Chapter 5: The Pale Girl
“No, this… how is this possible?!”
Li Tianming stared at Wu Qin’s fallen body, his face filled with disbelief.
He slowly raised his head, meeting those terrifying eyes. His previous composure had completely vanished, replaced only by fear.
“You… you…” Li Tianming stammered, his face filled with horror. “What… what are you…?”
An Awakened One?
No, this couldn’t be an Awakened One…
She must be a Grotesquery!
The girl didn’t answer his question. Her small, demonic figure slowly walked towards him.
“Wait! Miss Luo Ling, this is a misunderstanding!” Li Tianming shouted, a look of terror appearing on his face. “You don’t need treatment, we should be allies…
“Just like ‘Forgotten River’! The woman’s child in the hospital, he’s our ally too!”
Li Tianming retreated towards the door as he spoke.
But his limbs wouldn’t obey. He collapsed onto the floor, just a few steps away from the door.
Just a few steps, yet the difference between life and death.
The girl continued to approach, seemingly oblivious, step by step.
As she drew closer, despair filled Li Tianming’s eyes.
He tried to summon his Grotesquery, “Puppet Ballad,” but the white mark on his arm remained dormant, as if even it feared those burning, dark-gold vertical pupils.
“No, don’t kill me…”
Finally, Li Tianming let out a terrified scream, no longer resembling the judge who controlled the fate of Awakened Ones.
But the girl didn’t respond. She simply extended her delicate hand.
As casually as picking up an object, her hand plunged into Li Tianming’s chest and pulled out his heart.
…No, it wasn’t a heart, but rather a mass of writhing, white threads that seemed alive.
Even more bizarre, despite having his heart removed, Li Tianming wasn’t dead.
He stared blankly at his heart, his expression shifting.
Only one thought filled his mind:
“Why am I not dead?”
Li Tianming slowly lowered his head and saw that his body was like an empty shell, filled with slowly wriggling white threads.
He recognized them. They were the mycelia of the “Puppet Ballad,” used to control puppets.
Wu Qin’s body was filled with these mycelia. If Luo Ling had been successfully “treated,” her flesh and blood would have been replaced by them as well.
And now… the Puppet Ballad’s mycelia were inside him.
There was only one possibility.
An expression of disbelief and madness crept onto Li Tianming’s face.
“No… this is impossible…”
He could feel his memories receding like a tide, all memories related to Awakened Ones and Grotesqueries fading away.
This meant… these memories had been implanted into his mind by someone else using the “Puppet Ballad.”
The “treatment” and salvation that Li Tianming believed in were nothing more than the laughable actions of a puppet controlled by someone else.
He was just another puppet.
A puppet of Grotesquery Sequence Number Forty-Nine, the “Puppet Ballad.”
…No human could ever truly side with a Grotesquery.
Realizing this, the only part of Li Tianming’s brain that truly belonged to him withered and died.
Finally, his expression froze in utter despair.
Perhaps it was Li Tianming’s loud cries that brought Luo Ling back to her senses.
She had been in a semi-conscious state, and upon waking, she saw Li Tianming cowering before her.
At the same time, Luo Ling caught sight of her own hand in her peripheral vision. Looking at it, even she couldn’t help but gasp.
“Is this… my hand?”
Her once delicate hand was now covered in bluish scales, her fingertips tipped with razor-sharp claws. The claw on her thumb was still stained with bits of brain matter.
Although the temple was the weakest point of the skull, reinforced by “Bone Steel,” even a drill would have difficulty penetrating it.
But for Luo Ling, with her monstrous strength and sharp claws, it was like paper.
Luo Ling turned to look at the mirror on the dressing table. Just one glance, and she recoiled in horror, shattering the mirror.
With a crisp sound, the scattered shards of glass all reflected a demonic figure.
“Is this… me?”
Luo Ling was suddenly terrified, but something even more terrifying followed.
She watched in horror as the girl in the mirror calmly picked up the white heart and slowly… ate it.
“What am I eating?”
Luo Ling looked at the viscous white mycelia in her hand, half-eaten, and felt a wave of nausea.
But a horrifying impulse controlled her. Even though she tried to resist, she couldn’t fight the temptation.
This impulse was called “hunger.”
An unprecedented hunger.
“So fragrant…”
So hungry…
Luo Ling ate with tears streaming down her face, but the small clump of mycelia seemed endless.
More and more mycelia flowed from the still-living Li Tianming and the deceased Wu Qin, converging in Luo Ling’s palm.
Luo Ling slowly knelt on the floor, staring in horror at the scattered mirror shards.
The demon in the mirror greedily devoured the mycelia in her hand. Her hair grew longer and longer, turning white like the mycelia. Her skin became deathly pale, and her body seemed to shrink.
“Don’t eat… don’t eat…”
Her spreading white hair almost covered the entire room, continuing to spread outwards.
Only after devouring all the mycelia did this terrifying transformation finally stop.
The white hair on the floor seemed to burp in satisfaction, gradually receding to Luo Ling’s ankles.
Finally, free from the controlling hunger, Luo Ling stood up, staring blankly at the two corpses before her.
“I… killed them?”
Li Tianming’s terror, Wu Qin’s relief, remained frozen on their faces.
There was no doubt, they were both dead.
Murder.
For an ordinary high school student, it seemed like a distant concept.
But now, it had happened at her hands, and for some reason, she only felt… lost.
She looked again at her reflection in the broken mirror shards and saw only a delicate, pale-skinned girl with white hair.
The girl’s frail appearance evoked pity. Her pale lips and faded pink pupils made her look like she had been suffering from a long illness.
Although Luo Ling could still see traces of her former self, the difference in demeanor was stark.
Was this her?
Or…
Luo Ling remembered the “Puppet Ballad” that Li Tianming kept mentioning, and she shuddered.
Had she become some kind of Grotesquery? Had she become… the “Puppet Ballad”?
Also, Luo Ling noticed that her severed arm had grown back, while the severed arm on the floor, previously pinned by the ‘Bone Spike,’ had vanished.
Was this also because of the “Puppet Ballad”?
As Luo Ling pondered in confusion, a knock sounded on the door, and Su Wan’s worried voice came through,
“Dr. Li, Xiao Ling… are you alright?”
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