Chapter 1279: Chapter 1279
He instinctively reached for her arm, then snatched his hand back. He knew what had just happened: while in the material world, he had touched Silver Flute Miss from the Doomsday Illusion, and that contact had pulled him in. By that logic, if he, now trapped in the illusion, touched the woman in the real world, the newly freed Silver Flute Miss might be dragged right back.
But her departure was a good thing. Once he confirmed that Silver Flute Miss was truly gone, Jenkins immediately used [Real Illusion] to return to Ruen. From there, he activated the lodestone in his closet and stepped back into the reality of Nolan.
Opening his eyes to the sight of a rainy early spring night, Jenkins breathed a sigh of relief.
He left his own home once more, climbed up to his neighbor's second story, and slipped through her window—he’d locked the front door from the inside earlier. He brewed a cup of tea and waited. Twenty minutes later, Silver Flute Miss finally returned from the moonlit night.
The woman was soaked to the bone, but she looked utterly elated.
"Mr. Candle, I'm truly delighted to see you," she exclaimed. "I'll even overlook the fact that you made yourself at home in my kitchen."
"How did you get out of the Doomsday Illusion just now?"
Jenkins set down his teacup, his curiosity piqued.
"I have no idea," she admitted. "One moment we were talking, and the next, I found myself in a stranger's attic. Thank goodness the family were heavy sleepers, or I would have been stuck hiding up there for much longer. But never mind that, Mr. Candle. I'm leaving Nolan immediately!"
She had no way of knowing how accurate her theory was, but since each entry and exit seemed tied to a specific location, getting far away from Nolan seemed like the surest way to avoid being dragged back in.
"Mr. Candle, you saved my life, and I will repay you," she said, her voice urgent. "But I have to leave now. Here's my temporary address—if you need me for anything in the near future, you can find me there. I'll return once this crisis has passed... Oh, and it seems the Doomsday Illusion is slowly superimposing itself onto the real world. If it's left unchecked, I fear it won't be long before Nolan becomes that desolate place, with no line between what's real and what's illusion.
So, if you get the chance, please report this to the Church. I know you have friends in the Sage Church."
With that, she grabbed her packed luggage and rushed out, not even sparing a second thought for Jenkins, who remained standing in her home.
Watching her retreating figure, Jenkins could only hope for her safety. He had no desire to one day find a stone statue of Silver Flute Miss in that city bathed in the light of a yellow moon.
This crisis was no less severe than the one brought by the Skull Sword. If her predictions were correct, Nolan could be wiped off the map entirely. Jenkins was determined to solve the problem, but he didn't even know how to get back into that world.
So, after closing the door for her, he ventured out into the rain and headed for the black market. There, he paid a broker to deliver a message to the Church containing all the information he had on the Doomsday Illusion and that particular Mysterious Realm.
A crisis of this magnitude was too much for one person to handle. His current power was insufficient to quell the monsters of an entire city.
By the time he returned to Ruen, it was past eleven at night. Dolores was already asleep, but Alexia was still waiting up for him.
Jenkins recounted the night's events in detail, and the petite woman fully agreed with his course of action. She also had a theory about the twisted phenomena he'd encountered in the Mysterious Realm, connecting it to the calamities that marked the end of an epoch:
"A few months ago, you told me that a final calamity befalls the material world at the end of every epoch, so I began researching the subject. This 'Doomsday Illusion' you speak of seems to be a concentration of all those historical calamities—the ones we can only glimpse traces of—unleashed upon a single city. Things like the toxic fog and the yellow moon you described. The problem is, we know far too little to connect each anomaly to its specific era." The most update n0vels are published on noⅴelfire.net
Jenkins agreed with Alexia's assessment. He had long suspected that every Mysterious Realm originated from a world belonging to some sovereign being. He and the professor had once been trapped in a Mysterious Realm with no clear resolution, and its theme had also been disaster. This led him to theorize that a sovereign entity with immense power over time existed somewhere beyond the material world.
By that logic, the Mysterious Realm Silver Flute Miss had endured most likely came from that same sovereign's domain. This presented an opportunity. If he could, Jenkins desperately wanted to understand in detail what calamities and suffering the people of the material world had faced in ages past.
If the Doomsday Illusion truly did overlap with Nolan, it would inevitably lead to the city's complete disappearance, and perhaps even a worldwide catastrophe. Jenkins must have dwelled on this too much, because that night he dreamed again of the decaying city, its grotesque monsters, and that brilliant yellow moon.
