novelraw Chapter 632: The Second Strange
Chapter 632: The Second Strange
Chapter 632: The Second Strange
The sealing proceeded smoothly.
The black rune had already floated directly above the salt jar and began to descend slowly.
The buzzing of the curse scripts grew louder and louder, causing the air inside the storage room to resonate along with it.
Everything was going according to plan.
Then, an accident occurred.
“Ugh…”
The Curse Witch suddenly let out a muffled groan.
Her right arm… from shoulder to palm suddenly twisted into an unnatural posture.
It was as if someone was wringing a rag, twisting the entire arm along with the palm in the opposite direction. Muscles, bones, blood vessels, nerves… all tissues emitted faint tearing sounds under that twisting force.
The Curse Witch’s face instantly turned unsightly, because she had not detected any attacker.
Her left hand quickly rose and pressed onto the twisted right shoulder. A black light surged from her palm, attempting to resist that twisting force.
The other wizards instinctively looked toward her and raised their guard against the surroundings.
This was only natural.
When a teammate was suddenly injured, anyone would focus first on what had happened.
But in that very instant, the moment everyone’s attention shifted from the finger to the Curse Witch, Jie Ming’s spiritual force captured the change inside the salt jar.
The finger was still there.
But the strange power attached to the finger had already dissipated.
In the previous moment, it had still been there, radiating that indescribable “abnormality.” In the next moment, it was gone entirely.
The finger had turned into an ordinary dead person’s finger covered in age spots.
Jie Ming reacted almost on instinct.
His spiritual force erupted at full power, and the Fate Subsystem overclocked as he attempted to track where that dissipated force had gone.
But the power had dissipated too thoroughly, leaving no trace behind, as if it had never existed.
“It escaped,” Jie Ming said in a deep voice.
The air inside the storage room froze for a moment.
Under the Curse Witch’s resistance, the twisting force on her right arm rapidly weakened and finally stopped.
Her right arm was already severely deformed, the bones broken into several pieces and the muscle fibers largely torn.
Yet she only frowned. Her right arm began to automatically recover, the bones emitting cracking sounds as they realigned.
Her gaze fell on that finger, and her pale gray eyes narrowed.
“Tch.”
A dissatisfied click of the tongue came from beneath the hood.
“Just one step short,” she stared at the finger, her tone carrying a trace of annoyance. “The arm-twisting was to create chaos. In that instant, it detached from the finger.”
The deep blue-robed male wizard’s expression also didn’t look good. “Can it still be tracked?”
“Unlikely,” the Curse Witch nodded. “That damned thing’s main body was never an actually existing object to begin with.”
The atmosphere inside the storage room became subtle.
The Curse Witch’s right arm had already recovered under the effect of her self-repair sorcery.
She flexed her fingers to confirm that their function was undamaged, then raised her head. Her pale gray eyes swept across everyone present.
“Did any of you feel the force that twisted my arm?”
The burly male wizard nodded. “I felt it. It was very sudden, without any warning.”
“It didn’t seem to come from the finger,” the young female wizard frowned as she recalled. “My spiritual force was locked onto that finger the whole time. Before it dissipated, the finger itself showed no abnormal energy fluctuations. That force felt more like… it came from somewhere else.”
The blue-robed wizard looked at the finger. “Based on our analysis of that salty finger, its ability should be limited to the concept of ‘salty’: making food salty, causing kidney failure, letting victims taste saltiness. It shouldn’t possess the ability to twist limbs.”
“So either we missed something in our analysis…” The slender male wizard narrowed his eyes. “Or this Strange has characteristics we haven’t discovered yet.”
“Or…” the life-system wizard picked up the thread, his body having already reverted from elemental state back to flesh form, his complexion returning to normal. “Something else intervened.”
One wizard’s eyes brightened. “Meaning there’s actually another Strange here?”
This statement suddenly made the air inside the storage room grow heated.
The salty finger had already proven the research value of Strange entities.
To the wizards, of course the more the better!
And the person on site who understood what had just happened most clearly was naturally Jie Ming, who had been continuously observing the surroundings from the start!
