Scritch, scratch, scritch...
The black ink left neat handwriting on the white paper of the document.
Alain finished signing his name and began writing down his phone number. At the same time, he glanced at the intermediary Uncle who was idly smoking a cigarette by the side.
"By the way, is the owner at Number 6 right now?"
"Mn?" The Uncle ground his cigarette into the ashtray, then pulled another one from the pack. "I haven't seen her in the last two days, actually."
Click!
With the crisp sound of the lighter, the jumping orange flame singed the round tobacco. He took a drag, his words exhaled along with the white mist.
"The last time I saw her, it must have been the day before yesterday."
Zzzzt—
Hearing the sound, Mila looked at Alain with confusion.
Alain's writing motion stopped abruptly. In an instant, the sharp pen tip carved a short, jagged tail across the document.
Two days ago, Yang Wanhua had just arrived at the residence?
Alain took a deep breath, and the scratching sound of writing resumed. But his state of mind was instantly thrown into chaos, like a cluttered room.
Two days ago was exactly when Alain encountered the Mist Entity and fell into the illusion.
Weren't these two timeframes a bit too close? Or was it...
Simply a coincidence?
Alain himself did not really believe in the possibility of coincidences.
He wrote down the final string of numbers, picked up the document to carefully check his handwriting, and then handed it to the intermediary.
Thinking about these uncertainties now was useless.
All truths would be revealed once they reached the residence.
The Uncle took the document and scanned it up and down. As if seeing something, he let out a soft "Eh?"
"Is there a problem?" Alain's mouth twitched.
As a university student, he harbored an innate 'fear' of such documents. The class committee members often instructed: 'You absolutely cannot get a single word wrong on the document, nor can you make corrections. If you make a mistake, the entire document must be filled out again.'
"No..." The Uncle looked at the bottom right of the document, puzzled by some handwriting or another.
He glanced at the document, then at Alain, frowning. Then, with a scritch-scratch sound, he pulled open a drawer filled with files.
He was rummaging for something inside.
The rustle-rustle of friction between papers rang in the ears of Alain and Mila.
The girl cast a subtle glance at Alain while gesturing toward the katana in her hand.
Alain signaled that there shouldn't be a need to go to that extent. Should be... right?
He truly couldn't understand why the Uncle, after seeing the document he wrote, started rummaging through his own files as if checking a household registration...
Could it be that there was something fishy about what he wrote? Or did it expose something that the man noticed?
The next step wouldn't be cross-referencing some document, pointing out Alain and the others' intentions on the spot, and then informing Yang Wanhua, would it?
Shhh—
While the minds of Alain and Mila were surging with turbulence, the Uncle pulled out a slightly wrinkled document.
He handed it over for the two to inspect.
He and the girl exchanged a glance. Mila took two steps forward and received that scorching hot document...
She began to examine it.
"Th-this..." Mila's bewildered voice drifted over. She sized up the document while shooting a glance of disbelief at Alain.
The next second, words that Alain couldn't comprehend drifted from Mila's mouth.
"Did you... come here before?" She thought about it again... "But, that's not right either. If you had been here, we should have been able to find Number 6 very quickly."
Mila looked at the Uncle, then added, "To catch that woman cheating!"
"???" Alain truly couldn't make heads or tails of it, so he simply walked to Mila's side and examined the document.
The document's title was... [Visitor Registration Form]. The specifications were identical to the one he had just written.
Whether it was the name or the phone number, they were all Alain's.
But the difference lay in—the handwriting on this document appeared very graceful, not looking like something written by a male. And the date in the bottom right corner was two days earlier than today.
"Wait a moment...!"
Not written by a male, then who was it?
Moreover, this handwriting... he was truly too familiar with it. Familiar to the point that... it was as if he had seen it countless times in the past.
The slender silhouette of a girl in a white dress quickly floated into his mind.
Alain raised his head, forcibly suppressing his surging emotions, and looked at the Uncle with a poker face.
"Let me guess... the writer of this document is Yang Wanhua?"
"Correct, correct." The Uncle nodded. "No wonder I kept feeling you looked familiar earlier; now I recall it."
"Originally, I thought it was because of your voice. Later, you said we had spoken over the phone, so I didn't think much of it.
"But... looking at that face of yours, it felt off. Now seeing this document, I finally understand—
"I saw you two days ago."
Alain looked at his burning tobacco. The firelight eroded along with the Uncle's stubbly mouth drawing upon it, sizzle sizzle, leaving less than half of the pale white cigarette remaining.
"How... did you see me?" Alain patted his own mouth, realizing this question was completely beside the point.
"You... saw me together with Yang Wanhua?"
