After the old man stepped aside, I stood face-to-face with the bear. Its glass eyes looked at me, and I felt as though I could see my reflection in them.
There were so many things I wanted to ask. But I knew very well that the answers I got might not come from Lu Qiaolan's teddy bear. They might only come from the toy spirit.
Perhaps... Lu Qiaolan's teddy bear had already disappeared...
Spirits were born from human consciousness and survived through it. They became evil because negative thoughts were always more intense than positive, optimistic ones.
Perhaps most people in this world were selfish, and none were entirely good. They might never have committed a crime, but everyone had entertained all kinds of vicious thoughts.
Human society didn't punish people for such thoughts. Unless someone confessed, they might never be discovered in their entire life.
But spirits were different. They could receive those thoughts directly and be affected by them.
I looked at the teddy bear, recalling every little thing I knew about it.
From the moment Lu Qiaolan approached the people at Greenleaf and hired them, to her death.
Suddenly, I realized I'd overlooked something all this time.
From the very beginning, these bears hadn't been kind.
They had served as hosts for kidnapped children. They had killed the traffickers. They had killed the burglars who broke into Lu Qiaolan's home to protect her. And in Huixiang, they had killed people too.
I'd never thought much of it before. Their actions had seemed like acts of justice, self-defense, and punishing evil.
Although society's laws didn't encourage this kind of thing—in fact, they explicitly opposed it—in those circumstances, given that the teddy bears weren't human, I'd accepted what they did. In my eyes, they had always been kind. Lu