"Magic, my favorite."
The girl puppet with the steel saw turned and sang, but the background music had already stopped. Below the stage, Jenkins clutched his side, his gaze fixed on the performance. He watched the lights shift from warm to cool tones, watched the girl puppet twirl and sing as she approached two constantly shifting wooden boxes.
"Oh~"
he murmured, swallowing hard:
"Why does it always have to be a story like this?"
As he watched, the girl puppet expertly used the steel saw to slice the two wooden boxes into twelve segnts in just a few short minutes. The grueso work was accompanied by the screams of the other two puppets and the girl's cheerful song.
Then, it rearranged the twelve segnts, swapping their positions.
With a deafening snap of its fingers, the two boxes rose into the air and vanished. The puppets, now "rearranged," remained standing there. There were no visible marks of cutting or piecing them back together, but their appearances had completely changed, as if they were brand new. Even their clothes were different:
"Father, Mother, I'm going out."
The girl puppet casually tossed the steel saw toward the hole in the oil painting backdrop, smashing an even larger hole in it, and then recited her lines.
"Alright."
The reply was simple, but the two new puppets' voices were completely devoid of emotion.
Remaining perfectly still, they ascended into the air, while the girl puppet walked toward the door depicted on the oil painting. The backdrop changed again, signaling the start of the third act.
The ticket listed the number of acts for different plays. "The Magic Girl" had only four, which ant the puppet show was already halfway over.
Jenkins let out a long sigh. The wound on his side had mostly healed. Based on the pattern of the first two acts, where he, as "Mr. Mirror," had been forced to interact with the girl puppet once in each, he figured he would probably be dragged into the third and fourth acts for so bizarre reason as well.
In the first act, he had rely answered a question; in the second, he had been forced to fight the puppets. He had no idea what the third act would bring. And as he pondered this, the third act began, accompanied by a complex soundscape.
The oil painting backdrop reappeared, depicting a bustling, noisy street shrouded in a swirling gray fog. This ti, the figures in the painting weren't puppets but real humans. The background sound wasn't music; a cacophony of voices and carriage wheels filled the air, as if a genuinely chaotic street lay just behind the stage.
The girl puppet skipped onto the stage from the side, making her way to the center with a cheerful gait, singing a tune even without musical accompanint. The lyrics weren't particularly important, mostly expressing her joyful mood, and, of course, boasting about being the most beautiful girl and the most brilliant magician.
New props descended from above: a puppet-sized carriage and a coachman puppet sitting atop it, waiting for a passenger. The girl puppet approached the carriage and declared in a sing-song voice:
"The stage is about to open, the magic show cannot be delayed! Please take to that theater."
The coachman puppet leaped down from the carriage with an exaggerated flourish, twirling with the girl puppet as he replied:
"The stage is about to open, you're the scheduled perforr, but please, pity this poor coachman—pay your fare before we depart!"
"The fare can certainly be paid, but please, state your price."
the girl puppet sang back.
"Since you're a magician, please retrieve their hearts for ."
Three beams of light shone down on the stage, and within them, three new puppets descended. On the far left stood a male puppet reading a newspaper in front of a painted lamppost. In the middle was a middle-aged woman puppet clutching a bag of bread before a painted intersection. Closest to the carriage was a flower girl puppet with a basket, her head bobbing left and right as if looking for custors.
Jenkins couldn't fathom the connection between "magician" and "retrieve their hearts," but the girl puppet readily agreed.
The stage lights abruptly went out, leaving only four spotlights: one on the girl puppet and one on each of the three passerby puppets.
"The magic show is imminent! Watch , the prettiest magician, effortlessly claim their hearts."
The girl puppet sang and twirled, approaching each of the three puppets in turn. She then produced a knife from sowhere and, right before Jenkins's eyes, perford a demonstration of puppet disassembly and woodworking, genuinely acquiring three wooden hearts.
She praised her own exquisite magical skills and was about to carry the three wooden hearts back to the carriage. But she suddenly stopped. The stage lights flickered, and the piercing, hurried screech of a violin cut through the air. The three dismantled puppets reassembled themselves as if ti were reversing. However, the restored puppets were now black. The girl puppet's voice recited:
"How unlucky, the undead have risen! Oh, mirror, mirror, please help deal with these spirits!"
