Chapter 29: 【You Taught Them What Fear Is.】

Chapter 29 "You Taught Them What Fear Is."

The next morning, the sun was obscured by thick, felt-thick clouds, casting a wan, gloomy light.

In an unfamiliar environment filled with unease, the group of students had all risen early and gathered around the dining table on the first floor. The atmosphere was eerily quiet, with no one inclined to speak.

They absentmindedly spooned porridge into their mouths, their gazes drifting toward the front door, hoping the four classmates who had gone to seek help would burst in like miraculous rescuers, bringing vehicles and rescuers.

Yet when the door finally swung open, what appeared before them were the four students, disheveled and worn-out.

"We sneaked out around half past midnight last night, sneaking and evading our way to the car, then drove downhill."

"At first, everything went smoothly. But after one o'clock, a dense fog suddenly descended. Even with the fog lights on, we couldn’t see anything beyond two meters."

"We kept driving forward, but no matter how long we went, we remained on the same stretch of road, watching the same familiar trees pass by the car window again and again."

"It was unnaturally silent, as if the whole world had been reduced to darkness—just us inside the car... We pressed on for about four or five hours. By all logic, we should’ve reached the town outside the mountains by then, but we were still trapped."

"Finally, when dawn broke, we had no choice. We were out of gas and exhausted, so we had to turn back."

As the four recounted their experience, the spark of hope in everyone’s eyes gradually flickered out.

Their helpless gazes drifted toward the window, where the house shimmered faintly through the fog, as illusory as a mirage.

Then, raindrops began to patter down, the slender threads of rain weaving a vast net that seemed to trap the entire mountain—and everyone on it.

Li Yin fumbled her spoon, her hands trembling as she cradled her head and murmured, "Ever since we arrived here, everything has felt like a dream..."

"A nightmare we can’t escape."

Beside her, Yi Fengchu silently observed the four exhausted students, his dark eyes inscrutable.

To him, though their appearances and behaviors remained unchanged, the strands of fate behind them had all been tainted a corrupted, inky black.

A sign of their abnormality—they were no longer themselves.

Yi Fengchu’s scrutiny made the four stiffen.

These divine servants, occupying human bodies and awaiting their metamorphosis into moths, had, in that instant, intuitively grasped what fear was.

They held their breaths, cautiously glancing at Yi Fengchu, as though fearing to disturb some terrifying presence—the pressure they felt even greater than when facing the Moth God.

Only when Yi Fengchu lowered his head again to eat his porridge, expression unchanged, seemingly unaware of their anomaly, did they finally let out relieved breaths.

"We’re exhausted from last night. We’ll go upstairs to rest for a while."

Taking advantage of the moment while Yi Fengchu appeared distracted, the four hastily excused themselves and hurried upstairs.

Back in their room, the mere memory of Yi Fengchu’s calm gaze—and the fate of the two unlucky kin who had crossed him before—made them break out in a cold sweat, fidgety and anxious.

An indescribable sense of danger throbbed in their chests, like the ticking of an unseen countdown above their heads.

"Actually... we don’t need to fear him that much," one of them finally spoke, breaking the silence.

"He may have the backing of some supreme being, or bear powerful blood... but so what? We too have the Moth God’s protection."

"Besides, from what we’ve seen, he’s just a mortal who doesn’t even know how to wield his power, unaware of the occult..."

Had it not been for their pale faces and clammy palms, the words might have carried some conviction.

The other three exchanged glances, about to chime in for morale, when a knock sounded at the door.

Yi Fengchu’s considerate voice came from outside: "You must be hungry after last night. I brought you some porridge—have a little to fill your stomachs."

His tone was gentle—uncharacteristically so, compared to his usual aloofness—yet it made their spines tingle.

In their long existence, they had once stood by the Moth God’s side, observing with disdain human fear and despair.

But now, unwittingly, they had become the very wretched beings they once scorned, trembling before something far more terrifying.

Though reluctant, they forced themselves to respond politely to avoid suspicion: "Thank you... Come in."

The door opened. Yi Fengchu stepped in, carrying a wooden tray with four steaming bowls of porridge.

As he set the tray on the bedside table, something spherical slipped from his pocket and clattered on the floor.

The four froze, watching as Yi Fengchu—apparently vulnerable—bent down to pick it up.

Malice oozed from beneath their human skins.

—Now was the moment!

They could join forces to eliminate this intruder, this possible bearer of divine blood, removing a threat to the Moth God’s metamorphosis...

They would prove themselves the bravest, most worthy children among the Moth God’s countless offspring!

In an instant, moth-wing patterns erupted in their pupils, pale hues swallowing the original black. Their mouths opened in unison, ejecting foul strands aimed at Yi Fengchu’s neck.

Just as the threads were about to coil around him, he let out a quiet laugh.

"—Pandora’s Heart."

Those were the last words they heard before their consciousness twisted, as if compressed into a marble.

......

Ever since Yi Fengchu had borrowed "Pandora’s Heart," he had collaborated with his phone to study this powerful mental-attack artifact.

Given its conscious nature, Yi Fengchu had also engaged in numerous one-sided "conversations" with it, confirming that this "Pandora’s Heart"—acquired by Luo Shengle in the Playground System’s dungeon—was not the same as the "Pandora’s Box Fragment" he had initially seen.

To be precise, it was a fragment of that S-grade artifact, leading Yi Fengchu to comment: "The Playground System is so stingy, unwilling to let items with divinity fall into ordinary players’ hands..."

