Jump Card

The doll shop really was new. Huo Lin remembered that this place had still been a bakery last month.

The bread hadn't been particularly good, though. Mostly, it had lacked anything distinctive, and several branded dessert shops nearby, including Orange House and Dessert Heaven, had drawn away its customers.

Competition had been too fierce, and it had closed before she noticed.

The doll shop's sign read "Twin Bells."

"Two clock bells?" Huo Lin read the name and translated it literally.

"It actually means 'a pair of little bells.' Welcome!" A young female clerk stood at the entrance, greeting customers.

The clerk was pretty, with fair skin and delicate features.

"Bell" could mean a church bell or a little jingling bell.

"Got it. Like the pair of bells around a Christmas reindeer's neck?"

"Two church bells" would have been a rather odd name, but "a pair of little bells" sounded much cuter.

"You guessed it. Jingle bells! Come in and have a look around."

The clerk welcomed them into the shop. Since she was the only employee there, she was probably the owner, too.

Huo Lin and Hayate were about to enter, but Michiko stood rooted to the spot, looking frightened.

"Th-that... that's my doll!"

Following Michiko's pointing finger, Hayate and Huo Lin both spotted a panda plush on top of the pile of dolls displayed in front of the counter for customers to choose from.

A pink bow was tied around its neck.

"I tied that bow on it."

Although the toy shop had plenty of identical dolls, that bow was one of a kind. Michiko had loved the doll so much that she had dressed it up.

At that, the shop owner's expression turned troubled as well.

"Again?"

She didn't doubt Michiko's words, because this wasn't the first time something like this had happened.

"Miss, what do you mean by 'again'?"

"Sigh... this happened last week, too."

That time, it hadn't been this panda plush, but a giraffe plush. The police had even gotten involved after a customer reported that the shop had stolen back a doll it had sold.

She had absolutely no reason to do such a thing, but the doll really was the one she had sold, and it had indeed returned to the shop for no apparent reason.

The police hadn't said much. There were still plenty of unanswered questions, after all, and the security cameras inside the shop and along the surrounding streets hadn't recorded anything suspicious. They had simply let the customer take the doll back.

Still, to salvage her reputation, she had paid the customer a substantial sum in compensation, hoping to keep them from coming back and damaging the shop's image.

Now the same thing had happened again.

She didn't know what to say. If this kept happening, Twin Bells would have no reputation left. She had finally managed to open her own shop, only to face having to close it or move to the neighboring town.

But relocating would cost another considerable sum.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart. I... I don't know what to say. You can have this doll back, and you can take any other doll you like from the shop, too. But could you please not tell anyone else about this?"

Judging by Huo Lin's experience of living in Beika Town for over a year in her previous life, those words were practically a confession.

A shop owner with kleptomania who liked stealing back the dolls she sold to little children.

To borrow the catchphrase of that famous high school detective who was always in the newspapers, once all the impossible explanations had been eliminated, there could only be one truth, however you looked at it.

But in this world, "eliminating all the impossible explanations" was itself a false premise. Magic existed here, which meant anything theoretically "impossible" could still happen.

Most importantly, Huo Lin could distinctly sense magic here.

Was someone really using magic for a prank like this?

Still, the source didn't have much magic power. Huo Lin wasn't quite sure what units magic power was measured in, so she could only judge it against what she had encountered before.

It was roughly equivalent to half a page of the Book of the Night Sky.

Huo Lin walked around the shop. It was dinnertime, and this newly opened shop hadn't attracted much business yet, so there were no other customers inside. That was a good thing.

Huo Lin didn't know whether magic was subject to any sort of "secrecy law." Nobody had told her about such things, but ordinary people would still find it hard to accept.

Then she stopped in front of a plush toy.

It was a black-and-white bear.

She reached toward the plush, making as if to grab it. Just then, a Pink Rabbit sprang out of it.

The creature didn't look entirely like a rabbit, but that was the closest description she could think of.

Calling the creature a "monster" would have been a little unkind, since the Pink Rabbit was quite cute. Still, the creature definitely wasn't a normal living thing.

The instant the Pink Rabbit appeared, the creature tried to leap away. Not only that, but the surrounding dolls began bouncing one after another. Huo Lin sensed the creature's magic spreading outward and affecting the surroundings.

To everyone else, however, dolls bouncing around was clearly beyond belief.

"Is it an earthquake?" The shop owner panicked and shouted for everyone to run outside to an open area.

But the supposed "earthquake" lasted only a moment. Two or three seconds later, it stopped, and the dolls went still again.

For Huo Lin, this hardly even counted as a fight.

She really didn't know many spells. At present, she only had Defense Shield, which she had raised to its maximum level. But her experience suppressing the Book of the Night Sky had made her very familiar with this sort of suppression method.

Suppressing an entire Book of the Night Sky took no effort, let alone something with a mere half-page's worth of power.

Magic Null Zone!

That was the name Huo Lin had given this method. Put simply, she compressed a vast amount of magic power into a single area, until none could be detected in the surroundings, creating a blank zone of magic.

Within that area, the excessively compressed magic overloaded and shut down all magical items, producing an effect similar to sealing them.

Using a method meant to seal the Book of the Night Sky on this Pink Rabbit was overkill. It was like firing an antiaircraft gun at a mosquito.

The creature couldn't resist in the slightest and simply dropped into Huo Lin's hand. A second later, without magic to sustain that form, the Pink Rabbit turned into a card.

It was a card of a kind Huo Lin recognized.

Just a few weeks earlier, on the day she and Hayate had taken a trip to the hot springs, she had intercepted one from the air.

That card had read "The Mist," while this one read "The Jump." Its illustration showed a long-tailed rabbit with wings growing from its back.

"The Mist and the Jump Card?"

Everything had happened so quickly that the shop owner and Michiko were still scrambling to escape the earthquake. Neither had noticed what happened. Only Hayate seemed to have caught a glimpse.

"What's that?"

"Probably some kind of magical item. It lost control without an owner." Huo Lin fiddled with it for a while, then let Hayate have a look when she saw her curiosity.

"How do you use it?"

"Just channel magic power into it. But don't use it here. It'll cause trouble. You can play with it when we get back."

As Huo Lin understood it, this card probably let people jump very high. The shop owner and Michiko were still there, and the streets outside were bustling with rush-hour traffic. Jumping several meters, or even a dozen meters, into the air would attract far too much attention.

"All right."

Hayate returned the card to Huo Lin and watched her slip it into the Book of the Night Sky like a bookmark.