Chapter 536: The Witch Trials

That night.

Phoebe was lying on her back, and when she first found out she was having her period, her mother was clearly delighted: "You're growing up Phoebe!"

But soon this delight turned to bitterness at the sight of Phoebe's pale face and the bloodstains on her body: "But it doesn't seem to be a good thing for girls to grow up around here."

Phoebe lay motionless on the bed like a corpse, her eyes vacant as she covered her belly and said, breathlessly, "Can I curse all the gods who make women bleed during their periods to hell when I pray tonight?"

Her mother smiled up, "Of course."

"Phoebe." Her mother, lying next to her, looked at her pale face and asked her, somewhat distressed, "Why do you want to be the heir to the Hinchmani family?"

"This is not a good place for you to grow up and if you are able to leave now, you can ......"

"Is there a place in the world, where I can grow up?" Phoebe asked in an unusual tone, "or rather, a place where I, with my Hinchmani name, would not be found by my father?"

Her mother was silent.

"It's normal not to." Phoebe rippled, "Then I'll just get the Hinchmani family and make it fit for me to live in, and that's it."

"If this place is not free enough, I will be its controller, and make it free."

Phoebe turned to her bewildered mother, "You don't need God Xiang Ming to pray at that time, you just need to tell me what you want and you will have it all."

"If you want to be a bird, I can get them to make artificial skeletal robots so you can really fly in the sky like a bird."

"If you want to leave Hinchmani forever, I guarantee you will never see the Hinchmani family again and if you want Hinchmani to disappear, then it will disappear."

"Mum." Phoebe looked at her, her face still a little pale, but her tone was normal and sure, "The only true freedom in this world is to be strong."

"There is no freedom for the weak."

Her mother said nothing for a long time, then she asked Phoebe softly, through tears, "Maybe you're right, Phoebe."

"...... You remind me of someone, a friend of mine who helped me a lot, but I haven't seen him for a long time since I came here and I miss that boy."

"I want to take you to meet him."

"I'm fine these days, but it's hard to get past my father when you're going away with me." Phoebe thought for a moment, "Wait until Daniel's seventeenth birthday, he's taking over some of the family business to go on an adventure, my father will be going along on a visit to Daniel and will be away for at least a month, we can run away during that time."

Soon after, Daniel's seventeenth birthday arrived.

Hinchmani children do not celebrate birthdays until they reach adulthood, and the first birthday they will be widely celebrated is the bar mitzvah - that means they have lived to adulthood in a tussle.

And to start killing.

On the day of coming of age, the Hinchmani children take their own guns and go to the Hinchmani family's private prison, pick one of the prisoners who has been locked up - perhaps someone who has betrayed the family or someone from another family who has been locked up - and fire the first shot of their turbulent lives at the prisoner, killing him with their own hands. This is an iconic ritual that signifies that you are henceforth a member of the family, born to kill those who are hostile to the family and those who betray it.

It is reasonable to assume that they will not receive a trial assignment until they reach adulthood.

But since Phoebe's intention on the shooting platform was to train Daniel, Daniel came off the shooting platform and was taken on various missions by her father, who led him to do them all very well, so this time, Daniel is going on a trial mission on his own, with his father monitoring him from start to finish and not interfering or helping - which means Daniel will officially be second in command of the Hinchmani family. This means that Daniel is now officially the second in command of the Hinchmani family.

Before leaving, Phoebe stood at the corner of the stairs on the third floor and looked at Daniel in front of her.

Daniel is growing fast, having grown a head taller in just a few months, his soft blonde curls looking out of place in his hands, his apple-green eyes cold as a cocktail of ice, his gun at his waist, his right hand bandaged, the smell of blood as he brushes past Phoebe's shoulder, his whole persona an extreme and twisted desire to kill.

--It's hard to imagine being a little boy four years ago who would hide in the bathroom and weep after shooting.

"There's training in mind before you move." Phoebe said blandly, "Not saving some strength for yourself to save your life?"

