Rage

As he reached the edge of the attic, a sudden downpour began outside the window, its rain arriving without warning and pattering loudly.

Ji Minghuan looked up at the locked Wooden Door ahead. The Restraint Band at his fingertips slipped into the keyhole and undid the lock on the other side. He then retracted the band, pushed open the Wooden Door, and carefully made his way down the stairs without waking the girl behind him.

Returning to this Library after so many days left Ji Minghuan with complicated feelings. He looked around, slightly wrinkled his nose, and breathed in the scent of old books. He did not know how many days and evenings he had spent surrounded by that smell.

The rain outside was growing heavier, and fierce winds battered every window of the Library with loud bangs.

But Ji Minghuan's attention was not on the Library itself, but on the descending steps at its edge.

Remaining alert to his surroundings, he softened his Footsteps and headed for the basement entrance. He descended deeper into the darkness, arriving before the iron door from his memories—the one he had never been allowed to touch.

He pressed the Restraint Band against the iron door. Its senses seeped forward like rainwater, bringing him an image of what lay beyond.

Cramped, stagnant, damp. Perhaps it really was nothing more than an ordinary basement.

Ji Minghuan raised his right hand and lowered his gaze to the lock. With a series of delicate motions using the pitch-black Restraint Band, he silently picked each lock on the iron door.

Then, with a soft clank, he pushed open the iron door. Beyond it lay a corridor leading into a place so dark he could not see his hand before his face.

Maintaining the effects of "Restraint Band Color Change," he slowly walked deeper into the basement. It was not as Ji Minghuan had imagined; there was no research institute beneath the Library. The place looked increasingly like an utterly ordinary basement.

Then the Restraint Band's sharp senses caught a faint sound of breathing.

Beneath his mask, Ji Minghuan raised an eyebrow. He approached the source of the sound, descended another flight of stairs, and finally reached a corner.

He raised his right hand and extended the Restraint Band.

The Restraint Belt Senses were especially acute in the darkness. In a cramped corner deep in the basement, he saw a ragged black-haired girl. Her right hand and feet were bound by iron chains, which were fastened to a stone pillar beside her. She bore many injuries, though most were bruises.

Through its senses, Ji Minghuan saw her face clearly.

He froze for a second, then his eyes widened slightly in the dark.

When he had first entered the Welfare Home, Ji Minghuan had met this girl. Her name was Xu Keyin. Both of them had been frail and sickly, so they often huddled in a corner of the playground to read together. Over time, they became friends. They had not spoken much, but she was one of the few people Ji Minghuan had truly considered a friend.

But later, the girl had suddenly vanished without any warning, as fleeting as snow melting in one's palm.

Soon afterward, the old director reported her disappearance to the police. Yet after years of searching, the police had never found any trace of the girl. Investigation after investigation led nowhere, and the case was eventually forced to close.

Everyone at the Welfare Home, including Ji Minghuan, believed that the girl had either died or been abducted by human traffickers.

Yet no one could have imagined that she had been imprisoned in this basement all along. Every night, while they slept peacefully in their dormitory beds, the girl leaned against a damp, freezing wall, head hanging low as she forced herself to sleep.

Only one person could have done all this. Only one person had the key to this basement.

—The director.

Completed "No. 1 Card Event." Reward obtained: Event Card—"Bird in a Cage."

Seeing the wounds covering the girl's body, Ji Minghuan's pupils constricted.

He tried to open his mouth, but no words came out.

His hanging fringe obscured the eyes beneath his mask. The Corner of His Mouth twitched faintly, and every Restraint Band wrapped around his body trembled. Each one did its utmost to withdraw its senses, as if unwilling to let him keep witnessing the girl's misery.

After a moment, he slowly raised his head and looked expressionlessly at the basement security camera, as though staring through its lens at someone behind a screen.

Three minutes later, inside the director's office.

A torrential rain poured outside. The old director dried his hair with a hot towel, entered the office holding a cup of tea, and sat down before his desk. Just as he was about to turn on the computer and check the surveillance files, the window behind him flew open. A pitch-black strip suddenly wound around his neck and violently yanked him backward, pinning him against the chair's backrest.

"Tell me... who took Ji Minghuan and Kong Youling away a month ago?" Black Cocoon dispelled Restraint Band Color Change, revealing himself as he spoke slowly beside the man's ear.

"I... I don't know..."

The director's face turned red as he desperately clawed at the Restraint Band around his neck as if tugging at a black Great Serpent. But the band did not budge, continuously feeding him a suffocating sensation like drowning in the deep sea.

"You don't know? Oh, right. Then there must be a way to make you know."

As he spoke, Black Cocoon wrapped the Restraint Band around the director's lower body and activated the skill he had just acquired—"Restraint Band Truth."

Restraint Band Truth: Forces a person bound by your Restraint Band to speak the truth.

"No distinguishing features... They wrapped their bodies up completely," the director rasped.

