Scalpel
“What do we do now?”
In the past, it was always others who asked the Memory Master what to do. Now, she finally had the chance to ask others what to do. She felt as happy as if there was someone tall enough to hold up the sky when it fell.
"As written in the Scriptures, I will be the last listener and narrator. Everything is over."
"What about you? Where are you going?" The Memory Master hugged his knees and looked up at the white mist.
"I will return to the border between fog and light."
The illusionist couldn't help but reach out and touch the thick fog: "That's where you were born"
The fog wrapped around her fingers: "No, there was never a birth, only exile. Where the fog and the light intertwine is our living tomb."
"The King of Kings—"
"The King of Kings will return with me, to our place of rest."
After a moment of silence, the illusionist asked: "Will there be a withered dynasty in the future? I mean, will there be as many deaths as today?"
"They are not dead," Meleagro squeezed the red light in his hand tightly.
"Things are not that bad. But the King of Kings will eventually come back. He has an anchor in the world, and there will definitely be foolish people who will summon Him at the cost of their lives."
“I can remember Him and remain sane. I am His anchor.”
When no answer was given, the Memory Master sighed: "Please erase my memory."
"I can do it, but I don't want to. The owner of your body probably doesn't want me to do it either. Important gifts will disappear along with all memories. For humans, the price is too heavy."
"Wanting turned into memetic suppression..." the illusionist muttered.
Until the last moment, Wanting's memetic suppression, which she transformed into at the cost of her own death, protected Liu Tianyi.
But Liu Tianyi still died.
The illusionist stood up suddenly: "I have a report to make, so I'm leaving first."
She once described to a young client the whole process of how a bullied person becomes a bully.
If Wanting's death was Liu Tianyi's rusty sword, then she has now found a scalpel, a scalpel sharp enough to remove all necrotic tissue and fill the cavity of Liu Tianyi's soul.
After Meliegro appeared, the illusionist was so relaxed that he overlooked one thing - the real Liu Tianyi would never ask Meliegro to erase her memory.
After the King of Kings forcibly awakened Liu Tianyi's memory that was erased by Wanting, she saw the truth of the whole incident and recalled her previous inferences. She must have been ashamed.
Liu Tianyi once deduced that Wanting was a harbouring criminal, and she once believed that Wanting committed suicide out of guilt.
Now it seems that this inference contains Liu Tianyi's selfishness. On the surface, Wanting did not go to school after quarreling with her, and suddenly committed suicide a week later.
From an outsider's perspective, the quarrel on Christmas was the trigger for the suicide.
She had a secret fear hidden deep in her heart, she was afraid that she was the murderer who caused Wanting to commit suicide. That's why she had that reasoning, she had to rely on extremely logical reasoning to convince herself.
Convincing herself is the most difficult thing in the world. She succeeded in doing the most difficult thing but encountered the truth. The truth made Liu Tianyi so painful. It was not Wan Ting who killed people, but Wan Ting was her protector.
From the moment she realizes that she is the anchor of the King of Kings, she will be surrounded by a kind of ecstasy - she can finally die happily and perfectly like Wanting, in order to resist the things she resists and to protect everything she loves.
She couldn't wait to die, as if dying like Wanting could make up for all her guilt, and then forgive herself for the young Liu Tianyi, and forgive herself for becoming a bully.
The memory teacher ran into the comprehensive building and pushed open the door of the classroom. Professor Shen was standing on the podium, quietly waiting for her.
"Hu, hu" the illusionist exhaled all the air, then inhaled slowly through his nose, allowing the air to fill his abdomen and chest.
Pushing Liu Tianyi's tired body to run at top speed caused her ribs to ache, but it also calmed her down.
The Withered Dynasty has been resolved, but the matter of the fake person has not been resolved. The Memory Master doesn't think Liu Tianyi can commit suicide successfully.
Professor Shen noticed her embarrassment and said, "Don't worry, you can go back and continue preparing. Call me anytime if you want to make a report."
The Memory Master nodded gratefully and went down the stairs into the storeroom.
She once saw a box of office supplies in the storage room, which might contain what she needed, so she picked up the box and rummaged through it.
Having found it, she hid the thing in her arms with satisfaction, walked out of the comprehensive building slowly, and walked towards Liu Tianyi's dormitory at the pace of a walk after dinner.
It was already dark, and the campus was so quiet that only the sound of the wind could be heard. The Memory Master walked while recalling the contents of "Malice".
The murderer's boyhood in this novel has many similarities with Liu Tianyi.
Having been bullied before; becoming friends with a classmate who saved him from bullying; abandoning friends for various reasons and joining a bullying group.