"Oh?" Daniel scattered back, his apple green eyes playfully sweeping Phoebe, "Do you care if I die or not? The future head of the family?"

Phoebe gave Daniel's face a sidelong glance of unwashed oil paint - the man was getting crazy, painting himself in various clown masks before going on a mission, and although the intention was to disguise himself from outsiders, the choice of this also exaggerated approach said something in itself.

"I know the servant your mother left you on your last mission betrayed you and was shot dead by you." Phoebe paused, "but I left you alive on the firing table because I wanted you to be second in command, not a madman."

"Do yourself a favour."

"Me as second in command?" Daniel's nervous laugh came from behind her, "Be careful, Lord of the House, I may have blood in my bones from my mother's side, called betrayal."

"Is that so?" Unperturbed, Phoebe shrugged her shoulders and replied indifferently, "This blood is cleaner than the Hinchmani blood, no matter what?"

On the night of Daniel's departure, Phoebe uses her powers to get her and her mother out of the Hinchmani family, and after a few rounds of transfers, Phoebe and the girls make it to Sky Island.

That was the first time Phoebe saw Hearts.

The man, draped in a graceful robe of interlocking red and black patterns, his long hair falling, a long dark red tassel earring in his right ear, leaned languidly in the sofa, looking away from the island at the rain, his purple eyes half-closed as if lost in thought, the teardrop beneath his eyes faintly visible in the dense candlelight, a beauty that could not be discerned in its gender.

To be honest this is the first time Phoebe has seen such a beautiful human being.

But she didn't like Hearts.

"You look weak." Phoebe looked at Hearts and raised an eyebrow, "The man who gave my mother faith is actually a weakling?"

Phoebe's mother turned her head in disbelief, " Phoebe!"

"I'm weak?" Hearts turned his head to look at Phoebe and he smiled, "What am I weak in? My appearance? Do I look weak?"

"No." Phoebe looked Hearts straight in the eye, "My mother kneels at my bed every night praying to leave the place that traps her, why don't you have that faith?"

"Why are you afraid to leave this island that traps you? What are you holding on to on this island?"

The smile faded from Hearts' face as he looked levelly into the green eyes of Phoebe, who looked squarely at him impartially.

"Can I ......" Hearts turned to a somewhat baffled Phoebe's mother and smiled slightly, "talk to her alone?"

After Phoebe's mother left.

"You cherished your mother and sent her to see me specifically to protect her, you were good to her." Hearts paused for a moment, "What if one day she leaves you?"

"Why did she leave me?" Phoebe asked rhetorically.

"She died." Hearts said very softly.

"What made her die." Phoebe asked.

"The disease, the island, her faith, the many people." Hearts replied, "People are fragile and die easily."

"If it's a disease, I'll cure it, if it's an island, I'll blow it up, if it's faith, I'll make her change." Phoebe looked up arrogantly, her eyes were as strong as ever, "What kills her, I will destroy."

"...... What if ......" Hearts looked up, his purple eyes held a lot of emotion and his tone was as soft as the rain off the island, "was she herself?"

"What if she doesn't want to live herself?"

--sudden illness, each on-time decline, the final long-accepted farewell, the long-prepared last words, like a dance play that she had rehearsed countless times, played out before him to fall.

Hearts repeated the words very softly, "What if it was she, herself, who had chosen to die?"

Phoebe choked, and she got stuck in a rare moment.

Phoebe had no answer to this question when she was escorted off the island that day by Hearts, and she looked back at the man in the large, wind-blown tunic standing on the edge of the stormy island, and Hearts' eyes fell for a moment on them as they boarded the boat, through the darkness of the storm, and then moved away again.

--It was as if he was expecting an answer from her too.

When she got back that day, her mother told her about Hearts and finally just sighed, "I knew Hearts' mother, and it was a wonderful person, just ......"

"Not everyone can live and die like that."

And what about you - Phoebe wanted to ask the question but she didn't end up asking it because she didn't know what the answer to the question was that she would be satisfied to hear.

Soon, this issue, which Phoebe had forgotten about, came to her and her mother in an unexpectedly poignant form.