Thus, everyone’s gazes turned toward him.
Jie Ming was currently standing beside the stone, his gaze not on the salt jar but on some uncertain point in the void.
Deep within his pupils, golden light slowly flowed—that was the sign of the All-Purpose Eye and the Fate Subsystem operating simultaneously.
“I was continuously monitoring the fate conditions in the surroundings earlier,” Jie Ming said, his tone neither hurried nor slow. “I did indeed capture an abnormal fate line.”
“What direction? Related to the finger?” the deep blue-robed male wizard asked immediately.
“Your guess is correct. That later force did not come from the finger,” Jie Ming said affirmatively. “That finger is ‘dead’ on the fate level; it has no active fate output. The force that twisted the arm came from outside. The specific direction…”
He closed his eyes and traced the trajectory of that fate line in his consciousness. “Northeast direction, roughly one kilometer away from here.”
“Northeast, one kilometer,” the young female wizard quickly sketched the town’s map in her mind. “That’s the garden area at the edge of the town. There’s an abandoned noble manor, and behind the manor is a long corridor.”
All the wizards’ spiritual forces surged in that direction together. Soon, everyone discovered something was off.
“Huh?!”
“Let’s go take a look,” the deep blue-robed male wizard decided decisively.
Nine figures swept out of the fruit storage room, skimming along the rooftops as they flew toward the northeast.
One kilometer was nothing more than an instant for wizards.
Jie Ming descended into the air above the manor garden, observing the area from above.
It was clearly a manor that had been abandoned for many years.
Half of the main building’s roof had collapsed, vines crawled all over the stone walls, and weeds grew rampant in the courtyard.
But the garden’s layout was still faintly discernible, with neat paths, broken stone sculptures, and a long corridor covered in wisteria.
The corridor was very long, about a hundred meters, with stone pillars carved with exquisite patterns.
Stone slabs paved the floor of the corridor, covered in dust and fallen leaves.
What truly caught Jie Ming’s attention were the walls on both sides of the corridor.
The walls were covered in graffiti.
It was the very common child-like graffiti—crooked lines, unevenly applied colors, as if some child had casually drawn on the stone walls with a crude brush.
Jie Ming’s spiritual force swept across those graffiti, and his brows furrowed slightly.
He landed at one end of the corridor, and the other wizards landed one after another.
“These graffiti…” The young female wizard walked closer to the wall and examined them carefully. “They look quite old. The pigments have already seeped into the stone, at least several years old.”
“But not all of them are old,” the Curse Witch pointed to a section of the wall. “This part wasn’t here before.”
Jie Ming looked in the direction she pointed.
It was a relatively clean section of wall. The graffiti pigments looked newer and the colors more vibrant. There were several human figures in the drawing.
Nine human figures in total, each in different postures—some standing, some sitting, some with arms crossed over their chests, some sitting cross-legged.
Although the style was childish and the lines simple, the features of each figure were surprisingly clear.
The colors of the clothes, the outlines of the bodies, and even some subtle posture details highly matched the nine wizards.
Jie Ming found himself.
That figure sat cross-legged on the ground, back against the wall, its posture very similar to his.
The figure’s face had no facial features drawn, only two dots at the head position.
Jie Ming remembered that he had kept his eyes open the entire time in the storage room while maintaining his spiritual force scan.
The Curse Witch’s figure was also easy to recognize, wearing a black cloak with the hood covering the head, identical to her appearance in the storage room.
But what truly made everyone’s pupils contract was the right arm of this figure.
The right arm representing the Curse Witch’s figure had been smeared away from shoulder to palm with some dark pigment.
It was as if someone had crudely painted over it with black pigment, erasing the entire arm from the image.
“This…” The burly male wizard showed an interested gaze. “When was this drawn?”
Jie Ming squatted down, activated the All-Purpose Eye, carefully observed the drying degree and penetration depth of the black pigment, then analyzed the chemical composition of the pigment with his spiritual force.
“Newly drawn,” he said, his tone flat. “The pigment hasn’t completely dried yet. Based on the penetration speed and volatilization degree… it was probably drawn a few seconds ago.”
