Her forehead felt a little cold.
Pandora subconsciously reached up to touch it, her hand coming away damp with a cold sweat.
Strange.
Why was she sweating?
Pandora didn’t understand.
In the corridor outside their compartnt, the orderly sounds of people disembarking could now be heard. Inside, everyone else was silently gathering their ager belongings.
Pandora casually flipped through a few pages of the heavy to. A journey of over a day, spent wholly engrossed in reading, had indeed yielded significant gains. She found that the foundational theories of Alchemy in her mind seed to have beco much clearer and more systematic.
Wait, why had she used the word “seed”?
And what was it she was just about to do...
What was it?
The line to disembark had reached their row.
Pandora remained seated, unmoving.
Everything around her was proceeding normally, except for her. It was as if she had frozen in this mont. Because she felt sothing was wrong, a voice in the back of her mind was screaming—
Sothing was very, very wrong.
“My lady, it’s ti to go.”
Elsa had already risen. She reminded her in a low voice.
Pandora’s body stood up on instinct, her hands moving automatically to close the book and stow it away.
And at that mont,
her fingertips, between the pages, brushed against sothing foreign.
It was—a folded, rough-edged slip of paper.
She froze. Her mind raced, but no matter how she searched her mories of the train ride, she had no recollection of this note that had appeared out of nowhere.
She slowly unfolded the slip of paper; its edges were rough, as if crudely torn from a larger sheet. There was no signature on the note.
Only, drawn with so kind of deep red, long-dried pignt, was a crooked, wobbling smiley face. The artwork was as crude as a child’s doodle, yet it sohow radiated a spine-chilling horror.
Beneath the smiley face, written in the sa deep red pignt, was a single line in a ssy, fancy script.
“I see you.”
A spine-chilling feeling, like countless icy ants, crawled up inch by inch from the gaps between the vertebrae, slowly climbing up her spine—no, not hers, but Betty’s nape.
“So... so scary...”
Betty’s trembling voice suddenly sounded from behind her, interrupting Pandora’s nearly frozen train of thought. The little chef had, at so point, edged close to her side, curiously staring at the note.
“My lady, is this sothing you just wrote?”
Pandora stared at the note and shook her head. “Not .”
“Then who left it?” Betty guessed curiously. “Could it be the book’s last owner?”
No, obviously not.
Almost without thinking, Pandora had already dismissed the idea. But this ti, after a mont of stiffness, she answered:
“Perhaps.”
She didn’t say anything more, imdiately following Elsa to join the line disembarking. Seeing this, Betty lost interest and turned her excited gaze toward the world outside... the outside, which would be a new world for her.
How could she not be excited?
Pandora “should have” been excited as well,
but right now, she felt none of the mood of soone arriving in a new world for the first ti.
Because just now,
the mont she saw the smiley face and the ssage on the note,
she rembered again. All the illogical monts; the disjointed feeling of ti skipping.
That strange, surreal feeling was back!
But—
why her?
Why was it only after seeing this note that she could rember everything?
Pandora gripped the note tightly, forcing her eyes away.
And when she did...
that feeling vanished again.
She couldn't even rember what was on the note anymore. It was only because she had, beforehand, consciously decided to look at the note again, that she was able to see the note and once more recall everything.
What on earth was going on?
mory... the note... the ti-skip the train was experiencing...
For a mont, Pandora had the urge to find that “conductor” and demand an explanation, but after a deep breath—she abandoned the idea.
You can’t judge a thing by its appearance.
The note seed strange, terrifying,
but to her, it was “friendly.”
Perhaps the being that wrote it, the entity, had no concept of human “goodwill,” but at least from the results, it couldn't be called an enemy. It made her different from the other “passengers.” It allowed her to clearly perceive what had just happened. It gave her a choice, a chance to see the truth,
even if that truth was as epheral as a soap bubble.
In the sa way, this experience was seemingly strange and horrifying, but objectively, she was lucky.
She was like the chicken that saw the slaughterhouse...
If she told the others what she saw, it would do her no good whatsoever. It would likely only incite the hostility of the flock, or even cause her anomaly to be noticed by the “farr”!
So—
“Haaa—”
Letting out a long breath, Pandora’s mind returned to order. Her gaze was clear and calm. She carefully refolded the note, treating it like a treasured object, and carefully tucked it back between the pages she had just been on.
The truth, a bubble, dissolved again.
She no longer even rembered the conflict, the hesitation she had just experienced. Like any ordinary passenger,
she followed the silent flow of people and got off the train.
Once again, she rembered nothing, save for one thing: the note was important. She must not lose it; she must not forget it.
..................
Everyone got off the train.
Around the platform, it was a sea of fog. They could only see, in the denser fog ahead, the faint, towering silhouettes of a city’s buildings. But for these “dieval people,” they simply couldn’t imagine what a real city looked like. What they saw, were just overly large, incomprehensible shadows. So what they feared was rely the excessive height of these shadows, and the sky, which appeared increasingly narrow as it pressed down.
Even Arthur’s face, trying hard to maintain composure, looked a little... pale.
In contrast, Pandora, free from the interference of the “truth,” was much more normal.
She only felt a little surprised by it. Because ever since seeing that strange research institute of another era, full of steel and reinforced concrete, in the forbidden woods, she had so expectation of what she might see at the end of this journey.
The silhouette before her now, more or less confird her prediction.
However, she hadn't predicted everything.
For example...
the white fog before them, as the train silently departed and the platform slowly dissipated, also gradually faded, finally vanishing.
Not only did the distant scenery gradually beco clear,
but the sounds that had been blocked by the thick fog and glass returned once more—
that was—
a familiar, low zombie growl.
The familiar sound caused the hearts of everyone who had just begun to recover from the shock of the grand tropolis to tense up.
Soone tried to break the deadly tension with a dry laugh.
“Ha... ha ha... did you guys... hear that too?”
Before the words had fully left his mouth,
“ROOO—”
another, clearer growl sounded directly from the fog in front of them.
This ti,
everyone,
fell silent.
“Hooo...”
The low, deep sound, from the depths of a thick throat, continued to erge from the depths of the thinning white fog.
Every syllable was like a hamr blow to the survivors’ already-frayed nerves.
This sound was no different from the nightmare they had endured for seven days.
The crowd instinctively huddled toward the center, the formation becoming cramped and chaotic in their panic. They looked at the white fog as if it were a giant beast slowly opening its maw.
Every face was etched with tension,
and a fear that had been suppressed to the absolute limit, teetering on the brink of collapse.
The main reason this fear was still barely contained from a full-blown ltdown was the black-robed figure standing not far away—the Warden, Bradley Dulles.
He was the one who had brought them here. Since he had done so, he must have a way to deal with these zombies, right? Of course! He had dealt with the zombies in the previous world, so he could undoubtedly do the sa here!
This was what everyone thought.
And it was this very thought,
that kept the emotions of these still-terrified survivors from imdiately capsizing.
However,
the white fog that enveloped them,
seed to have no intention of letting them off so easily.
Before their very eyes, it accelerated its collapse and dissipation at a visible speed.
At the end of their line of sight, those grand, fog-shrouded silhouettes grew clearer.
The surrounding scenery also slowly erged as the fog receded. And when the full picture of where they were standing was clearly revealed to everyone,
all of them,
whether they were the strong knight-squires or the unard commoner youths,
it was as if an invisible hand had clamped down on their throats.
Even their hearts,
seed to skip a beat.
Even Pandora couldn't help but let her pupils contract violently.
This was a modern, dead city.
The reason for calling it “dead” was that the city before them had now been completely reduced to a ruin, eroded by both ti and forgetting.
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