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In the café on the second floor, Steeky was asleep on the sofa in the living room, reminiscing about the taste of the crispy fish Xiao Peng had prepared. He was happy that Madeline and James had offered Xiao Peng the position of their chef; otherwise, he would have threatened him into becoming their cook.
The peace was serene in the living room, making the nap very beautiful and enjoyable without any interruptions.
But that didn't last long, as a hair from his black mustache twitched, causing him to open his pale green eyes and look forward, where many packages soon appeared on the table and on the floor. Then he glanced towards the pink-colored room! He heard the sound of a human body being thrown onto the bed behind the door, and then a pair of metal-framed glasses appeared on his face, making him look like an intellectual cat. Steeky didn't mind and went back to his nap as if nothing had happened.
…
At the same time.
In an abandoned factory behind the factories in the northern area of Freundinestream city, screams and pleas could be heard from a distance, but there was no response because there were no people in the area.
Only that sound echoed through the rusty factory, which had some vines growing on the outside covering most of the holes in its roof.
Inside, the sound echoed, carrying a sad tone and an intense longing for life in those pleading screams.
"You don't have to kill me!" a man screamed, pleading to a person sitting in the shadows in front of him.
"…" That person remained silent and said nothing, as if he were the darkness itself.
"No no… you shouldn't kill me!" the man screamed while tears streamed down onto the rusty factory floor.
"…" But that person still didn't say anything; instead, he continued observing from the shadows the man wearing a brown coat, a white shirt, and a medium-sized round hat, with tears streaming from his blue eyes.
"Hooff!" The man from the shadows sighed, causing the pleading man to stop screaming and crying to look carefully, trembling, at the person in the shadows.
The person in the shadows suddenly took out a copper coin from nowhere, tossed it up before catching it professionally in his hand, and said in a gruff voice, "This is the most I can do! Choose now!"
The pleading man was surprised and said, "I knew you were crazy! I shouldn't have pleaded for mercy in the first place, I should have run!" Saying that, he tried to get up but couldn't move from his spot.
"You… what did you do to me?" the man asked, surprised by his inability to get up.
"I didn't do anything to you? You're the one who wanted to play, so you have to follow the rules and start playing with me!" the person said coldly.
"I don't want to play! Let me go!" the man screamed hysterically and tried to move but couldn't.
"…" The person didn't respond this time, just sitting in the shadows observing.
But at that moment, a sound echoed throughout the abandoned factory.
Bloob! The sound of a drop of blood hitting the man's head echoed, and it ran down around his eye, making him feel terrified… so he looked up involuntarily, and what he saw caused him to wet himself.
There were many corpses hanging from the rusty factory ceiling by moving vines in the roof. Some corpses were decapitated with hands and legs cut off like a dismembered chicken, and other corpses had their hearts extracted from their bodies, revealing internal parts like the rib cage and some arteries, and they held papers with strange symbols and geometric shapes.
"Have you seen enough? Now choose!" The person from the shadows looked at the man in front of him and said coldly, "If you don't choose yourself, I'll choose for you, but I don't think my luck will be good." His words carried a demonic tone within them, and the psyche of the pleading man was shaken from within.
"Ahh… I choose, I choo…ose." The man stammered from fear as he looked at the hand of the person in the dark, gathered himself and said, "I choose the face of the coin!"
The person in the shadows lifted his fingers from his palm and saw that it was an engraving of a wheat plant, not the face of the coin, so he said in a gruff, cold voice, "That's truly unfortunate."
"Wait! Please, I want to con––" The man was trying to say his last words, but at that moment, the man's neck was severed and rolled on the floor of the abandoned factory, forming a pool of blood while his eyes were wide open, with some red blood inside them, showing expressions of sadness and desire to live.
Even his four limbs were torn from their places, and a deep hole appeared in the chest area behind his white shirt, staining it with blood before it tore and his remains flew apart with much blood gushing profusely from that hole in his chest.
Then something pulsing violently emerged from that hole, pumping blood onto the floor with each beat. It was the dead man's heart, which flew up to two meters before stopping and remaining suspended in the air.
The person in the shadows looked at that floating heart with a bored expression and moved his hand to the side, causing long vines with crimson thorns that were dangling from the factory's ceiling to descend to the floor.
They picked up the body of the man, which no longer had any limbs or head, with only that hole in his chest pouring blood profusely onto the floor, forming a medium-sized pool of that blood.
Its ripples reflected the shapes of the corpses hanging from the ceiling, but it didn't reflect the image of the person in the shadows, as if he had no reflection.
The person moved his hand and ordered those vines to take the body and hang it on the ceiling beside the other corpses, before turning his gaze back to the heart that was still pulsating in the air.
"Come to me!" the person said coldly, before the floating heart moved to his place in the shadows, and the latter extended his hand to grab that heart.
The heart stopped pumping blood from its openings when it was in the hand of the person in the darkness.
The person in the shadows said things resembling incantations very quickly, and strange runic letters appeared and spun around the heart before stopping and merging with it.
At that moment, the person in the shadows opened his mouth and took a bite from the heart in his hand. Not satisfied with that, he continued eating it until he swallowed it whole, then stopped.
The man felt the encompassing energy moving throughout his body, giving him a sensation of breakthrough, as its power increased more and more, swirling around his body from the outside too, and a violent whirlwind appeared in the abandoned factory due to that energy.
The energy moved like a violent waterfall in his body and tried to ascend to his head area, but it was soon repelled by something.
"Cough… cough…" The person in the shadows coughed violently in response and said, "More! I need more than this to advance! This is never enough, no sign of breaking through the bottleneck has appeared yet! I've done everything required of me to move to the next level, but I haven't broken through yet! Is it because all the people I made choose were men? Then, I must make women choose instead of men! And thus the condition for the advancement ritual will be complete!" the person in the shadows said.
While wiping blood from his mouth, his eyes gleaming with murderous intent. "Soon, I will avenge you, Lucy! I will kill the entire Gustav family when I advance to the next level! But for now, let's work with them and put on a good show tonight!" Saying that, he laughed a demonic laugh, before a small whirlwind appeared around his body and he disappeared, leaving the corpses hanging from the factory ceiling and also the artwork he created on the floor.
…
End of Chapter ~ To be continued