Lin Ye opened the wardrobe. Inside were lined up women’s heads, all frozen in smiles, looking like some kind of macabre art display.
Those women seemed almost alive, possessing an unsettling lifelike quality.
“This definitely shouldn’t be displayed out in the open.”
Alice decided to abandon the bed; she didn’t want to know what the owner of this place had done on it.
The bedroom door suddenly shut on its own, separating them from Mia.
“This should be your battleground, right? This is your home turf.”
Lin Ye looked at Alice. Although he could use the power of Rule Fragments to fight, he didn’t know how to kill a mental creature inside the mental world.
“Of course. As long as you lend me a bit of mental energy, I can handle ordinary foes.”
Alice still held out hope of borrowing Lin Ye’s mental energy.
“I won’t lend it. I feel like you’d use my mental energy for something bad. This is the mental world; you should be able to actively absorb mental energy, right?”
Lin Ye hadn’t forgotten what she really was.
“Maybe so.”
Alice showed a look that said, oh, that’s how it works.
“Can’t you at least worry about me? I’ve been stuck out here alone.”
Mia pushed the door open and complained, clearly annoyed.
“This is your turf, and you were the one who dragged me in here. You should be the one worrying about me.”
Lin Ye suddenly felt fine with that arrangement. He was always the one protecting others; this time he prepared to let Mia and Alice handle the enemies.
“...That seems okay. Stay behind me, don’t run off.”
Mia accepted Lin Ye’s decision without hesitation.
“Fine. Are these heads the rare items you were looking for?”
Lin Ye didn’t like this place. He would rather spend an afternoon fishing by the sea than wander in a pervert-murderer’s mental world.
“No, not this many.”
Mia led Lin Ye out of the bedroom. In the living room lay a male corpse, its body covered in wounds, yet still intact.
It made Lin Ye think of the raincoat cucumber.
The living room connected to another bedroom and a downward staircase; this seemed to be the upper level of the building.
The two bedrooms were indistinguishable; every wardrobe held rows of women’s heads.
The three of them went down the stairs. On the first floor, a hall connected to the kitchen, the restroom, and the bathroom.
Strangely, the first floor had no exit and no stairs to other levels.
They searched around the first floor but found nothing useful.
“If you were a killer who collects women’s heads, where would you hide anything important?”
Mia seemed unable to sense the building’s structure with mental energy either, and so appealed to Lin Ye.
“...Do you have some bias against me? Why would you think I can understand a killer’s mind?”
Lin Ye really didn’t want to know the psychology of that kind of person.
“Aren’t you a doctor? Doctors should encounter lots of patients like that, right?”
Mia said matter-of-factly.
“I’m not a psychiatrist, and my workplace never gets that dramatic.”
On the contrary, Lin Ye’s job was sometimes boring enough to make him ponder the meaning of human existence.
“Stop the chatter. The next storage point is still waiting for us to explore.”
Mia kept moving her fingers, impatient.
“I’d put it in the basement. There’s no exit here and no cavity in the walls. The exit is either above or below. I think below is more likely, because those heads don’t have bodies.”
Lin Ye stamped his foot; there didn’t seem to be emptiness below.
Thud!
Mia couldn’t wait and stomped on the floor. The floor collapsed in a spiderweb pattern, revealing an underground space hidden beneath.
“Hurry up, follow me! It’s collapsing!”
Mia jumped into the basement. The basement was hung with headless corpses. In the center of those bodies stood a large-looking, strangely soft bed, and a man lay on it.
The whole building began to collapse. The man had just opened his eyes when he was thrown into the adjacent wall.
Mia started searching the bed. She found a black book tucked in a crevice of the mattress and a scepter inlaid with gems on the bedside.
“That man should have something too.”
Lin Ye reminded her.
Mia grabbed the man from the wall and pulled him back, finding a small knife on his person.
Then Mia shoved the man back into the wall.
A large amount of rubble fell into the basement. Alice opened an umbrella to shield Lin Ye from the falling stones.
“Follow me.”
Mia opened a large door on the basement wall and led the two of them out.
The three passed through a passageway and returned to the cave.
“You didn’t need to search the basement by all that fuss, did you?”
Lin Ye thought Mia could have simply torn down the house.
“For small storage points like this, you can only tamper with the building once before the storage point collapses. If we picked the wrong spot, not only would we fail to get the items, we’d have trouble leaving the storage point. I could force-sense the structure of the storage point, but that would alert its owner. Even I would have difficulty killing the storage point’s owner inside the storage point. That man was just the storage point’s defense mechanism.”
Mia took out the three items and gestured for Lin Ye to choose first.
“I don’t even know the functions or value of these items. Are you sure this junk is really worth more than Dreamstones?”
Lin Ye picked up the black book. He already had a scepter and didn’t lack spiritual energy weapons.
“These are mental constructs the storage point owner used for a long time. They’re definitely more valuable than Dreamstones.”
Mia chose the small knife and handed the remaining scepter to Alice.
“I get one too?”
Alice accepted the scepter and waved it a couple of times.
“Three people, three items, it fits.”
Without further words, Mia led them toward the second storage point.
Lin Ye glanced through the black book and found it recorded processes for making various artworks.
The knowledge inside was complex; it was more than superficial techniques and contained much about inner craft as well.
‘...Pretty interesting.’
Lin Ye only skimmed a few pages and realized the book was far more useful than he had expected.
Before long, Mia led them near a blurred region. She used Dreamstones to create a passage. The three entered the storage point through the passage.
Unlike the previous bedroom, the second storage point was a strange maze.
The passage connected to the maze’s wall. They exited the passage and stood on top of the maze walls.
The walls rose about ten meters. From the top, all Lin Ye could see in his field of vision were gray walls; the maze’s end was nowhere in sight.
“Are you sure this is a storage point?”
This was clearly some kind of anti-theft setup.
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