"I want you... to play with me!"
A piercing shriek tore through the castle's dead silence. The resentment of Annie, the Orphan Girl in Red, surged like a burst dam and instantly engulfed the entire space.
"Crack... crack..."
The broken toys scattered across the floor began to emit dense sounds like bones being dislocated.
They rose stiffly to their feet, their hollow eye sockets turning in unison toward Qin Feng.
A mental pressure mingled with decay and malice swept over him like a tide.
The ancient rotary telephone tattoo, [Death Notice], quietly surfaced on his left wrist. Wisps of cold black mist seeped from it, making the surrounding resentment instinctively recoil and retreat.
A flash of silver light appeared in his right palm as the D-Class Legendary Armament, [Scissors of Truth], condensed into shape. A silver gleam on its dull blades seemed capable of tearing through retinas, so sharp that it subtly distorted the space around it.
"Roar!"
Countless broken toys howled and charged at him like mad, dragging their stiff limbs behind them.
Qin Feng's hawk-sharp gaze pierced through layers of ghostly figures before finally locking onto Annie at the bend of the second-floor stairs.
He shifted the lollipop in his mouth to the other side and called out indistinctly, "Hey, little girl, even if this group summon doesn't cost mana, you can't waste it like this, can you?
"The quality's this bad—having more of them won't help!
"Look at that teddy bear. All its stuffing's leaked out. It'll fall apart after two steps.
"And that Barbie—her face is cracked. Won't she scare your own side at night?
"I suggest you learn from the necromancer next door and go for a premium lineup. Do you even understand differentiated competition?"
"You... want to die!" Annie's voice twisted with rage as even more toys poured from the shadows and fearlessly lunged at Qin Feng.
Qin Feng clicked his tongue and shook his head slightly.
These toys were merely extensions of Annie's resentment. Hurting them was equivalent to draining her power.
And as the system had analyzed, the core of her power was "loneliness" and "anger."
She turned every victim into a "toy," using that method to resist her fear of being abandoned.
So what she feared most was not physical harm, but... being abandoned again, being stripped of the "game" that defined her existence.
But how could he target that point precisely?
At that moment, Qin Feng's gaze settled on the wooden horse still rocking by itself in the center of the hall.
Through his Spiritual Sense, he saw countless threads of resentment extending from the toys and ultimately converging on Annie.
Yet the source of every thread seemed inextricably linked to that wooden horse.
And on the horse's mottled base, he keenly caught a line of small words, nearly worn smooth by resentment and carved in childish handwriting:
"For my little Annie, Mommy will always love you."
Annie... was that her original name?
So that was it.
A nearly cruel smile curled across Qin Feng's lips.
Ignoring the claw-wielding teddy bear already right in front of him, he instead aimed his left hand, wreathed in cold black mist, at Annie on the second floor.
He did not use [Death Notice] to declare death. That would have been too crude—and too unstable.
Qin Feng activated the ability, clearly declaring in a cold, teasing voice like a demon's whisper:
"I foretell that ten seconds from now, you will remember that your name is Annie."
"And you will be unable to stop yourself from... missing Mommy."
The instant his words fell, it was not the rule of death that descended, but a stranger, deeper form of "conceptual contamination"!
Like the most precise virus, the command followed those invisible threads of resentment, bypassed every defense, and forcefully invaded Annie's logical core!
"Boom!"
Annie's abyss-black pupils suddenly trembled!
For the first time, confusion, pain, and struggle appeared on that little face twisted by rage.
Countless human memories buried beneath resentment exploded in her mind like shattered mirrors.
A swing under the sunlight, her mother's warm embrace, that lullaby hummed countless times...
[Mommy...]
A supernatural tale could understand death and fear, but it could not understand what a "mother" was.
This warmest obsession from the very origin of life violently clashed with her current cold, hate-filled nature.
The resentment around her body fell into unprecedented chaos in an instant!
"Roar...?" The army of toys charging at Qin Feng froze in unison like robots that had lost their signal, their movements slowing into confusion.
Now!
At the instant Annie's power went out of control due to the confusion in her sense of identity, Qin Feng moved!
He pushed off violently, shooting forward like an arrow loosed from a bow. His target was not Annie on the second floor, but the wooden horse in the center of the castle hall!
That was the first vessel of Annie's obsession, the first "home" of her soul, and the core of the entire Doll Island domain!
"Stop him!" Annie's shriek carried a trace of panic and pain.
The largest teddy bear let out a roar. A thick shield of resentment, enhanced by the domain, instantly covered its body. Like a black wall hurtling forward at high speed, it crashed down in front of Qin Feng.
Qin Feng did not even look at it. He charged straight ahead and casually swung [Scissors of Truth] forward.
"Crack!"
Silver light flashed across the blades as the D-Class armament's new trait, [Law Breaking], activated with force!
That seemingly indestructible resentment shield was as fragile as glass before the edge that severed rules.
There was no violent explosion, only a crisp cracking sound. The shield shattered at once, and before the giant teddy bear could react, it was split in two down the middle, silently turning into two wisps of black smoke.
Unstoppable!
Qin Feng appeared before the lone wooden horse in an instant.
He raised Scissors of Truth high. Through his Spiritual Sense, the thickest and most central thread of resentment-based rules extended from the wooden horse, visibly connected to the entire castle.
"Your game," Qin Feng's voice boomed like thunder through the trembling castle, "ends here!"
The silver scissors came down with the resolve to sever all falsehoods!
They did not strike the physical wooden horse. Instead, they precisely and unerringly severed the core rule thread sustaining the entire domain!
"No—!"
As the rule was cut, a shriek filled with rage, unwillingness, and overwhelming sorrow came from the second floor.
The entire Gothic castle began to shake violently.
The cute cartoon wallpaper on the walls cracked inch by inch, revealing rotten, damp brickwork beneath the peeling plaster.
The crystal chandelier on the ceiling crashed down and shattered into pieces.
The toys that had been ferocious only moments before froze like puppets whose strings had been cut. Countless cracks then spread over their bodies, and with a "bang," they turned into black smoke that filled the air before vanishing completely.
Qin Feng had forcibly severed Annie's connection to the Doll Island domain in the most brutal, unreasonable way possible!
The resentment around her body rapidly faded like a punctured balloon.
In just a few seconds, the earth-shaking turmoil subsided.
The castle was still the same castle, but it had become utterly dilapidated, revealing its truest and bleakest form.
Qin Feng stood in the center of the wrecked hall, flicking nonexistent dust from the scissors as Scissors of Truth turned into silver light and disappeared into his palm.
He slowly raised his head and met Annie's eyes, which had become hollow once again, on the second floor.
Using his tongue, he lightly shifted the lollipop stick—the candy long gone—into a more comfortable position. A smile as bright as sunlight spread across his face.
"You see, disobedient children don't just go without candy."
"They even get their homes torn down."
Before you continue