Chapter 217 Temporal Sequence
“Speaking of which…” Heli, clinging to the counter, tilted her head, her silver mask refracting the dim, yellow light of the shop. “Your ability to come here is itself a manifestation of extreme luck.”
Li Wen furrowed her brows. “What do you mean?”
Heli simply chuckled at this, her slender fingers continuing to tease the guinea pig in the cage. The plump creature let out an indignant squeak, its short paws scrabbling against the iron bars, its purple eyes darting around, glancing at Li Wen from time to time.
Time in the clock shop seemed to have frozen. Countless clocks ticked in their own diverse rhythms, their discordant sounds intertwining within the confined space, forming an irritating cacophony. Li Wen’s gaze swept over the strange objects displayed in the cabinets: lanterns, chessboards, metal books… each one emanated an exceptionally peculiar feeling.
“Did your father collect all these?” Li Wen asked, pointing to the exhibits.
Heli stopped playing with the guinea pig and turned to look at the objects.
“Some were brought back by Dad, but most of them I found myself,” she said, puffing out her chest with pride. “These are all my collections. Dad doesn’t have this kind of hobby.”
Li Wen nodded thoughtfully. The guinea pig suddenly struggled violently, its front paws desperately beating against the iron cage, producing a harsh metallic clanging, until Heli impatiently tapped the cage, and the guinea pig immediately quieted down, shrinking into a corner and trembling.
Time ticked by, the ticking of the clocks becoming ever more piercing, Li Wen’s patience wearing thin. She spoke again, “When exactly is your father coming back?”
“Dad is a punctual person,” Heli replied without looking up. “When the time comes, he will naturally return.”
“How long precisely do I have to wait?”
Heli fell silent, focusing intently on the guinea pig. The creature in the cage had given up struggling, collapsing into a furry ball, allowing the little girl to do as she pleased.
It seemed the little girl wasn’t taking her seriously at all.
Li Wen raised an eyebrow but forced herself to calm down. She walked towards the nearest display cabinet and carefully observed the strangely shaped lantern. A faint blue flame emitted a chilling glow, casting shadows on her face through the translucent bone-like lampshade, giving her a shiver.
“Where did this lamp come from?” Li Wen asked.
Heli finally looked up, her eyes behind the silver mask gleaming with an unusual brilliance. “I got it from a poor lost soul. It thought it could find its way out with this lamp, but… now it’s one of my favorite collectibles.”
Li Wen’s heart tightened, and she imperceptibly took half a step back. Heli seemed to notice her wariness and laughed happily. “Don’t worry, I’m not interested in living people, at least not yet.”
So there would be a “yet”?
Li Wen, having a premonition of something bad, instinctively opened her character panel. The next moment, her pupils contracted sharply. The glaring red warning on the character panel stabbed into her vision like a sharp knife—her life had dropped to a critical 20% and was still decreasing. What made her shudder even more was that her Witch Form had, inexplicably, entered cooldown at some unknown time.
A cooldown of over ninety hours.
Li Wen instinctively clenched the Raven Feather Dagger, her knuckles turning white from the force. Witch Form would naturally enter cooldown when canceled, with the cooldown time calculated as one hour for every 1% of Twilight Erosion progress. A cooldown of over ninety hours meant that, even with the most conservative estimate, her Twilight Erosion progress had reached nearly 100% when she last exited Witch Form.
However, a more accurate assumption would be that Li Wen had died while maintaining Witch Form at some point, and she had no memory of it.
“Customer?” Heli tilted her head, the silver mask reflecting an eerie cold light. “You don’t look very well…”
Before she could finish, a cold flash appeared.
Her dagger, imbued with Spell-less Arc Light, shot out like a venomous snake, precisely severing the girl’s slender neck. Heli’s head was tossed high into the air, her chestnut curly hair tracing an elegant arc in the air, her silver mask flashing like a shooting star in the dim light. Li Wen’s cloak rustled due to the momentum of the thrust, and the soles of her boots crunched on the tiny gear parts scattered on the floor.
But in the next second, the world twisted and rewound like a kinetoscope.
“Why did the customer do that?” Heli sat on the counter, perfectly fine, her clear left eye filled with confusion. The brass pocket watch she was fiddling with rotated slowly counter-clockwise, the sound of meshing gears particularly grating in the silent shop.
Li Wen had experienced this absurd scene not long ago, but at that time, she was the one in control, and now she had become the victim. Of course, although the two scenes appeared very similar in their presentation, Li Wen firmly believed that their essence was not the same.
One was to easily alter fate, thereby changing established facts; the other was to reverse time, returning to a moment before anything had happened.
“Temporal Path.”
Li Wen murmured, staring intently at the brass pocket watch held in the girl’s hand.
She retreated half a step, her Emerald Star Cloak billowing as if in a wind. “From the moment I arrived here, I felt that this place was too bizarre, but this bizarre feeling doesn’t come from the shop, nor from those items on display—it comes from you.”
The clocks hanging on the wall simultaneously stopped, the ticking abruptly cut off as if by a knife. The guinea pig in the cage frantically rammed the iron bars, its purple eyes bulging with terror.
“You know nothing about this,” Heli’s movements suddenly froze, her voice exceptionally cold. She slowly removed her silver mask. The right side of her face revealed beneath the mask made Li Wen involuntarily knit her brows. It was not a human face at all, but a decaying texture covered with bark-like wrinkles, amber-colored mucus seeping from deep brown cracks, and the gray pupils embedded in her right eye socket splitting without limit, dividing into two, then four, then eight…
The brass pocket watch sprang open in Heli’s palm, its three hands of varying lengths twisting and stretching like living things. She nimbly brushed her right hand across the watch face, and the air in the shop suddenly solidified into substance.
“Welcome to the inner layers of time,” Heli’s voice split into a dual tone, half childish, half ancient. “This is my workshop, and it will also be the end of your journey.”
Li Wen’s dagger was drawn once more, but it froze midway. Her movements were infinitely stretched, the trajectory of her thrust leaving an asphalt-like trail in the air, while Heli casually sidestepped to avoid it, tapping the counter lightly with her pocket watch.
“Crack.”
Time suddenly accelerated. Li Wen’s dagger completed its thrust at a hundred times the speed, and inertia sent her stumbling forward. At the same time, the lantern on the shelf suddenly exploded, its faint blue flame coiling around her like a living creature. In a moment of crisis, the Emerald Star Cloak suddenly emitted a bright light, and “Emerald Star’s Eternal Protection” activated at the last second, three layers of pale green shields surrounding her, precisely blocking the flames attacking from all directions.