A few seconds ago.
Exactly when the Curse Witch’s arm had been twisted.
“So,” the deep blue-robed male wizard’s voice was slow, as if chewing each word. “There is something we don’t know that drew portraits of us on the wall of this corridor. Then, it painted over the Curse Witch’s arm in the portrait. And then, the Curse Witch’s arm twisted in reality.”
“Very likely,” the slender male wizard said. “This graffiti… or rather, the thing that created this graffiti, can rewrite reality.”
Everyone’s gazes once again fell on those graffiti.
Nine wizards, nine portraits.
Aside from the Curse Witch’s right arm being painted over, the other eight portraits were complete.
But Jie Ming noticed that some of the portraits had faint traces of incomplete alterations at the edges.
For example, the fingers of one portrait had been redrawn, the foot of another had been lengthened a bit, but those modifications had later been erased.
It looked like testing.
“This thing seems to possess intelligence,” Jie Ming pointed at those alteration traces. “Look here, here, and here. It has modified the portraits more than once. It is trying, experimenting, testing how much influence its power can exert on wizards.”
His gaze grew solemn. “And from these traces, it has already attempted many times. It’s just that because the wizards’ law resistance is too strong, those previous minor modifications produced no obvious effects.”
“Until it took advantage of the moment when we deliberately lowered our resistance earlier to experience the curse’s effects. It increased its strength, painted over the entire arm, and finally caused real damage.”
“Although it was only an arm twist, which isn’t a serious injury for a sixth-ring wizard,” the Curse Witch flexed her fingers, which could now bend and extend normally. “But what if it increases its strength further? What if next time it paints over my head?”
“I don’t think it didn’t want to paint over your head, but rather that it couldn’t. After all, we can’t expect this thing to have any kindness,” Jie Ming shook his head.
The others thought for a moment and silently nodded in agreement.
The ability of this thing was actually already very obvious: it could modify reality through graffiti.
But unfortunately, the wizards all knew very well that no matter how strong a mechanism was, it still needed numerical support.
When the numbers were insufficient, facing stronger numbers, the mechanism would no longer work.
From the previous situation, it was obvious that the wizards’ numbers far surpassed them.
“From this perspective, although both are Strange, the salty finger and this graffiti have clear differences,” the young female wizard walked to the other side of the corridor and looked at the graffiti on other sections of the wall. “The salty finger operates mechanically. It kills family by family but does not adjust its strategy according to the situation. It is merely executing some fixed rule.”
“But this graffiti is different,” Jie Ming continued. “It tested us, then, based on the situation at the time, chose the Curse Witch as its first target.”
After all, the Curse Witch was the main force of the sealing.
If she was injured, the sealing would be interrupted, and the salty finger could escape.
“So it was helping the salty finger escape?” The deep blue-robed male wizard’s brows twisted into a knot. “These things can even cooperate with each other?”
“I actually think it might just be a coincidence. After all, we didn’t anticipate the possibility of a second Strange earlier, so when I mobilized the fate lines, I pulled all fates possibly related to the Strange over,” Jie Ming shook his head.
“So this thing was essentially also drawn over by us. The real point we need to pay attention to is this thing’s strength.”
He looked at the Curse Witch’s right arm.
“It was able to injure a sixth-ring wizard. Although the injury wasn’t severe, and it only succeeded after the sixth-ring wizard deliberately lowered their defenses, it did succeed. And its ability is of the ‘reality modification’ type… the danger level of this power is several tiers higher than that finger.”
Jie Ming turned his head to look at those crooked child-like graffiti on the corridor walls, his expression serious and his gaze carrying more caution.
The other wizards also nodded in agreement.
“The question is… where is it now? Is it attached to these graffiti, or is it hiding somewhere else and remotely controlling these graffiti through some method?” one wizard asked.
Jie Ming reactivated the Fate Subsystem and fully spread his spiritual force, attempting to capture any abnormal clues in the surrounding fate network.
A few seconds later, he opened his eyes.
“The fate lines are very chaotic,” Jie Ming shook his head. “I can’t find its main body for the time being.”