Chapter 59: Anger!

Chapter 59 Wrath!

The circus performance was about to begin, and it was time to buy tickets and go in.

An adult general admission ticket cost 5 lubis, a child's ticket was 2 lubis, and a VIP ticket was 10 lubis.

Karen bought 7 VIP tickets, spending 70 lubis, as the VIP tickets did not qualify for the child discount.

Tickets of different colors corresponded to different sections; upon entering, dedicated ushers checked the tickets and guided people to their respective areas, with the VIP seats situated dead center, right in front of the stage.

This was the designated section, though the tickets bore no specific seat numbers; long benches were arranged within each area, and anyone holding a ticket for that section could sit wherever they pleased.

Karen chose a spot in the third row, taking the leftmost seat; Eunice sat to his right, followed by Mina and the other three in succession, while Alfred occupied the seat right by the aisle on the far right.

The music blared with a potent, driving rhythm, and a figure dressed as a clown stood on the stage holding a microphone, continuously directing the audience to their seats.

"Do you find it too loud?" Karen asked Eunice, who sat beside him.

"No, I think it's very lively, and I'm quite looking forward to it," Eunice smiled. "I've never been to a place this bustling before."

Karen figured that what Eunice meant by "lively" was probably "down-to-earth."

Finally, once the audience members were mostly seated, the clown shrieked into the microphone, intending to gather everyone's attention; instead, the speakers cracked instantly, bursting into a harsh wave of electronic feedback.

The VIP seats were right at the front, closest to the speakers, making it tantamount to a sonic assault.

Karen took a deep breath and looked over at Eunice and the children, finding that although they were covering their ears, they were still laughing.

"Honored ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the performance hall of the Kachilo Circus! Our spectacular program is about to begin. First to grace the stage is our beautiful diva, bringing you the famous Roga melody: 'The Roga Lover'!"

A slightly full-figured female singer, clad in a tight-fitting blue stage costume, walked to the center with microphone in hand; as the accompaniment swelled, she began to sing "The Roga Lover" with deep emotion.

It was a song composed by a Viennese singer of Rylane descent, born in Roga City but having immigrated to Wien with her parents at the age of three.

The song had once won an award at some music festival in Wien; though a traveling circus might view it as the very symbol of Roga City, the local citizens had, in truth, barely ever heard it.

And indeed, it proved so; the singer possessed a decent voice, but the lyrics and melody of the song were far too mundane, leaving everyone rather bored.

Nevertheless, the opening act served merely to ease the atmosphere, offering consolation to the impatient early arrivals while buying a little more time for those who hadn't yet managed to purchase tickets and enter.

After all, people had come to watch a circus, not to attend a concert.

From Karen's perspective, this loudspeaker, this aesthetic, the frozen earth beneath, and the surrounding crowd suddenly pulled him right back into the atmosphere of a rural funeral band from his past life.

The singer was highly professional, even attempting to interact with the audience halfway through and thrusting the microphone toward them at one point; yet it was everyone's first time hearing the song, so how could they possibly sing along?

Mercifully, however, the song finally came to an end.

The singer looked visibly relieved as she bowed to the audience.

"Thank you, everyone!"

Immediately following, horses came galloping in one after another, circling the stage as male and female acrobats on horseback began performing various high-difficulty maneuvers; the audience erupted into bursts of cheering, and the children especially shrieked with excitement.

Only now could the circus performance be said to have truly begun.

Next came the beast-taming act; a lion performed various maneuvers under the command of its tamer, offering a thoroughly thrilling spectacle.

Meanwhile, Alfred, sitting by the aisle on the far right, cast a glance back toward the entrance, then lowered his head to speak to Lunt, who was utterly spellbound by the circus beside him.

"Lunt, Uncle has to step outside for a moment. Stay in your seat and look after your sisters, alright?"

"Mhm!"

Alfred glanced toward Karen, who sat a fair distance away; after a brief hesitation, he decided to stoop low and walk over to him.

"Young Master, there's a minor matter outside; I am going to check on it."

Karen frowned slightly and asked, "Is it serious?"

"I am not certain; I shall go and see."

"Do we need to go together?"

Looking at Alfred's expression, Karen sensed that things might not be so simple; if there were truly any unexpected danger or risk, he would not hesitate to take everyone home.

Alfred looked around and said, "Young Master, there are many people here, so it is safe. It will suffice for me to go out and investigate alone."

"Very well."

Alfred stepped out through the exit; since most people were inside watching the show, the outside was largely deserted, save for a few Chaser vendors and Johns.

Even so, Alfred walked directly toward a small Chaser tent.

Lifting the flap, he saw a man dressed in Chaser attire lying on the ground, while a woman pried forcefully at a savings box, cursing as she worked: "He died quickly enough, but where on earth did he hide the key to the savings?"

