Chapter 566

Chapter 566: Foreign Object and Cleaner

It was a small bag of trash—a black trash bag, its mouth tied in a tight knot. On the side of the bag there was a tiny scuffed tear, and through that tear he could see a crushed paper cup.

Duncan stared blankly at that small, familiar bag of trash. For a moment his mind held nothing but confusion and endless questions. He had indeed guessed that the Great Hollow that had appeared inside Alice’s mansion might change one day. When he heard the headless Butler mention a “foreign object intrusion” just now, he had also wondered what kind of strange and unspeakable thing might have entered the mansion. But this scene before his eyes… he had really never imagined it.

That bag of trash was the one he had thrown away—not long ago, after he vaguely realized that the barrier between him and his homeland might already be an uncrossable gulf. After he had carefully cleaned his little studio apartment, he had gathered up that bag of trash and thrown it into the black fog outside the door.

Now it appeared on the inner side of the Great Hollow inside Alice’s mansion, in the form of an “intruding foreign object.”

With a complicated and subtle feeling, Duncan took a step forward and walked toward that “intruding object.”

At the end of the corridor, the huge Great Hollow left behind by the vanished room looked like a strange and terrifying abyss. The floor and walls around the rim of the void were shattered, like twisted, jagged teeth. That black bag sat at the very edge of the broken floor. To be honest… Duncan even found the whole scene a little absurd.

Yet the servants in the mansion were extremely tense. The terrifying headless Butler even lost his composure a little when he saw Duncan walk forward and cried out: “Guest! Please do not go near there! It is very dangerous!”

“Dangerous?” Duncan did not even know what kind of expression he should make. He looked back at the Butler, the corner of his mouth twitching. “It is just a quiet pile of… discarded waste.”

Even so, the Butler and the servants still stood at least ten meters away as if facing a great enemy. Their buzzing, rumbling whispers were full of panic and fear. Although none of them had heads, Duncan still felt as if he could sense their confused, chaotic gaze—wanting to peek, yet shrinking away again and again because of fear.

It was as if… what they saw was not a harmless black bag, but some far more terrifying, far more unspeakable thing.

“Gue… Guest…” The headless Butler suddenly spoke, his voice low and trembling. “Do not be fooled by appearances. Please slowly keep your distance from it and move this way toward me. Be careful. Do not awaken these growing shadows…”

[Growing shadows?]

Duncan slightly frowned at once, as if confirming the guess that had just flashed through his mind for a moment—these servants were seeing something else?

He turned back and looked at that black bag at the edge of the broken floor.

In a certain instant, he saw the black plastic bag suddenly… “flicker.”

It was like the image on a monitor with a bad connection, or like a thin veil suddenly covered its surface. Duncan saw it flicker for a moment, and in that very brief change of light and shadow, it seemed… to turn into something else.

Duncan watched it with a calm gaze, as if waiting for it to change again. Then, the second flicker appeared.

This time, he caught the image that flashed by.

He saw a mass of swelling and shrinking shadows covering the floor not far away. The edges of the shadows trembled and shook, spreading out like countless sharp thorns. Some black substance was surging and seeping out from the center of the shadows. Countless eyes hid there, and countless mouths and tongues as well.

Yet as soon as he focused and looked carefully, that thing would immediately turn back into an ordinary pile of “discarded waste.” The eerie scene he glimpsed in that moment felt like nothing more than an illusion clinging to the shallow layers of his mind.

Duncan silently kept his gaze on the scene. Many guesses slowly settled in his heart. After an unknown time, he suddenly turned his head and asked the Butler: “Has there been a ‘foreign object intrusion’ here before?”

His voice sounded hoarse for no reason.

“Occasionally,” the Butler answered at once. “The mansion is closed off, but for some reason there are always things from ‘outside’ that connect to here. They… often bring great trouble.”

“‘Great trouble’?” Duncan frowned.

“Yes… Foreign objects do not belong to the mansion. To this place, they are like a disease. The invading matter causes some parts of the mansion to decay or twist, and it often takes a long time to recover…”

Duncan listened in silence, thought for a moment, then asked: “Then how do you deal with these foreign objects?”

“The mansion will ‘digest’ them on its own,” the Butler answered. “You only need to wait patiently nearby. The Cleaner should appear soon and should be able to properly handle the intruding foreign object.”

“The Cleaner?” Duncan’s tone held doubt.

