The alley was silent as the girl stared blankly at the pool of bright red blood on the ground.
Seeing the cat turn into a cloud of blood in an instant made her feel absolutely awful.
She slowly turned around, and her vision suddenly took on a hazy red tint.
Smiling faces. They covered the walls around her and the ground, painted everywhere in crooked lines of different sizes.
They were clearly simple lines, like graffiti, yet they looked incredibly vivid, as if countless red smiling faces were staring right at her.
“Tap, tap.”
A huge shadow slowly emerged from the darkness behind her, bearing a twisted smile.
The monster was right in front of her.
She’d run straight into it, but the cat who knew how to use the gem was dead, and she didn’t even know how to use the thing.
She should’ve been afraid. She should’ve been terrified, just like before.
But Chen Qinyao felt utterly exhausted. She couldn’t even feel fear anymore.
It was always like this. It was always like this.
In the end, she couldn’t change a thing. Her mom had been like this, her sister had been like this, and now this damned stone was no different.
Why did life always have to get worse?
Why was every bit of hope snuffed out the moment it appeared…? Why?
Why me?
Why is it always me?!
Why does it have to be me?!
Blood rushed to her head. The boundless fear inside her ignited in an instant, turning into boundless rage.
“Crack.”
It was a crisp sound of shattering.
The girl crushed the gem in her hand.
“So this is how Magical Girls trick human children?”
Standing on a telephone pole, Gu Tong had watched the whole farce below.
She’d originally planned to look for food, but halfway there, she’d sensed an extremely faint trace of magical energy in the air.
It smelled of the Abyss.
She’d followed the scent here and witnessed what had just happened.
She’d always been curious about how Chen Qinyao had gone from a sickly little girl to a Magical Girl nicknamed Mad Dog.
So she’d been tricked into it?
That mysterious creature was a product of the Abyssal Sea.
Or rather, like Ba Hui, it was an intelligent entity from the Abyss.
The only difference was that Ba Hui was powerful, while that thing was weak enough for a monster to crush with ease.
The energy it gave off was incredibly enticing to low-level monsters.
First, it used illusions to confuse the humans nearby.
Then, once it found a suitable target, it lured nearby low-level monsters over.
Through this carefully planned deception, a new Magical Girl was born.
But the monsters’ lethality was real.
Whether someone could become a Magical Girl through this deception was itself a test.
As for those who failed, no one cared.
Sure enough, nothing from the Abyss was ever harmless.
Gu Tong had held back from acting because she wanted Chen Qinyao to become a Magical Girl. Only then would there be any point in corrupting her.
Watching the monster corner the girl at the end of the street, Gu Tong had no intention of interfering before the girl crushed the gem and became a Magical Girl.
That was how it was supposed to go. Chen Qinyao’s only value lay in her talent as a Magical Girl.
If Chen Qinyao didn’t become a Magical Girl, Ba Hui would have no reason to look after an ordinary human.
That was how it was supposed to go.
But as Gu Tong watched the scene below, wave after wave of irritation spread through her.
Irritation.
An irritation that gnawed at her bones.
But Gu Tong couldn’t figure out where it came from. Why was she irritated?
Was it just because Chen Qinyao was being chased like a stray dog?
She was a monster without a shred of compassion.
How could something like this possibly irritate her?
E Qiong had been hungry for days.
As a newly born monster, it didn’t know why it had appeared in the sewers of a human settlement.
By rights, the Core Zone’s underground device had all but prevented large Abyssal rifts from appearing in the Inner Ring.
Without a rift to the Abyssal Sea, no monsters from the Abyss could appear.
The monsters roaming the wilderness couldn’t cross the Isolation Wall’s physical barrier and enter the Inner Ring.
And yet E Qiong had appeared in the Inner Ring’s sewers.
Even it didn’t know how it had gotten there, but it knew very well that it had to hunt.
It had to fulfill that person’s demands.
There were many other monsters like it.
They’d been ordered to hunt a certain number of humans within a set time, with those at the bottom eliminated.
That person had no use for worthless test subjects.
E Qiong had seen it with its own eyes: one unlucky monster had failed to meet its target and escaped the Inner Ring, only for that person to find it with ease and crush it into pulp with a casual squeeze.
Who knew how they managed it?
But E Qiong had lost all thought of resisting.
It had to hurry up and hunt humans.
But as luck would have it, patrols in the Inner Ring had grown stricter lately, leaving E Qiong no chance to strike.
It had no kills to its name, and after days of hunger, it could wait no longer. It had to risk going aboveground and grab some unlucky victim to fill its stomach.
E Qiong quickly crawled through the shadows and soon found a promising target: a human child.
It seemed luck was on its side today.
E Qiong didn’t rush to tear the little girl apart. Souls and fear were a monster’s food, and after going hungry for so long, it needed to wring more fear out of her to fill its belly.
E Qiong stretched its lean, lanky body and felt for its connection to the Abyss.
Connecting with the Abyss was a highly specialized skill.
Human society seemed to have people who communicated specifically with network AIs.
At their core, those who awakened supernatural powers had awakened the ability to connect with the Abyss.
But not every Awakened could communicate with the Abyss smoothly after awakening.
Unlike monsters, humans clearly needed more tools to help them.
As for monsters, all they needed was a small gesture with a hint of suggestion.
For example, tapping.
“Tap, tap.”
Its dry knuckles lightly tapped the glass window.
An invisible curtain of air suddenly spread through the rain, but E Qiong kept walking and tapping, again and again. Ring after ring of air expanded.
Within the invisible veil, the power of the Abyss rapidly unraveled reality, turning it into an otherworldly downpour.
The Abyss’s power blurred the streets beneath the rain.
The Reality Stabilization Device kept that power from spreading to the absurd extent it once had, but it was more than enough for hunting.
Within the cage woven from the Abyss’s power, E Qiong casually chased the little girl, in no hurry to close its net.
Like a cat toying with a mouse, it wanted to wring the girl’s fear out of her bit by bit, fill her heart with terror, and torment her until she fell into utter despair.
But things didn’t seem to be going as it expected.
The girl was certainly desperate enough.
But the scent of despair naturally attracted creatures from the Abyss.
E Qiong sensed an irregular fluctuation of magical energy.
A thief had slipped into the illusion it had created.
Sure enough, E Qiong soon lost control of the human child.
The intruder was skilled at evading its pursuit.
What a nuisance.
Fortunately, it could guess where the intruder was taking the human child.
E Qiong simply went to lie in wait.
As expected, before long, the fool had led the human child right into its trap.
You aren’t going anywhere.
Amid the torrential rain, E Qiong tapped again.
Magic surged rapidly, and its eyes blazed red.
It raised a finger from the shadows.
A flash of red light flared, and a destructive magic bullet tore through the curtain of rain.
It moved so fast that the human child didn’t even react before the mysterious creature beside her was pierced by the magic bullet and blown into a cloud of blood.
With the nuisance out of the way, E Qiong slowly stretched its body and draped its enormous form over the girl.
The concentration of Abyssal power in the air had grown so high that it had begun to take physical form.
White mist mingled with E Qiong’s body, turning into black waves that rushed straight at the girl.
“Crack.”
It was a crisp sound of shattering.
The girl crushed the gem in her hand.