Chapter 67: Changes
It was her sister.
Her sister had always been like this…
Luo Ling lowered her head slightly and whispered,
“Mm, I know.”
This scene reminded her of the heartwarming yet cruel moments at An Yu’s grandparents’ house in Baiyan Village.
An Yu must have felt the same way back then.
Until the very end, An Yu had tried to convince herself that her grandparents were still alive…
And now?
She… had become another An Yu.
No, no, there was no Puppet Ballad here, no white reishi, her sister was her sister.
But what if…?
…There were no “what ifs.”
Luo Ling looked up at her sister and met her gaze. Su Wan had put down her chopsticks and was watching her beloved sister intently, as always.
Could even her sister, like this, be a Meat Puppet of the Puppet Ballad?
The thought lingered, the events of Baiyan Village leaving a deep impression on her.
The best way to confirm if her sister was real was to cut her skin and see if her flesh and blood had been replaced by white mycelia.
Luo Ling had a dagger hidden on her. Her sister was right there. A few simple actions would be enough to dispel her doubts.
Draw the dagger, swing it, cut the skin, that was all it took.
“What’s wrong? Eat up. I already ate this afternoon, I’m not hungry,” her sister said with a smile, the wrinkles around her eyes not diminishing the warmth in her gaze.
“Okay.”
Luo Ling lowered her head and continued eating.
What was she thinking…?
She couldn’t be influenced by such thoughts. If she cut everyone she met to confirm their identity, she would be no different from a lunatic.
The “egg” had a purpose. It needed to hatch, to accumulate power, so it created Meat Puppets.
Only in a relatively isolated place like Baiyan Village could a large number of Meat Puppets exist. An “egg” living in the city, like Li Tianming, could only target Awakened Ones.
After all, there were too many people in the city. If it acted as recklessly as in Baiyan Village, it would have been eliminated by the city’s Awakened organizations long ago.
Calm down, the situation wasn’t that dire yet. It couldn’t be that the entire Jiangcheng County was populated by Meat Puppets.
This thought calmed Luo Ling’s anxiety. After quickly finishing her meal, she stood up to get her backpack.
“Remember to rest early, don’t study tonight,” her sister’s concerned voice echoed.
“Okay.”
Luo Ling turned, forcing a smile to reassure her sister, then hurried upstairs to her room.
“This child…”
Su Wan chuckled and shook her head.
Then she noticed something on the chair where Luo Ling’s backpack had been. She walked over, picked it up, and frowned.
“…Whose photo is this? Why is it in Xiao Ling’s bag?”
Su Wan looked up, about to take the small, passport-sized photo upstairs, but then decided against it, not wanting to disturb her sister’s rest.
“Never mind, I’ll leave it here. She’ll remember when she sees it.”
Su Wan placed the photo back on the chair and went to clear the table.
The photo was of a pretty but thin girl, her head slightly lowered, looking anxious and uneasy, her black, shoulder-length hair deliberately covering her cheeks, a faint, dark gold glint in her eyes.
…
Back in her room, Luo Ling tossed her backpack aside and instinctively looked at the full-length mirror.
The girl in the mirror looked strange, the blue scales on her temples quite noticeable. She had to comb her hair over them to hide them.
That was fine; she usually had this hairstyle at school anyway. But the dark gold glint in her eyes was more conspicuous, easily noticeable even without close inspection.
Luo Ling rubbed her eyes, but the eerie golden hue didn’t fade.
“I need to buy some colored contacts…”
Luo Ling sighed, a strange feeling settling in her heart.
Even with her looking like this, her sister hadn’t found it strange?
But thinking about it, her sister hadn’t even reacted much to her “White Witch” form, so this small change was indeed nothing significant.
“I should check on Elsa first.”
Luo Ling calmed herself, and the girl in the mirror’s hair grew longer, spreading across the floor, her face taking on a childish appearance.
Looking at the somewhat cumbersome long hair, Luo Ling thought she should tie it up next time. A change of hairstyle would be nice.
With a thought, her perspective shifted to the unconscious Elsa.
“Her breathing is steady, her aura stable, completely different from in the subterranean cavern… It seems Gypsy Girl really did intervene.”
Luo Ling continued observing, then suddenly felt a strange gaze on her. She shifted the Spore’s perspective and saw two cloth buttons staring intently at her.
…Bella.
Seeming to sense Luo Ling’s consciousness within the Spore, Bella started struggling, threads… were those tears?… leaking from her button eyes.
Luo Ling ignored Bella’s pleas and continued to examine Elsa’s condition.
Her vital signs and body were unharmed. Soul injuries weren’t something the Myriad path could heal, let alone Luo Ling, whose path was Silent Demise, the opposite of Myriad.
“To understand why Elsa is like this, it seems I have to look into her memories.”
The new ability, Read, which she hadn’t used before, Luo Ling wasn’t sure if it was safe, but she had to use it now… Since she was the one using the ability, she could simply destroy the Spore if anything went wrong.
Read: Spores take root and read the host’s information.
Luo Ling felt her consciousness being pulled into somewhere. When her vision returned, she was in a cold laboratory, surrounded by sealed containers.
The walls and ceiling were a cold, sterile white, different from a hospital’s, with a faint blue tinge, seemingly made of a special material.
Besides the sealed containers, there was a lab table piled with books and experimental records.
“This should be a fragment of Elsa’s memory, so this place is… Scientist’s lab?”
Luo Ling examined the lab curiously. Her perspective could move freely within this memory fragment, able to examine everything within, without restriction.
—Of course, only things the memory’s owner had seen firsthand.
For example, the books and experimental records on the lab table. Luo Ling flipped through them and found they were only covers, the pages inside blank, because Elsa had never seen their contents.
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