“It is a part of the mansion, the oldest part. It is responsible for removing destructive ‘entities’ from the mansion. After that, the mansion will slowly return to the state it had before the intrusion… Ah, it has appeared, Guest, look—”

The Butler suddenly raised his arm and pointed at the floor not far away.

A mass of sludge-like stuff had appeared there at some unknown time and was slowly wriggling and spreading.

That “sludge” was dark in color, yet it had a metallic sheen. Its surface seemed mixed with countless crystal grains that, with each slow wriggle, endlessly refracted tiny points of light like starlight. It wriggled and spread, and as if it had a mind of its own, it slowly drew closer to the intruding “foreign object.”

Part of its edge deformed, stretching out into a tentacle-like extension. It used that structure to reach forward and probe, then slowly “covered” itself over that mass of growing shadows.

Duncan did not interrupt the process. He only stared hard at the scene, not letting a single detail slip.

The “waste” itself had no value to him. The key was why the waste had appeared here, the strange phenomena he had just observed, and the secrets hidden inside the mansion.

For him, the crucial piece of information had already appeared the moment he saw that small bag of trash inside the mansion.

The devouring was silent. The soft-bodied creature called the “Cleaner” soon completely covered the small bag of trash. In Duncan’s senses, he faintly felt that… something had vanished into that soft-bodied creature with its metallic sheen and tiny points of light.

The servants around them finally seemed to breathe out in relief.

But in the next second, Duncan saw the soft-bodied creature that had finished its devouring slowly turn its “body.” The edge of it rose and fell, and a bulging part that looked like a head was now firmly pointing this way.

The corridor instantly fell into tense silence. All the servants went rigid and quiet.

The Cleaner wriggled over. Under Duncan’s gaze, it approached like a mass of living sludge, seeming slow yet somehow fast.

He felt neither goodwill nor hostility from it.

Duncan slowly tensed up. ghostly green flame was already faintly flowing between his fingers. He stayed wary of this thing called the “Cleaner” and quickly thought about how he should deal with this mass of sludge and get out of here if it attacked, while damaging Alice’s mansion as little as possible.

However, the Cleaner stopped about two meters in front of him.

The mass of sludge stopped in front of Duncan. The soft structures that had spread around it slowly drew back bit by bit. It seemed to be carefully observing something. Duncan did not know if it was just his imagination…

He even felt as if he saw a confused emotion on a lump of “soft mud” that looked like a slime.

It had reason. It was trying to observe and understand the uninvited guest before it—but it could not.

It was as if the stranger’s existence had already gone beyond some “built-in logic” of the mansion.

After a moment, the Cleaner seemed to break out of some kind of “dead loop.” It suddenly shifted its attention away from Duncan, then turned as if nothing had happened and slowly wriggled toward a dark corner not far away.

Duncan blinked and stared at this scene in confusion. After a long moment, he turned his head to look at the Butler. “What does that mean? This ‘Cleaner’ does not welcome me?”

“This… I have not seen this either,” the Butler said, sounding rather confused himself. “It is the first time I have seen the Cleaner have any extra activity after finishing its cleaning. Under normal conditions, it never lingers after it completes its work…”

Duncan frowned but did not ask further. Instead he turned and walked to the broken edge of the corridor, to the place where the Cleaner had just carried out its ‘cleaning task.’

That small bag of “trash” had completely vanished. After undergoing strange and mysterious changes, it had been broken down and devoured by an equally strange and mysterious power, leaving not a single trace behind.

However, how had it come here?

Duncan stood on a broken floor tile at the edge of the corridor and leaned forward, looking out into the boundless darkness beyond.

For a moment, he even felt as if he were about to see his own “little room” out in that darkness—that it might be floating not far away, wrapped in a mass of fog, just like… all those countless other Old World fragments in this world.

But he saw nothing. At the end of the corridor there was only endless darkness. The Great Hollow inside Alice’s mansion did not seem to lead anywhere.

The pull of emotion almost made him step out into the void to search that darkness for so-called answers, but at the last moment, reason pulled him back.

He instinctively felt danger in that endless darkness. His intuition told him that it was not yet time—that he still could not return safely from that darkness.

“Guest?”

The voice of the headless Butler came from behind, cutting off Duncan’s wild thoughts.

Duncan let out a soft breath and stepped back, returning to the relatively safe corridor.

“I should leave,” he said softly. “Take me back to the garden.”

In the Mortal Realm, Duncan suddenly blinked. His senses rushed back, and he fully woke up within two seconds.

Alice was still sitting properly in front of him.

In the Mortal Realm, only an instant had passed.