Chapter 180 – Traces Left Behind

Eileen released her hand, and the unfolded “secret letter” immediately erupted with layers upon layers of illusory flames before shrinking and folding back in the blink of an eye into an utterly unremarkable sheet of stationery.

Yet Yu Sheng remained motionless, staring at the paper, his brow heavy with gravity and thought.

After a long while, Little Red Riding Hood’s voice finally came from beside him: “…Old Zheng, he… it really was him…”

The girl’s tone carried hesitation and resistance. Clearly, she found the clue before her difficult to accept. Even though she had come here precisely to uncover something—now that something had actually been uncovered, the result was not what she had hoped for.

The sacrifice in the Museum’s White Exhibition Hall really had been a trap targeting her, and the one who had led her into that trap was indeed the “liaison” she knew so well.

Though from the wording of the secret letter, it wasn’t hard to judge that the liaison known as “Old Zheng” had likely been deceived and manipulated himself.

“The signature is Servants of the Angel—it’s obvious. The ones who wrote this letter are those cultists who follow the Twilight Angel, the same group that conducted the sacrifice ritual in the White Exhibition Hall,” Yu Sheng said, shaking the letter in his hand, his tone calm. “The reason they used ‘letters’—such a primitive means of communication—was apparently to use this special kind of ‘spell’ to conceal their activities.”

“Whoever received this letter was thoroughly duped,” Eileen chimed in from the side. “Blessings, breaking curses, goodwill, being misunderstood by the world—those are all classic cult lines, but sometimes they really do work.”

Yu Sheng glanced at the expression on Little Red Riding Hood’s face, thought for a moment, then spoke: “Judging from what the letter reveals, Old Zheng actually didn’t know it was a trap. He probably thought he was helping you… He might have even been trying to help you for a very long time, and it was precisely because of that desire that those Angel Cult members exploited him.”

Little Red Riding Hood listened in silence, never opening her mouth. After a long pause, she finally muttered, breaking the silence: “Someone who deals with ‘curiosities’ and the Otherworld every day—how could he fall for something like this? How long has he been deceived?”

“…Probably quite a while,” Yu Sheng said, recalling the contents of the secret letter while thinking it through. “The letter mentioned things like ‘witnessing with his own eyes,’ which means Old Zheng didn’t just take those Angel Cult members at their word—he may have even been drawn into participating in certain rituals, or at least been exposed to things connected to the Twilight Angel. Before he tricked you into going to the White Exhibition Hall, he was already in deep.”

He paused there, and after a moment of contemplation added: “And this letter reveals another important piece of information… Those people—their real target probably isn’t you personally, but the ‘Fairy Tale’ behind you.”

Little Red Riding Hood said nothing, only shifting her gaze to the other letters and notepads.

“Eileen,” Yu Sheng immediately caught on as well, “can you check if there’s anything else here that’s been hidden like that letter?”

“Let me look,” Eileen agreed, sitting down amid the pile of things on the desk and beginning to rummage through them.

But after searching for a long time, she came up empty.

“Nothing. The rest of these are all perfectly ordinary things, including these letters—it looks like communicating through traditional letters was just a personal hobby of this person’s,” the Little Doll said, sitting on the desk with her legs dangling over the edge, swinging back and forth. She raised her head and surveyed the surroundings. “I also gave this room a once-over. Nothing worth noting.”

Yu Sheng wasn’t surprised by the Little Doll’s answer.

It seemed that anything connected to the Angel Cult members had either been moved in advance or destroyed. Only this last letter hadn’t been dealt with in time.

But Yu Sheng wasn’t discouraged. He simply observed the room with even greater care, then began examining every corner of it.

The correspondence and items directly related to the Angel Cult members might indeed have been moved or thoroughly destroyed ahead of time, but that didn’t mean no other clues remained here. The liaison had clearly been in deep—to the point of actively reaching out to the Twilight Angel. That kind of involvement would inevitably manifest in his daily life: changes in habits, traces left behind inadvertently, fragments of writing in a journal… A person who lived left traces. He couldn’t possibly have cleaned everything away.

Little Red Riding Hood noticed Yu Sheng’s intent and began helping him check every corner of the room. She even summoned her wolves, sending these creatures of shadow to investigate clues that human eyes could barely discern.

Eileen also began carefully going through the papers and books on the desk—though these were all perfectly ordinary “mundane objects,” clues could still be hidden among commonplace notes and messages.

Just then, a Shadow Wolf suddenly stopped in the center of the room, letting out a low whine, its paw repeatedly batting at a rug beside the bed.

Little Red Riding Hood’s brow instantly furrowed. She stepped forward and yanked the rug away.

