I picked up my phone and saw that I had two missed calls, both from Wu Ling.
I was about to call her back when she rang again.
The first thing Wu Ling said when she heard my voice was, "You're out."
"Mm," I replied. "That place... was it an illusion?"
"Yes. It was probably someone with the ability to manipulate people's minds and consciousness. Using that scroll, she pulled our consciousness into a virtual space she'd created. It wasn't like another dimension; that space was an illusion. Only our consciousness went there."
"Oh..."
"The ability user is very young, and her powers are fairly ordinary. She's also poorly trained. Don't worry—she can't see into our deepest consciousness, and she can't read our thoughts." Wu Ling offered reassurance first.
I relaxed a little, then immediately thought of the teddy bears.
Wu Ling had gotten out of the illusion before me and had started looking into the teddy bears sooner. But Greenleaf hadn't made much progress.
The foreign exorcists' association wasn't within their sphere of surveillance. The limited information they had came from the association's past interactions with the domestic supernatural community. What the old man knew, for instance, came from experience; he couldn't possibly have known every detail about them. The fact that they'd once gone after the teddy bears was already the most they could establish. Wu Ling and the others hadn't found out who sealed the bears or how they did it before, and they still couldn't find out now.
"We do know where Karan and the girl are. They're staying at a few different hotels with the other exorcists. But we can't just show up at their doors," Wu Ling said. "As for Lü Qiaolan, we have her address and phone number. But we just found out