Mysteries: Arcana Wars

Klein woke up in a daze, followed by a headache and dizziness, and a strange feeling of nausea came from all parts of his body.

Everything in front of him was unfamiliar. Klein found himself sitting in a Fifth Epoch-style family restaurant. In front of him was a long wooden dining table that could seat more than a dozen people. Although the table was simple, it was very clean, just like everything else in the room, full of life.

Where...is this?

Klein subconsciously tried to stand up, but found himself tied to a wooden chair. The red ropes made it even more difficult for him to move since his limbs were weak.

Bits of memories struggled to break through the fog of thoughts. Klein vaguely remembered that he seemed to have just been fighting in a casino in order to help a man named Angel find clues about his daughter. After a series of inexplicable changes, he started fighting with cultists and poachers.

...wait...in here...

There seemed to be a strange little girl. Klein began to remember that little girl crying and running around in the casino, but Melissa gave him instructions in her hallucination, asking him to kill the eight-year-old girl.

Of course, Klein did so.

Then, it seemed that the annoying guy named Yis appeared. Under the influence of the embers of disillusionment, his thoughts were confused, and he chased after him in a daze, burning his spirituality to approach nothingness. Finally, he fell to the ground because of the exhaustion of spirituality and the collapse of reality.

And after that?

The more he thought about the memories of this period, the more his temples throbbed. He seemed to have been picked up by someone, dragged into a small room, and tied up. But he was too distracted at the time and could not remember the situation at all.

...So am I in... a fantasy or reality...?

The wall lamps flickered and the candlelight wavered.

His vision wavered, doubled, hazy, and blurry black spots licked the view before him from time to time.

Klein gritted his teeth and tried to break free, but it was in vain. He just dragged the chair on the ground, making a harsh sound.

After another effort, Klein and his chair fell to the ground with a bang.

Only then did Klein notice the difference in his body. The long legs and suit leather that had originally resembled Hermann were gone, replaced by a pair of delicate limbs with puppet-like joints, covered by a strangely designed skirt.

I became a... doll? ?

...No...My consciousness is trapped in this doll!

This is a fantasy!!

And my perspective is... this puppet?

Klein tried to twist and turn on the chair again, shouting, but he found that he actually had no control over his limbs. The struggle just now was actually just the action of the puppet character in the illusion, and he was still just a camera.

...wait, no...

The desire to break free and overturn the chair just now was not Klein's real thought, but the thought of the puppet in the illusion. This thought really affected Klein through the illusion.

Not only the senses, but now the emotions, spiritual intuition, and even thoughts from the illusion are invading Klein's mind!

He is no longer a person who has nothing to do with the camera, but a rag doll that has been eroded and polluted in all directions!

The door creaked and someone came in, casually placing an antique lantern on the dining table.

"Have you thought it through? Our Mr. Alice?"

This familiar voice is... me?

As Alice's perspective moved upward, Klein saw the person coming.

The person in front of him could not see any changes in his appearance. The strange and flowing cloth was long and numerous, wrapped around his body and floating in the air, completely covering his body curves. Two pale and slender hands stretched out from the layers of black cloth, and gently tapped the white mask on his face through the strange black gloves.

Affected by Alice in the illusion, Klein couldn't clearly see the appearance of the visitor. He only felt that the mask in front of him was pale and slippery, as if it had a kind of wriggling vitality, making it difficult to tell what material it was made of. It was hard like plastic or ceramic, but also mixed with the flexibility of flesh and broken bones. It was even impossible to tell whether it was an inorganic man-made object, or a twisted life form that was beyond human rational cognition.

The man with blurry facial features, wrapped in a squirming black cloth, approached Klein and helped him up with the chair, but did not untie him. He took a few steps back and sat lightly on the dining table.

The disability caused by sluggishness and confusion gradually eased as Klein's mind became more active, but some kind of unreasonable anger and hatred burst out from somewhere in the storm of thought, driving Klein to tear the joints of his puppet.

"Sly! I won't let you go! Ever!!"

A hoarse and piercing voice gushed out of Klein's mouth, roaring at the vague Roselle text.

"Oh? Really? But we've been working together for over a thousand years, and I thought we were pretty compatible."

"Fuck you bullshit! Sneaky you old liar! If it weren't for your bastard trap, I wouldn't be trapped in this damn place!"

The black gloves removed the strange white mask, revealing a strange face. Klein could vaguely find his own face on this face. It seemed a bit like Klein Moretti in the Fifth Epoch, and a bit like Zhou Mingrui in the Old Epoch. Many of his originally clear memories were shattered, and the most familiar features were completely smashed into a mess, mixed together in an unknown way, and instead appeared in front of Klein in a completely unfamiliar form.

But this is not entirely based on familiar memories. During the difficult gaze, a large amount of dark and strange black water and impurities gushed out from the shattered face, and finally merged the appearances engraved on the soul into a daunting skin.

Klein salvaged fragments of memories from his madness. He seemed to see this disturbing face in the gaps of previous history.

Is this... my future self?

Or... my past self——

The real me? ?

Alice continued to howl, madly crushing her rationality and her words, leaving no meaningful words in her screams. She struggled hard with the chair, but in the end, she was left with only impotent rage.

Klein could no longer distinguish, deep in his soul and spirit, what was the mad erosion of Alice in the illusion and what was his true thoughts. The mad god's chaotic delusions broke through the boundary between reality and illusion in the form of hallucinations, and were mixed up with Klein's own thoughts and spirituality.

The strange face just smiled and said nothing, watching Alice's struggle with interest.

Expression, speech, appearance, spirituality... The strong sense of disharmony made Klein shudder. Every word, smile, and gesture made Klein unable to believe that he could one day show such a state, which was completely different from his most fundamental self-perception.

The Mad God's split and distortion seriously affected Klein's self-thinking. All the uneasiness and doubts he had felt since waking up grew infinitely in the fear at this moment.

Beneath that face was an uneasiness and unknown that spanned the long river of time, and a horror that went against all of Klein's current self-perceptions.

It was as if He had completely mixed His two identities with Klein Moretti and Zhou Mingrui, cruelly sewing the two skins into this comfortable coat to cover up the huge lies under the false disguise. The horrifying and desperate story kept growing under the empty shell of the broken man.

The [mystery] before my eyes, is it me, or——

Fu Sheng Xuan Huang Tian Zun!!!