The spotlight on the girl puppet vanished. The three black puppets, bathed in cold white light, all turned their heads to face Jenkins in the audience.
He glanced uneasily at the tal doll, which had sohow returned to the seat beside him.
"If I take them apart this ti, it shouldn't affect the story's progression, right?"
"Of course, if you can actually manage to take them apart."
The tal doll was already starting to clumsily flee toward the row of chairs behind them again.
Perhaps to emphasize the puppets' undead nature, all three black puppets flew directly from the stage toward the audience, propelled by the increasingly sinister background music.
Black, root-like tendrils sprouted from their wooden bodies. Within seconds, the wood of their fras began to take root and sprout anew, twisting their already unsettling faces into sothing even more grotesque and chilling.
Jenkins had never seen a so-called "Treant," but he was certain they didn't look like this. These were more like monsters cultivated by an old witch in a horror story, specifically to eat children.
"So that's how it is."
He drew the White Bone Holy Sword.
"The third Mysterious Realm is an extrely rare one—a trial of martial strength."
Mysterious Realms typically tended to test wisdom and luck. When he entered his first one, Mr. Barnard had ntioned that trials of strength were generally more dangerous. This wasn't just because abilities could only be used once, but also because most enemies within such realms were beyond what a human could handle.
In the past year, Jenkins had experienced a double-digit number of Mysterious Realms, but he had never encountered one that could be overco by pure force. He thought his story was nearing its end, yet he never expected to face a situation like this at the final stage.
With his abilities limited and six more trials to consider, he refrained from using other thods. Instead, he tried to use the White Bone Holy Sword to command the power of the undead, combining it with his own control over plants, in an attempt to seize direct control of the three black puppets.
But it was useless. The mont his Spirit made contact with them in mid-air, he imdiately realized that while they looked like wood corrupted by undead energy, they were definitely not puppets. Jenkins couldn't describe what he felt. He only knew that compared to physical puppets, these three flying things were more like aggregates of so concept—not tangible, yet more real than any physical object.
For a fleeting mont, he even saw the flying puppets as flying pages. He wasn't sure if this was a flash of insight or a simple hallucination.
"So, the truth of this Mysterious Realm couldn't possibly be..."
He guessed at a terrifying possibility, but couldn't verify it yet. With a single-handed flick of his sword, *Clang!* The first puppet was sent flying. But the second one imdiately grabbed his blade, and the third scuttled like a spider along the length of the sword, its hand swiftly touching Jenkins's own.
"Damn it~"
The black tendrils pierced Jenkins's skin, and a toxin imdiately spread through his veins. A slight numbness lasted for less than a second before fading, but that confird this non-toxin toxin was actually effective against him.
"It's not a toxin, it's... information."
During that brief mont of paralysis, the puppet holding the White Bone Holy Sword lunged at his face. More branches sprouted from its wooden body, allowing it to wrap itself around Jenkins's head.
More and more wooden splinters dug into his skin. The other two puppets followed suit, one latching onto his right leg, the other onto his left arm.
But after a brief silence, all three puppets shrieked in agony, their cries even drowning out the music from the stage.
Fire, a raging inferno, erupted from Jenkins's pores, igniting the three puppets attached to him. They tried to let go, but he grabbed them instead.
"Trying to leave now?"
He tore the one off his face and smashed it violently against the one on his right hand. An eerie, bluish fla enveloped the three puppets. No matter how much they struggled, they could not escape their fate of being burned to ash.
But Jenkins could feel it. This was less like fire burning wood and more like fire scorching souls. The puppet show was strange through and through, and the puppets on stage were not puppets. He understood this more deeply now.
His suspicions were being confird, piece by piece. He began to understand why the Difference Engine, despite its limited influence here, had still made this Mysterious Realm a part of the tower.
"Perhaps this place is more terrifying than the previous two Mysterious Realms combined..."
he thought, glancing behind him. His gaze wasn't on the tal doll, but on the darkness further back. In that void, a small patch of black was distinctly different. And in his Eye of Reality, that patch was exceptionally conspicuous—it was the temporary escape route Jenkins had opened from outside the tower.
"It seems fate is still on my side. The opening to let my soul leave, even temporarily, happens to be right here!"
As this thought crossed his mind, the three puppets finished burning to cinders. The final act had begun.
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