"What else do you remember?" Black Cocoon asked, enunciating every word. His voice seemed to carry the rumble of thunder.

"I remember a symbol on the uniforms beneath their coats."

"A symbol? What symbol?"

"Let me go first... let me go, and I'll draw it for you. I'll draw it for you!" the director said hoarsely.

Hearing that, Black Cocoon loosened the Restraint Band slightly and used it to toss a pen onto the floor, as though throwing food to a dog.

The director picked up the pen and slid off his swivel chair. Kneeling on the floor, he drew a Hexagram Pattern with trembling hands. There was a circle in the center, and a larger circle around it connecting every point of the hexagram.

Beneath his mask, Ji Minghuan froze for a second. This pattern had appeared in the memories of No. 2 Game Character.

After Xia Pingzhou's former teammate, "Red Light," went mad, he became a lunatic who specialized in hunting Exorcists. At every crime scene, he left behind a Hexagram Pattern and a line of Latin:

—Sodalitas Salvifica.

The Hexagram Pattern in those memories and the one the director had drawn on the floor... were exactly alike.

Why had Red Light left behind the same pattern and a line of Latin meaning "Sodalitas Salvifica" after his killing spree?

"Sodalitas Salvifica..." Black Cocoon read aloud the Latin Red Light had left behind, narrowing his eyes. "The uniforms of the people who took Kong Youling and me had the same Hexagram Pattern. Could it be... that Instructor and the others came from an organization called Sodalitas Salvifica?"

He tapped the computer keyboard with the Restraint Band. A moment later, he said, "All surveillance footage from those two days has been deleted from the Welfare Home's cameras?"

The director clutched his still-aching throat and said haltingly, "They demanded it. I had no choice!"

Black Cocoon sat in the swivel chair and tilted his head, his gloved fingers pressed together. "Let me guess. You must have received quite a few benefits from them?"

"No, absolutely not. I only thought it would be more..."

Black Cocoon bound his body with the Restraint Band again and used Restraint Band Truth to force him to tell the truth.

"I... I got two hundred thousand from them," the director changed his answer, his voice sounding as though it did not belong to him.

"You sold your conscience for money. You sold these children—children with no parents, children no one would care about even if they vanished from the face of the earth—to demons," Black Cocoon said slowly. "Why? In your eyes, was that money truly worth more than the safety of those two children?"

As he spoke, his gaze flicked toward the safe in the corner of the office.

The director mumbled, "They... they threatened me!"

"If they truly threatened you... why didn't you report it to the Esper Association?" Black Cocoon interlocked his fingers and tilted his head. "Or did you think the Esper Association could not handle them either?" He paused. "That's not it, is it? You were never threatened from beginning to end."

As he spoke, the Restraint Band suddenly shot out, seized the safe hidden inside the bookshelf, and smashed it hard against the floor.

The safe burst open with a bang. Amid arcs of electricity spraying like water, metal parts flew in every direction, followed by an envelope dropping to the floor.

Black Cocoon used the Restraint Band to scoop up the envelope. He opened it, glanced inside, and found a thick stack of banknotes.

Using the Restraint Band in place of his right hand, he flipped through the money and confirmed the total amount.

"Two hundred thousand," Black Cocoon calculated on his fingers. "Uh... for two hundred thousand, you sold your soul. You handed the children of the Welfare Home over to people of unknown origin and gave no thought to their futures. Did you feel even a second of guilt, old director?"

"You misunderstand."

"Oh, are you sure... I'm the one misunderstanding?"

Black Cocoon dropped his relaxed tone. Slowly raising his mask, he fixed his deep, dark eyes directly on the director's face.

The next instant, the Restraint Band sent the director out the window, dropping him from a height of ten meters through the torrential rain. In the final seconds before he hit the ground, it yanked him back and viciously hurled him onto the floor, where he slid several meters before crashing into the tea table.

The rain had drenched the director until he looked like a drowned rat. He raised his head, his face twisted to the utmost by terror, and stared pallidly at Black Cocoon's mask.

"I was wrong... I was wrong."

He muttered hoarsely as he hurriedly dropped to his knees.

"And the girl you locked in the basement and abused day and night... how do you intend to explain that?"

"It was all my fault, all my fault..." The director trembled all over.

"You won't even try to explain?"

"Spare me... please forgive me..."

"Fine. Then I forgive you," Black Cocoon said calmly. After all, no one held grudges against the dead, he thought.

The moment his words fell, the pitch-black Restraint Band surged forward like a tide. Gently and softly, it helped the director to his feet. Then, like creeping Thorns, it slid across his thigh, spiraled up his waist, and finally wound around his neck.

The Restraint Band looped around once and tied a knot—a dead knot. Then it abruptly tightened.

Black Cocoon narrowed his eyes and silently watched.