Furthermore, an old man in a tattered leather jacket sat on a low stool, a small knife in hand, tapping rhythmically against an iron ring on his ring finger, producing a crisp, sharp sound.

When Alfred entered, the old man lifted his eyelids slightly.

That single glance instantly exerted an immense, crushing pressure upon Alfred; in that fraction of a second, Alfred realized that the elderly man before him was an existence he could absolutely never hope to oppose.

And almost instinctively, he compared the old man before him to Lord Dis.

The emotional conclusion he drew was that Lord Dis ought to be the more powerful of the two.

For Lord Dis had once given him the illusion that... if he worked hard enough, he might barely manage to fight him to a draw.

Lasma tossed the dagger in his hand down before Alfred,

and said:

"Gouge out one of your eyes yourself and give it to me. Do it carefully; leave no scratches."

Alfred's peripheral vision darted toward the woman who was still prying at the lock.

A faint smile graced the old man's lips as he raised his hand:

"Order—Cage."

In an instant, a black frame materialized all around Alfred, isolating him completely within and severing every capability of the Succubus Eye.

Lasma was the Grand Priest of the Church of Order; beneath the Divine Hall, he was one of the few figures wielding the supreme mantle of authority. When news of his impending arrival in Rylane spread, the various officials in charge of the Rylane Regional Management Office grew anxious at heart, and upon meeting him, they too had to bow respectfully and call out: Lord Lasma.

Alfred could indeed afford to look down upon ordinary local Inquisitors, but the rank of the individual before him was vastly superior to that of any local Inquisitor.

To a certain extent, he stood as one of the worldly faces of the Church of Order.

Yet at this moment,

Alfred, whose heart had been bordering on despair just a moment ago, suddenly breathed a sigh of relief.

He brought his hands together:

"Praise Order."

Subsequently,

an identification document drifted out from his pocket.

Lasma's gaze narrowed slightly.

He extended his hand,

and the identification document fell into his palm.

The signature at the bottom read: Roga City Inquisition, Rylane Region, Church of Order.

However, this title was not something Lasma needed to care too much about; what caught his attention was the name written behind the title: Dis Inmeles.

Rathma waved his hand, and the cage vanished. Alfred fell back to the ground, bowing respectfully.

"My Lord."

"Are you one of Diss's men?"

"Inquisitor Diss is my direct superior."

"Sigh..."

Rathma sighed, making almost no attempt to conceal it.

He spoke very bluntly:

"I quite like your eyes. I originally intended to just take them. After all, you are an aberrant demon, and I am an enforcer."

Alfred said nothing.

"But since you are also a part of the Order of Judgment, I'd feel embarrassed to steal from you. However, I can trade you something for them. I believe I can offer a price that will tempt you, so that you would willingly exchange an eye with me."

Alfred continued to remain silent.

"But since you are one of Diss's subordinates, it is inconvenient for me to do anything."

In his heart, Alfred cried out:

Praise Diss!

Rathma patted his forehead and continued, "Once upon a time, I thought I wasn't inferior to Diss—at least not by much. But later..."

Alfred: I felt the same way.

Rathma pointed to the corpse on the ground and said:

"He insulted the Order of Judgment."

"Yes, I will take care of the disposal."

It just so happened that he had driven the hearse here this time.

"Mm."

Rathma stood up. As he walked out of the small tent, the lock the woman had been picking all this time finally opened with a sharp click.

"Whew..."

Rathma looked at the massive circus tent ahead. Since Diss's people were already here, he didn't need to involve himself further.

He had wanted to suppress the emotional turmoil caused by his arrival in Rogia, but who would have thought he would end up right back where he started.

He looked up at the starry sky with a touch of melancholy.

As he walked away, he shook his head and said:

"Sigh, this entire day was spent for nothing."

...

Inside the big circus tent, the performance was still underway.

Currently on stage was a live-action magic show. The magician was a very delicate, soft-looking man whose every movement seemed deliberately effeminate.

If one observed closely, they could tell he was actually the clown performer from the opening act, only now he had removed his makeup.

The performance was titled "Underwater Survival." A vertical glass container had already been wheeled onto the stage, completely filled with water.

When the host announced the title of the performance, Karen was slightly surprised. Under normal circumstances, shouldn't it be called "Underwater Escape"?

The kind where the performer is bound, submerged in water, and then struggles to untie the ropes before finally pushing open the lid to poke their head out. The person tying the knots could be a lucky audience member chosen from the scene—that was an escape.

Survival... made it sound more like living underwater.

"Please welcome our performer, Miss Mandira, to the stage!"

The magician pointed toward the backstage, and a young girl in a dress walked out to the side of the magician, waving her hand to greet the audience.

Her smile was somewhat constrained and unnatural, countless times stiffer than Mina's had been during the day when he requested her to sit with Eunice.

