Chapter 812 The Little Boy <TOC> Chapter 814 New Agreement
Translator: SumTLMan
Angel turned to the little girl trapped in the blood formation, her expression sullen, showing no surprise at their presence, merely staring at them with lifeless eyes.
“Sunny, is it? Who trapped you here, and when did this happen?” Angel looked directly into Sunny’s eyes.
Sunny merely sneered coldly and said nothing.
Angel turned his gaze towards the little boy standing by the edge of the formation. The boy seemed to want to touch Sunny, but he was too afraid of the pooling blood underfoot, pacing anxiously. “You said earlier that Sunny hasn’t left here for months. So, she was trapped here within that time frame?”
The boy nodded, “Yes, she was just fine half a year ago…”
“You don’t know why she’s trapped?” Angel continued.
“I don’t know. Sunny never allowed me near this building,” the boy mumbled, his head lowered.
Angel gave an understanding “Oh,” then turned back to the reticent Sunny, clicking his tongue, “For such a young girl, why is your resentment so much stronger than his?”
“And even in such a state of intense resentment, being trapped in a blood formation for up to half a year, you haven’t decayed into a ghost. I wonder why? Is there some conviction that’s keeping you from decay?”
The girl glared at Angel with her icy face, her eyes full of venom, but she refused to respond.
“Sunny is not like this when she sleeps, she’s very gentle,” the boy murmured, “But when she wakes up, she becomes very stern, as if she’s transformed…”
Before the boy could finish his sentence, Sunny shouted harshly, “Shut up, you fool, Alda!”
The boy, referred to as “Fool Alda”, pouted in frustration and retreated a couple of steps in fear.
At this moment, Drew, who had been shivering all this time, stammered at Angel, “Lo-Lord…why are there so many here…”
Drew swallowed the last word, his gaze fixed on a transparent water tank.
Inside the tank was a body, frozen stiff. The glow of the fluorite shone in, and judging by the size of the body, it was a child.
Drew, trembling with fear, slowly moved the light towards the child’s head. Finally, he saw the child’s face…
He looked back at the boy who was lowering his head, then again at the body in the tank. The faces of the two were exactly alike. The only difference was that the body in the tank bore many wounds and was missing a foot.
Drew noticed a label seemed to be stuck on the tank. He moved closer to read, revealing a line of text.
Drew read it aloud, “Alda, eight years old, died in the year 3389 of the Golden Era.”
The current calendar of the Central Empire is labeled by the Golden Era. The current year is 3421, which means that the boy, Alda, has been dead for 32 years.
If one were to count age in terms of time, Alda should be 40 by now, older than both Drew and Angel.
“This is you, isn’t it?” Drew turned to Alda.
Alda hesitated for a moment before nodding, “Yes, it’s me.”
“How did your corpse end up here?” Drew asked, his gaze wandering around the room. Everywhere he looked, there were tanks, each one preserving a frozen child’s corpse.
“They were killed by Director Tyson. He preserved them here as mementos,” the response came not from Alda, but from Angel.
Freud had explained the situation to him earlier, so the sight didn’t shock him. However, faced with the remains of so many innocent children, Angel still felt a twinge of discomfort and a surge of anger.
“Director Tyson, the director of the orphanage? Why did he do this?” Outrage tinged Drew’s voice.
“Because he couldn’t bully adults, so he vented his rage on children instead,” Angel recalled Freud’s words from before—
Freud’s full name was Freud Tyson. The director of the Nightmare Orphanage was his father.
Director Tyson was once an orphan himself, abused as a child, which resulted in a physical disability. His left leg permanently lost its function and had to be amputated. Fortunately, at the peak of his suffering, Tyson’s biological parents found him and brought him back to the Tyson family.
Skipping over certain details, Director Tyson, after achieving success, opened this orphanage named “Dream.” He claimed to want to provide a haven for homeless orphans, yet what he did was abuse and murder.
The torment he had once experienced himself, he now inflicted on these innocent, defenseless orphans. It was as if a cycle was repeating itself, the trials of the past not blooming into hope but transforming into a lifetime of demons, passing the cycle of suffering onto equally innocent children.
However, the only consolation was that this cycle ended with Freud’s generation.
Angel wasn’t sure if Freud had this inclination, but he couldn’t discern it from Freud’s usual behavior. But even if Freud had inherited his father’s karma, it didn’t matter anymore, for he was already dead.
“Human nature is a multiple-choice question. Some choose forgiveness after suffering, some choose retaliation. Both choices have their merits. However, there’s a third choice, the most cowardly and the least justifiable, which is not to retaliate against those who hurt them but to become one of them,” Angel reflected.
