Chapter 19 Chapter 19 Before the final struggle, she...

This thought grew deeper and deeper, stirring up emotions buried deep in their hearts that neither she nor He should have.

The grievance of being misunderstood and the sadness of being hated.

The resentment of being accused of crimes without any basis.

The pain of objects hitting the body and the stains of dirt on clothes.

Lin Miao endured the villagers' malice motionlessly, and his heart became calmer.

"Since it's not you, why don't you explain?"

——I don’t believe it.

The devil used magic to recreate his memory scenes, but it was just an ordinary story of him passing by a village and lending a helping hand to a girl who accidentally fell into an icy lake.

But the village chief said that the devil was full of lies and it was easy for him to weave false pictures.

The village chief's wife said that the devil is capable of all kinds of evil. If he really has good intentions, why did the devil take over his daughter's body and make her confused as soon as she came back?

——No one believed in Him.

"So you're just going to stand there and get beaten?"

The demon king who could slaughter all the monsters in the mountains as soon as he was born and whose power shocked the three realms, allowed a group of ignorant and powerless villagers to humiliate him like this?

No response.

The scene in the illusion began to reverse again. The crowd and the village disappeared, and what appeared before her eyes became a very familiar scene.

A gap was torn in the inky black sky, and the dazzling golden light inevitably invaded every inch of hell.

A god wearing a crown and holding a scepter of light hangs in mid-air, surrounded by auspicious clouds, with pure and powerful divine power overflowing; behind him, seven archangels stretch out their six wings, their white feathers soaked in soft light, and they are the biggest nemesis of the creatures of hell.

Lin Miao stood on the ground, looking up at these powerful guests from heaven who were respected and worshipped by the human world.

She heard the god, whose face she couldn't see clearly, say to "her", "Stop."

Admit your sins, repent of your deeds, and accept your punishment.

His voice was compassionate, gentle, and full of admonition.

——And from above, charity.

Lin Miao recalled Gabriel's arrival in front of the Jingyu Temple and his confrontation with Reese.

It is so similar to the scene in this fantasy.

But at least Reese still had her that time, but in the illusion, there was no one behind him.

There is only Him, alone.

"Is this what you wanted me to see, Demon King?" Lin Miao asked softly. "You want to tell me that demons born in hell are just like this, born evil and stubborn, always standing against light and good, and ultimately, they can only—"

"Will you be slaughtered?"

Silence is more like a silent recognition.

Lin Miao hated this silence.

She laughed suddenly and so hard that her stomach ached.

"no way."

She said.

Before her final struggle, her fate should never be decided by outsiders.

The button lights up.

Within twelve hours, the third opportunity to trigger "Thorns" was used.

The moment the green vines stretched out their claws and stabbed at the god, the picture of the god descending from heaven vanished like a flower in the water.

Gods, angels, demons, everything disappeared without a trace, and returned to darkness.

When Lin Miao opened his eyes again, he found himself standing steadily on the stage of a theater.

False stage, boom, and sound equipment.

The extremely modern decoration almost made her think that she had returned to the 21st century. The so-called car accident and the so-called transaction were nothing but a pipe dream.

It was not until she moved her body and was shocked to find countless white silk threads wrapped around her arms, even embedding into her flesh and leaving red marks, that Lin Miao felt that she was still in an illusion.

...Nothing special, just curious :)

She looked up and saw the silk threads hanging from the ceiling, shining with a pearly luster, silently controlling every major joint of her limbs.

She became... a performance puppet?

Even though Lin Miao claimed to have some understanding of the nature of this illusion, he still couldn't figure out what the relationship was between the Demon King's past and the stage puppets.

While she was still trying to cope with the discomfort caused by the rapid scene jumps, the black curtain in front of her slowly opened to both sides, revealing the spacious theater space and rows of dark red seats.

Countless dark silhouettes rose from the ground, lying naked on the seats, and the air became increasingly cold and chilly;

What made Lin Miao even more horrified was that all the shadows had the same facial makeup stiffly pasted on their faces—

The background is pale, indigo tear marks flow around the empty eye sockets, and the scarlet cracks at the corners of the mouth almost extend behind the ears.

Weird and creepy.

The next moment, a spotlight came towards her with a dazzling white light, illuminating a circle with a radius of about one meter with her as the center.

She was pinned center stage.

A mournful, resentful sound of music arose from somewhere, and the shadows began to whisper and chatter among themselves, making mutters that sounded like frayed vocal cords.

The scene on the stage changed.

The modern equipment was hidden by the fog, and a courtyard appeared around it.

Behind the rusty iron gate is a back garden overgrown with weeds and full of insects. Large patches of paint are peeling off on the blue-gray walls of the only small building. The pond is full of duckweed and the water is extremely turbid.

