A hallucination? Hao Ren naturally didn't believe what he had just seen was a hallucination.
He was certain he had seen "Roll," and it definitely wasn't because he missed his family so much that he had developed some kind of visual hallucination—if he wanted to talk about people he missed, there were plenty of them. Even if he missed Doudou, he wouldn't start imagining that stupid cat who did nothing besides scratch at doors, claw sofas, steal food, throw rats into pots, and crouch by his ears every morning, loudly going "meowwwww"...
He connected what he had seen with the phenomenon of "Light Erosion" occurring near the Tower of Sunscorching.
So after giving Veronica a perfunctory response, Hao Ren made up an excuse to leave on his own. He searched the Golden Rose Palace for the areas where the Light Erosion phenomenon was most concentrated. Such areas were no longer uncommon. After the Tower of Sunscorching's energy eruption, a third of White City had been dragged into phase anomalies. As he walked, he would see walls or platforms that had vanished into thin air, and sometimes entire houses. Virginia creeper and curtains floated in midair within those Light Erosion zones, looking both bizarre and conspicuous.
He didn't find the stupid cat again, but he did see two nervous-looking maids in front of a pavilion.
The two maids had their backs to Hao Ren and hadn't noticed anyone approaching. After he walked over, he heard them talking in low voices:
"...Did you see that just now? It whooshed past in an instant. Good heavens, it scared me half to death."
"I saw it too! I thought it was a hallucination... That thing looked like an octopus, with tentacles all over its body. It seemed to be floating in the air. It