The Connection Between Illusion and Reality

Those little night hawks drew closer again.

...What were they doing? Avenging that... Great Night Hawk? But with their strength... what could they possibly do...

Hope closed his eyes and found the black figure still there. Even with no light remaining, he could still recognize it from within the pitch darkness.

But closing his eyes wasn't to avoid looking at it.

Because his thoughts were blocked, painting a picture in his mind took more time—but it wasn't completely impossible.

When Hope opened his eyes, he found himself already half a meter away. "Uncertainty" had activated normally.

Neither the night hawks nor the black shadow had become obstacles to "Uncertainty."

That being the case, Hope no longer felt urgent. Though his thoughts were chaotic, being able to use Uncertainty at any moment gave him a sense of safety.

Hope stayed where he was, wanting to see what the night hawks actually intended.

He didn't wait long. Almost the moment the thought crossed his mind, a breeze swept past, and the flock of night hawks flew right before his eyes. They were disorderly, shifting their forms and positions at random.

Hope tensed in vigilance, already picturing Old Williams's living room in his mind. If the night hawks showed any sign of attack, he would instantly teleport beside the grandfather clock, using that as a relay point to return to Whateley House.

But he quickly realized his vigilance was unnecessary.

The night hawks passed overhead. Their cacophonous cries made Hope's dizziness worse, his back felt as if it were being roasted over a fire, and the black shadow deepened in color.

Yet the night hawks didn't pause for even a moment.

Even the one closest to Hope wasn't near enough for him to make out its features.

Hope guessed they carried malice, but this flock seemed to be merely passing through.

They sang their "ta-ta-ta-ta" song, and one miscreant even left behind a splatter of bird droppings that fell into the storage room. They ignored Hope entirely—this "soul reserve" not yet fit for consumption—and quickly flew away.

As the night hawks departed, Hope's dizziness gradually faded. The black figure grew fainter, its color lightening and turning translucent. This illusion, born from the night hawks' cries, was about to vanish.

Hope was now three meters from the table, and the figure happened to be floating beside it.

Hope had already confirmed that the figure was an illusion only he could see, incapable of affecting reality in any way. So he held no guard against it, quietly waiting for it to dissipate on its own.

But the figure moved. For the first time since it appeared, it made a motion—it reached out a hand toward the table beside it. Its blurry hand was barely distinguishable into five fingers.

It grabbed that steel pen.

Its grip was impossibly clumsy, like a child's, yet it truly lifted the pen.

Sensing something wrong, Hope quickly turned his head, trying to shift the black shadow's position. The shadow did move rapidly with his line of sight, but it didn't put down the pen. The pen moved along with it.

Hope bit his nails... Could the black shadow be real, not an illusion?

Hope knew there was a button on the right shoulder of his shirt. That button had become loose, about to fall off.

Now he pinched the button, yanked hard, and tore it off without much effort. He flicked his wrist, tossing the button toward the black shadow.

No sound of it hitting anything solid. The button passed straight through the shadow, flew out through the roof, and fell toward the ground.

Still an illusion?

As the button left the roof, Hope lowered his head, forcing the black shadow to overlap with the floor slab. Just like the table before, the floor slab didn't stop the shadow.

But the floor slab blocked the pen. The steel pen couldn't pass through the concrete. When the black shadow reached the underside of the cement, no matter how tightly it gripped, it was forced to separate from the pen.

Whatever the black shadow intended to do with the pen, it could no longer accomplish it.

Hope kept his head down, stepped closer, and picked up the pen—simultaneously pushing the black shadow further away from it.

The night hawks' cries had faded. The black shadow was so faint it was nearly invisible. In no more than five seconds, it would vanish completely.

But the black shadow suddenly made a motion of "opening its mouth." Its blurry form had no such organ as a "mouth," so a crack split open along the edge of its face, opening and closing.

From that crack came strange sounds—twisted and bizarre. Hope felt he had heard something like this before...

It was Wilbur. His "incantations" sounded just like this, inhuman.

The black shadow was using a spell!

In an instant, aside from the shadow's chanting, all surrounding sounds became muffled and indistinct.

Hope suddenly realized that the black shadow was no longer in his line of sight. The moment the incantation began, the shadow was no longer fixed to a corner of his vision.

Before Hope's eyes, a small area on the silver pen suddenly lit up. Bizarre symbols rose from it, displaying a strange rhythmic motion, echoing the black shadow's voice.

This pen was wrong!

Hope dropped the pen as if he'd touched hot coals. Before he even saw it hit the ground, he had already closed his eyes.

With the night hawks gone, "Uncertainty" took less than half a second to teleport him beside the grandfather clock.

He opened his eyes briefly. The black shadow hadn't pursued. In the gap of his escape, he saw the grandfather clock seemed broken—its second hand motionless.

...Was that the effect of the spell? Hope didn't observe further. He closed his eyes again, this time targeting his own room.

"Uncertainty" encountered no obstruction. After releasing the spell, the black shadow made no other moves. Here, even the sound of the incantation was gone. Hope even suspected it had vanished.

All sounds faded. The blurry wooden ceiling came back into view. He had successfully returned to his room.

Still shaken, he lay on the bed. After waiting a few seconds and checking his body, he finally confirmed that the black shadow's spell had caused him no obvious harm.

He pulled the iron chain out from under the bed and locked it back around his wrist.

He calmed down again:

He had run off without even figuring out the effects of that spell... No, he couldn't afford to wait and see before acting. A wise man does not stand beneath a crumbling wall—if he delayed and couldn't escape in time, he'd have only himself to blame.

At the very least, he wouldn't go near Old Williams's house for the rest of the night.

That Steel Pen was definitely problematic. It was very likely that the shadow had only changed after coming into contact with the pen...

Damn it! What had Robert said back then...

"This is Old Whateley's pen. Pretty, isn't it? He just gave it to me."

Was this the depth of a veteran cultist? Even a casually gifted pen was this bizarre.

Hope steadied his emotions, knowing he needed to sleep. This wasn't like his university dorm—if he slept straight through until lunch, it might raise suspicion... Lavinia was no concern, of course, but he still had to be wary of Wilbur.

Agility: 1.31, Physique: 1.55, Vision: 0.67, Mana: 0.01, 0, 16

Uncertainty: 1

Source-ification: 0.3

Curse of Darkness: 1

The Curse of Darkness still remained, meaning Hope still hadn't shaken off the shadow—it was just invisible now.

But...

Mana... had increased?