Yu Sheng spent a long time calming the squirrel down again.
At the same time, he felt that he had finally begun to understand the underlying chaos of the strange Otherworld known as "Fairy Tales."
The children's wild imaginations, Dark Angel's mistaken understanding of human stories, and the alterations made to the "stage" by generations of Fairy Tales members after they fell into subsets—these three influences, combined with eighty-six years of accumulation and distortion, had ultimately formed the bizarre and twisted Fairy Tales system as it existed now.
This enormous, distorted Story Collection had become like a bloated, cancerous mass of flesh, and the moment of complete collapse and rupture was fast approaching. Ankaela's "child" was about to be born from that growth.
The friction of growing trees and the deep, rumbling vibrations from beneath the earth echoed through the Black Forest. Yu Sheng tucked away the neatly organized stack of Fairy Tales fragments inside his clothes. Then, gripping the bullet that constantly radiated heat in one hand and his weapon in the other, he cautiously rose to his feet.
Eileen sat on his shoulder, while the squirrel had somehow ended up in Eileen's arms.
Huli stood nearby, the fur on her ears slightly bristling as she tensed up. "Benefactor... The atmosphere around us has changed..."
Yu Sheng said nothing. He merely raised his head and looked toward the sky.
The fragments that had originally belonged to the orphanage's structure had completely vanished from sight. His gaze passed through the gaps between the treetops, revealing a hazy, muddled dusk. That clearly was not the sky of the Crossroads.
The faint light of dusk filtered through the forest, casting mottled silhouettes between the towering trees. Indistinct wolf howls drifted from the distance, sometimes near and sometimes far, as if an invisible