Karen frowned slightly.

Instinctively,

this female performer named Mandira made him feel a bit uncomfortable.

Mandira stepped toward the middle-aged spectator, and the two embraced, during which his hands deliberately slipped beneath her skirt, kneading obscenely.

Downstage, many men in the audience instantly let out exaggerated shrieks, accompanied by a succession of whistles.

"Very well, sir, please come and help us bind the ropes around her hands," the magician said.

The middle-aged spectator began to tie the rope, possessing no skill for binding, merely wrapping it in circles and making knots.

"Excellent, now that the ropes are tied, we next invite our performer, Miss Mandira, into the water tank. Let us encourage her with applause!"

With her hands bound, Miss Mandira climbed the ladder, and before entering the water, she faced the audience and bowed, that very standard smile still remaining, practically unchanged.

"Everyone, countdown with me!"

The magician, truly worthy of his part-time role as a clown, bounded up and down, leading the whole crowd in a collective countdown:

"Three!"

"Two!"

"One!"

Miss Mandira leapt, plunging into the water tank.

"Ohhhhhhhh!"

The entire audience cheered in unison.

"Hiss..."

Karen, however, drew in a sharp breath of cold air, feeling as though the one who had just leapt into the water was distinctively himself.

"Karen, what is wrong with you, are you feeling unwell?" Eunice asked with concern.

"No, I am fine, I am fine."

Karen sat up straight once more.

On stage now, the magician began to lock the lid of the water tank with a large padlock, while the audience could see Miss Mandira through the glass of the tank, now submerged beneath the surface of the water.

The hem of her skirt floated upward, revealing a pair of long, pale thighs, presenting a strangely stimulating image.

She was still waving her hands, interacting with the audience in the water, and that standard smile remained, as invariant as before.

"Then we shall perform other acts first."

The magician produced cards and began to perform a simple, dull, and tedious card trick, the kind the audience had actually seen many times before and had no interest in, yet at this moment, no one heckled or booed.

For practically no one was paying attention to what this magician was doing; even if he sat there eating a bowl of macaroni, no one would curse his lack of performance skill or shout for a refund;

Everyone was watching Miss Mandira inside the water tank—why was she not out yet, how much longer could she hold her breath?

"Cold... I am so cold... really so cold..."

The voice appeared once more in Karen's mind.

This feeling reminded Karen of when he had stood on the first floor of his house and heard the weeping of Mr. Mosang in the basement.

This Miss Mandira was a corpse!

And when Karen shifted his gaze toward the water tank,

Miss Mandira inside the tank also aligned her figure toward the direction where Karen sat:

"So cold... so cold... they soak me in the water again and again... time and again... time and again... so cold..."

"Who are you," Karen attempted to ask in his heart.

"They call me... Mandira..."

"Who are they..."

"It is the troupe leader... it is the magician... it is the master who bought me from my parents... it is the person who drowned me in the water... it is the person who soaks me in the water again and again..."

Karen frowned; he instinctively wanted to detach himself from this bizarre "communication," because he had already detected that a powerful and complex emotion was rapidly infecting him:

Incomprehension,

Doubt,

Resentment,

And that intense hatred, thick enough to almost drip out!

Karen had always been sensitive to emotions, and he did not want to be influenced by the emotions of others, so he closed his eyes, giving himself a psychological hint akin to hanging up a telephone.

However,

When he opened his eyes again,

His vision suddenly became incredibly distorted; this was the obstruction of water, this was the barrier of glass, and every figure outside seemed to become heavily exaggerated and deformed.

Yet he still saw a group of familiar figures, that group of children...

Runt, Sarah, Chris, Mina, Eunice...

He even saw himself, sitting right next to Eunice!

Karen placed both hands on the glass surface, feeling a profound sense of suffocation—a suffocation that could not be described in words, and more terrifying than that, the despair that no matter how much you suffocated, you would not die!

Because you were already a dead person; you could not die again!

This was a form of mental torture beyond human comprehension, as if falling into Avici Hell on earth.

Meanwhile, the audience members let out waves of cheers because of these movements by Miss Mandira, for from their perspective, Miss Mandira maintained her "exquisite smile" throughout, and this action of slapping the glass surface looked more like interacting with them.

Karen blinked his eyes continuously,

He wanted to leave this state,

Otherwise he would go mad, he would certainly go mad.

Finally,

After the next blink, Karen's body shuddered, and his vision returned to his seat.

"Karen? Are you really alright? I called you just now and you did not react at all?"

Karen embraced Eunice, burying his face in her, while his palm slipped directly inside her clothes, touching her warm skin.

This was almost an instinctive behavior, just as a person about to freeze to death would subconsciously grasp at any warmth, even if it meant throwing oneself into a great fire, it mattered not, because the brain simply could not think at this moment.