When Daniel disappears during a trial mission, his father becomes furious and mobilizes almost the entire family, but Daniel is never found again. After clearing out suspicious enemy homes outside, her overly suspicious father quickly turns on those within the family.

What was important to her father was that someone dared to move his men in front of him, against his wishes and out of his control.

During one round of family purges after another, the fact that Phoebe and her mother had left the family during Daniel's trial mission was soon revealed to the tortured servants.

No one can do in front of her father what her father does not allow and does not know, including her as the heir.

Phoebe was used to being thrown in jail and tortured, her father used to discipline her when she didn't answer and behave as he wanted, it wasn't unique to her, Daniel, or to every child in the family who had been in private prison.

But what was different this time was that her mother came in too.

Before she was arrested, Phoebe repeatedly warned her mother that the officers at the private prison would administer a lie detector to her and that they would not torture her as long as she told them the truth - it was a tradition in her family that the Sinchmani family would treat honest people well.

So Phoebe knew that if she was honest, she would be out of this filthy prison in a week at most.

She did confess honestly that she had gone to Hearts, whose bizarre island in the sky was not accessible to anyone without Hearts opening the door anyway, but the tense way the men repeatedly asked her where exactly she had gone made her subconsciously a little anxious.

...... This was in the case of inconsistent statements from the inmates on both sides of the conspiracy, repeatedly verifying the statements before asking her the same questions over and over again.

On the tenth day, honest Phoebe is released from the bastille, but her long-held ominous premonition is verified when she meets her tortured and bruised, dishonest mother.

Her father sat aside in the overseer's chair and looked at her with a downcast expression, "Your mother was as foolish and stupid as my former wife, who also betrayed me by refusing to tell me honestly where she had been."

"The Sinchmani family has no room for dishonesty, but she is your mother and you are my only heir, and I will give her one last chance for your sake and in your presence."

Her father looked to her mother, who was on her knees with her hands nailed to a bloodstained wooden post, "Where did you go? Seen someone?"

"If you give an honest account this time, I can let you live."

"Honesty?" Her cloaked mother tilted her head, Phoebe had never thought her always weak mother could actually put on this look in front of her father, with sarcastic disdain, she was covered in bruises and was actually laughing, "I've told you a million times."

"I ascended a territory of freedom that a sinful man like you could never ascend."

"I met someone as beautiful as you will ever see."

"Name the place and the name." Her father's face had gone completely gloomy, "Your daughter has already given part of the information, if you give a truthful account of how you found the place, I will let you go"

Her mother looked at her father with hazy eyes and smiled hoarsely, "You have been to that place before, and you have seen the people I have seen."

"But it's been almost a dozen years, so it's normal for you not to remember, but you're going to hear from me to go along with tricking him into opening the door for you to go up to that place-"

"-never."

"That place was once known as the Pure Land, and now it really is the Pure Land; you are not worthy to ascend to disturb his purity; even if I die, I will not let you see my late friend one more time."

Her father's face stilled for a moment, then he raised his hand and a squire beside him solemnly drew his own gun from his back waist and placed it in her father's his spread palm.

Phoebe stared deathly at the gun, she was familiar with its construction and had used it a thousand times, but right now, looking at the blackened muzzle, for the first time, she had a strange feeling - she was fearing the tool she had used countless times.

Her heart pounded wildly.

"You are the second wife to betray me." Her father adjusted his gun carelessly, "I'm sure you already know what happens when you betray my first wife, I never regret killing a betrayer of my family with my own hands, but the only thing I think I did improperly in that case was to alienate Daniel from me because of it."

"I failed to teach my young one competently what a betrayer was, leaving him not to understand what I had done in killing his mother, growing up quite rebellious and drifting away from me until he grew up betrayed and suffered a lot in the mission."

"Once you've done it, I won't make the same educational mistakes this time."

Her father looked up at Phoebe, reached out and held her shoulder forcefully, put the gun in her palm and said coldly, " Phoebe, as a worthy heir to the throne, you know how to treat a betrayer, don't you?"

