Wang Yue watched as the thorns writhed, gorging themselves on blood. Each long spine grew increasingly translucent, resembling the stinger of a scorpion or the fangs of a venomous serpent.
On the mother plant of the brambles, one or two of the pale green fruits began to blush into a deep crimson.
Lana’s legs shook so violently she could barely stand. A mournful cry escaped her lips as she sobbed brokenly.
“Sister… it hurts… it hurts so much…”
Her pace slowed as she tried to catch her breath and gather her strength. The malicious spikes seized the opportunity, sinking deep into her flesh. The stinging pain lanced straight into the marrow of her bones.
Wang Yue suppressed the urge to intervene with witchcraft. Now was not the time for misplaced kindness.
She was like a seasoned boxer—aged and worn, perhaps, but rich in experience. She had to minimize her exertion, willing to take a few hits if it meant preserving her strength for the final, decisive blow.
Furthermore, this situation was like a tangled knot. Pulling blindly on the loose ends would only tighten the bind; it required a deft hand to unpick the core.
In the flowerbed, Lana had run into trouble.
She was too frail, her stamina insufficient to carry her through the thorns. Though the fruits on the mother plant had turned red from her blood, they remained just out of reach.
“Help me!”
Seeing her about to collapse into the thicket, she let out a cry of pure despair.
Wang Yue began to hum a soft melody. At the sound, Lana suddenly jerked upward like a marionette. Her spine snapped straight, her limbs moved in stiff, rhythmic swings, and she began to charge forward!
The thorns shredded her calves, and she wailed in agony, but this was far better than falling into the brambles to be stung to death.
She finally reached the mother plant and reached out to pluck a fruit engorged with blood.
Instantly, the mother plant curled into a ball as if in self-defense, shielding its remaining fruit. The sprawling thorns retracted in sync, shrinking into black, prickly spheres.
The path cleared. Returning would no longer be a gauntlet of pain.
Under the guidance of Wang Yue’s humming, the chestnut-haired girl finally stepped out of the flowerbed.
The moment the melody broke, she collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. She didn’t even reach out to break her fall; instead, she curled her body tightly around the translucent, eerie fruit.
Just before she hit the ground, Wang Yue caught her.
“I’m sorry for taking control of you without asking.”
“Thank you… thank you… sob… I thought I was going to die… you saved me…”
Lana leaned against her, her shoulders heaving with uncontrollable sobs.
Wang Yue noticed that the girl’s tears did not wet her cheeks. Instead, they solidified into transparent beads that bounced as they hit the ground.
She picked one up and squeezed it. It felt soft and springy, like a fish-oil capsule.
Lana clutched the red fruit with one hand and scrambled to pick up the tear-beads with the other, crying all the while.
“These are for making ‘Moon Dew’… I have to collect them…”
“Did Greya tell you that?” Wang Yue asked.
“Yes.”
Wang Yue cupped her hands into a bowl, telling the girl to cry into her palms so they wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of picking them up off the ground.
The girl let out a small, watery chuckle, and the crying stopped.
Once Lana’s emotions settled, she swallowed hard and said, “I’m sorry. I used to think Witches were… difficult people to get along with. You’re actually very kind.”
“Let’s go.”
Wang Yue said nothing more as she helped the girl back to the conservatory.
Inside the gazebo.
Medeili rested her chin on her hands, staring intently at the doll posed on the table.
“You like to move around, don’t you?” she asked in a hollow voice.
The doll remained motionless.
“You tried to give her a hint. That makes me very angry. That black-haired brat is already starting to get suspicious… but she really is beautiful. Her bangs are so neat, cut in a perfect straight line.”
Medeili rolled her eyes upward, tracing a finger across her own smooth forehead. She sighed softly. “Hmm. When I was alive, I had neat bangs too.”
She then placed a glass jar next to the doll. She gripped the doll’s head and twisted it toward the caterpillars inside the jar.
These were the most vicious of larvae—stinging moth caterpillars. Along their blue dorsal lines grew symmetrical tufts of toxic bristles that looked like miniature cacti.
“See these? I spent a long time catching them in the garden,” Medeili’s tone turned terrifying as her eyes widened, fixed on the doll. “The slightest touch on the skin, and you’ll feel like you’re dying of pain. What do you think would happen if someone were stripped naked and dropped into a pile of these wriggling little cuties?”