"Even resorting to surreptitious item swaps. How cheap."

"Pandora’s Heart" lay quietly before him. Deep within the glass sphere, a sealed eyeball suddenly cracked open, darting around nervously before squeezing shut again, playing dead.

After a moment of scrutiny, Yi Fengchu suddenly smiled brightly. "According to the system information, you need five seconds of contact to activate? That’s enough time for enemies to realize something’s wrong and escape."

"As one of the minor fragments of an S-grade artifact, I believe in your true potential. So why not strive harder to demonstrate your value?"

Leaning closer, his smile filled its view in the glass sphere’s reflection, making it shake violently.

—This was why, now, the dark-gray glass sphere could trap the four with just a graze against their ankles.

As for the artifact’s usage limit, it was irrelevant to Yi Fengchu.

The system’s restriction of "Pandora’s Heart" to three uses was based on the fact that, afterward, this sentient artifact would begin killing its wielder.

Its power drew from the deepest fears of intelligent beings, spinning endless delusions from those fears to destroy its targets. In essence, upon first use, "Pandora’s Heart" was a tabula rasa, holding no one's terrors yet—

But after being used three times, the glass orb had gathered the most intense and deadly fears from the depths of the three deceased's hearts. It would then utilize this accumulated power to kill the "insolent wielder" who dared to wield it.

—Broken as it was, it still contained a trace of divinity. How could it tolerate being used by mere flesh-and-blood humans?

Yet, in Yi Fengchu's presence, Pandora's Heart was far more compliant.

No matter how many times it was used, its remaining charge count in its system log never changed, appearing exceptionally docile.

The moment the glass orb touched the four, their bodies stiffened and froze in place as their minds were dragged into a hallucinatory hellscape of fear.

Occasional spasms and struggles in their physical forms betrayed the creeping death-by-terror they were experiencing.

"Fascinating—what would the fears of creatures born from a god look like?"

Calmly observing their reactions, Yi Fengchu mused aloud.

His phone interjected abruptly: "...Likely yours."

Yi Fengchu glanced at it curiously. "Why? Because I'm the only one here who can harm them?"

"Because you're the one who imprinted fear upon them," the phone answered succinctly.

After an unknown length of time, under Yi Fengchu's fascinated gaze, the pale moth-wing silhouettes in the four's pupils gradually faded.

They retched a few times, expelling wads of snow-white pupae mixed with blackened blood, before their eyes rolled back and they collapsed onto the bed, unconscious.

The moment they showed signs of vomiting, Yi Fengchu swiftly picked up Pandora's Heart, tossed it into his pocket, covered his nose and mouth with a hand, and took several steps back, his features contorting with revulsion.

Fortunately, aside from the pupae and some black blood, the four host classmates didn't vomit anything else, sparing Yi Fengchu from any foul odors.

Letting out a slight sigh of relief, he lowered his hand and deftly channeled Bryce via his phone.

A golden-haired figure in gray robes swiftly materialized in the room. With lowered eyes, he began delving into the memories stored within these pupae.

The moths Bryce had killed in the mountains last night existed solely to guard.

They seemed destined from birth to be mere tools guarding the Moth God's secrets, unrelenting until their dying breath. Their memories consisted only of an endless cycle—hatching from cocoons in caves and standing guard nearby, day and night.

Yi Fengchu was curious: And these parasitic pupae that parasitized human bodies, waiting to hatch? What were their origins, duties, and memories?

Could he find more useful information within their consciousness?

The Ability "Echoes of the Past" silently engaged. Unlike the clear, bound-volume memories of normal humans, these pupae's memories resembled a twisting maze—

Born with vision limited to black, white, and gray, their memories played like sepia-toned newsreels, forcibly crammed into the narrow, winding corridors of the maze.

Inside the corridors, Bryce saw them mimicking cries for help outside car windows at night, ensnaring and usurping the bodies of several students.

He saw them as clusters of alabaster chrysalises, sprouting sticky silk threads to latch onto boughs, appearing from afar like fresh snow clinging to dense treetops...

Passing through the labyrinthine corridors of memory, at the end of the maze lay their birth.

Bryce's vermilion pupils slit to needles as he instinctively prepared to defend himself.

The soft, ribbon-like tendrils beneath his gray robes suddenly unfurled and grew, twining about him in barbed gray coils, their tips gleaming with a deadly sharpness.

—At the end of the maze, he witnessed what the villagers called the "Moth God."

It was an enormous pupa, similar in shape to the four on the ground—smoothly rounded ovals—but countless times larger, its entire body covered in obsidian tracery.

These patterns exuded a profane miasma, writhing slowly like living things, reminiscent of earthworms crawling over one another in a bait bucket.

The giant pupa had already partially split open, its ruptured sections dissolving into clusters of silk threads piled at the base, occasionally coalescing into small oval shapes—the very cradle from which the four pupae had been born.

These small pupae gathered beneath the giant one, often crushed by the mother's massive body before being slowly devoured by a feeding tube protruding from the fissure, emitting crisp, crunching sounds.

Through the fissure, a colossal human-faced moth could be seen curled inside. Its wings were covered in faces of varying sizes, constantly fluxing through grotesque emotional extremes of joy, anger, sorrow, and delight.

These faces twisted together, some crying, some laughing, rendering a tableau of visceral wrongness.

One of them seemed to sense Bryce's gaze. Its grayish-white eyes slowly turned, locking directly onto him—

Locking gazes with Bryce outside the maze of memories!