"Qilan?"
A short-haired girl stood before the cell door, carrying a bag of shumai she had brought back.
"Ha! Grandpa! You've become so young!"
Xiao Qilan spread her arms and pounced on her. The latter did not dodge, letting the little Witch act spoiled in her arms. Even that worm-like magical creature hopped onto her shoulder.
So it really was Professor Liu Mulan. I had no idea how that little girl recognized her...
Oh, right. I remembered.
Liu Mulan's current appearance was exactly the same as when she had drunk the Rejuvenation Potion. I had seen her during that photoshoot, so it had left a deep impression on me.
But after becoming a true Magical Girl, she looked even younger than she had then. Still, among Magical Girls, her looks were rather plain, with no particularly striking features. She was like a middle school girl who had not learned makeup yet but had not started getting acne either, carrying a precious innocence beneath her simplicity.
"You're Miluno?"
The old man who had once been the director of the Möbius Research Institute looked up at me as well.
"The world really is small. I never expected you and Yin Lu to be roommates," I replied.
They recruited terminally ill patients under the guise of treatment, implanted Black Crystals harmful to the human body into them, and forcibly created artificial monsters known as "Negative Variants."
That was the research Professor Liu Mulan had once led, filled with anti-human atrocities that made me sick to my stomach...
So from the bottom of my heart, I disliked the grandfather Xiao Qilan spoke of.
She clearly looked like a kind old lady, and now she even had the harmless appearance of a young girl. Yet she could calmly accept and carry out such brutal experiments.