The doll’s expression was frozen. Its emerald glass eyes were forced to watch the hideous, writhing mass of insects through the refraction of the jar.
“You’ll want to die, but unfortunately, you won’t be able to. Heehee…” Medeili’s pale fingers tightened around the doll, her voice dropping to a sinister whisper. “If you don’t listen to me, I’ll throw you in. Do you understand?”
She continued, “I want you to help me lure that black-haired girl into the conservatory. She’s suspicious, but she has to trust someone, doesn’t she? I want to take the neural plug from the conservatory and drive it right into her little brain. If you don’t help me, I’ll give you a stinging caterpillar bath. It’s only fair.”
In The conservatory.
Wang Yue was studying the conservatory’s mechanisms.
Two partitions divided the space into three zones.
The inner room was a bathroom. A cloud-white ceramic tub was fitted perfectly into the oval end of the building—spacious, comfortable, and large enough for two girls to lounge in.
The middle section held a double bed draped in crimson silk and layers of heavy curtains.
The outer room was a long parlor, the largest space at roughly thirty square meters.
Near the window in the parlor, Wang Yue found a piping system integrated into the conservatory.
Through a pneumatic system, it spat out bags of food and bottled water, resembling an automated pet feeder.
The pipes were two-way.
Under the elder sister’s instructions, the younger sister placed the tear-beads into the chute. They rattled as they rolled down, heading to some unknown destination.
Seeing Greya take the red fruit into her palm, Lana asked anxiously, “Sister, I brought you the fruit. Can we go now? The… the thing on the back of your head is so scary…”
“Go?” Greya thought for a moment. “Not yet. We can only leave once we’ve contributed enough ‘tear-beads’ and ‘Nectar’!”
She smiled radiantly. Her soft lips pressed against the red fruit, her teeth grazing the skin. Crimson juice, dark as blood, spilled out. To the sound of rhythmic gulping, she sucked the fruit dry until only a transparent skin remained.
Greya exhaled a cloud of heavy, exotic fragrance. Her cheeks were flushed, and her voice was husky, like someone who had just woken up.
“So delicious… I think… I’m starting to like you a little…”
Wang Yue watched it all from the sidelines.
Next to the dressing table stood an intricate, fan-shaped machine made of glass bulbs, crystals, copper rods, gears, and decorative filigree, resembling a peacock in full display.
Wang Yue noticed that inside the machine, a transparent liquid was circulating through hundreds of coils. It traveled a long, winding path, dripping through a sieve like ice-drip coffee.
The moment Greya finished the fruit, the clear drops suddenly turned white, solidifying into round pearls as they were caught by the fine mesh.
Is this the “Nectar”?
Wang Yue fell into deep thought.
After receiving Lana’s “service,” Greya had clearly developed a sweet, positive affection for her.
The expression of that emotion triggered a change in the fan-shaped machine, causing the product to shift from clear water to Nectar.
In an instant, the realization hit Wang Yue, and her face went pale.
This was a Deduction!
When she had asked Lord Aurora about the Lesser Lord’s invasion, he had explained the concept of “Deduction.”
Among the countless emotions of humanity, some are exceptionally beautiful and noble—courage, friendship, love, devotion, and sacrifice.
In daily life, human emotions are calm, like a sine wave with little fluctuation. Some “low-energy” types are practically a flat line.
However, whenever an intense emotion is triggered, the emotional line vibrates violently. The vibration of these energy strings generates a minuscule amount of supernatural power.
The power produced by a single human is negligible. But when many people are gathered, it converges into a substantial flow.
The Iron-Flow Giant Stag released despair during its invasion to harvest the bursts of courage and sacrifice that humans displayed in their final moments. It absorbed the supernatural power generated by those minute string vibrations to run the calculations for the Rule Constructs it controlled.
By devouring multiple human settlements, it gained the chance to refine and upgrade the “Incinerating” rule, ascending to a more powerful existence.
That was Deduction.
And here, in the Silver Moon Phantasm, it was the same—but the method was far more refined and “sustainable.”
The “consumables” weren’t used up all at once. Instead, it was like tapping a rubber tree. Cut after cut was made into the snow-white bodies of these girls, continuously collecting the milky-white essence that bled out.
The pain and despair were being infinitely prolonged.