The man with the knotted Restraint Band around his neck first convulsed violently, struggling for a while with a flushed face. Then his arms slowly fell like severed reeds, and his head drooped. His eyelids had not yet closed, his eyes still fixed on the floor, but his entire body had gone completely still.

Amid the vivid bloodstains, a slender black silhouette stood quietly.

No expression could be seen on Ji Minghuan's face beneath the mask. He lightly twitched his nose, and the smell of blood hit him head-on.

A deathly silence shrouded the office. Wind and rain raged outside, and the slanting curtain of rain swept in through the window, lifting the hem of his coat.

Still too impulsive... If Instructor learns that the director died at Black Cocoon's hands, he'll suspect me.

Amid the sound of rain, he murmured softly.

After a long silence, Ji Minghuan reached into his trench coat pocket, took out his phone, held it to his ear, and called Gu Qiye.

"Who is this?" A reply soon came from the other end.

"Mr. Blue Arc... I need your help." Ji Minghuan spoke slowly through a Voice Changer, doing his best to maintain his usual teasing, unhurried tone, though his voice came out slightly hoarse.

"You again..."

At the sound of his voice, Gu Qiye's tone darkened.

"Come to Saint Dili Welfare Home..." Ji Minghuan said expressionlessly. "There's a body in the director's office. I need you to cover for me and publicly declare that the cause of death was 'suicide by hanging.'"

"You killed someone?"

Black Cocoon did not answer. Instead, he said in a low voice, "There's a girl in the Library basement. Once you see her, you'll understand why the director died. That's all I'll say... If you refuse to help me, I'll reveal your identity to the public."

The other end of the line fell silent for a long time. "I'll go and assess the situation first. Then I'll decide whether to help you."

Gu Qiye paused, his tone gradually growing heavy. "Let's be clear: if I decide not to help you, it won't matter even if you reveal my identity to the public... I will not help a criminal. That is my principle."

"Fine," Black Cocoon paused. "And one more thing—the girl in the basement..."

"What?"

Ji Minghuan was silent for a while beneath the mask. He glanced sideways at the torrential rain outside and said slowly, "I hope you can find her a good home. Let her attend school like an ordinary child. Arrange the best psychologist for her... If she wants to shut herself away, then give her some time first. Don't force her."

He paused. "Most importantly... don't let her go near this Welfare Home again. She has suffered enough. Don't make her remember any of this again."

At that point, Black Cocoon suddenly tugged at the Corner of His Mouth in self-mockery. "You know, Mr. Blue Arc, other than you, I don't know who else in this city I can trust. It has to be you. I only trust you. You have to take her away and personally watch her get better, or I won't forgive you."

Gu Qiye froze for a moment upon hearing that.

He could tell that Black Cocoon's tone had changed completely. There was not the slightest trace of teasing left, nor was he as cynical as before. He sounded just like a lonely, cold child clenching his fists and begging him for something.

"Though I still don't know what happened... I'll be at the Welfare Home right away," Gu Qiye said.

"See you."

With that, he hung up. Ji Minghuan stared blankly at the director on the floor for a while, then at the Hexagram Pattern he had drawn, before slowly turning to face the city beyond the curtain of rain.

"Sodalitas Salvifica... wash your necks and wait for me."

The Restraint Band crawled over his entire body like black snakes, tightly winding around every inch of his skin. A thunderclap descended amid the violent rain, illuminating the slender black figure before the window. Then his body vanished in an instant, as though swept away by endless gusts of wind.

Three minutes later, in the Library basement.

A bolt of Deep Blue Electric Light flashed in, dazzling arcs of electricity rippling outward and sweeping away the wild grass-like darkness. Gu Qiye came to a stop. He was still wearing casual clothes, apparently having had no time to change into his Battle Suit.

By the lingering electric light, he saw the girl in the darkness.

After freezing for a moment, Gu Qiye raised his right hand and gathered lightning at his fingertip as a Light Source. He carefully examined the wounds on the girl's body and the iron chains binding her hands and feet.

"Beast..."

He muttered under his breath, his face twitching faintly. He stepped forward slowly, gave his lightning-wreathed right hand a light shake, and the chains shattered one by one, clattering across the floor.

Gu Qiye lifted the girl into his arms, taking every care not to hurt her battered joints.

The girl opened her eyes. Fear filled her gaze as she looked at him. She wanted to speak, but she seemed to have lost her voice. Her lips merely moved faintly. "The... director, he, he..."

Gu Qiye lowered his eyes and softly told the girl in his arms, "It's all right... You're safe now. The director... he won't be coming back."

As his words fell, his body transformed into a fierce bolt of lightning and vanished from the spot.

It rained heavily in Li Capital that day. The entire city lay beneath a gloomy Sky Curtain, but its residents sat huddled before their heaters, watching television as they passed an ordinary morning.

The New Book has reached tenth place on the overall rankings. Requesting Moon Tickets—thank you, everyone!