Anne left happily, seemingly without suspecting anything - after all, she was just a child.

The old guard stood at the gate of the cemetery for a long time, looking at the direction where Anne left. It was an unknown amount of time before he suddenly reacted. He reached for his chest pocket with trembling fingers, took out a tube of medicine and poured it into his mouth.

He feels much better.

"This is too weird... We must report it to the cathedral immediately... God of Death... This is too weird..."

The old man muttered to himself, turned around and walked quickly towards the guardhouse. After entering the room and closing the door, he went straight to the side of the bed and looked at a desk that looked old and ordinary. After opening a cover on the desk, he revealed delicate pipes and valves, as well as buttons and handles.

Several metal capsules lay quietly in the grid next to the pipe.

The old man took out a piece of letter paper from the desk drawer, sat down, picked up the pen next to him, and began to write a report quickly. He then rolled up the report and stuffed it into the metal capsule compartment. Then he opened the pipe in the secret compartment of the desk and placed the capsule compartment into the groove.

“May Bartok bless this pipe and the air flowing through it…May the valves operate smoothly without jamming, depressurizing or bursting—and may the differential machine at the sorting and delivery center not make mistakes.”

The old man gave a brief prayer, then reached out and pressed a button next to the pressure pipe. After the green light in the secret compartment came on, he pulled the handle next to the button.

A strange gurgling sound came from deep within the pipe, which sounded like the movement of the airflow being blocked, but soon the sound disappeared, and the hissing sound of the pressure pipe operating normally and the sound of the capsule device sliding rapidly began.

The old man looked at the pipe with some concern, muttering, "...Could it be that the letter mentioned something about the higher being that affected the machine..."

After a while, two green lights representing the "express delivery" to the superior sorting center lit up. The old guard finally felt relieved and closed the cover of the secret compartment.

※※※

Alice walked on the street holding a big paper bag, looking curiously at the surrounding buildings, observing this city which was completely different from Plande, and observing the lives of the people in this city.

In the paper bag were the things she had just bought from the corner store - some vegetables, eggs, frozen hard butter and two pieces of mutton, which were the ingredients for today's lunch.

Alice can already go shopping independently, although she is not very skilled and occasionally makes mistakes in the amount of change she asks for. But she has been working hard to learn it all - making progress every day, although not much.

She lowered her head slightly, holding the paper bag in one hand, and took out a note from the bag with the other hand to confirm the contents of the note.

There were some letters written on it in crooked handwriting. It was today's shopping list. Part of the content was words that she could read and write, and the other part was replaced by simple pictures. She wrote this list herself and took a lot of effort.

Make your own daily menu, plan your own ingredients, write your own shopping lists, go to the shops yourself - try to calculate the change, and try to get home on time. If you can do all this, the captain will be very happy.

Alice will be happy too.

After confirming that everything on the list and in the paper bag was fine, Miss Doll put the note away with satisfaction and continued walking towards her temporary residence on Oak Street.

But just when she was halfway there, a commotion coming from the street corner suddenly caught her attention.

She looked up in the direction where the sound came from, and saw about a dozen people gathered next to a residential building that looked rather old. Some of them were pointing at the building, and everyone was talking about something. Occasionally, she could hear words like "that woman is crazy", "poor thing", "the church is alarmed".

Alice couldn't help but slow down her pace, slower and slower, until she finally stopped and looked in that direction with great hesitation.

It was… lively, and the captain said not to join in the fun, because if heads fell off in a crowded place, the noise would be too much.

But it looks really interesting over there, and what they are discussing... seems to be something that the captain would be interested in.

Alice became entangled, and in her confusion she moved her feet towards that side, and then moved them again.

"I'm just going to check out the situation... to help the captain gather information... I'm not just joining in the fun, I'm joining in the fun seriously..."

Alice used all her wisdom to convince herself, and she succeeded.

