believing whatever people tell you… Your mother… hic… was captured all for your sake… and you actually thought that York… was a good man… hahaha… hahahaha…”
What?
What was the babysitter saying?
Hostage? Witch? Captured? What’s happening? She missed her mother so much—where was her mother?
Mama… mama… mama…
Perhaps because her emotions were so intense, that night the little girl dreamed of her mother.
In just two short years, her once healthy and strong mother had become weak and haggard. White witches were naturally gifted in restoration and healing, while curses were among the most wicked forms of black magic. Each time Olivia used a lethal curse on a living person, it consumed a tremendous amount of her energy and even eroded her soul. But Olivia did not dare refuse, because her daughter was still under the Kingsleys’ control…
It was all her fault. All because of her. Her mother was being forced to kill at the cost of her own life!
Like a blade cleaving through the fog in her mind, everything suddenly became clear.
So that was the truth…
And with understanding came anger.
Anger at the people who threatened and coerced them. Anger at the church’s greed. Anger at York’s despicable schemes… and anger at her own helplessness.
She desperately wanted to do something. She tried, just as she had during her magical outburst at six, to curse to death those who threatened and harmed her and her mother. But she was too young—her body’s magical circuits were not yet fully formed. Though this body was filled with power, she was far from the age when she could wield it freely. No matter how tightly she clenched her teeth, until her gums bled, the curse would not take effect.
Countless attempts. Countless failures.
At last, the raging flames of anger consumed her reason. She sank into despair, into self-blame and self-loathing.
If only I didn’t exist, she thought.
If I weren’t here, Mother wouldn’t be forced to kill.
I am the source of all this misfortune. I deserve to disappear.
Fate played a cruel joke on her.
The power that had failed to manifest after thousands of curses worked perfectly the very first time she formed a clear intention to curse herself.
The girl transformed into a wooden mannequin.
…
Comments 2