old room

[I shouldn't have opened that parchment. 】

This was the first sentence that came to Ivan's mind after he opened his eyes.

[Yeah, you shouldn't, but by the time you realize this, it's too late. 】

Another voice... maybe his own, maybe someone else (or something) here then continued in his head.

Yes, everything is too late.

Alvin found himself in the room.

Of course, not his harsh but reassuring room in the mage's tower.

It is another "room", located in his imagination, a room located at the far end of the starry sky—since he was frightened by that weird visitor to the point where he was almost delirious and fled in embarrassment. Never thought about coming here again.

But obviously, the current Ai Wen himself cannot decide his own coming and going.

The visitors in the room forced Ivan to come back here again in a mysterious way.

During the time Ivan was away, his visitor (the guest who always made tireless clicking noises) did not rest, and he made some changes to Ivan's room quite graciously.

To be precise, only a very small part of Ivan's room remains weakly as it was originally.

Alvin saw the scene he had set, his dead former mentor's favorite hook still on the cold brick wall.

And the knight novel on the bookshelf is still spread out, and the pages stay where Ivan saw last time.

But, in the rest of the room, space takes on a bizarre twist.

The wall was skewed, and the solid stone bricks melted like heated butter into a light gray slime, which continued to flow downward.

In the twisted gaps between the brick walls, something is undulating regularly.

Ivan took a cautious look at the thing: the surface of the thing was covered with a thick layer of mucus, making it almost impossible to see its own color, but under the hazy mucus, Ivan did not miss the densely packed one. Small pieces of undulating polka dots.

When Aiwen walked around, the dots moved regularly, aiming at the weak mage apprentice in the room.

It was a dense eye.

Ai Wen had goosebumps because of his own perception, and he couldn't help taking a step back, but it was precisely because of this that something wet and cold passed through the back of his neck.

Ai Wen almost screamed because of this, but when he turned around in shock, he found that there was nothing behind him.

Even the study room of his former tutor that he imagined before has disappeared, replaced by a long corridor—Ivan doesn't even know when he came here.

He was in a daze.

Rationally speaking, he felt as if he had just turned his head, but deep in his heart, there was always a voice whispering.

wrong……

Is it really just a moment of turning back?

Time and memory have become blurred and viscous at this moment.

It seems to be the darkness in the deep part of the long corridor. Looking back from where Aiwen is now, he can only see the scarlet carpet and stone wall permeating into the darkness in the distance.

Ivan only looked at it for a short while, then quickly withdrew his gaze. He always felt that in the depths of the darkness, there was something that he didn't dare to touch, or even think about, was spying on him.

Red, yellow, cloudy light.

Ivan was panting, he held his forehead, and staggered forward, although he didn't know where he could go.

After a while, the wall of the corridor changed.

Ivan saw some picture frames one after another.

There are also some specimen containers that seem to be embedded in the wall.

They appeared in Ivan's field of vision in a chaotic manner.

The colors of those photo frames are bright and weird, like the things drawn by a painter who is extremely skilled but completely crazy.Ivan even couldn't help pausing for a while in front of one of the paintings.The scene on the canvas seemed familiar, and Ivan felt that it might be the poor farmhouse where he lived before he was discovered the talent of a mage. He recognized the messy and messy fence, and the crooked porch in front of the cottage due to disrepair. In the shadow cast by the porch, a small dog squatted there with its tongue out and its eyes wide open.

"Little Billy."

Ivan stared at the outline of the puppy, and murmured a word.

That was the dog's name—for Goddess of Magic's sake, that dog should have died when Ivan was two or three, and he shouldn't have remembered the name of an insignificant puppy, but That word automatically jumped into Ivan's mind.

And when Ivan called out the puppy's name, the paint on the canvas seemed to squirm, and the dog's tail seemed to be shaking slightly.But when Ivan took a closer look, the puppy was just two or three dots of paint scattered randomly on the rough canvas.

The feeling of dizziness emerged again.

Every spot of paint on the canvas seems to be wriggling like some brightly colored mollusk.

Ai Wen suddenly felt a strange shudder, and he felt the sight again, but this time the sight did not come from both ends of the corridor, but from the canvas in front of him.

Next to the dark porch, the artist drew a long, skewed window, in which there was darkness, except for two spots of dust that seemed to have fallen accidentally on the uneven surface of the paint.