There was nothing hidden beneath it, but on the floor, one could just barely make out some nearly indiscernible traces.

They were strange symbols and lines arranged in a circle roughly one meter in diameter, their color carrying a faint dark red tinge. They appeared to have been carefully scrubbed clean once, leaving only very faint traces—but perhaps because this process of “applying and scrubbing” had been repeated too many times, the floor still retained those vague, ghostly outlines.

“Looks like it was drawn in blood,” Little Red Riding Hood said with a frown, carefully studying the extremely faint marks on the floor. “It’s a very basic séance ritual, but only the traces of the runes remain. Without the offerings and the accompanying prayers and invocations, it’s hard to trace what it was specifically used to communicate with.”

“Could it have been used to communicate with the Twilight Angel?” Yu Sheng asked curiously.

“Hard to say,” Little Red Riding Hood frowned and shook her head. “You know I’ve never dealt with this kind of thing. I’ve only heard that although those Angel Cult members claim to have the ability to communicate with the ‘Emissary,’ in reality most of the time they’re just experiencing frenzied hallucinations from taking too many drugs. The Twilight Angel itself actually never responds to humans at all—or rather… its way of responding is to simply drive people insane.” She paused, her expression darkening slightly. “Someone like Old Zheng—clearly a ‘novice’ who was tricked into this, using such a basic séance ritual—it’s hard to say he could have successfully communicated with anything… Most likely it was just another layer of deception those Angel Cult members prepared for him, to make him believe he could truly hear ‘divine will.'”

Yu Sheng listened without comment. After a moment of contemplation, he crouched down and slowly ran his hand over those blurred dark red traces.

Then he suddenly pulled a small knife from his pocket and made a small cut on his hand.

Bright red blood dripped onto the floor.

Little Red Riding Hood was instantly alarmed, instinctively reaching out to stop him: “Hey, what are you doing! You can’t just casually—with something of unknown purpose—”

The blood was absorbed by those blurred dark red traces in the blink of an eye, like water droplets falling on a sponge.

Little Red Riding Hood’s startled cry from beside him suddenly receded into the distance, becoming an elongated, intermittent noise.

Yu Sheng raised his head and saw that everything in the room seemed to have been draped in a thin veil—a blurry sensation as if he were sinking into some dimension gradually peeling away from reality. Little Red Riding Hood and Eileen became two shadows frozen in place not far away. They seemed to still be moving slowly in his direction, but the entire process felt as though it had been stretched to infinity.

Yu Sheng rubbed his eyes and stood up from the floor. He was somewhat surprised by the situation before him, but not overly shocked—after witnessing so many bizarre and outlandish scenes, his tolerance for these “sudden shifts in circumstances” was extremely high. His nerves had grown thick enough to serve as load-bearing pillars.

Then he noticed that the blurry “veil” over his surroundings seemed to gradually recede.

The room was still the same room, only everything had taken on a layer of grayish dimness. The daylight streaming in through the window had turned into a pale, muted white—still seemingly bright, yet somehow incapable of illuminating anything beyond the window frame.

Yu Sheng’s eyes suddenly widened.

He saw that in the places the “sunlight” could not reach—on those gray walls and floors—writing was continuously emerging.

As if someone’s “thoughts” were being powerfully projected into this eerie pocket of space-time, Yu Sheng watched the words spread in every direction as they kept appearing—

“I want to help them…

“I went to the Orphanage again. It’s been months… and another familiar face has disappeared…

“The tree planted by the last Little Red Riding Hood has already grown very tall. Today another new child came to find me. She said she’s the new Little Red Riding Hood…

“Only fourteen years old. She said she wanted a job…

“Nobody can do anything. The Special Operations Bureau can’t do anything. The association can’t do anything either. All the things I’ve collected and studied for breaking curses and fighting dreams—none of it helps.

“…Someone came to me on their own. He said they could help…

“They’re somewhat suspicious. I suspect they’re connected to some illegal secret cult, but they showed me some things…”

The writing spread across the floor and walls, spread through the air, spread across Yu Sheng’s field of vision—until it had nearly covered every inch of space within his sight—then silently, gradually faded away.

A strange sound came from above, like something slowly writhing.

Yu Sheng slowly raised his head, looking toward the source of the sound.

He saw that the room’s ceiling had, at some point, split open with a hole—a circular gap corresponding to the dark red circular traces on the floor.

From within the gap came low, chaotic noise, accompanied by the eerie sound of some creature slowly moving and scraping. A slender limb covered in bizarre protrusions and fine, intricate patterns extended from within.

The tentacle silently expanded and contracted in the air, beginning to slowly patrol and inch its way toward Yu Sheng’s position…

(End of Chapter)