Embodied Game

Only a pure goal was the sole reality.

Her words still reached Hoffa's ears, but he no longer knew how to respond.

In that instant, he seemed to suddenly find himself in a weightless, matterless vacuum. Blinding white light surrounded him, leaving him unable to see anything.

He did not know where his physical body was. He did not know where he actually was. He could not even sense the existence of anything. This place was so strange that it left him utterly baffled.

The unknown experience began to make Hoffa panic, but he immediately remembered what the masked person had told him: only a goal was the sole reality.

His goal was the Disillusionment Charm.

The Disillusionment Charm.

The moment that thought arose, the white light around him immediately sensed it.

One beam of white light separated itself from the rest and merged with Hoffa.

Disillusionment.

Several profound, complex syllables entered his mind. Before he could carefully make sense of the spell—

The white light around him abruptly began to take form. Gravity and matter began to appear.

Gradually, the white light faded, and the scenery around him emerged.

Clang!

Clang!

Church bells mixed with the fluttering of birds' wings reached Hoffa's ears. Voices buzzed all around him, and wooden wheels rumbled along.

The world before him gradually came into focus.

Once he had familiarized himself with his surroundings, he discovered that he was not in the dim basement from before. He was not even at Hogwarts.

Hoffa was standing on a bustling street.

The sky was cloudless. It was a bright, sunny morning, and black carriages drawn by four horses occasionally sped down the street, the old kerosene lamps on them jingling.

The last time Hoffa had seen carriages like these was when he watched Pirates of the Caribbean in his previous life.

The people around him wore tall black hats, suits, and checked pocket watches. There were also women on the street dressed in Victorian clothing. They wore exaggerated yet worn pleated skirts and carried baskets as they went back and forth, looking like servants or cooks.

Beyond these cooks and coachmen stood rows of towering villas, with lofty entrances, imposing doors, round arched windows, and stonework at the corners, all exuding luxury and grandeur.

The ornate, intricate carvings on the pillars and window ledges, along with the soaring church spires in the distance, showed that this was definitely not 1938. Hoffa might have believed it was 1839, or even earlier.

Looking more closely, Hoffa realized that this body was not his either.

He was dressed in a dirty, tattered gray robe, with a necklace of colorful feathers around his neck and strings of bone beads tied around his wrists. He looked exactly like a shaman.

More importantly, he had become a Black man, like a Black wizard sold to Europe through the slave trade.

Hoffa was utterly stunned by the sight.

He tried to move, but he could not move at all.

The Black wizard stood in a corner of the street, beneath the shadow cast by a tavern sign.

As if waiting for something.

At that moment, an elegantly dressed old man emerged from a villa across the street. Several coachmen hurriedly opened the carriage door for him.

After he got in, the carriage rumbled away.

The instant the carriage departed, "Hoffa" began to move, completely beyond his control.

It was as though two souls inhabited this Black body—one was himself, and the other was its original owner.

Hoffa understood his situation a little better. This perspective was like switching to a teammate's point of view after dying in a first-person shooter.

Except everything he was experiencing should have been this Black wizard's memories.

The Black man hurried around the street corner to the side of a villa. He looked up at the relief carvings high on the mansion, then turned his sinister gaze toward an alley by the street.

Then, seeing no one around, he immediately climbed the villa's relief carvings and swiftly scaled the wall. He was remarkably agile.

Clinging to the windowsill, the Black wizard pulled out his wand—a strange, curved wand shaped like an iron hook—and tapped the window.

"Alohomora."

The window flew open with a bang.

The Black man climbed inside without hesitation. Watching all this, Hoffa understood. This guy was a thief—a thief among wizards.

The room contained many obviously valuable items: exquisite gold watches and fine porcelain atop the fireplace.

There was even a naked European beauty sprawled across the floor. Fine silk lay all around her, along with scattered empty wine bottles.

She was sleeping soundly.

She was probably the old man's mistress, the old man who had just boarded the carriage. They had likely been fooling around in here earlier.

But the Black wizard paid no attention to any of it. Neither the woman nor the valuables interested him. He quickly searched everywhere, as if looking for something far more important.

After giving the woman a couple more glances, Hoffa stopped paying attention. She was beautiful, but to someone who had lived through the twenty-first century, she was nothing unusual.

He was more concerned with the current situation.

Without a doubt, the scroll the masked person had opened for him at school was some kind of tool similar to Tom Riddle's diary or a Pensieve.

It recorded events that had truly happened, then allowed him to witness them, with the purpose of conveying some sort of message to him.

But what did this have to do with his pursuit of the Disillusionment Charm?

The Black man searched for a long time but failed to find what he wanted.

At last, he drew his wand and tapped around in the air—the bookshelves, the porcelain, the floor, even the woman on the ground.

Suddenly, when his wand touched a marble globe, the globe turned slightly. The Black wizard immediately put away his wand, leaned over the globe, and studied it carefully for a while.

Finally, he gave it a hard twist, and the globe made a series of clicking sounds.

A deep rumbling suddenly came from beneath the luxurious mahogany floor.

It was a mechanism and a hidden door!

The hidden door was pitch-black inside, bottomless and seemingly leading to some unknown place.

Awakened by the sound of the door opening, the woman drunk on wine and pleasure began to slowly stir. But the Black wizard did not notice. He seemed rather excited.

He quickly approached the hidden door and lit his wand, but just as the wand lit up—

Grrr!

A low growl came from the dark passage.

An overwhelmingly dangerous feeling arose.

Strangely, that feeling came directly from Hoffa's heart, as though he himself were the Black wizard. He did not know why, but instinctively wanted to retreat.

At that instant, control of the Black wizard's body fell into Hoffa's hands, and he took a step back.

Just that one step.