By becoming what they once despised the most, they no longer tremble in fear during their midnight reveries. But such a course of action results in the worst parts of human nature being amplified to an extreme extent.
In spite of not recounting Director Tyson’s tale to Drew, Angel found that Drew inexplicably comprehended the crux of it. Initially, Drew was timorous of Alda and Sunny, yet now there was a trace of pity in his gaze when he looked at them.
However, Sunny responded to Drew’s empathy with a disdainful scoff.
Drew sighed, moving to Angel’s side, “Lord Pat, what should we do now? Where is the thing you’re looking for?”
Angel’s gaze drifted to a colossal circular crafting table behind Sunny. According to Freud, he’d stashed the Dream Conch within this table.
Yet, judging by the current situation, it was highly probable that the Dream Conch was already claimed. Perhaps, he was destined to return empty-handed.
Angel approached the crafting table, swiftly splitting it into two halves according to Freud’s instructions.
Upon witnessing Angel’s actions, Sunny’s eyes widened, as if recalling something, her gaze tainted with bitterness.
“As expected, there’s nothing.” Angel sighed in resignation, his countenance mirroring his disappointment. It seemed he was indeed destined to return empty-handed.
It was then that Angel noticed Sunny glaring at him. After a moment’s thought, he crouched down, meeting Sunny’s gaze at eye level.
“You know who took the item inside, don’t you?” Angel questioned her, “Tell me, who took the box?”
“Impossible!” Sunny retorted adamantly.
Angel gazed into Sunny’s furious and resentful eyes, as if he could see through her thoughts, and said softly, “Tell me, and I’ll let you leave this blood formation.”
Sunny maintained her stance of non-violent non-cooperation.
Angel continued, “After Director Tyson killed you, you’ve been consumed by resentment. You hate humans, so you killed those construction workers. This accumulated hatred must have brought you to the brink of falling into darkness countless times, right?”
“But why didn’t you fall? I find that curious.” Angel continued, undeterred by Sunny’s expressions, “I think there must be a reason that kept you from falling. Perhaps there’s something you still hold faith in, or maybe there are other bonds that stop you from succumbing.”
“I heard from Alda that you’re very gentle in your dreams.”
“You’re a tender little girl in your dreams, yet when awake, you’re a murderous ghost child. So, are dreams your sanctuary, your source of faith?”
“Shut up! I said shut up, can’t you hear!” Sunny roared, a wave of potent soul energy attempting to break the shackles of the blood formation.
“If you continue to harness the power of the soul, you will truly fall into corruption,” Angel, gently and neutrally, infused his mental energy into the furious soul of Sunny.
Her rising anger, unknowingly, was quelled.
Upon seeing this, Angel continued, “At first, I thought that dreams were the source of your faith. After all, the item hidden in the table, aside from its insignificant function, could also pull you into dreams like a Dreamweaver Ant, weaving you a tender and lingering dream.”
“But now it’s been taken away, perhaps even half a year ago, and during this time, you couldn’t dream. You’ve been trapped within the blood formation, and your resentment should have been enough to make you turn into a ghost. But you didn’t fall.” Angel’s eyes twinkled as he looked at Sunny. “So, the dream isn’t the source of your faith. The person who created this dream is what you’re holding on to, isn’t it?”
Upon hearing Angel’s words, an image flashed through Sunny’s mind. It was a young man with perpetually dark circles under his eyes. He was the only person, apart from the fool Alda, who gave her a sense of warmth from birth to death.
“Still not answering?” Angel didn’t mind and continued, “You don’t want to converse with me because you think I’m in league with those who took the box and chained you here?”
Sunny didn’t deny it.
In truth, Angel was bluffing her, but her lack of denial suggested that the people who trapped her in the blood formation and took the Dream Conch were indeed the same group.
“If I say I’m not with them, would you believe me?” Angel asked Sunny.
Sunny remained silent.
“Your guard is too strong, which is not endearing at all,” Angel muttered under his breath, “Alda is cuter.”
“No matter how I explain it, you probably won’t believe me,” Angel pondered. “So, how about letting the person you’ve been holding on to talk to you?”
At these words, Sunny paused for a moment, but in the next second, she maintained her dismissive expression.
Angel said nothing, casually releasing Freud from the Cathedral of the Dead. From the earlier conversation, he had deduced that the reason Sunny was unwilling to fall was likely because of Freud.
However, Freud appeared behind Drew, whose towering figure blocked the sight of others.
But aside from Drew, everyone else noticed the additional figure behind him.
Drew looked puzzled, wondering why Angel, Sunny, and Alda were all looking at him. But at that moment, someone lightly patted his back, and a cold voice, accompanied by a chilling breeze, whispered into Drew’s ear.
“Move aside, living one, you’re blocking the way.”