Chapter 32: Gift

Chapter 32: Gift

On a night with pale moonlight, inside the garden of 160 Böklund Street.

A gray rat rustled out from its hole and ran beneath the balcony of the master bedroom.

A very small lump of black, paste-like matter then drifted down and was balanced by the rat on its head like an acrobatic performance.

It quickly turned around, ran out of 160 Böklund Street, and reached the entrance of a nearby sewer.

At that moment, the gray rat raised the front half of its body and extended its two claws.

Its claws suddenly and strangely lengthened, and clearly visible lumps of muscle appeared on its forelegs!

Then, relying on those mutated front claws, it forcibly moved aside the manhole cover, making almost no sound!

Without stopping, the gray rat slipped into the sewer and traveled all the way to the place where the Demoness Trissy had once hidden.

It scratched and dug in the corner, unearthing a fragment of mirror from the soil.

Having finished this, the gray rat flung the paste-like black matter on its head to a relatively clean place beside it, then retreated into the corner. Its body slowly lengthened and widened, as if pulled by invisible hands, transforming into a middle-aged man wearing a dark-red coat and an old tricorn hat. It was unmistakably the Blood Admiral who had once been active at sea.

However, this Senor, including both body and clothing, was only a thin layer, like a paper figure cut out with scissors.

“This rat was fairly fat…” The paper-like Blood Admiral raised a hand and rubbed his chin. Blown by the cold wind inside the sewer, he nearly floated up.

The one speaking was Klein. Inside the master bedroom, he had manipulated Spirit Body Threads, turned a rat into a marionette, and sent it carrying ritual materials to the sewer to attempt contact with the Demoness Trissy.

Senor, his arms twisting back and forth in the wind and with his movements, bent down and picked up the paste-like black matter. This was what remained after Trissy used black flames to burn a strand of hair. It could be used as material for a contact ritual.

Immediately afterward, he wiped the mirror fragment clean and smeared the material in his hand across it.

After finishing this step, Klein had his marionette hold the “mirror” and step back twice, then stick itself with a slap against the moss-covered wall like a realistic oil painting.

…

In the East Borough, inside a room with thick curtains and almost no light.

One dark, slippery “tentacle” after another wound together in layers, forming a giant sphere.

At the ends of those “tentacles,” some were inlaid with clearly black-and-white eyeballs, while others had grown into poisonous snake heads, their mouths slightly parted and tongues flicking out. Each was grotesque and frightening.

Suddenly, they either rose or withdrew, and the sphere unraveled layer by layer.

In the center wrapped by the sphere was a young girl curled into a ball. She had an extraordinarily sweet face, with her brows tightly knitted and her expression slightly twisted by pain, making her appear especially pitiable.

The slippery, disgusting “tentacles” had all retracted by now, rapidly shrinking and finally returning to their original form:

Strands of glossy black hair.

The girl covered in smooth, long hair gradually relaxed her expression. Moving somewhat slowly, she rose, walked to the bed that had been cut into small pieces, picked up the nightdress that had fallen to the floor, and put it on.

Then she gathered her black hair, came before the full-length mirror, extended her right palm, and wiped it across the glass surface.

A layer of black flame instantly rose, silently burning the air before rapidly vanishing without a trace, leaving behind a mirror that had become dark and deep.

Inside the mirror, light and shadow floated. The filthy, muddy environment of the sewer rapidly appeared, and a middle-aged man in an old tricorn hat and dark-red coat was thinly pasted against the wall…