Volume 2, Chapter 33 (Chapter 71): First Time

Chop! Chop! Chop!

A silver light gleamed in the kitchen, and the knife was constantly raised and lowered. The urban legend’s core was finely cut into fine pieces bit by bit under Lu Yibei’s knife.

Cutting the core, she thought of her father.

Although my father wanted me to go down a more creative path, he never stopped me from cooking, she thought, thinking back to the time when she would help in the kitchen at home. Her father would even spend some time with her and teach her some of his own ancestral cooking skills.

Thanks to her father, her proficiency in wielding the knife was extremely high.

Yibei sighed.

It took her a few minutes to cut the core into a couple of dozen equal-sized pieces.

Carefully wiping away the residue stuck on the knife, she looked at her masterpiece on the chopping board and sighed again.

‘I’m good.’

‘If I were to be judged, I could win an award or something!’

Leaning over, she took out a clean, porcelain bowl and put the cut cores into the bowl. Mincing a piece of garlic, she tossed it into the bowl while eyeballing a couple of drops of soy sauce and stirring vigorously.

When Yibei was done, she brought over bowls and chopsticks, and all of the apparitions were still sitting obediently at the coffee table.

Looking at the eyeball, she frowned: “Some of you don’t have mouths—how do you even eat?”

“Like this.”

The wig puffed forward, and its body began to squirm. A ‘poof!’ could be heard, and a large mouth with sharp teeth revealed itself beyond the endless mounds of hair.

Seeing this slightly unnerving scene, Yibei couldn’t help but back away a little.

‘Even if I treat them as pets, they are still urban legends at their core.’

‘But…’

The wig’s mouth was still open wide, waving its large, sticky tongue towards Yibei. She picked up a piece of the chopped cores with a pair of chopsticks and tossed it into the wig’s mouth.

“Ack!”

With a foreign object suddenly stuck in its throat, the wig let out a muffled groan.

The other apparitions stuck close to each other, cold sweat dripping down their backs. “Is she trying to kill us?”

“Ack!”

The wig convulsed and twitched, and tiny arcs of electricity swam on its body. The already thick wig rustled and grew rapidly, and its somewhat translucent body became more and more opaque.

Crap. I should have cut it into smaller pieces for them, Yibei thought.

After waiting anxiously for a few minutes, the wig stopped moving.

The wig was once football-sized, and now it’s as big as a medium-sized dog that hasn’t been trimmed in a while.

“How do you feel?” Yibei gulped. “Are you alright?”

The wig immediately popped up and hovered before Yibei, dancing with an intoxicating sense of comfort as it was filled with spiritual energy.

“Thank you, Mrs Witch! I don’t feel unusual; I feel powerful! It’s just that…”

“What is it?”

“It just tastes a bit strange,” the wig paused. “Like canned herring mixed with spoiled vinegar.”

“It felt alive too,” the wig continued. “I choked because I could feel cold, slimy tentacles caressing my throat.”

Lu Yibei gulped.

Although she had already guessed that the cores would taste less-than-pleasant, she didn’t expect them to literally be hard to swallow!

Looking down at her bowl, which was filled with the cores, she thought to herself, ‘The wig seems fine, so it should be safe to eat.’

Using her chopsticks to pick up a piece of the chopped core, she opened her red lips lightly and tasted the core with her tongue.

A pungent, sour taste that overpowered the foul taste the garlic was trying to mask; burnt; creamy; sticky.

It squirmed in her mouth, and she couldn’t help but feel sick.

Just as she was about to spit it out, something strange happened.

Her body temperature rose slightly for a moment, and the core in her mouth melted into a cold current that was immediately absorbed into her body.

Like cold electricity, it flowed through her body, causing her to itch uncontrollably.

Lu Yibei felt the changes in her body, but they disappeared as fast as they hit her.

That was fast, she thought. ‘Could it be that I’m stronger than the wig so that I’m able to bear its effects?’

Moving her chopsticks again, she picked up three cores this time.

The pain tickled at her, and her body tempted her to take more bites, like nectar after a long drought. Every single limb, every single pore cheered out, “More!”

The tingling sensation rushed through her body, but once again, it ended as soon as it came.

Soon, three pieces became five; five became ten; ten became twenty…

The strange sense of comfort seemed to mask the foul taste of the cores, and she wanted more.

When there were only half of the cores left in her bowl, she took a deep breath, pinched her nose, stuffed all of the cores into her mouth, and gulped them down.

The cold, greasy feeling quickly flooded her mouth as it passed through her oesophagus. In an instant, thin, long tentacles caressed her throat, and the stimulation instantly penetrated every cell.

Her vision was blurred, and her thinking was erratic but clear.

A large amount of information seemed to pour into her mind. Fragments of memories are edited like an old movie. Laughter, pain, sunshine, and darkness—the emotions contained within each fragment were like her own.

With the influx of information, she felt a sharp pain in her forehead and a dream formed before her eyes.

This dreamscape was different from the visions she was granted before—she was no longer a bystander but in their shoes.

In the dream, she was no longer Lu Yibei but a girl named Xue Qi.

Opening her eyes for the first time, she saw herself forming like an embryo.

The second time, she saw the cradle she was put into and nurses dressed in white. They smelled of disinfectant and expertly changed her diapers. Soon, a beautiful woman breastfed her tenderly.

Immediately afterwards, countless broken fragments flashed: studying hard at school, strolling through a sunny park, and sweating profusely in a dance studio.

It felt too real. Yibei’s brain could fool itself into thinking that she was Xue Qi.

She knew her likes and dislikes. She knew her pain and happiness. She knew everything about her as if a whole new personality had been injected into her, and it shuddered her soul.

Like an immersive performance, she was part of.

But a performance she had no say in. She was like a puppet on a string, a soul imprisoned in a character.

The process of her growth seemed to have been omitted and flashed before her rapidly.

The scene froze for a moment, and it was fixed in a girly room—pink with a faint fragrance. The lights were warm, and it made one dizzy.

Lu Yibei could see a girl in Spongebob pyjamas with her long hair coiled up. It still dripped with water, as if she had just taken a bath.

Sitting in front of the computer, she moved the mouse and clicked on the lower-right corner of the screen. A chat software icon popped up, followed by a dialogue box.

Before she saw the content in the chat box, Lu Yibei saw the girl’s ID on the dialogue box, and her heart tightened slightly.

Seeing the profile picture of the girl’s chat partner, her soul shuddered even more.

A picture of the black sun totem—the symbol of the Eclipse Society!

And [Daydream] was the girl’s screen name…