Chapter 180

Chapter 180: Traces

Irene let go, and the unfolded Secret Letter rose with layers of phantom flame. In the blink of an eye it shrank, folded, and became an ordinary sheet of stationery.

Yu Sheng still stared at the paper, his brow tight with thought.

After a long while, Little Red Riding Hood finally spoke in a small voice: “Old Zheng… it really was him…”

Hesitation and resistance colored her tone. She had come here to uncover something, but now that she had, the result was not what she had hoped for.

The sacrifice in the Museum’s white Exhibition Hall had truly been a trap for her, and the person who led her into it was the very “contact” she knew.

Even so, the wording on the Secret Letter made it easy to see that the contact called “Old Zheng” had likely been tricked and sweet talked as well.

Yu Sheng tapped the paper and said calmly: “The sign-off says Servant of the Angel. It’s obvious the writer is one of those followers of the Dark Angels, the same group that staged the ritual in the white Exhibition Hall. They used ‘letters’ on purpose so they could hide their moves with this kind of spell.”

Irene nodded and added: “Whoever received it was thoroughly duped. Blessing, lifting curses, kindness, being misunderstood by the world… classic cult lines. Sometimes they work.”

Yu Sheng glanced at Little Red Riding Hood’s face, thought for a moment, and said: “From what the letter shows, Old Zheng didn’t know it was a trap. He probably thought he was helping you. He may have wanted to help you for a long time. And because of that, the Angel Cultists set him up.”

Little Red Riding Hood listened in silence. After a while she muttered, breaking the quiet: “Someone who deals with curios and the Otherworld all day long, how could he fall for this… How long has he been fooled?”

“Probably not a short time,” Yu Sheng said, thinking back to the Secret Letter, “It mentioned things he ‘saw with his own eyes.’ That means Old Zheng didn’t just buy the Angel Cultists’ promises. He was likely pulled into some rites, or at least came into contact with something tied to the Dark Angels. He was already in deep before he lured you to the white Exhibition Hall.”

He paused, then added: “And the letter hints at something else. Those people may not have been aiming only at you, but at the Fairy Tale behind you.”

Little Red Riding Hood did not answer. She lowered her gaze to the other letters and sticky notes scattered around.

Yu Sheng turned to Irene and said: “Check if there are more items like this letter, hidden by a spell.”

“I’ll look,” Irene replied. She sat down amid the pile on the table and began to search.

She searched for a long time and found nothing.

The little Doll sat on the table with her legs dangling over the edge, looked around the room, and said: “That’s all. The rest is plain stuff, including these letters. Looks like old-school letter writing was just this person’s hobby. I also took a quick sweep of the room. Nothing worth noting.”

Yu Sheng was not surprised.

It seemed anything tied to the Angel Cultists had either been moved in advance or destroyed. Only this one last letter hadn’t been dealt with.

He didn’t get discouraged. Instead he studied the room with even more care, then started checking every corner.

Maybe the direct exchanges and items linked to the Angel Cultists were gone, but that didn’t mean there were no other clues. The contact had sunk deep, deep enough to reach out to the Dark Angels themselves. Daily life would show that influence. Habits change. Unintentional traces get left behind. A line in a diary. People always leave a mark. He could not have wiped everything clean.

Sensing Yu Sheng’s intent, Little Red Riding Hood joined the search. She even summoned her wolf, letting the creatures of shadow check for traces that human eyes would miss.

Irene carefully flipped through the papers and books on the desk. They were ordinary, but clues can hide inside ordinary notes and messages.

Just then, a Shadow Wolf stopped in the middle of the room and let out a low whine as it pawed at the rug beside the bed.

Little Red Riding Hood’s brows knit. She stepped up and flipped the rug over.

There was nothing hidden under it, but faint marks could still be seen on the floor.

They were odd symbols and lines forming a circle about a meter across. The color was a dim dark red. Someone had scrubbed them carefully, leaving only a very pale stain. But maybe the smear-and-scrub was done too many times, so the shallow outline still remained.

Little Red Riding Hood frowned, studying the faint traces: “Looks like it was drawn with blood. It’s a basic spirit rite. But only the runes are left. Without the offerings and the matching chants and calls, it’s hard to track what it was used to contact.”

Yu Sheng asked with interest: “Was it used to reach the Dark Angels?”

“Hard to say,” Little Red Riding Hood said, shaking her head, “You know I never deal with that area. I’ve only heard that while the Angel Cultists claim to speak with ‘messengers,’ most of the time it’s just drug-fueled madness. The Dark Angels don’t really answer humans. Or rather… their way of answering is to drive people insane.” She paused, her face dimming a little: “Old Zheng is a ‘newbie’ who got duped. He used a simple Spirit Summoning Technique. It’s hard to believe he truly contacted anything. It was probably another layer of the cultists’ scam, used to make him think he could hear ‘divine will.’”

Yu Sheng listened without arguing. After a moment of thought he crouched and slowly brushed his hand across the blurred dark red marks.

Then he pulled a small knife from his pocket and made a shallow cut on his palm.

Bright blood dripped onto the floor.

Little Red Riding Hood startled and reached out on instinct: “Hey, what are you doing! You can’t mess with something when you don’t know where it points-”

The blood was sucked up at once by the blurred marks, like water soaking into a sponge.

Little Red Riding Hood’s shocked cry stretched and grew distant, turning into a long, broken noise.

Yu Sheng looked up. A thin veil seemed to fall over the room, and it began to peel away from reality. Little Red Riding Hood and Irene turned into two shadows caught mid-motion, still slowly moving toward him, yet the whole process felt stretched to an endless length.

He rubbed his eyes and stood. The scene surprised him, but not by much. He had seen too many strange things. Sudden scene changes no longer rattled him. His nerves were about as thick as a load-bearing beam.

The veil in the air thinned and faded.

The room was still the room, but everything wore a gray cast. The light at the window became a dim pale, bright to the eye yet unable to light anything beyond the glass.

Yu Sheng’s eyes widened.

In the places the “sunlight” could not reach, on the gray walls and floor, writing began to rise into view.

It looked like someone’s thoughts were being projected into this eerie space. The words grew and spread on every surface, even in the air, until they filled almost every inch of his view, then slowly began to fade:

“I want to help them…

“I went to the Orphanage again. After a few months… familiar faces are gone again…

“The tree planted by the last Little Red Riding Hood is tall now. Today a new child came to me. She said she is the new Little Red Riding Hood…

“She is only fourteen. She said she wants a job…

“No one can help. The Special Affairs Bureau can’t. The Association can’t. I have gathered and studied so many things to break curses and fight dreams. None of them work.

“…Someone came to the door on his own. He said they can help…

“They are suspicious. I think they are linked to an illegal secret cult, but they showed me some things…”

The writing stretched across the walls, the floor, and the air in front of Yu Sheng, then thinned away without a sound.

A strange noise, like something slowly squirming, came from above.

Yu Sheng raised his head toward the sound.

A hole had opened in the ceiling, a round gap that matched the ring of marks on the floor.

From the hole came a low, muddled hiss and the rasp of something crawling. A thin limb, covered in odd bumps and tight patterns, felt its way out.

The tendril pulsed in silence, drifting through the air as it slowly swung and inched toward where Yu Sheng stood.