Phoebe's chest rose and fell sharply in the corset that had grown and tightened as she developed, the little gap her mother had made for her by carefully altering it day and night was not enough for her to breathe in such a tense scene, and she subconsciously gripped the gun with a rare expression of post-choking stasis.

"Just like you did when you were ten -" her father whispered, "with a gun to your mother's heart."

"It's like knocking an apple out of the hat, punching through that heart."

She looked to her mother who, as always, looked at her with a smile, as she had done that day of the heir test, and said to her with a muzzle: [Shoot it].

Phoebe took two deep breaths as she slowly raised the gun without a tremor in her hand, then flipped and pinned her unresponsive father in a swift motion, pressing the muzzle against his temple with an icy expression.

Almost instantly, all the attendants drew their guns on Phoebe.

Her father slowly raised his hands, a crack of horror appearing in the expression he had been holding in his hands, "What are you doing, Phoebe ? Why do you dare point a gun at me ?!"

"Why wouldn't I dare?" Phoebe cocked her head, her expression sweet but her tone icy, "The moment you taught me to point a gun at my mother, you should have expected me to have exactly the same courage to point it at you, my esteemed father."

"Untie her."

Her father froze for a moment and ordered, "Untie her mother."

But at the same time, her father made a very faint downward gesture, which Phoebe saw with quick eyes - a coded signal from the head of the house, meaning to shoot.

So Phoebe shot her father's hand first, without hesitation, and almost as soon as her father screamed, the guards froze their guns.

"I said, untie her." Phoebe was about to hyperventilate from the corset, but her tone was still calm.

"...... True to form, a child I have raised with my own hands, courage and reflexes not missing a thing." Her father actually looked up with a little appreciation covering his own palm that was gushing blood, he stared at her with a sinister gaze, "Perhaps with a little more time you could actually succeed in taking power from me."

Phoebe felt acutely uncomfortable as she saw her father pull out a circular object with the sign of the reverse cross from the lining, the scent of the object emitting made Phoebe want to back away for a moment.

"It's the family's new smuggling business, the scientific name for this is [Heresy] and it has all sorts of effects you can't imagine." Her father laughed out loud, "Like this one in front of you, the effect is that if you shoot me, the gunshot wound caused will be transferred to the person who matters most to you."

"And the gunshot wound in my body heals." Her father held up his intact palm and looked over at her with a smile, "Amazing isn't it? I carry a lot of these [heretics] around with me."

Phoebe's pupils fluttered and she turned her head to look at her mother - she was on her knees covering her hands and bleeding all over the floor.

"It seems I have not taught you enough." Her father suddenly gripped her gun, his look and tone turning grim and cold, "Then let's re-teach you starting with this lesson today."

Her father took hold of her gun and snapped it at himself, at the same time a loud gunshot rang out behind Phoebe and her expression and movements were frozen as she was cupped by his face and turned her head to look over.

Her mother, struck through the heart, collapsed in a pool of blood.

Phoebe tried to breathe hard, but couldn't muster the strength.

Because she felt the little gap in her bodice that she could use for breathing, disappear.

[System Alert: Player Phoebe's desire to log into the game has been detected.

After Phoebe crawled out of her first single player game covered in blood, she went on a mad scramble to find something that could heal her wounds.

She knew that as long as she didn't log out of the game now, her mother's time would be frozen shortly after the moment she was wounded, and that her shot had missed a bit and not hit her heart squarely, so maybe there was still hope!

But soon Phoebe realizes that the game, which seems to be omnipotent and can grant everyone's wishes, has no healing props - the player has no access to props that can restore life points, and she can't find any that can instantly heal gunshot wounds.

Phoebe logged out of the game in a trance and chose a random coordinate.

Unfortunately, her mother did not die.

Hearts had sent someone to follow them after sending them off the island, and when things went wrong, Hearts realised something was wrong and quickly sent someone from their guild, or player, to infiltrate the Cinchmani family by any means necessary to bring her mother, who had been shot, out and bring her to the island under close guard.