His presence was instantly locked onto.

Then, a gigantic crimson tongue nearly five meters long shot out of the darkness like lightning, piercing straight through the Black wizard's chest—and Hoffa's as well.

An incomparably intense, real pain swept through Hoffa's mind. This was not fake! This was real!

His chest had been pierced through!

Blood gushed out in torrents.

The Black wizard—no, Hoffa—collapsed to the floor.

The woman's terrified scream and the sound of shattering bottles reached his ears. His vision went black.

Hoffa had no time to think. He only exhaled once before dying instantly.

Maybe it was one second. Maybe it was a century.

Clang!

Clang!

Church bells mixed with the fluttering of birds' wings reached Hoffa's ears. People chatted around him, and wheels rolled along.

Hoffa woke from the agony.

Before him was still the bustling street beneath a bright, sunny morning sky.

A coachman driving a black carriage clattered past him, the carriage's kerosene lamps jingling. Nearby, an early-rising cook carried a basket as she bargained and picked through vegetables at a wooden roadside stall.

What a peaceful, ordinary scene.

Hoffa was dumbfounded. What was going on?

The scene of his inexplicable death was still vivid in his mind. The helplessness of blood pouring from his chest had been so real, and the despair caused by that pain still made his chest feel tight.

He wanted to gasp for breath, only to find that he could not.

Because control of the Black body was no longer his. "He" was once again standing beneath the tavern sign, scanning his surroundings with a gloomy gaze.

Then something even more despairing happened. At the entrance of the luxurious villa ahead, a pot-bellied old man pushed open the door and walked out. He was dressed like a Muggle member of parliament, his face tinted blue with a hangover and his expression full of displeasure at having to get up for work.

Then he got into the carriage, the door closed, and the carriage left.

As the old man departed, the Black wizard began to move. He headed into the alley, making the exact same movements as before.

Damn it!

Hoffa wanted to stop him, but how could an existence without a physical body prevent this man from walking into death? Hoffa did not know.

In the alley, the Black wizard reached up, grabbed a protrusion on a Roman column, and swiftly climbed upward. Hoffa panicked. He could not speak or move. He could only watch helplessly.

"Alohomora." The Black man took out his wand and opened the window again.

The wizard jumped into the room. It was just like before: scattered wine bottles, the beautiful woman sprawled on her back, even the drool at the corner of her mouth was the same...

The Black wizard found the globe and opened the passage.

The low growl appeared again.

That was right. At this very instant.

Control was handed over to Hoffa.

"Fuck!"

After blurting out a curse, Hoffa instinctively turned and ran, trying to jump out the window. He did not want to experience that agonizing pain through his heart again.

But things did not go as he wished.

That thick red tongue still shot out from the dark passage. In an instant, it caught up to Hoffa and pinned him to the windowsill like lightning.

The woman's screams and the sound of shattering bottles slowly faded away.

GG.

Clang!

Clang!

The church bells rang again, and Hoffa returned to the starting point yet again.

Before him was still the bustling street.

The cooks chatting cheerfully.

The hurried coachmen.

For a moment, Hoffa could barely react.

As the old congressman with a sour morning mood stepped irritably into the carriage, the Black wizard decisively and resolutely carried Hoffa into the shadow of death.

"Damn it!"

Hoffa finally understood completely. He was so furious he wanted to curse someone's mother.

This was a real embodied game!

Something people in the twenty-first century had not even developed, and these wizards had gone and invented it in 1938.

Without a doubt, throughout the entire scenario, he would gain roughly three seconds of control.

And within those three seconds, he had to make the right response and choice to change death. Otherwise, he would experience the pain of dying over and over again.

The masked person had told him to bear the consequences himself. What kind of magical artifact had she used on him? Even Tom Riddle's diary in the original story did not have this effect, did it?

And what kind of lunatic kept a gigantic magical creature inside a villa? What exactly was this Black wizard trying to steal? In real history, had he ultimately lived or died?

But no one could answer this string of questions.

As the Black wizard climbed up the villa, opened the window, entered the room, and dealt with the mechanism, control once again returned to Hoffa.

Life and death hung on a single instant.

A low growl echoed from the dark passage.

Hoffa was not an idiot. He immediately thought of the spell that mysterious voice had prompted him with amid the white light—Disillusionment.

The sense of danger made his scalp tingle, but this time, Hoffa did not choose to run. He directly controlled the Black wizard and pulled out his wand.

"Disillusionment!"

At that instant, magic flowed from the wand and spread throughout Hoffa's body, as if a basin of cold water had been poured over his head.

Hoffa's figure began to blur. This spell was the Disillusionment Charm.

But unfortunately, Hoffa was using the Disillusionment Charm for the first time and was not proficient with it. Many of his syllables and movements were incorrect.

He did not truly conceal himself. He had only blurred his body.

But the red tongue seemed to have been affected by the magic. It veered off course and pierced straight through Hoffa's left ribs, punching through his lung and stomach.

It lingered for one second, then the tongue that had pierced through his lung snapped back like lightning.

That hurt like hell!!

Tears sprang into Hoffa's eyes. He sucked in a breath and dropped to his knees. Instinctively clutching the gaping hole in his chest, he wheezed harshly like a broken bellows. Stomach acid was seeping into his chest cavity. He would die from suffocation and poisoning. This felt even more painful than dying outright.

Beside him, the woman screamed as she threw everything she could see at Hoffa.

Then, through his increasingly blurred vision—

He saw a gigantic lizard slowly crawl out of the dark tunnel. Its head was as large as a small car, with three protruding eyes and scales standing upright all over its body. It looked like a cold, merciless chameleon.

The next second, the lizard opened its huge mouth. Its tongue curled around Hoffa and dragged him into its tooth-filled maw.