Witch trials

The Night.

Phoebe was lying on her stomach, and at the beginning, when she found out about her period, her mother was clearly elated: "You've grown up Phoebe!"

But soon, this delight turned into a bitter smile after seeing Phoebe's pale face and the blood stains on her body, "But around here, it doesn't seem like it's a good thing for a girl to grow up."

Phoebe, lying motionless as a corpse on the bed, stared vacantly at her belly and said breathlessly, "When I pray tonight, may I damn to hell all the gods that make women bleed when they have their periods?"

Her mother smiled, "Of course."

"Phoebe," her mother asked her as she lay next to her, looking at her pale face, somewhat distressed, "why do you want to be the heir to the Sinchimani family?"

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

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

Her mother was silent.

"No, that's normal." Phoebe was unperturbed, "Then I'll just get the Sinchimani family and make it fit for me to live in, and that'll be that."

"If this place isn't free enough, I'll become its controller and make it free."

Phoebe turned to her baffled mother, "You don't need to pray to the gods at that time, you just need to tell me what you want and you'll have it all."

"If you want to become a bird, I can have them make artificial skeletal robots, so you can actually fly through the sky like a bird."

"If you want to leave Sinchimani forever , I guarantee you will never see the Sinchimani family again, if you want Sinchimani to disappear, it will disappear into thin air."

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

"There is no freedom for the weak."

Her mother didn't say a word for a long time, then she asked Phoebe softly through her 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 in a long time since I got here, and I miss that kid."

"I want to take you to meet him."

"I'm fine these days, but it's not going to be easy on my father if you want to go out with me." Phoebe thought briefly, "Wait until Daniel's seventeenth birthday, he's going to take over some of the family business to go on his adventures, my father will be tagging along to check on Daniel and will be away for at least a month, we can run out during that time."

It wasn't long before Daniel's seventeenth birthday arrived.

The children of the Sinchimani family don't celebrate their birthdays until they reach adulthood, and the first birthday they'll be widely celebrated for is the Bar Mitzvah - that means they've survived the tussle to reach adulthood.

And to start killing.

On the day of their coming of age, the children of the Sinchimani family take their own guns and go to the private prison of the Sinchimani family, picking out one of the inmates - perhaps someone who has betrayed the family, or perhaps someone incarcerated from another family - and firing the first shot of their tumultuous lives at that inmate, the Sinchimani family's first enemy. Killing the first enemy of the Sinchimani family with your own hands - this is an iconic ritual that signifies that from now on you are a member of the family, born to kill those who are hostile to the family and those who betray it.

It was reasonable to say that they wouldn't receive a trial mission until they reached adulthood.

But since Phoebe's intention on the shooting platform was to train Daniel, Daniel was carried by his father to various missions after he got off the shooting platform, and under his father's leadership, Daniel accomplished all these missions very well, so this time, Daniel is going to go out on a trial mission on his own, and his father is just going to be a watchdog from the beginning to the end, and he's not going to intervene or help - this means that Daniel will officially become the second-in-command of the Sinchimani family. This means that Daniel will officially be the second-in-command of the Sinchimani family.

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

Daniel was growing up fast, a head taller in just a few months, his soft blonde curls looked so out of place in his hands, his apple-green eyes were as cold as cocktail ice, he had a gun at his waist, his right hand was bandaged, he could smell blood as he brushed past Phoebe's shoulder, and his whole body was filled with a twisted and extreme desire to kill.

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

"There's still training on your mind before you move." Phoebe said faintly, "Not saving any strength for your own life?"

"Oh?" Daniel looked back diffidently, his apple-green eyes swept playfully at Phoebe, "Do you care much whether I die or not? The future head of the house?"

Phoebe squinted at the still-unwashed greasepaint on Daniel's face - the man was getting crazy, and would paint himself all sorts of clown masks before going out on a mission, and while the intent was to camouflage himself from outsiders' view of the face, the choice of this also-exaggerated approach said something in itself.

"I know that on the last mission, the servant your mother left you betrayed you and was shot dead by you." Phoebe took a pause, "But I left you alive on the firing table in the hopes that you would become second in command, not a madman."

"Do yourself a favor."

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

"Is it?" Unperturbed, Phoebe shrugged her shoulders and replied indifferently, "This blood is cleaner than the Sinchimani family's blood any more, isn't it?"

The night Daniel left, Phoebe used her powers to get her and her mother out of the Sinchimani family, and after a few rounds of ferrying, Phoebe and her mother made it to the Sky Island.

That was the first time Phoebe saw Heart.

This person is draped in red and black lines interlaced with elegant robes, long hair hanging down, the right ear wearing a dark red long tassel earrings, look lazy leaning back in the sofa, don't look at the rain outside the island, purple eyes half-locked seems to be in a trance, in the dense candlelight, under the eyes of the tear mole hidden, there is a kind of beauty can not be seen in the gender.

