Can the sadness that magic cannot take away be offset by love?

Before the time agreed with the witch, Iris visited all the places in the city that she had never been to, and the map unlocking progress reached 95%.

Among the numerous skyscrapers, she found the tallest one and leaped onto its roof.

Under the clear sky, she looked down at the noisy wind under her feet and the people walking or hiding in various postures. Gradually, the sun rose from under her eyelashes to the center of her pupils. The dazzling and dizzying wandering light flickered vaguely in her vision. Time was reversed. Under the moonlight many years ago, her thin and tall body stood on the high terrace of Saint Jeunesse Palace just as it does now.

"Are you dissatisfied with our decision?"

The woman in red held a red staff diagonally in her hand, with one hand clasped across her chest, calmly admiring the expression on Iris's face as she was forced to the edge of the terrace.

Iris in 7142 was no different in appearance and temperament from when she appeared in the Caitlin Kingdom competition two years later. She had learned to hide her emotions and looked indifferently at the murderous people in front of her.

“Always dissatisfied.”

Her right hand covered the palm of her left hand, slowly wiping the blood around the two scars on it, and her sight finally fell on the staff that the woman had just used.

The one who caused her injury.

"I shouldn't have spared your life years ago."

The woman twirled the staff in her hand and gently placed the tip of it in the palm of her other hand.

"Child, if you hang yourself now, you can save yourself a lot of pain."

At that time, the gray-haired girl, who was full of sharpness, slightly raised one corner of her mouth, nodded obediently, supported herself on the guardrail beside her with one hand, raised her head and fell into the endless night behind her.

The woman led her subordinates and walked quickly to the guardrail. She looked carefully and saw that the girl falling down was trying hard to smile at her.

"Can't let her go."

The woman left a word and turned into a piece of red gauze, quickly rolling towards Iris. The black shadows behind her also followed her and transformed and fell.

Before the red gauze approached her chest, Iris's eyes were already blinded by the scarlet gauze, and she remembered that night a few years ago.

At that time, she bought a rare magic weapon at an auction in Lawrence Underground City that was said to have been stolen from the Ramirez family. According to the description of the auction, it was a powerful weapon that could make a city disappear in the blink of an eye.

The weapon looked like a dead branch in winter, ordinary and crude, but it was coveted by many people - especially the leader of the Finny gang, who was the actual ruler of the Lawrence Underground City at that time.

At that time, Iris had only lived in the dungeon for a short time and had no channels to learn about the local tyrants' interest in the item. However, after she found that no one raised the price after she made the first bid and successfully won the item, she had a premonition that she was in big trouble.

At the booth, before the third hammer fell, she had already turned around and tried to leave the venue, but she felt a pain in the back of her neck. When she woke up, her eyes were tightly covered with red gauze, and her hands and feet were restrained on the chair.

The lot had long since fallen into the other party's hands, and she didn't understand why she was still alive.

"Whose child are you? Why are you out here playing by yourself?"

A lazy and casual voice asked this.

After hearing this, Iris calmed down:

"I got separated from my father and he will come to find me."

The speaker was a woman. She snorted softly and then said:

"I'm asking for your last name."

After a moment of silence, Iris said decisively:

"Auxerre."

Among the four major families, she didn't dare to easily associate with the surnames of Novero and Ramirez, for fear that the news would spread and attract the attention of the Novero family. As for the Viglas family, they were enemies with many forces in the dungeon because of their opposition to forbidden magic. She was not sure about Lawrence's attitude towards forbidden magic, so she had to report to the Auxertin family, which seemed to have no conflicts with everyone.

She knew even less about the families below her and didn't dare to make up stories about them.

The woman didn't say anything for a long time. Suddenly, someone pinched Iris's neck hard. Her heart suffocated, and she felt the hand on her neck gradually tightening, making it more and more difficult to breathe.

She struggled violently, but to no avail, until she finally lost her strength and her consciousness began to fade.

A breath fell into her ear:

"I just asked, the master has no children in the dungeon right now, you lying brat."

Before Iris fell into a coma, she wanted to turn this outrageous world upside down. Why would a dungeon rat like them, who were shady enough to not see the light of day, have a relationship with the Auceptin family, who sounded unattainable? Was it some dirty bond that she didn't know about?

Damn it, destroy it.

*

When she successfully opened her eyes again, Iris's first reaction was that she was really lucky and was not dead yet, but when the woman put her hand on her neck happily again, she could not laugh out loud.