With one hand on her head and the other holding a paper bag, Miss Doll quickly moved closer to the crowd and looked up at the residential building in front of her like them.

Unlike the two-story building that the captain temporarily rented, the building in front of him looked older and more cramped. The narrow windows and external gas pipes made it look crowded and chaotic, as if many independent residents were gathered in this building.

Alice listened to the chaotic discussion of the people around her for a long time but didn't understand what was going on. She carefully patted the shoulder of the person next to her and asked politely, "Excuse me...what happened here?"

The man next to him was startled, but after seeing that the person who made the noise was a young girl in a veil, he relaxed and pointed upwards: "A woman has gone mad, insisting that she killed her husband and wanted to strangle her child... First the sheriff was alarmed, and now even the church has arrived. I think this is a serious matter."

As soon as he finished speaking, another person spoke up: "Even people from the church are here... Could it be something bad?"

"... I hope nothing serious happens," a woman muttered in the crowd, "I live downstairs from them. If something really happens, we'll have nowhere to go..."

"Whether you are okay or not, it's better to go to the church today and ask the priest to help you do an exorcism. It's always better to be careful."

The people around them started talking at once again, and soon the topic came to something Alice didn't understand. She was a little distracted in this chaotic discussion, and her sight slowly drifted into the air.

Light threads floated in her field of vision, and more thin threads extended from the nearby residential buildings, floating in the air like hair swaying in the wind, quietly stirring the sky.

Alice suddenly blinked.

She suddenly noticed that some of the lines floating above the city-state seemed particularly illusory and transparent, and were even flickering like light bulbs with poor contact.

※※※

There was a faint musty smell in the old residential building, and the antiquated piping system had a slight leak somewhere, and the sound of dripping water could be heard from time to time. Guards dressed in black, holding canes and lanterns, gathered in the living room, making the already not spacious house seem even more cramped.

A woman with disheveled long hair was huddled in the corner of the sofa, with her head lowered as if she was frightened, occasionally mumbling incoherent sentences.

There were two guards in black standing nearby, watching over this mentally ill woman.

The guards are checking the house for remaining clues, and they have been busy here for two hours.

Just then a gray wind blew down the corridor, passed through the open door, and swirled into the living room.

The guards stopped what they were doing and saluted the gray-white whirlwind.

Agatha stepped out of the whirlpool and glanced across the room.

"What's the situation now?" She raised her head and looked at the highest-ranking guard on the scene.

The captain of the guards was a neat woman with short black hair. In response to the gatekeeper's question, she immediately stepped forward and said, "We collected a small amount of 'mud' samples from the floor of the bathroom, and confirmed that it is consistent with the samples collected before."

"Elements..." Agatha said softly, then frowned, "A small sample? How many? Only so many?"

"About the amount of a test tube," the short-haired female captain raised her hand and gestured, "That's all the samples - we have searched the entire building, and there is only a little left on the floor of the bathroom."

Agatha groaned in silence, then turned to look at the long-haired woman curled up in the corner of the sofa.

"She is the person involved?"

"Yes," the team leader nodded. "She rented a house here. We have investigated and found that she has a clean background and no criminal record. She is an accountant for a nearby firm. In addition, her husband used to work in the Boiling Gold Mine. According to the information, he died in a mining accident three years ago."

Boiling Gold Mine... Mine Accident...

Perhaps influenced by recent events, Agatha instinctively noticed these words. Then she calmed herself down and came to the side of the woman who was still muttering.

"Ma'am - I am the gatekeeper of the city-state. You are safe now," Agatha said in a steady voice, quietly using her spiritual soothing power, "Tell me, what happened?"

When the long-haired woman on the sofa heard the sound, her trembling suddenly stopped. Then she mumbled something incomprehensible and suddenly raised her head.

A pair of eyes that still contained fear and madness stared at Agatha.

"He's back, he's back... I killed him, I killed that monster... in the bathroom! It melted in the bathroom!"