Chapter 234: The Town Where Memories Are Forbidden

Chapter 234: The Town Where Memories Are Forbidden

"Now, do you hear it? The sound of the flute playing in your ears!"

Rat-Eyes no longer hid the venomous malice in his eyes, like a weasel that had clamped its teeth onto its prey's neck and wouldn't let go, his elongated tri-colored eyes almost oozing poison.

In the next moment, an overwhelmingly shrill and piercing flute sound exploded in Lena's mind—

The horn of death blew right by her ear, the rapid breaths climbing up her ear canal, as if countless sharp nails were scratching the folds of her brain, driving Lena to the brink of madness.

Lena frowned deeply, her gaze momentarily dazed, taking a step back as if unable to bear it, her steps somewhat unsteady.

She could feel her sanity evaporating rapidly in the flute sound, like a channel drying up under scorching sun, soon to expose its most vulnerable, defenseless bottom.

But Lena was not panicked.

She had long passed the age of being easily frightened.

She even had the leisure to wonder if this was the last sensation those children felt before they disappeared...

Black spots of various sizes floated before her eyes, gradually devouring her vision, and within the trembling black spots, the vague outline of a figure dressed in flamboyant colorful clothing and wearing a feathered hat appeared, the image of the piper.

With each breath, the piper's figure drew closer, ready to take away the child he had chosen.

Lena squeezed her eyes shut, trying to clear her vision, catching a glimpse of Rat-Eyes' smug expression.

Rat-Eyes was already impatient—

He was determined to make everyone who had despised and trampled on him pay the price.

He couldn't wait to see Lena either in terror or driven mad!

He had deceived many players before, drawing joy from their cries, but this one was the Cardinal of the Destiny Pilgrimage...

Such a high and mighty figure would surely bring him even greater pleasure?

However, Rat Eye waited in vain for Lena's look of fear or tears of regret.

Only a sigh drifted gently into the air.

Lena endured the chaotic flute music, laughing and sighing:

"You know I'm called 'The Seamstress,' yet you didn't think—besides cutting away excess threads, I can also weave and stitch them together into something more to my liking?"

Rat Eye struggled to lift his gaze, only to see Lena looking down at him with almost pity, as if observing a dying man.

What...?

Rat Eye was dazed, unable to react.

Lena had no time for him, her fingers deftly weaving through the air, as if sorting, twisting, and stitching threads invisible to Rat Eye.

As she worked, Lena mumbled, diverting her attention from the pain to maintain her thoughts and sanity:

"Just cutting away the excess is too crude and simplistic; there should be more ingenious ways to handle scraps... Sewing is an art!"

"How to cut, how to piece together, how to design—all require careful consideration, especially when applied to the golden and silver threads of fate. I will not tolerate any desecration."

Rat Eye couldn't understand the professional seamstress's mutterings, but that didn't stop his face and lips from turning pale, the self-satisfied, malicious smile on his face vanishing instantly.

Because of the flute music... it came to his mind.

Incredibly, incredibly close.

—It had come to take him away.

Lena successfully sewed the unwanted scraps onto Rat-Eye's fate, finally heaving a sigh of relief and raising a smile: "The destiny that the flute music has caught me in is now yours. How does it feel?"

"No, no!!"

Rat-Eye let out a shrill scream, his limbs unable to move. He relied on the strength of his waist, wriggling like a worm on the ground, desperately trying to escape.

He shook his head wildly, as if trying to shake the haunting melody out of his brain, his eyes bulging with bloodshot veins.

"Don't come near me, don't grab me... get away! Get out of my head!"

Fear gripped Rat-Eye's heart, making his resistance to the flute music far weaker than Lena's.

Before long, Rat-Eye gradually lost his senses, tears and snot streaming down his face, his eyes fixed on some direction in the void, uttering desperate pleas: "Please, spare me, please, just this once..."

Lena knew he was looking at the direction of the flutist, though she could not see it now.

But—

Why did Rat-Eye blurt out "this time"?

Could he have experienced more than one death from the flute music?

Lena picked up on Rat-Eye's subconscious choice of words, sensing something amiss.

Intuition told her that Rat-Eye might be hiding some secret... But he was about to be taken away by the flute's melody, and Lena needed to catch the tail of the secret before that happened.

So, Lena quickly made up her mind, bent down, grabbed the collar of Rat-Eye's shirt, and tightened her grip, shaking him as she demanded fiercely, "When did you come to town?"

Seeing Rat-Eye's lips tremble, unable to speak, Lena hesitated not a moment and slapped his face twice, "Answer!"

"I, I..."

Rat-Eye's whole body shook, his cheeks swelling rapidly from the slaps. The pain brought a fleeting clarity to his clouded eyes.