When they grew up, even the most crucial point was extremely similar - they ruined their friends' reputations after their deaths.
The murderer in the book used a series of tricks to deceive the police and the media, making the world think that he was the victim's ghostwriter and wanted to claim the work of his former friend as his own.
Before her death, Liu Tianyi posted a long article on social media, making the incident of five years ago public and asserting that Wanting had sheltered a murderer.
Admittedly, Liu Tianyi's approach was an effort to convince herself; she needed public approval to avoid her deep-seated fears.
If Wan Ting knew about this in the afterlife, she might not care about her doing this. But she caused actual damage to Wan Ting's reputation after her death, which is no different from the murderer in the book.
But they are completely different. The murderer in "Malice" killed his own friend with his own hands.
Liu Tianyi has always been Wanting's good friend, and Wanting even entrusted her with the meme suppression that she obtained at the cost of her life.
Of course, the murderer's trick in the book failed, and the righteous police officer went through many hardships and difficulties to expose his conspiracy and restore the innocence to the victim.
The illusionist discovered her blind spots and focused all her attention on the murderer and the victim.
Because all the names in the book were replaced with Wanting, she naturally thought that this was a dispute between Wanting and Liu Tianyi.
Wanting and Liu Tianyi's experiences were so similar to those of the victim and the murderer that she ignored the police officer. Now she has a guess about the police officer.
The illusionist came to Liu Tianyi's dormitory. The dormitory was empty. She went to the bathroom first, turned on the faucet, and then walked towards Ren Shanshan's desk.
The things on the table were almost unchanged. She picked up the selfie stick, grabbed the black telescopic rod, and pulled the slender rod out little by little.
Ren Shanshan’s selfie stick is very old, and the telescopic rod is quite difficult to pull. It gets stuck just after it is pulled out a little. I guess only its owner can tame it.
But this length was enough. The illusionist turned on the fluorescent light in the dormitory and spun the selfie stick in his hand towards the light.
At the top of the metal telescopic rod, she found a faint trace of tape.
When I put the selfie stick back on the table, the telescopic rod that couldn't be pulled just now suddenly became unstuck, and the rod swung out of the handle and hit the pen holder with a snap. The illusionist guessed that the plastic water cup was knocked over by the selfie stick.
She picked up the wide transparent tape on the table and gently stroked it along the edge. After finding the tape end, she peeled it off with her fingernails to avoid leaving fingerprints.
When held up to the light, there was a small, messy but clear mark on the top of the pressure-sensitive adhesive side of the transparent tape. The Memory Master cut off the tape and kept it carefully.
She tore off another piece of clean tape, stuck it tightly to Liu Tianyi's hair, and waited for a while before peeling it off.
Comparing the two, the marks on them are very similar, enough to prove that this tape has been used to stick hair.
The long-haired black shadow that the Memory Master encountered when he first entered the game was not a fake person. It was just someone using a selfie stick to stick a wig to pretend to be a ghost.
Such low-level trickery was successful because Professor Shen’s class and the flyers in the toilet jointly created the concept of a pseudo-human.
Once the illusionist believes that the fake person is real, when she recalls the black shadow again and thinks of the electronic sound and delay when the black shadow spoke, she will inevitably infer that the black shadow is a fake person.
People tend to believe the truth they have deduced. This general conclusion, which was once used by the illusionist to guide Heige away from pollution, was originally used by others on herself.
The concept of "pseudo-humans" is so terrifying because they are a group of purely malicious monsters with no purpose.
When the Memory Master learned that the pseudo-human Wang Yue approached her for memetic suppression, it became clear that the pseudo-human was no different from a human with bad intentions.
The shadows are fake, the fake people are fake, they exist to hide the real things.
There was a sound of water overflowing from the toilet. The illusionist grabbed the blunt wallpaper knife on the table, put the rest of the things back in place, turned around and walked into the toilet.
She looked at herself in the mirror from several angles and turned off all the fluorescent lights in the bathroom and dormitory, leaving only the small desk lamp on Liu Tianyi's desk.
She took out the thing she found in the storage room box from her coat, stepped into the plastic bucket holding it, posed according to the scene of Liu Tianyi's death in her memory, and picked up the wallpaper knife and pointed it at her wrist.
The water surface was soon dyed red, and the illusionist closed her eyes with satisfaction. She hoped that the person she was waiting for would come and kill Liu Tianyi quickly and not let her stay in the cold water for too long.
Soon, she heard the slight sound of the dormitory door opening, followed by soft footsteps, and she couldn't help but slow down her breathing.
The person who came in pushed open the toilet door and there was no sound of shoes stepping on water, which meant that the person was standing outside the door cautiously observing the situation.