It looked like a reflection in someone's eye.

Someone—something—was staring at Ivan behind that window.

It looks very similar to Alvin's former sea gnome roommate.

【Hey, Ivan...】

In a trance, Ivan even heard a faint voice.

【You will like it here...】

Ivan took two steps back suddenly, and the painting returned to normal again.

And Ivan turned his head without hesitation, he crossed the painting and started to run wildly forward.

In the specimen containers inlaid on the stone walls on both sides, Ivan also saw many things that had appeared in his life.

He saw a butterfly he had chased as a child—perched on a delicate flowering branch in a glass vessel.

The color is the pale blue left over from a meager memory, but... but something is twisted.

The butterfly's wings fluttered slightly, and twisted and twisted lines were reflected on the radiant scale powder.

Ai Wen felt as if his heart was about to jump out of his throat in the next second, and even he himself couldn't explain why he was so scared now.

It was just a cursory glance, and Ivan already had the answer in his heart. Those paintings—those specimens—should all be things he had encountered before, but similarly, they were also distorted and mutated in the same way.

Alvin was so scared that he almost wanted to vomit.

The carpet laid on the floor has become thick, sticky, and wet unconsciously.

Before, there was a vague touch of carpet, but soon Aiwen found that he had stepped on a piece of wet red moss without knowing it.

Every step of his footsteps would make the moss make a "sizzling" sound, and then some translucent red liquid would ooze out.

"Da da--"

Ai Wen didn't know if he was really completely crazy, but he still heard the suffocating and terrifying friction sound.

At the same time, the wall of the corridor undulated regularly.

Something resembling a tentacle... or rather a vine hangs down from the high dome.

They swayed softly like water plants in the windless corridor.Those damned tentacles were a sickeningly brilliant color, and the translucent surface looked like an oil film had been applied to it.The metallic smell in the air was so strong that Ai Wen could hardly breathe.

Aiwen realized that his perception of time and space was infinitely passivated.

He ran wildly in the corridor, but he didn't feel tired, and he didn't know how long he had been trapped here—it seemed like only a short moment, but it seemed like hundreds of millions of years had passed.

The carpet is getting wet and thick.

Occasionally, Ivan felt that when he stepped on it, his skin seemed to be fused with the wet and sticky algae.

And more often, Aiwen can detect that rhythm—a cold, scorching rhythm coming from a deep place under the ground.

Unknowingly, the corridor turned into a long and narrow circular tunnel.

The carpets and stone walls have completely disappeared, and even the weird paintings and specimens that oppressed Aiwen's nerves are gone.

Various markings emerged on the surface of the dark red, wet and cold, reptile-like tunnel.

The edges of the black circular spots are inlaid with brilliant red and yellow stripes.

Ivan didn't dare to look at them, because he always felt that the spots were staring at him.

The light became very dim... The tentacles hanging from the top of the head became denser, and they emitted a kind of dark green fluorescence like a will-o'-the-wisp in a cemetery, and the tips of the soft tentacles, scattered like coral, grew out Thin, white tentacles.

When Aiwen passed by them, those tentacles were like the fingertips of a dying person, gently stroking Aiwen's hair and cheeks.

Some of them have even stubbornly followed Aiwen's ear holes and nostrils, and slowly penetrated into his body.

The smell of metal now smells with an indescribably sweet aroma.

All this should have terrified Ivan, but the reality is that he has no intention of resisting the tentacles that try to penetrate his body.

Aiwen suspects that he looks like the kind of drunk who is spurned in the back of the alley.He swayed violently, staggered, and even basic balance became so difficult because, as he had feared not so long ago (or so long ago), part of him seemed to have been aligned with the line. The long corridors are connected together.

thumping—

thumping—

thumping—

The rhythm that penetrated from the depths of the corridor unknowingly resonated with Ivan's heartbeat.

Finally, when Aiwen found that he had stopped unconsciously, he finally collapsed completely.

Not only did he stop—

He even opened his arms unknowingly, as if he wanted to hug something strange, and walked towards the inner wall of the water channel step by step.

Now the inner wall of this waterway has become moist, soft, and dark red like the internal organs of an animal, and the surface is covered with tangled meridians and blood vessels, as well as some tumorous growths.

Ai Wen stretched out his hand and directly tore off the translucent film of some growths, and he was not surprised to find eyeballs clustered together like grapes.

He was watching him all the time.