Ch. 12
Chapter 12
The next morning.
The instant the light slid across Luo En’s eyes, he jolted awake and scrambled out of bed in a tangle of limbs.
“Good morning, Mr. Luo En. I’ve prepared breakfast for you and Miss Moruna.” Lilika stood in the doorway, lifting her skirt in a polite curtsy.
Luo En didn’t answer right away; he ran his hands over his body first.
He found no trace of sweat, no lingering exhaustion. He had felt as though he’d been dunked in water the night before, gasping for air, yet now everything pointed to a nightmare that had never truly happened.
He rubbed his temples. It had to have been a dream. What kind of system forces its host toward death?
“Mr. Luo En, you’ve been acting strange since last night,” Lilika said, raising an eyebrow.
“Me? I’m fine.” He waved a hand. “Just a nightmare.”
“I’ll eat in a minute. I need to clear my head first.”
Lilika gave a small nod. “Then I’ll wait for you at the table.”
After she left, Luo En muttered, “That dream was brutal.”
Without warning, the System chimed.
[Congratulations! You have completed this training session. Your physical condition has improved dramatically! Keep up the good work!]
[System Reminder: You did not have a nightmare.]
[Through your efforts, you have passed Enhanced Training and attained a qualitative leap in strength.]
[Name: Luo En]
[Strength Rating: Warrior First-Rank]
[Ring Fragments: 0]
[You’re still weak, but at least muggers won’t bother you anymore!]
Luo En stared at the messages in stunned silence.
At last he said, “It wasn’t a nightmare? How is that possible...?”
[Your body shows no strain because the System restored you.]
[All training scenarios are designed to unveil parallel possibilities. You have now revealed your potential as a Warrior.]
“What are you even talking about?” The words made his head throb. The Ten Sages had also mentioned “parallel possibilities,” but hearing it again solved nothing.
Worse, he felt no different—no surge of power, no new weight in his muscles.
“So it really wasn’t a dream?” he asked once more.
[Answer: It was not a nightmare.]
[If an Otherworlder is injured during training, the System is obliged to restore the body.]
[The System cannot resurrect the dead, so please exercise caution.]
“Exercise caution?” He almost laughed. That magical barrage had been aimed to kill; caution had nothing to do with it.
Whatever the truth, he would treat the System with suspicion from now on. If last night had been real, he’d been lucky to survive.
He dressed and headed to the dining table, shoving the chaos in his head into a corner.
“Today’s breakfast is corn soup with white bread and bacon-egg-grilled leek,” Lilika said as he approached.
Moruna sat beside her, eating like an automaton—yet her movements were smoother than yesterday, her eyes no longer vacant. A little more time and she might fully regain herself.
“Mr. Luo En,” Lilika said softly while he buttered his bread, “there’s no deadline for your investigation, but I suggest you finish quickly.”
“Why?” He hadn’t even finished chewing.
“Because the Culprit may not stay in this town forever.” Lilika lowered her lashes and draped a coat over his shoulders.
...
...
After breakfast, Luo En stepped once more into the wind-bitten town.
Having been here yesterday, he didn’t flinch at the lifelike ice sculptures lining the streets.
What surprised him was the cold—or rather, the lack of it. He inhaled experimentally; he could almost take the coat off without shivering.
“Is this because of Warrior First-Rank?” he murmured.
[Correct. Your senses are now sharper as well.]
“Seriously?” He sounded skeptical, but the evidence was hard to ignore.
Either way, the cold no longer crippled him. He could search the town thoroughly, perhaps all day. Yesterday an hour or two had been his limit.
With limbs no longer stiff, he soon reached the spot where he’d stopped the previous evening.
The cutting wind had vanished. He glanced around; the white squirrel was nowhere to be seen.
The town lay in perfect stillness. His footsteps echoed, loud and lonely. He could hear every breath, every heartbeat, every swallow.
He kept expecting the sculptures to lurch to life and attack, yet nothing stirred as he walked on.
He hadn’t even laid a hand on an enemy—at most he’d spotted a few wild animals darting through the brush.
“Still, this town’s bigger than I thought...”
From the outside, Luo En hadn’t thought much of it. Yet once he stepped inside, it took him a full half-hour just to trudge from one end of a single street to the other.
Now Luo En was the very picture of a headless fly—utterly lost, with no idea where to begin his investigation.
Then a gust of wind brushed his ear, sharp as a blade. Buried inside it came a chorus of voices, faint and faraway, as though carried across an ocean.
“It’s useless!”
“Get a grip—do that and you’ll freeze the whole district solid!”
“No. Only the ones branded by the Evil God will turn to ice.”
“Are you planning to bury everyone? We’ve all had the Evil God planted in us!”
“What the hell are you thinking? Why do you hate the Evil God so much?”
“Why are you asking me? They’re called Evil Gods for a reason—evil!”
The words sloshed together, muffled, like speech drifting through deep water.
Luo En spun around, searching frantically, but there was no one in sight. “What was that?”
The System offered no explanation; the whole thing felt like a hallucination.
The next moment, a translucent figure stepped into a side alley—its outline identical to his own.
He blinked.
Both the voices and the phantom vanished without a trace.