Eunice froze, but seeing Karen's pale face, she did not push him away; instead, she used her bag to block Karen's hand, obscuring the view that people nearby might cast;

With her other hand, she looped around Karen's neck, pressing her face against his.

To outsiders, this looked merely like the normal movement of a young couple sitting in a rather intimate posture.

"Hoo... hoo... hoo..."

Karen panted incessantly.

He could hear her voice, he could feel her emotion, he could even enter her perspective.

Experiences of interacting with corpses like this had occurred to Karen several times before, but never had it given him such a powerful sense of immersion as the one before his eyes.

Was it because... she was originally a moving corpse?

Was she different from those corpses that originally lay on gurneys or in coffins, awakened by him?

Slowly, Karen's breathing began to steady once more.

Eunice kept gently patting Karen's back, keenly aware of the emotional tempest that had just undone the man in her embrace.

Meanwhile, the fervor of the audience was steadily mounting, for Miss Mandilla had remained submerged in the water for far too long—so long that the magician had already churned through several tedious, uninspired, and amateurish illusions to pass the time.

Inside the glass tank, Mandilla's body was now tilted backward, her floating gown drifting upward until it almost completely veiled her face, leading the crowd to wonder in hushed anxiety if some tragedy had struck, if she had already drowned.

Minalent and the others had long since shielded their eyes, utterly lacking the courage to watch any further.

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment to witness a miracle is upon us!"

The magician finally tossed his wretched prop cards to the floor and strode toward the tank, executing a flamboyant spin on one foot before ascending the ladder to flash the key to the spectators, deliberately prolonging the suspense as he swayed his hips and made a grand show of slowly unlocking the lid.

Midway through, he feigned that the key wouldn't turn, dropped it to the stage, and had to climb down to retrieve it before ascending again—a series of staged mishaps that drew a chorus of frightened, cursing outcries from the audience.

Yet, regardless of the antics, the atmosphere had been whipped into a perfect frenzy.

At long last,

The magician turned the lock and flung open the lid of the water tank.

In the very next instant,

Miss Mandilla broke the surface, her arms sweeping upward in a classic balletic pose, looking for all the world like a dancer of the deep.

"Ohhhhhhh!!!!!!"

"Magnificent, absolutely magnificent!!!"

"I was frightened half to death, truly, half to death!"

The crowd erupted into roaring cheers, driving the fervor inside the circus tent to its absolute zenith.

Minasara and Chrissy were weeping even as they clapped their hands raw, having been genuinely terrified for the safety of the female performer moments before.

It was at this precise moment,

Karen, who had been resting in Eunice's arms,

Turned his face toward the stage,

And facing the spotlight,

A deep, unfathomable chill flickered within his dark eyes as his lips parted slightly, uttering a silent phrase:

"Go die."

Miss Mandilla, still holding her graceful pose and basking in the adulation of the crowd, suddenly reached out and threw her arms around the magician, who was standing on the adjacent ladder tipping his hat to the audience.

"Splash!"

The magician plunged headlong into the water with her,

And beneath the surface, Miss Mandilla whipped her long gown upward, completely blanketing the magician's face as she threw her weight over him, pinning him down beneath her body.

The magician's hands began to claw and tear frantically at the performer's body, groping with a desperation far more unbridled than that of the middle-aged volunteer who had assisted on stage earlier!

From the audience's vantage point, however,

This was merely the next act of the performance,

A passionate, dramatic vignette being played out by the magician and his assistant within the watery depths!

"Ohhhhhhh!!!!!"

"Brilliant, brilliant, truly spectacular!"

"This ticket was worth every single penny!"

"So beautiful, so aesthetically perfect!"

No one cared how long the performer and the magician remained locked in that submerged embrace; after all, no matter how long it took, they would be perfectly fine, wouldn't they?

The girl had just survived in that tank for an eternity without a single scratch, hadn't she?

The spectators simply cheered with abandon, talking excitedly among themselves, letting the raw adrenaline and stimulated hormones wash over them, secretly resolving that the moment the show concluded and they stepped outside, they would surely make a beeline for the showgirls' tents to properly indulge themselves!

Inside the tank,

The magician's hands had ceased their struggles, and beneath the veil of the floating skirt, his hidden face was forever frozen in an expression of sheer terror.

Yet Mandilla held him fast in that deadly embrace, showing no intention of ever letting go.

Up in the grandstands,

Karen finally realized the gravity and impropriety of his actions, and he sat up straight.

"Are you feeling any better, Karen?" Eunice did not question his sudden movement, offering only her gentle concern.

Karen nodded and whispered softly to Eunice:

"Thank you."

At the exact same time, a girl's voice, carrying a long, trembling sigh of profound deliverance, echoed beside Karen's ear:

"Thank you, sir."