Phoebe meets her unconscious mother on the island.

"I used a lot of props to keep her vital signs up." Hearts sat end over end next to a speechless Phoebe and was quiet for a moment before saying, "But there are no healing props in the game, there's only so much I can do."

"I'm sorry."

"I fired the shot and I caused her to be where she is." Phoebe's tone was flat, "I'm sorry it's not your turn to say that."

The two men lapsed into silence as they looked at each other without a word.

"She hadn't fallen into a coma when we rescued her, she was just a little fuzzy on consciousness." Hearts paused and whispered, "Her last words were left for you."

"She said, Phoebe, you are right, it is the strong who have freedom, and a weak person like her is not worthy of freedom in this world, no matter where she goes, under the island, only to pray and struggle."

"She lives, and to you, perhaps, it is only a burden of the weak against the strong."

Phoebe's hands clenched in her lap.

Not so!!!

I'm the weak one to you now! There's nothing I can do!

Hearts got up and left, and Phoebe stood alone at the foot of her mother's bed for a long time, then she looked out of the window at the moonlight for a moment, then folded her hands and slowly knelt down.

"O God." She closed her eyes and chanted softly in a hoarse voice, in a gesture of reverence, as her mother had clumsily corrected her earlier, "If you do exist, I pray to you with devotion."

"I hope she survives."

"Did you know?" A player whispered, "That little witch, the player who recently made a big splash on the Newcomer Rank 1, actually has a healing skill!"

"Wow, a healer? The major guilds are going to go crazy for her!"

"Yes, the King's Guild has spent more than a million charging points, but I have not seen her join, and she has harsh conditions for healing, never easily heal players, she does not even see pulling in front of her, completely depending on the mood to heal, sometimes a dozen players at a time, sometimes not a single treatment, and she will not only heal, or poison people, sometimes you beg for treatment to make her guilty, directly give you poison stun.

"It's kinda dangerous to find her then."

"Yeah, the big guilds are getting defeated, we bottom players are better off just watching the action."

The chattering player walked past Phoebe, who stared unblinkingly at a player covered in black robes in front of the entrance - the little witch.

Hearts' admonition was still ringing in her ears - [The Little Witch is a very dangerous player, you've only just entered the game, follow the guild and brush up on your skills, leave the subjugation of the Little Witch to the guild].

[Don't go near the little witch, she only plays dangerous big books with more than fifty people, you're just sending heads if you follow her in].

Her mother had weakened to a very dangerous threshold.

In fact, after using so many props, she shouldn't have weakened so quickly, but it was as if her mother had lost her will to live, decaying so quickly that she could feel her breath grow faint every time she came close.

Phoebe finally had to face the question Hearts had posed to her - [what would you do if she chose to die?

She also gave the answer - there was nothing that could be done, nothing that could be done.

But she can't just sit back and wait either - it's Phoebe's idea to approach the little witch and gamble at least once.

She, a novice player who had entered the game less than a week ago, just followed the high ranking novice list one [Little Witch] into the highest difficulty copy in the small TV area - a large copy with more than fifty people.

Then unsurprisingly, they were abused to the hilt.

Phoebe was not sure how much she was relying on her obsession, dragging her body, almost corrupted by the monster, to the ground with her hands braced in death, towards the witch who was standing on the ground, jumping lightly, spraying poison everywhere and dispersing the corrupted monster.

The poisonous mist mixed with the monster's brooding blackness and lunged towards Phoebe's face, and she looked into the twisting black mist in a trance, almost seeing the blackness that represented death descending before her.

It was as if she had seen the chaos of blood in the private prison that night.

...... Is this the end of her?

She had never lost since birth, ignorantly thinking she was the strongest in the world, only to be vulnerable as an ant in this world and never get the freedom she wanted.

The black mist is broken by the shaking cloak, the monster is dispersed by the poison and the forest falls into a shimmering light.