"You should be glad. I really like the expression on your face when you are dying of suffocation—"

After Iris desperately grasped the other person's hand, she found that the woman did not fasten her to the chair this time. However, no matter how hard she pulled the other person's wrist, the calloused hand still pressed on her neck as still as a mountain, and the movement was as casual as holding a swan to be slaughtered.

As the amount of oxygen she inhaled gradually decreased, her mind went blank and she finally passed out in a violent state of near-death fear.

After experiencing several times of waking up and being forced to faint, she lost the concept of time and space here. She only knew that as soon as she regained consciousness, she would be caught and tortured soon. She would never be sure whether she would die in this torture.

She had almost forgotten the details and could only recall that women tortured people in many ways. The background color of her memories of that period was dark red or gray-black. If she explored deep into the ocean of memory, the moment she touched the surface of the water, her body would produce an involuntary stress response, with stiffness, fear, or nausea - that's about it.

At that age, if she walked on the ground of Kakkar with a pale face, she would be taken to the police station to wait for her parents.

Once again she slowly woke up on the cold ground, her whole body aching. She couldn't move even though there were no shackles. At first she could only hear her own trembling breathing. After she became aware of the woman's voice outside the door, she dug her nails into her flesh, forcing herself to be quiet.

She gradually understood what the woman said:

"It will be delivered tomorrow morning..."

"Energy storage is seriously insufficient and it is expected to take several years..."

"All news from there has been cut off, but there is still no way to deal with the contract..."

"After a long time, the energy of the contract has become very weak. There will be a way..."

"Okay, I'll definitely send it over as soon as possible... Lord Sothoth, please rest assured, I've sent..."

"As for Ramirez... the news should be kept secret for as long as possible..."

"We have also prepared the fakes over there..."

Iris' eyes went dark when she heard this.

Her intelligence work is still too poor.

The woman came in after she hung up the phone. Her red high heels landed on the side of Iris's face. She looked at her calmly and blankly. The woman squatted down and patted her face:

"I've been too busy lately and can't spare much time to spend with you, so I found two pets for you."

Just as the "pet" landed, the woman answered another call and went out:

"Young Patriarch, everything is normal here..."

"Ramirez... there was no auction..."

"I'll keep an eye on that..."

Iris recognized the two "pets" as poisonous snakes, one of which the woman had thrown at her and the other had crawled around her neck.

She tried her best but was still unable to move. Pain came from several parts of her body at the same time. She broke out in a cold sweat. After closing her eyes tightly, the sticky and disgusting touch became more obvious.

Her spirit seemed to be stretched into a line at some point, with undulating waves swinging up and down this line, bringing her waves of dizziness, like an illusion or a vision before death, with distorted and dazzling light and shadows flashing before her eyes.

It was like the sun was shining directly into her eyes. At that moment, she could not see anything clearly, as if her vision and spirit were being burned at close range.

The premonition of death has never been so clear. Outside the door, the woman's voice kept ringing, with no intention of stopping.

Her heartbeat quickened, cold sweat broke out, and she was certain that the poison had already entered her body.

If she continues like this, she will surely die.

The magic elements had long been uncontrollable. The woman had used some unknown method to make her lose her power over the elements.

In the quiet and deserted room, Adela's words from her memory broke into Iris's mind:

"The evaluation of a magic can only depend on the magician who casts it. Before the light of the staff lights up, all magic is equal and innocent."

It turns out that you meant to use this sentence here.

Iris thought vaguely and knew she had to speed up.

Following the method Adela had told her before, she released the suppression of the reverse point seeds in her body and allowed them to take root and sprout.

This is the last resort.

Adela had planted a reverse point in her body.

My father once opposed this approach, but later on, he did not follow through with his refusal.

Iris never objected to her mother's approach.

She knew her mother's fears, and she feared the same things herself - that was the craziest time for their entire family.

She even took the initiative to recite the reverse point usage method compiled by her mother.

See, it really works.

She suddenly sat up and spat out a mouthful of blood.

Feeling the reverse point flowing through her body, she gradually regained her strength.

The toxins and reverse points fought against each other, and she stood up tremblingly, holding on to the wall, shook off the two snakes on her body, raised her hands, and moved her fingers.

"Snapped."

Two pools of meat paste appeared on the ground.