It was honestly the first time Phoebe had ever seen such a beautiful human being.

But she doesn't like Heart.

"You look weak." Phoebe looks at Heart and raises an eyebrow, "The person who gave my mother her faith is actually a weakling?"

Phoebe's mother turned her head incredulously, "Phoebe!"

"I'm weak?" Heart inclined his head to look at Phoebe, he smirked, "What am I weak in? In appearance? That I look weak?"

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

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

The smirk faded from Heart's face as he looked levelly into Phoebe's green eyes, which were unbiasedly looking right at him.

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

After Phoebe's mom left.

"You cherished your mother enough to send her to see me specifically to protect her, and you were good to her." Heart paused, "What if one day she left you?"

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

"She died." Heart said very softly.

"What killed her." Phoebe asked.

"Disease, the island, her faith, many people." Heart replies, "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 a belief, I'll make her change it." Phoebe looked up arrogantly, her eyes were as strong as ever, "What kills her, I destroy."

"...... If ......" Heart looked up, his violet eyes held a lot of emotion and his tone was as light as the rain off the island, "is she herself?"

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

--The sudden illness, the decay each time on time, the final farewell that had been accepted long ago, the last words that had been prepared long ago, it was like a dance drama that had been rehearsed by her countless times, staged in front of him for the curtain to fall.

Heart repeated the words very softly, "What if she, herself, had chosen to die?"

Phoebe choked, she was stuck in a rare moment.

Phoebe didn't have an answer to that question when she was escorted off the island by Heart, who looked back at the man in the wide robe, windblown, standing on the edge of the stormy sky island, and Heart's eyes traveled through the darkness of the storm and landed for a moment on the women boarding the boat, and then moved away again, sparingly.

-- it seemed to be that he was expecting to find an answer from her as well.

When she got back that day, her mother told her about Heart and finally just sighed, "I know Heart's mom, that's a great person, just ......"

"Not everyone can live and die that way."

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 would be that she'd be satisfied with hearing.

Soon, this problem, which Phoebe had forgotten in the back of her mind, appeared to her and her mother in an unexpectedly poignant form.

Daniel disappeared in the middle of a trial mission, and his father went on a rampage, mobilizing almost the entire family, but no trace of Daniel was ever found, and after clearing out the suspected hostile family, her overly suspicious father quickly turned the tables on those within the family.

The fact that Daniel had disappeared didn't matter to her father; what mattered was that someone had dared to move his men in front of him, against his will, out of his control.

In round after round of family purges, the fact that Phoebe and her mother had been away from the family during Daniel's trial mission was quickly explained to the servants who couldn't stand the torture.

No one could do in her father's presence what her father did not allow, did not know, including her, the heir.

Phoebe was used to being thrown in jail and tortured, her father disciplined her this way when she sometimes answered and behaved poorly, it wasn't unique to her, Daniel, or every child in the family had been in a private prison.

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

Before being taken into custody, Phoebe repeatedly warned her mother that the officers of the private prison would take a polygraph on her, and that they would not torture her as long as she was truthful with the information - it was a tradition in her family that the Sinchimani family would take good care of honest people.

So Phoebe knows that if she's honest, she'll be out of this filthy prison in a week at most.

She did honestly explain that she'd gone to Heart, and that Heart's outlandish island in the sky simply wasn't accessible to anyone without Heart opening the door anyway, but the tight-lipped look of those people repeatedly asking her where the hell she'd been made her subconsciously a little agitated.

...... This was done by repeatedly verifying the statements before asking her the same questions over and over again in the case of inconsistencies in the confessions of the inmates on both sides of the conspiracy.

On the tenth day, honest Phoebe is released from her private prison, but her ever-present foreboding is verified when she meets her torturously scarred, dishonest mother.

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

"There is no room for dishonesty in the Sinchimani family, but she is your mother, you are my only heir, and I will give her one last chance in your honor 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? What people did you see?"

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

"Honest?" Her cloaked mother tilted her head, and Phoebe never thought her ever-so-weak mother could actually put on that face in front of her father, with sneering disdain, and she was so covered in bruises that she was actually smiling, "I've told you a million times."

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

"I see beautiful people that you will never see."

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

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

"But it's been almost a dozen years, so it's normal that you don't remember, but you're going to hear it from me, so that I'll cooperate in tricking him into opening the door for you guys to go up to that place-"

"-never."

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

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

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

Her heart beat wildly.

"You are the second wife who betrayed me." Her father adjusted his gun absently, "I'm sure you already know what happened to the first wife who betrayed me, and I've never regretted killing someone who betrayed the family with my own hands, but the only thing I think I did improperly in that case was to allow Daniel to become estranged from me because of it."