The little witch in her cloak lifted a corner to reveal a pair of grey eyes, and she seemed to be "looking" in Phoebe's direction, reaching out and handing her the white bottle in her palm: "Here you go, the antidote. "

--the miracle of the world that had come to her in a most bizarre way.

The one who gave her light was an invisible fellow.

She clutched the antidote handed to her with a death grip, braced herself to sit up, but couldn't, and thanked her somewhat rawly, "Thank you."

Phoebe was quiet for a moment and asked weakly in return, "Why did you give me the antidote?"

"Because you're too persistent too." The little witch knelt down and looked at her curiously, "The others who wanted to follow me would have scolded me for running away when they saw that I kept putting out poison without giving an antidote, but you kept following me no matter how badly I was hurt, and you're a girl."

The little witch shrugged her shoulders, "I'm still gentler with girls than I am with dog men, so here you go, here, use it."

"I don't need it." Phoebe refused with a very gentle shake of her head, "I'm taking it out and giving it to someone else."

"Huh?" The little witch sounded puzzled, "But I can't bring my antidote to the game."

Phoebe: "......"

The little witch was slightly alarmed: "Hey! Don't you cry! I can think of something!"

"...... that's right ......" After clearing the entire map of monsters, the game ended without Little Witch and Phoebe logging out of the game, Little Witch sat on the edge of the game's cliff and thoughtfully, "You're bringing it to your mother to use, let's see, there should be a trick to it."

"Ah there it is."

The little witch snapped to attention with a high five, "I know that Charles, the gamblers guild leader, has a skill that allows him to store skills to take out and use, and he's been pulling my strings lately, so let him use his skill to store a bottle of antidote for me, and you can take it out and use it."

Phoebe.

The rumours that the Little Witch's intelligence panel is in the nineties don't seem to be true, as she came up with Charles' skills almost at the same time as the Little Witch.

But ......

"Why do you want to help me?" Phoebe asked softly, "I'm just a weakling who is of no use to you."

"Is it because of sympathy?"

The little witch asked back with a slight hesitation, "You just pretended to cry to gain my sympathy, so why do you now look like you mind if I help you out of pity?"

Phoebe: "......"

Seen out.

Indeed, she had just heard the little witch say that she would be gentler with the girls and had quickly pretended to cry and sell out - she thought the other girl might eat that up, not realising that she had been shown up.

But seeing as it still ate up the set, it made Phoebe even more suspicious.

"You just said that your mother chose death because she felt she was weak and a drag on you." The young witch rested her jaw and changed the subject with a flourish, "It is strange that the weak have no freedom."

"What's so strange about that?" Phoebe asked rhetorically, "Isn't it an iron law of the world that only the strong can have freedom?"

"Even in the game, it's the strong who have more."

"Now you are weak even before me." The little witch shook the antidote in her own hand, "Where did you get the antidote from me, or the freedom to free your mother?"

Phoebe paused: "My freedom comes from your blessing."

"The freedom of the weak comes from the charity of the strong."

"Not oh." The little witch retorted calmly to her, "I did not help you because I gave you charity or sheltered you, it was your faith that moved me."

"That persistence and belief that I could definitely get the antidote out of my hands struck me, and I knew that as long as you didn't die, you would follow me around until I gave you the antidote, and the odds were that if I didn't give it to you now, I would be annoyed by you subsequently, so I gave it to you."

Phoebe was stunned.

"The source of freedom for the weak is faith, and there is freedom for the weak as long as they believe that what imprisons them will one day be overcome by themselves." The little witch's robes fluttered in the wind of the cliff, her voice floating in the wind from beneath her hood, "I too was once an oppressed weakling, but I too protected others in their plight, you too are now weak, you too are struggling to protect what you want to protect, we all have that freedom."

"It is not because one is strong that one has freedom, but because one aspires to freedom that the weak become strong."

Phoebe got the antidote and on the night her mother woke up, she knelt alone in front of her bed and prayed.

"God." She whispered, "I have seen only hell, never heaven, since I was born."

"If only a place as wonderful as heaven really existed in this world."

"Then please do let the little witch go to heaven."