Mysteries: Arcana Wars

Brilliant Holiday Hotel, lobby entrance.

Leonard finally arrived at the hotel. Looking at the entire hotel filled with an evil red light, his heart sank.

The towering glass building was like a burning torch. The blood-red light at the top had already covered one-third of the building, making it impossible to see what was happening on the roof. The sticky red light continued to devour downwards.

The dazzling light shot straight into the sky, dyeing the dense cumulonimbus clouds in the sky into a depressing red.

Without much hesitation, Leonard released all the natural spirits in his teeth and quickly entered the hotel.

After being caught by Gloria in Geraldine's dream last time, Leonard began to avoid entering Geraldine's dream on some sensitive matters. The spirituality flowing around him told him that the assistant was here, and he lost consciousness and sank into the dream. At this time, the natural spirits that he had hastily captured became the best means of tracking.

Judging from Emlyn's news and what has happened during this period, it is unknown why the Church of Night attaches so much importance to Geraldine, but Leonard believes that Gloria, who has received the news, will arrive soon.

These nature spirits don't have any special abilities, but practice has proven that they are indeed good at tracking.

It seems that everyone has their own place in this farce, and now Leonard only needs to smash the "bonfire" on the roof. As expected, it is David who is pushed onto the altar.

The red light circulated everywhere, staining all objects. The people stranded in the lobby held their heads and lay on the ground, wailing in pain, but gradually dissolved in the screams, their skin gradually stained with the luster of the marble slabs on the ground, and some places turned white and wrinkled, showing a paper-like texture.

Like some kind of spreading moss, cold marble patterns climbed up the crawler's skin along the arm, and the alienated part became a smooth strange stone born from contaminated flesh and blood, sucking the mother's flesh and blood and struggling to expand.

The floor that the crawler was touching was also contaminated and mutated. The tiles that touched his arms showed small pieces of yellow-white, soft and sticky skin texture, rising and falling as the wailer struggled. The tiles that touched people's clothes showed a disgusting and collapsed material that was a mixture of flesh and fiber.

People passively exchange characteristics with everything they come into contact with, seeking an equal intermediate state. The hard tends to be flexible, and the brittle tends to be tough, until two different things become the same equal existence.

This was a common feature of the few extraordinary disasters caused by the Ferris Cult. Leonard tried to recall that he once saw a man and a cow stick together and assimilate into two identical, half-man, half-cow pathetic creatures, just like two cups of incompatible juice were poured together and shaken to become two identical cups of swill.

What will happen if this pollution continues? Maybe we will see people who look like marbles, or marbles that look like people?

Now, under the pollution of the red glow, the entire hotel has turned into a large mixer. Steel bars, cement, flesh, bones... everything has been shattered by the sharp and fine wall-breaking blades, completely erasing all differences. Under the guidance of the red glow, they will be mixed and alienated into some new, completely equal existence, where there is no such thing as "self" and "other".

Some people even hugged each other and cried in fear, but in this way they merged with each other and could no longer be separated. The new tissue that was formed after the melting made the two people become one.

Whether out of fear or desire, these strange people couldn't wait to rush towards Leonard, screaming as soon as they saw Leonard step into the lobby.

A monster formed by the fusion of three customers charged forward, one of its heads completely crumpled into a ball of crumpled paper, but still stubbornly showing the texture of a human head. The whole creature huddled together like a ball, roaring and baring its teeth as it opened its six large hands to grab Leonard.

This is like a hug. They long to hug, to share, to pass on their own misfortune and pain to everyone equally, and greedily to share the thriving hope of the visitor, until the visitor is exactly the same as themselves, becoming a kind of identical existence.

Then a heavy luggage cart hit the monster hard. The strange power from the mythical creature turned the luggage cart into a cannonball, tearing the monster's body apart and taking several people with it, directly breaking the monster's attack. With a series of crisp "bang" sounds, the running monster exploded into a ball of flying confetti.

...These people...are all made of paper?

Leonard did not linger in the fight, but quickly advanced into the hotel, two police guns slipped into his hands, and he used intensive firepower to clear a way for himself.

Under the hail of bullets, the crowd that rushed over like zombies was immediately shot into sieves. But they were like a thin paper doll, with no trace of blood in the wounds on their bodies, only a large cloud of flying debris brought out by the bullets.

After a moment's silence, they suddenly burst into pieces, forming balls of flying confetti.

This made Leonard feel that he was not slaughtering some disgusting monster in a polluted hotel, but helping the newlyweds put away paper robes at a wedding, or like a mentally weak white-collar worker beating piles of documents in the office and going crazy.

The strangest thing is that the wall that was shot also looked so abnormal. There were no flying bricks in the bullet holes, but flying pieces of paper.

Was the entire building turned into paper, or was the entire building replaced?

Leonard was on high alert at the bizarre and strange scene. Faint soul fluctuations came from the paper figures. He immediately mobilized his spiritual power to spread to the crowd, trying to make the souls attached to the puppets fall asleep on the spot, but found that it had no effect on these paper figures.

No... that's because they have fallen into the same vivid dream, so these origami puppets are only controlled by a small part of the remaining mental body, like a weird collective sleepwalking, and the real souls are not in these paper people.

The real bodies of the passers-by involved in the extraordinary disaster disappeared and were replaced by some kind of paper puppets, but their consciousness fell into the same dream. They still thought they were awake and escaping in reality, unconsciously controlling the corresponding paper figures to run around, thinking that they were in great danger.

Reality feeds back to dreams, and dreams influence reality. The entire hotel becomes a grand puppet theater, and only the actors cannot tell whether they are puppeteers in their dreams or origami puppets on the stage.

The good news is that the changes in reality only affected these paper figures and did not pollute people's dreams. If they can successfully wake up from the nightmare the next day, it will be a new and clean day.

This gave Leonard a new idea. Leonard briefly entered this collective dream. As he expected, this huge dream completely reflected everything that happened in the hotel in reality. The people in the dream were shouting in despair, not realizing that they had already fallen into a deep sleep. All the bad luck was a nightmare. He could even feel that those who died were not dead, but were "kicked out" of this collective dream.

In this dream, Leonard did not sense Geraldine's presence.

In other words, the Geraldine here now is not an [origami puppet], but a complete real person.