He had little rationality left, his mind filled with the sound of the flute. Suddenly, a strong voice pushed aside all the sharp, chaotic, and piercing music, intruding deep into his consciousness, making him instinctively want to grasp it, like holding onto the only thread connecting him to the outside world and maintaining his sanity.

How ironic, just a few minutes ago, Rat-Eye had been fantasizing about stepping on Lena;

A few minutes later, he could only rely on the pain and suffocation she inflicted to regain his last bit of lucidity.

Rat-Eye's lips quivered as he mumbled, "Half a month ago..."

"Do you have any companions?"

Lena watched as Rat-Eye's fingers began to turn transparent, his body beneath his clothes rapidly dissolving. She urged him on, "Hurry!"

"Yes... seventeen."

Rat-Eye's eyes were already vacant, as if all his spirit had been drained, and his physical reactions were merely reflexes stored in his brain's neural pathways. His throat and tongue trembled, spitting out disjointed words.

"Dead. Most. Notes... pocket."

"They're all dying, none can escape..."

From then on, no matter how Lena pressed, Rat-Eyes’ face remained fixed in a mesmerizing smile, chuckling foolishly and repeating, "Ha ha, none of you can escape, you’ll all die here..."

Rat-Eyes collapsed like a sack of wet mud on the ground, his limbs, torso, neck, and head vanishing one by one, pierced through by the light.

In the end, he was like a stick figure erased from a child’s drawing, clean and completely gone.

Before he vanished entirely, Lena rummaged through his pocket and found a notebook, which roughly recorded the times and manners of death of Rat-Eyes’ companions as he had witnessed them.

Frowning as she read, Lena muttered, "Something’s not right."

The biggest issue was—

Why did Rat-Eyes only meet his end today when he encountered her, being taken away by the flute’s call?

According to Rat-Eyes, the more one knew about the flute’s sound and the more they had interacted with it, the faster it would catch up with them.

For example, Anna, the missing child Lena had glimpsed, began hearing her classmates hum the melody of the flute on May 24th and disappeared completely by June 5th, a span of 12 days;

So why could Rat-Eyes, who knew the origin of the flute’s sound, remain in the town for 17 days without being taken away?

With this question in mind, Lena carefully examined Rat-Eyes’ notebook again and suddenly noticed a more subtle and peculiar phenomenon:

These people’s experiences were too smooth.

A group of vicious criminals, stranded in such a dangerous and unfamiliar environment, would naturally engage in various conflicts and mutual killings.

Thus, the logical pattern of deaths should have been that several individuals died in the first few days after arriving in the town due to internal strife and violations of unfamiliar rules, with the number of deaths gradually stabilizing in the middle and later stages, but still experiencing occasional peaks—bloody conflicts over resources and power.

However, in Rat-Eyes’ records, none of these issues appeared.

It seemed that from the beginning, these people had a well-ordered system, with the death toll remaining consistently low, almost one or two deaths per day—this was unreasonable in such a bizarre and unfamiliar environment, especially considering the clearly malevolent nature of individuals like Rat-Eyes.

"It's as if..."

A startling hypothesis formed in Lena's mind.

"It's as if some entity has been hiding in the shadows all along, deliberately raising them, controlling their deaths to prevent too many from dying too quickly."

Of course, this kind of "raising" could not be out of benevolence.

Instead, it was more like tending to and observing a culture in a petri dish, allowing them only to breathe and survive, and then, at the chosen moment, fulfilling some mission assigned to them by human hands.

Moreover, Lena noticed that Rat-Eyes always recorded time in the form of "Day X," but this method was inaccurate because he never established a clear starting point.

Rat-Eyes believed he had stayed in the town for 17 days... but was it really 17 days?

Combining this with the incoherent words Rat-Eyes shouted when he was delirious, Lena even suspected that this might not be the first time Rat-Eyes had faced death by the flute's sound.

The town could materialize things from memories into reality; thus, the Rat-Eyes she saw—was he the original, or a "replica" created through someone else's memory?

Lena's pale silver eyes shifted, gazing out at the quiet street outside, muttering to herself:

"If my hypothesis is correct, who is that person hiding in the shadows?"

Lena thought that whoever it was, their appearance would not be far off.

Because by killing Rat-Eyes here, she had already disrupted the other party's plan, which might force them to reveal themselves.

She looked forward to that moment.

Suddenly, Lena’s expression changed, and she nearly jumped up in regret: “The pass! I forgot to grab the ticket!”

The mysterious aura around her faded, making her seem like a childish and playful child again, with her two jet-black braids hanging at the sides of her head like a pair of drooping long ears.

Lena felt she had lost a great deal.

After sulking for a while, she trudged along with heavy steps, planning to go collect the stamp from the leather factory first.

On a brighter note, she had already collected 3 out of 7 stamps!

Lena tried to think positively.