Dilapidated and desolate.

Lin Miao felt extremely familiar with all of this, so familiar that she could describe exactly what she had experienced in this courtyard without missing a single detail.

It was so familiar that the first time she saw it, her stomach began to twitch violently, and the overwhelming nausea almost drowned her.

...the orphanage where she lived as a child.

If Lin Miao didn't react at this moment and realized that the past presented in the illusion had changed from the devil to herself, her IQ would probably be ruined.

However, those silk threads didn't care about the feelings of the person being manipulated at all. They dragged Lin Miao and stumbled into the small building, bent her in a strange posture, and threw her into the dusty storage room.

Even the sense of pain has to be simulated 100%? Although the Demon King's "job test" is not close to God, it is already far from humans.

Lin Miao tried to divert his attention by using his habit of vomiting everywhere, but the activated memory code could not be easily put back to sleep.

The little girl, with a burning forehead and sore body, curled up quietly in a corner of the utility room, fighting the high fever brought by the virus, even her moans were suppressed in her throat.

The shabby wooden door was kicked open fiercely, and the voice of "Why are you pretending to be dead?" came first.

A woman in an apron poked her with a broom, followed by the pungent smell of cheap perfume.

"Of all the kids, you're the laziest! The sheets I told you to hang out to dry are still piled on the floor! Go clean the toilet!"

Her arm was pulled by the silk thread, and along with the woman's saliva, the words "lazy guy" and "lazy guy" drilled into her temples, and the iron nails were drilled into her skull.

Lazy.

The dark shadows in the seats trembled with delight, like sharks smelling blood, eager to watch.

The scene changed again, with green trees under the blue sky and white clouds. She was used to pointing and talking on the way to school.

"An orphan."

"An orphan, huh, isn't that just a bastard without a father or a mother?"

"How pitiful."

In the bright and clean classroom, her desk was in a mess, with books, paper and pens scattered all over the floor.

"You're the one who stole my watch!"

The tall and fat boy held the watch that he had "turned out" from her desk pocket, shouted loudly, and showed the "stolen goods" to the classmates around him with a proud expression.

"I said, only dirty orphans would covet other people's good things!"

"If you have any problems, you can go to the teacher. Why do you want to steal the watch?"

"As expected, it's hard to change one's nature. Orphans are orphans, and they are very greedy!"

She was tied to a chair with silk threads and silently accepted the poisoned accusations.

greedy.

In the audience, the rustling sounds that came one after another were like countless poisonous snakes spitting out their tongues at her, waiting and moving.

The scene in the classroom suddenly faded, and in the lounge outside the examination room, the silk thread controlled her to pick up the white powder, but she was bumped into by a group of people who suddenly rushed in from outside the door.

On the table next to her was the thermos cup of the senior student who had pursued her but was rejected by her.

The senior was a strong opponent in that exam.

"You're giving him laxatives!"

"You're just jealous! You're jealous that your senior is better than you and has a better chance of winning a prize, so you don't want him to take the exam!"

"No matter how jealous you are, you can't drug someone. That's too much!"

envy.

“…”

In this "memoir" of his own, Lin Miao acted as a rag doll, his limbs stiffly pulled by the strings to make him move one by one.

She thought she had guessed wrong at first.

The shadow wearing a clown mask is not a clown, but a complete bystander, the embodiment of every human being who stands on the moral high ground and accuses her.

Because it is not your own life, you can just sit back and watch the fire from the other side of the river, comment on it, or make fun of it.

Even if her crime was fabricated out of thin air, even if their accusations were groundless, so what?

The truth carried by the incompetent is never painful.

It's just malicious intent that will be forgotten as soon as you turn around, a trivial episode that will not harm your own life. Who would care about the self-esteem of a "stranger" being shattered by a few words?

…She is the real clown.

Suffering was sacrificed into a performance that was "sensational" enough, and the spectators frivolously watched her ridiculous and powerless first half of her life and looked down on her for fun.

At some point, the scene stopped changing.

The audience was restless and burst into shrill laughter.

This was more like a verdict, easily casting the final judgment on "Lin Miao" on the gallows.

——She committed a crime.

Her crimes were laziness, greed, jealousy...

Her crime was incompetence.

——Then the death penalty.

Pain, anger, unwillingness, all the suppressed negative emotions burst through the gates in an instant, as if a dying bird was trapped in the chest, and every time it flapped its wings, it hit the ribs, making a weak and desperate muffled sound.

She was drowning in this ocean of emotions.

"You, hate it?"

Lin Miao suddenly raised his eyes and found that he had already left the stage, and the white lines that bound him disappeared.

She was placed in a small, empty room surrounded by walls.

"Do you hate it?"

The voice asked again.

…It wasn’t her illusion.