"I was not qualified to teach the young one what it means to be a betrayer, leaving him to not understand what I did when I killed his mother, grow up quite rebellious, and drift away from me until he grew up to be betrayed and suffered a lot in the mission."

"Once I'm done, I won't make the same educational mistake this time."

Her father looked up at Phoebe, reached out a hand to hold her shoulder forcefully, put the gun into her palm, and said coldly, "Phoebe, as a qualified heir to the head of the family, you know how one should treat a betrayer, don't you?"

Phoebe's chest rose and fell sharply in the corset that had grown progressively tighter as she developed again, and the little gap that her mother had carefully altered the corset to make room for her day and night was not at all enough for her to breathe in a scene as tight as this, as she subconsciously gripped the gun tightly with a rare bit of post-asphyxiation stagnation in her expression.

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

"It's like knocking an apple off the tree, just punch through that heart."

She looked to her mother, who as always smiled at her as if she were the heir test that day, and mouthed to her, [Shoot it].

Phoebe took two deep breaths, and she raised the gun slowly, her hand not shaking for a second, 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.

Slowly her father raised his hands, a crack of horror appearing in the expression that had been grasping them, "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 that I would have every bit as much courage to turn it on you, my esteemed father."

"Loosen her up."

Her father froze for a moment and ordered, "Let go of her mother."

But at the same time her father made a very faint downward gesture, which Phoebe saw with a quick eye-it was the master of the house's code word for shoot.

So Phoebe went ahead and without hesitation fired a shot into her father's hand, and almost as soon as her father screamed out in agony, the guards froze their guns in motion.

"I said, untie her." Phoebe was on the verge of hyperventilating in that corset, but her tone was still calm.

"...... Truly worthy of being the child I personally taught and raised, courage and reflexes are not lacking in one." Her father actually raised his head with a few moments of appreciation covering the palm of his hand that was gushing blood as he stared at her with a sinister gaze, "Perhaps after giving you a little more time, you can really succeed in taking power from me."

Phoebe felt bad when she saw her father pull a round object with the reverse cross symbol out of the lining, and the scent from the object made Phoebe want to back away in a moment of discomfort.

"This is the family's new smuggling business, the scientific name of this thing is [Heresy], and it has all sorts of roles you can't imagine." Her father laughed out loud, "For example, the function of this one in front of you is that if you shoot me, the gunshot wounds inflicted will be transferred to the most important person to you."

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

Phoebe's pupils constricted and she turned her head to look at her mother - she was on her knees covering her hands, blood pouring out.

"It seems I haven't taught you enough." Her father suddenly gripped her gun, his look and tone becoming eerily cold, "Then let's start reteaching you from today's lesson."

Her father took hold of her gun and snapped it at himself, at the same time a loud gunshot rang out behind Phoebe, who was frozen in expression and movement, her head turned to look away as his father pinched her face.

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

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

Because she felt the little gap in her corset that could be used for breathing, disappear.

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

After Phoebe crawls out of her first single-player game covered in blood, she starts searching the game like crazy for props to heal her wounds.

She knew that as long as she didn't log out of the game right now, her mother would be frozen in time shortly after the moment she was wounded, and she might still be saved if she had missed her shot a little, not right in the heart!

But soon Phoebe realizes that this seemingly all-powerful game that grants everyone's wishes doesn't have healing props-players don't have access to props that restore their life points, and she can't find any that instantly heal gunshot wounds.

Phoebe logged out of the game in a trance, picking a random coordinate.

Unfortunately, her mother did not die.

Heart had been sending people to follow them after they were sent off the island, and after things went south, Heart realized something was wrong and quickly sent someone from her own guild, or player, to infiltrate the Sinchimani family in any way they could, and bring her mother, who had been shot, out to the island to be kept under close guard.

Phoebe meets her unconscious mother on the island.

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

"Sorry."

"I fired the shot, and I'm responsible for her current state." Phoebe's tone was flat, "I'm sorry it's not your turn to say it."

The two men fell into silence looking at each other.

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

"She said, Phoebe, that you were right, that it is the strong that have freedom, and that a weak person like her who can only pray and struggle wherever she goes in the world, on and off the island, does not deserve to be free."

"She lives, and to you it may be nothing more than the burden of the weak against the strong."

Phoebe's hands clenched in her lap for a moment.

It's not like that!

I'm the weak one to you now! I can't do anything!

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

"God." She closed her eyes and chanted softly in a hoarse voice, her gesture reverent, as her mother had clumsily corrected her earlier, "If You do exist, I pray to You with all my heart."

"I hope she survives."

"Did you know?" A player whispered, "That little witch, the player who has recently made a big splash as the number one newcomer, actually has a healing skill!"

"Wow, a healing department? The major guilds will go crazy for her!"