"Yes, but at that time, Miss Wanhua was driving the car. She came to fill out the form, while you sat in the back seat. The anti-glare effect of that glass is quite good, allowing me to only see a tiny bit of your face clearly."
The Uncle thought about it again, recalling the scene from that time:
"You should have been sleeping back then, right? Miss Wanhua also said you were drunk in broad daylight, so she came to help you sign the visitor document."
As he spoke, he couldn't help but laugh, "Sigh... if I had known you had been here, I would have just let you in directly. There was no need to mobilize so many people. So, do you still need me to lead the way? Uh..."
In the blink of an eye, the Uncle noticed that the atmosphere between these two had suddenly dropped to freezing point... Could it be that he said something wrong?
His fingers rose trembling slightly, intending to take a drag of the cigarette to calm down...
But seeing the gaze with which the girl was staring at that young man, the Uncle realized:
Could it be that this young man named Alain came here two days ago to have a secret tryst with Yang Wanhua?
And then, he himself had blurted it out directly in front of the rightful partner who came to catch the cheaters...
Holy... shit?
Did I just leak the client's privacy myself?
Alain, naturally, did not care about what the Uncle was thinking. At this moment, he clearly realized:
Whether it was the Yalin Villa No. 6 residence, or the matters within the illusionary residence...
They had all truly happened.
After entering the illusion, the Yang Wanhua he conversed with was real.
The meals she cooked for him were real; the plates and dishes he washed for her were also real.
The Alain in the illusion had indeed been living in a room with Yang Wanhua.
And since the Uncle saw his unconscious self sitting in the car, that meant...
The matter of imprisoning him was also real.
Thus, the subsequent events could also be imagined:
In order to escape his predicament, he tried to break out of the imprisonment room time and time again, but failed time and time again.
Then, in the name of love, he called Yang Wanhua back.
And killed her.
Thinking of this—screech—he pulled out a chair and collapsed onto it.
Looking at the ceiling, Alain took a deep breath, images flashing incessantly through his mind.
The jingling sound of keys; the thin mist drifting in the bathroom; the wood chips flying up as they were hewn by the greatsword; the real tactile sensation of the leather restraining straps...
The slender neck pulled by a large hand; the tears streaming from the corners of the girl's eyes; her voice of disbelief questioning him; her movements of hitting him as she couldn't catch her breath...
That azure greatsword stained with blood, pulled from her chest, splashing up scarlet liquid beads like a hollowed-out blood-colored flower.
Alain took a sip of tea. The bitterness and slight sweetness tangled indistinctly on his taste buds, the tea fragrance seeping into his heart, blending into his chaotic thoughts.
Very quickly, he calmed down.
First, there was the issue of the date within the illusion. The date the Alain of that time saw was undoubtedly "within two days of the Yang Wanhua breakup event".
The time point was necessarily in the past.
The equipment he used to check the time included a wall calendar and a mobile phone. A wall calendar can be faked, but a device like a mobile phone that is connected to the internet in real-time is difficult to fake.
Unless she modified the time on Alain's phone.
Secondly, it was the same old issue: If Yang Wanhua had really died, Monika would absolutely have come rushing over eagerly to tell him. Instead of being in this "Riddler" state where she was restricted everywhere.
Finally, according to his understanding of Yang Wanhua... she cherished her life very much.
Because Yang Wanhua still had unfinished business. And this business was Alain.
Before completely obtaining Alain and squeezing every possible bit of love and companionship out of him...
Alain firmly believed she would absolutely not die. Let alone personally coming into the illusion to risk danger with him—who had already been imprisoned once—to play such a deadly game of "playing house".
Therefore, Alain reached a conclusion:
The illusion was not an illusion, but a cage Yang Wanhua had fabricated to imprison him. She accompanied him in acting out a play.
And regarding the Yang Wanhua inside the illusion, Alain was very certain that she was the real her; it should have been a real person present.
Whether it was her behavior, expression, style of dress, and so on, they were all Yang Wanhua's posture in Alain's impression.
Thinking further, if even Monika could create a clone... the answer was easy to guess:
Yang Wanhua, also using a clone, created the Mist Entity tailored specifically for the Safety Assistant, created the illusion, and lived with Alain.
Finally, he killed her.
Alain felt that this speculation had a high probability of being the truth. As for Yang Wanhua's intention, that was also easy to guess.
He had tangled with the two yanderes, Yang Wanhua and Crazy Mita, for a long time one after another. If he didn't have some skill, he would have long since become a game cartridge.
What Yang Wanhua wanted to do was to make Alain see her, to recall her. To pull Alain out of the beauty and make him understand: living with Wanhua is the [Truth] and happiness.
This was also Yang Wanhua's "Notification Letter".
The content of the notification was...
[I am back]
___
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