The illusionist did not open her eyes, she gently squeezed the red ink bottle hidden in her hand.
The man seemed to have seen the red floating on the water with the help of the faint light, and then confirmed that Liu Tianyi was really committing suicide. The sound of small splashing water was heard in the toilet.
The sound of water splashing was quite light. The illusionist counted her steps silently. A second before the sound stopped, she took the lead in knocking over the plastic bucket from the inside, holding the wallpaper knife tightly in both hands, pointed directly at the opponent's door, and rushed towards the oncoming person.
"Ah——" Seeing the amnesiac holding a knife and covered in blood-red ink, the man let out a short scream uncontrollably and turned around to escape.
Before the blunt knife touched anyone, the illusionist pulled back the handle and put the blade back. She didn't want to kill people with this blunt knife that could barely cut paper, she just wanted to scare people with it.
Now that her goal had been achieved, she simply threw away the knife, imitated the round-faced girl's movements, and suppressed the intruder with a non-standard ground technique.
The illusionist ignored the violently kicking legs. She first locked the opponent's arms from behind and shouted through gritted teeth: "Throw away what's in your hand!"
She just saw what the visitor was holding, it was a sharp dagger.
The floor drain of the toilet was blocked, but the faucet was still working, and the water on the ground was accumulating more and more. The two people were like two wild beasts trapped in dark waters.
In fact, the illusionist has no strength left. Running around all day has consumed too much energy.
She was able to suppress this man only because of her heavy winter clothes that were soaked with water, and because Liu Tianyi was slightly taller than the other man.
Suddenly remembering the fighting skills Zhao Jianyu had mentioned, the Memory Master tilted his neck back abruptly.
She slammed her forehead against the back of the head in front of her, so hard that she could feel blood flowing out from her hair.
The person she had locked up screamed, and the strength of his resistance finally weakened.
"Throw it away! Now!"
The strange thing is that the visitor stopped struggling after hearing these words. The illusionist did not dare to relax his strength. Instead, he took this opportunity to lock the other person's thighs with his legs and tried his best to imitate the round-faced girl's ground skills.
She felt pain all over her body, especially the place where her forehead was scratched. The muscles in her upper arms and thighs were also sore from overexertion.
But she didn't dare to slack off. She had developed the habit of automatically observing things from the corner of her eyes. There was a cold light flashing in her peripheral vision, which was the tip of the dagger.
The person in his arms was quiet for a few seconds, and then suddenly, like a clockwork puppet, he stiffly turned his neck and turned his face towards the Memory Master.
The Memory Master laughed out loud: "It is you indeed."
Close at hand was a face with dislocated features, which seemed different from the pseudo-people he had seen before, but the illusionist was too lazy to take a closer look.
She hit the other person's face with her forehead again, concentrating the last of her strength in her waist, and exploded like a spring.
Almost in a flash, she lifted up the fake man, released her hands that were holding the fake man's arms, and snatched the man's dagger.
The fake man held the dagger too tightly, and the glove on his right hand was pulled off.
The Memory Master panted heavily, and rolled to the wallpaper knife she had thrown away according to the planned trajectory, pressing the knife with her body. With both weapons in her hands, the winner was already decided.
"Ahem." The illusionist choked on the water twice, and lay on the ground with the tip of the knife pointed at the fake man, "Now you do whatever I say."
The fake man was indifferent, and a strange sound came out of the organ on his forehead that looked like a mouth: "Give me back the knife and the things."
The blood on his forehead flowed over his eyebrows and into his eyes. The illusionist gritted his teeth to support himself, climbed up from the ground, clenched the dagger and approached the fake person: "Ren Shanshan, stop pretending, take off the other glove too."
"Take it off immediately, or I'll stick the knife into your neck."
Ren Shanshan was silent for two seconds, took off her gloves, and approached the illusionist in a gesture of surrender.
The illusionist used the eye that had no blood in it to see Ren Shanshan's hands, whose knuckles were tense, and laughed inexplicably.
Ren Shanshan seemed to be irritated by her laughter and took a big step forward to grab the dagger.
At the same time, the illusionist loosened his hands that were tightly holding the dagger, allowing the dagger to fall freely under the influence of gravity.
In the blink of an eye, the illusionist met Ren Shanshan's hands and interlocked their fingers.
The high-carbon steel dagger landed on the tile, making a crisp clanging sound, like a piece of music before a celebration.
The illusionist felt an itchy sensation on her face, as if ants were crawling on it. She knew that she had guessed right. Touching both hands at the same time was indeed the condition for activating Ren Shanshan's superpowers.
She struggled to control her facial features which were as distorted as those of a fake person, and gave Ren Shanshan a friendly smile.
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