Then his dream shifted, and he saw Chocolate. His cat had grown taller than a mountain. It opened its mouth, swallowed the yellow moon in a single gulp, and let out a satisfied burp. The cat's face was so immense that Jenkins could see the twitch of every single whisker and discern the subtlest shifts in its feline expression.
"What a bizarre dream," he muttered.
Waking in the morning, Jenkins pressed a hand to his forehead, chalking the strange vision up to his daytime anxieties. His movement startled the cat awake. Realizing it wasn't even six o'clock, Chocolate looked at him with concern, as if worried he wasn't getting enough sleep.
Sleep was now impossible. He sat up in bed, staring blankly at the spacious bedroom. The room was easily as large as the entire living room of his house in Nolan. Directly ahead of the door stood a desk and bookcase set before an elegant glass window. To the left was a sofa and coffee table set that screamed "expensive" at a single glance, all in a distinctly feminine style.
The bed he'd just left was on a raised platform. To reach it from the desk, one had to ascend three shallow steps to the left, though the elevation wasn't dramatic.
It was a grand, canopied bed, with sheer fabric draped from its four posts. Beside the bed stood a vanity and mirror. The mirror was a triptych: the central panel was the largest, stretching to within a few feet of the ceiling, flanked by two slightly smaller panels. The vanity table itself wasn't straight but gently curved, so anyone sitting on the red-cushioned stool would be equidistant from all three reflective surfaces.
"This was definitely Dolores's former bedroom," he mused. "She must have given it up for me when I arrived."
It wasn't the first time he'd reached this conclusion. The very first time he'd entered the room, he had caught the scent of Dolores's signature perfume lingering in the air.
"Oh, what am I thinking about?" he chided himself.
He ran a hand through his hair and climbed out of bed to get ready for the day. Glancing back at his cat, he gave a little wave, a silent question asking if it wanted to join him. The cat, sprawled across the bed like a furry noodle with its chin pressed into the soft mattress, let out a soft "meow." Jenkins took that as a "no."
It was still before six when he finished washing up, so Jenkins returned to Nolan to try his luck. He wanted to see if he could re-enter that bizarre doomsday world. But no matter how many times he paced around his home, nothing happened. Giving up, he decided to write a letter to Hathaway explaining the situation with the Doomsday Illusion.
He still didn't understand the rules governing how that illusory world pulled people in, so to be on the safe side, he told Hathaway everything. He would claim the information came from the Sage Church. Hathaway now knew he was a Scribe, and the Church was due to receive a report from the black market today. It was a flawless explanation.
Naturally, he would have to deliver the letter himself. Since yesterday was Friday, Hathaway was certain to be at home—that was the rule in the Hersha household.
Jenkins changed his appearance and stepped out into the five a.m. streets of Nolan, pretending to be on a morning stroll. It had rained the night before, and a thick fog now swirled through the avenues, shrouding everything in a smoky haze. With the early spring sun still hovering below the horizon, the cityscape possessed a unique, ethereal charm.
Unfortunately, at five in the morning, Jenkins was the only one on the streets of Nolan to appreciate it. He didn't see another soul until he neared the Hersha estate.
As he slipped into an alley, he startled two stray cats that were foraging there. They vanished in a flash down the other end. Jenkins watched them go with a pang of guilt before glancing up toward Hathaway's bedroom. Just as he'd expected, she was home.
The envelope was ordinary, and he had affixed a stamp of his own making. A letter this normal didn't warrant the risk of a personal delivery. Jenkins simply slipped it into the Hersha estate's mailbox and departed.
Of course, before leaving the area, he stopped by a corner bakery that was just opening for the day. He bought some soft bread and left it in the spot where the two stray cats had fled.
"There are so many poor people who can't afford to eat, yet here I am buying expensive bread to leave next to a trash can. I really have changed," he thought with a wry smile. "When I get back, I should make a personal donation to the Sage Church in Ruen. Come to think of it, I've never d there before."
Chocolate, in his laziness, hadn't accompanied him, so Jenkins walked the streets alone, his steps noticeably lighter. This was partly because he wasn't lugging around the hefty furball named Chocolate, and partly because he didn't have to constantly monitor his cat's mood.
It was still about forty minutes before six, yet most of the street-facing shops were already preparing to open. Housewives carrying baskets were already out for their morning shopping, and delivery carts rattled along the empty roads.
Jenkins watched the scene with keen interest, his heart filled with gratitude for this moment of peace in Nolan. But the thought of the addictive tobacco and the Doomsday Illusion cast a shadow over his mood. He sighed, looking up at the somber sky shrouded in black mist, and then felt something gently bump against his shoe.