The mont they stepped out the main door, the Main Quest on their task interface displayed as completed.
At the sa ti, a flash of white light swept over them, and everyone's status was fully restored.
The teleportation option had not opened yet, but Bai Mu knew the Script had ended here. They only needed to watch the final cinematic sequence before they could return to the community.
He speculated to himself that they might witness a scene of another oblivious young girl wandering into the Ancient Manor. After all, the demon and the manor had not disappeared. Many movies ended this way, planting a hook for a sequel so that if the box office perford well, a second installnt could naturally follow.
Of course, the Scripts of Paradise were not movies, but including a similar hint would be perfectly logical.
However, this particular ending did not seem to shift the perspective into the future. What appeared before everyone's eyes was a narrow, gloomy dirt house. The surrounding scenery shifted in an instant, and like idle spectators, they walked right into the building.
It was obvious that this family was utterly destitute. A bed, a table, and a cabinet were all cramd into the sa room, without even a decent stool in sight. Ventilation holes dotted the walls, and peering through them revealed a narrow alleyway just outside.
The buildings outside were identical dirt houses. This place was likely situated in so small town, a residential area for the impoverished.
Bai Mu could move freely within this scene, yet he could not touch anything. He tried to press his hand against the yellowish-brown earthen wall, but instead of the rough texture of stone, he felt only empty air.
His hand passed straight through a clay pot on the table. None of the five players could interact with anything in this scene. Scattered Fireflies felt a bit uneasy about this and asked, "Could it be that we still haven't cleared the stage?"
"The Main Quest is already completed. It's just playing a cinematic for us," Yan Yu said. "It's probably doing it this way because it's a team Script, leaving us so room for discussion while we watch. If this were a solo Script, we would have already been forced into a first-person perspective."
Before his voice could fade, they heard a fit of coughing.
A young girl materialized on the previously empty bed.
It was Ellen in her childhood. Bai Mu's mory of this Witch's appearance remained fresh, so he recognized her at a single glance.
"Is this showing us the Witch's past?" Yan Yu asked.
Ellen's legs were wrapped in bandages. She lay on the bed, entirely immobilized.
The five players gathered around her bed, but their presence didn't affect her in the slightest. This was likely just a recorded mory playing out like a film. Ti seed to be accelerated for the onlookers. They watched as she lay on that bed day after day, from sunrise to sunset. For the vast majority of the ti, she simply stared blankly at the cobweb-covered ceiling. Occasionally, spiders, cockroaches, and rats would crawl onto her bed. At first, she tried crying out for help.
But it wasn't long before she grew accustod to it. No one would co no matter how loudly she called. She dealt with it all with a numb indifference. Even when rats scurried over her body, she would rely grab them in annoyance and toss them onto the floor.
Her mother was responsible for changing her dressings and bringing back bread to feed her. It was rye bread mixed with chaff and wood shavings, hard enough to be used as a bludgeon.
Before becoming a Witch, she had lived a life of abject poverty. Her only toy was a stuffed teddy bear, a gift brought back by her mother. However, her mother was always busy, leaving the house before dawn and only returning at dusk.
As for her father, it was exactly as described in the diary; he treated her as if she were invisible. Even when he returned ho, he wouldn't look her in the eye, much less speak to her.
While her mother was tending to her, her father would occasionally drag the woman away into the adjacent room, followed by suggestive noises filtering through the thin walls.
Lying on her sickbed, Ellen would scratch at her dicine bottle in a daze. One day, she picked up the stuffed toy her mother had given her and tore at it violently. By the ti she snapped out of it, the teddy bear was nothing more than a pile of tattered scraps.
These scenes flashed by rapidly in the eyes of the group. In just a dozen seconds, they had witnessed Ellen's pathetic past in its entirety.
"Is it showing us this to make us sympathize with her?" Great Northern Wilderness pondered. "I have to admit, she really was quite pitiful at this point in ti. But there's no telling how many people she ended up murdering later on."
"If it were , rather than clinging to life like this, I'd rather end it all with a single slice," Yan Yu remarked. "Living like this is just too agonizing."
The cinematic continued to play. Firelight suddenly flared around them as a raging inferno ignited.
They stood in the center of the blaze, yet they felt no heat and slled no choking smoke. As the gloomy room burned, even the air seed to lose its dampness, no longer emitting that heavy, musty stench.
Two charred humanoid figures collapsed within the flas, while another tiny silhouette walked out into the dark alleyway.
Ellen limped out from the shadowy alley, tilting her head up to gaze at the moon. A black cat appeared at her feet. She cast one last glance back at the burning house, then plunged into the darkness without looking back.
"Don't tell she burned both her parents to death..." Scattered Fireflies said. "Is this the redacted content from the first diary?" "Her mother was actually quite good to her. Heartless. She really was beyond saving," Great Northern Wilderness said, shaking his head.
After this scene, the surroundings shifted once more. Ellen, previously clad in rags, underwent a drastic transformation. She was now dressed in a delicate, exquisite dress and lived in a magnificent, luxurious mansion.
She had beco a Witch. Everything she could never possess in the past was now at her fingertips. Then, she began to kill. She murdered in every conceivable way, just as cruelly as she had described in her second diary.
"So this final cutscene is just giving us a recap." Great Northern Wilderness stretched lazily. "It should be about over by now, right? I'm getting a bit tired and want to go back and get so sleep."
Another dozen seconds passed as the life of the Witch Ellen flashed rapidly before their eyes.
The images froze in darkness. Just as Great Northern Wilderness thought the cinematic was over, a bloody body began to crawl across the floorboards of the Ancient Manor.
It was the Witch, stripped of her lower half and her eyes. It seed that by this period, Ellen and the girl's bodies had already been swapped.
She could only drag herself across the floor using her hands, leaving a horrifying trail of blood in her wake. Yet, even in this state, she had not died.
That black cat appeared on the staircase ahead of her, speaking with a hint of surprise, "You still haven't died of despair after all this ti? I feel like you have a lot of potential."
"Ellen? She left a long ti ago. She's incredibly happy right now, running around in your body. At this ti of day, she's probably having dinner in your ho."
"Stop thinking about her, that's not important. Let teach you a magic spell to make the pain fly away. As long as you do things for , it won't hurt anymore." "Right? It's amazing, isn't it? It doesn't hurt anymore, does it?"
"Co on, I will guide you through your first job as a Witch."
"You don't want to? But if you refuse, it's going to start hurting again."
"Suit yourself. But if you change your mind, you can co find in the basent anyti. I'll be waiting for you there."
After the black cat left, the Witch who had lost her lower half began to bleed and tremble all over again.
Despite the agony, she persevered and dragged herself to the drawing room. There lay her half-sewn stuffed teddy bear. During the brief monts when the pain had subsided, she had tried to nd the toy.
Enduring the excruciating pain, she grasped the needle and thread and perfectly stitched the doll's severed arm back into place.
Afterward, unable to move any further due to the increasingly severe pain, she retreated back to her bed.
During this period, the black cat visited her bedside to persuade her several more tis, but she tremblingly refused on every single occasion.
"How strange. Why haven't you died yet?"
"You say Ellen is your friend and you think she'll still co back."
"That is simply the funniest joke I have ever heard. Humans truly co in all shapes and sizes."
"Just as I thought, you really don't have the aptitude to be a Witch."
The black cat left the bedroom in disappointnt, and everything fell back into dead silence.
[The Script's storyline has ended. You have completed the Script: Haunted Manor.]
[Community teleportation is now open. You will be automatically teleported to the Community in 180 seconds.]
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