"Yes, the King's Guild have smashed more than one million charging points, also did not see her join, and her treatment conditions harsh ruthless, never easy to treat the players, down in front of her she did not see will pull, completely depending on the mood to treat, sometimes a time to treat more than a dozen players, and sometimes a dozen also do not treat, and she is not only will treat, or poison people, sometimes you beg to treat to her to make a mistake Sometimes you beg for treatment to get her offended, directly give you poisoned stun."

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

"Yeah, the big guilds are all defeated, so it's better for us bottom tier players to just watch the fun."

Chatty players walked past Phoebe as she stared unblinkingly at a player in front of the entrance to the boarding gate who was fully covered in black robes - that would be the little witch.

Heart's admonition was still in her ears - [The little witch is a very dangerous player, you've only just entered the game, follow the guild and brush your books well, leave the matter of collecting the little witch to the guild].

[Don't go near the little witch, she only hits dangerous big books with more than fifty people, you're just giving away your head if you follow her in.]

Her mother has weakened to a very dangerous threshold.

In fact, after using so many props, she shouldn't have weakened so quickly, but her mother was rapidly decaying as if she had lost the will to live, and every time she got close she could feel her breathing getting fainter.

Phoebe finally had to face the question Heart had once posed to her - [What would you do if it was her choice to die?]

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

But she couldn't just sit back and do nothing either - at least get close enough to the little witch to gamble, was Phoebe's thought.

She, a newbie player who had only entered the game for less than a week, just followed the high player [Little Witch], who was number one on the newbie list, into the highest difficulty copy in the small TV area - the big copy with more than fifty people.

And then unsurprisingly get abused to no end.

Phoebe is not sure what kind of persistence she relies on, dragging her body, which has almost been corrupted by the monster, to the ground with both hands, and approaching the witch who stands on the ground, jumps lightly, and sprays poisons all over the place to disperse the corrupted monster.

The mist of the poisons mixed with the monster's brooding black aura and lurched toward Phoebe's face, and as she stared in a trance at the twisting and coming black mist, she almost saw the blackness that represented death descending in front of her.

It was as if she had seen the chaotic bloodshed of that night in the private prison.

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

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

The black mist was broken by the shaking cloak, the monsters were dispersed by the poison, and a shimmering light fell upon the forest.

Phoebe looked up in a daze at the person standing barefoot in front of her. The little witch in her cloak lifted a corner of her cloak, revealing a pair of gray eyes, which seemed to "look" in Phoebe's direction, and reached out, handing her the white bottle in her palm: "Here you are, the antidote. "

--The wonders of this world had come to her in a most bizarre way.

The one who gave her the light was an invisible guy.

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

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

"Because you are also too persistent." The little witch squatted down and looked at her with curiosity, "The others who wanted to follow me saw that I kept releasing the poison without giving the antidote, they had already scolded me and ran away, but only you have been following me no matter how badly hurt you are, and you are 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'm not using it." Phoebe shook her head no very gently, "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 the little witch and Phoebe logging out of the game, the little witch sat on the edge of the game's cliff and thoughtfully, "You're bringing it to your mother for use, let's see, there should be a trick."

"Ah there."

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

Phoebe, one time.

Rumor has it that the little witch's intelligence panel is on ninety, so it doesn't seem to be false, she came up with Charles's skills almost at the same time as the little witch.

But ......

"Why are you helping me?" Phoebe asked softly, "I'm just a weakling who's no use to you."

"Is it because of sympathy?"

The little witch asked back, slightly hesitantly, "You just pretended to cry to gain my sympathy, why do you now act like you mind if I help you out of sympathy?"

Phoebe: "......"

Seen.

Indeed, she'd just heard the little witch say she'd be gentler with girls, and had quickly pretended to be crying - she'd thought the other woman might eat it up, and hadn't expected to be seen to do so.

But looking out or eating the shit out of it made Phoebe even more confused.

"You just said that your mother chose to die because she felt weak and a drag on you." The young witch rested her jaw and had a moment to change the subject, "It's strange that the weak have no freedom."

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

"Even in a 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 calmly retorted to her, "I didn't help you because I was giving you charity or sheltering you, it was your faith that impressed me."

"That persistence and belief that it was absolutely possible to get the antidote out of my hands struck me, and I knew that as long as you didn't die, you'd follow me around until I gave you the antidote, and the odds were that if I didn't give it to you now, the followup would be annoying to you, 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 them." The little witch's robes fluttered in the wind of the cliffs, her voice drifted in the wind from under her hood, "I was once a weakling who was oppressed, but I also protected others in my plight, you are now a weakling who is also struggling to protect what you want to protect, and 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 the night her mother woke up, she knelt alone in front of her bed and prayed:

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

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

"Then please be sure to let the little witch go to heaven."