Chapter 302 — Meeting Again

Mary watched her mentor nervously; as for what that sudden outburst of his had actually meant, she honestly did not want to know.

She feared her mentor—feared him to the point of something close to terror. If she could have had her way, she would sooner never have shown any talent for magic at all, nor climbed ten years ago, out of sheer curiosity, into this masterless tower that had stood abandoned for decades, and there met the mentor who had only just moved in. By now she was already a formal mage of the second rank, and according to her mentor, "may yet reach the mid-tier in her lifetime." Yet to Mary's mind, becoming a second-rank mage was no honor at all—it was worse than being an ignorant village wife in some mountain hamlet.

At least a village wife did not have to dissect countless animals, did not have to cultivate deformed monstrosities, did not have to learn how to wire a human brain to a monster's, and did not have to bear the pressure of her mentor's disordered mind.

Daniel was a mage with something wrong in his head. In fact, to the handful of apprentices in the tower, the man was simply insane. He was often sunk in strange dream-states, and even when awake he had no sound emotions to speak of. He was violent, irascible, gloomy, and terrifying. He would make his apprentices eat rats and venomous snakes; on some hallucination or other he would loose dreadful demons and spellborn creatures into the tower, then drive his apprentices to fight them; and that was to say nothing of the horrible magical experiments he performed upon his own body...

True, Daniel did occasionally have gentle, kindly spells, but his mad periods outlasted them tenfold—and under such madness, his rare gentleness only grew more dreadful.

The old mage stood frozen like that for a dozen seconds or so, then at last stirred his body; the young female apprentice jerked her head up with a start.

"Mentor..." Mary bent forward slightly at the waist. "It's good that you're all right..."

Daniel looked at Mary for a good while, and only after seeming to notice the clasp at her throat did he recall that this was his student. He grumbled some indistinct syllables in his throat, then raised a hand and waved it: "Clean up the laboratory. You may rest for today."

Mary blinked, feeling a heartfelt relief. Then she watched the old mage before her slowly turn his body and walk toward the laboratory exit. The old mage's robe bulged out in a lump at his back, and artificial nerve cords, like snakes, poked out from the hem of the robe, twitching in spasms.

Gao Yang did not linger long in the "simulation arena." Once he had confirmed that the old mage had been kicked out of the network by his own doing, he released the data-dive state and returned to the surface layer of the mind-network.

Planting a spy among the Sleepers and finding a pawn he could control—that had been his plan from the start; and especially after discovering that the Sleepers had fabricated a "Otherworldly Wanderer" persona, the idea had only grown more refined. This cult was, after all, far too bizarre, and there was no way he could investigate everything himself, so finding such a pawn was inevitable—only that the pawn happened to be a Typhon mage as well, which counted as an unexpected harvest.

Having learned the rough situation with Daniel, Gao Yang had swiftly sketched out many provisional plans in his mind. He believed that, used properly, the old mage would serve many an unforeseen purpose.

He was not worried that this would increase his risk of exposure. After successfully breaching Daniel's mental defenses, he had already taken control of the man's privileges within the mind-network and set an "activation switch"—should the man so much as mention anything about an "Otherworldly Wanderer infiltrating the network," his connection would be cut at once. And even if this safeguard failed and word leaked out, how could the Sleepers possibly find Gao Yang?

Their network was riddled with holes; Gao Yang had already found countless vulnerabilities and back doors. This crude, primitive network had no real-name system, to begin with; second, it placed no limits on changing one's skin; and its address mapping and feature queries were botched beyond all reason. Gao Yang reckoned that for those cultists to pick one person out of the mind-network would be harder than finding a spell other than Fireball in Rebecca's spell list.

Rebecca did not have a spell list.

"Oh, it's the uncle from last time!"

A clear, bright voice suddenly came from beside him, and Gao Yang, walking along the tree-lined path with his mind wandering far away, was jolted back by that somewhat familiar child's voice.

He looked toward the sound and saw a little girl with light brown hair running happily toward him, her steps skipping and bouncing.

It was that "little girl" he had seen last time?

Instantly Gao Yang's mind tagged her with the profile of a standard-issue greasy middle-aged male internet scammer—the model with a voice changer set to a little girl's pitch—and so his whole heart cleared at once, and he looked at the "little girl" with not a ripple of emotion: "Patty?"

"Ah, the uncle remembers me!" The little girl's face lit up with delight, and she hopped and skipped around Gao Yang. "The uncle's come again!"

Gao Yang's mouth twitched. At last he admitted something to himself: the true identity behind this little girl was probably not a greasy middle-aged male cultist after all. The mind-network was a fully immersive virtual reality, and even if the perversion index of creatures like cultists ran five plus signs above normal people's, it would still be rather hard to skip and bounce to this degree—even a figure of the standing of Suo Jilin could not manage it...

Perhaps a greasy middle-aged female internet scammer with an overly youthful mindset...

"Uncle, what are you thinking about?" Patty's voice came again. "Uncle, do you like zoning out a lot?"

Gao Yang looked down at the little girl, who did not even reach his stomach, and found that this creature truly could not stay quiet for a single second. He could not help frowning: "Why are you always hopping around?"

"Because I like to!" Patty said as though it were the most natural thing in the world, then wrinkled her nose. "But I can't do it once I'm home..."

"Once you're home?" Gao Yang felt he had heard a phrase that warranted attention, but before he could open his mouth to ask, a soft female voice came from the side: "Patty, are you bothering a stranger?"

Gao Yang raised his head and saw a woman in a long dress, wearing a veil, standing not far off and frowning slightly at Patty.

Patty immediately flung herself at her in delight: "Ah! Sister Selina!"

Gao Yang watched the little girl dive into the veiled woman's arms; the latter subdued the child with practiced ease and looked up: "My apologies. This child has no wariness of strangers."

"The uncle is a very good person!" Patty said, tilting her head up.

Selina bent down and pressed a hand to Patty's hair: "Then you can talk to the uncle again next time we get the chance. Patty, it's time for you to rest."

The little girl's expression fell at once: "But I want to play a little longer..."

"You've played long enough," Selina said, shaking her head gently but firmly. "You mustn't be willful. Understand?"

Patty hesitated a moment, but obediently nodded: "...Oh."

At that assent, Gao Yang saw the little girl's figure rapidly fade in the air, and within a few seconds it dissolved into motes of light that scattered on the wind: she had left the mind-network.

Selina straightened up and smiled politely at Gao Yi: "Sorry, I hope you'll forgive the spectacle."

"No harm done. I didn't mind." Gao Yang shook his head, while rapidly making judgments in his heart.