She closed her eyes and felt the surrounding routes through the wall - this was the ability brought by the reversal point.

It was as if the cloth that had been covering my eyes was taken off one day, and my senses had never been so sharp and clear - no wonder so many people knew the dangers of forbidden magic but still crave its power.

She used her newfound strength to tear the wall apart and staggered out.

How many people she killed along the way, where she ran through, who stopped her... She couldn't remember anything.

When she returned to her residence, she immediately drank the antidote on the laboratory table, and then used the reverse point to clear the toxins in her body. Then her eyes went black again, and she fell to the floor again.

No matter what she had been through, the curse that haunted her during the day and woke her up at night remained unshakable. That morning, as she returned home from the bakery with a basket of bread, she felt unwell, but after checking several times, she found nothing wrong.

It's always like this recently. Yesterday, when I was playing games with May, I suddenly felt a suffocating feeling like drowning. The day before yesterday, the suffocating feeling was slightly different, as if I was being strangled by the neck.

May didn't notice anything unusual about her. Even though she was so scared that she curled up on the bed and shivered constantly, May continued playing their game as if she couldn't see anything.

"Sister Ecelia, stop being lazy and come play with me."

"Child, don't be lazy. If you don't breathe hard, you're really going to die."

The figure of a woman in red flashed before her eyes. She opened her eyes wide to see clearly, and then she saw May's enlarged face:

"No, Xu, being lazy!"

When I finally opened my eyes, it was already night.

She got up from the ground and vomited some blood again.

The reverse point was rampaging through her body.

Only then did she feel the real impact of forbidden magic.

Her mind was still in a trance, and she didn't dare go out in this situation. She just checked the protective magic a few more times and then collapsed on the chair.

It hurts.

She thought so as she stared at the dim lampshade.

She closed her eyes, trying to suppress the power surging in her body.

She didn't notice that her limbs were covered by the shadows of long tentacles several times, returning to normal at a certain moment, and then immediately stretching and waving, like an octopus struggling on the shore - the shadow cast on the wall also vividly interpreted the fangs and claws.

It really hurts.

Who can help me.

……

No one came to save me.

*

After barely stabilizing herself, she finally had time to sort out the chaotic information in her mind.

She looked at the mahogany box on the table. Inside was a dead branch, exactly the same as the one she had bought at the auction.

She only remembered one scene: a dark room, a red tablecloth, two identical wooden boxes, and she picked up one of them.

Why didn't you take the second one?

I don’t remember, maybe I forgot, maybe I didn’t expect it, or maybe the person behind me was chasing me too closely.

In that state, anything she thought was possible.

When thoughts are too confused and complicated, even memories are painful.

The dead branch she got was probably a fake, just an ingredient for a potion.

Later she found out that the woman who kidnapped her was the leader of the Finny Gang - the Finny Gang was one of the local bosses in the Lawrence Underground City and occupied a position in the Saint Jesuit Palace opposite her home.

...I don't know how she got rid of those people, but no one has found this place for a whole day, so it should be safe for the time being.

When she opened her eyes, she saw Iris falling from the terrace of Saint Jesuit Palace a few years later, with the leader of the Finny gang and a group of followers above her.

Two days ago, on September 7142, 9, the Feeney gang raised the water and electricity bills of residents of Anlu Boulevard to 15% of the original price. Anlu Boulevard is where Saint Jeunes Palace and Iris live.

"It's time to finish."

Iris thought. She looked at the red gauze rolling towards her.

No one can save you today.

She smiled and moved her lips, but no sound came out.

The black spots on her fingertips flickered and turned into sharp blades that pierced through the blood-red gauze, and the smelly blood splattered on her body.

He lifted her feet so that she landed steadily on the ground and stood up. The place was dead silent. Only the fresh blood flowing on the ground and the broken limbs scattered on the ground announced the end of life and the kiss of death.

On September 7142, 9, the top leaders of the Feni gang were skinned and hung for public display at the Palace of Saint Jeunes on Anlu Avenue in the Lawrence Underground City.

*

"She was skinned..."

"It's most likely the Auxerdin family did it. After Yue Baizhi fell into our hands, they discovered that she was an undercover agent."

"That underground city..."

"That's their home ground. We should stop after we get what we want. It would be impolite if we don't stop."

"Lord Sothoth...will the Ramirez family come?"

"Haha, I will."

The mahogany box next to the speaker was shiny and bright.