"My apologies. I think we were affected by sothing. What was it you just said?"
As a demigod, Miss Broniaons was in slightly better shape than Miss Audrey. Of course, it was also possible that the strain of the forced divination had taken a severe ntal toll on them both, leading to their current condition.
"So, are we opening the door?"
Jenkins repeated the question, taking each woman by the hand and channeling his [Life Source] into them.
Their bodies were unhard, but the nurturing touch of the natural spirit was an effective balm for the mind—a reminder of the intrinsic link between soul and flesh.
"Let's open it. We have to, sooner or later."
In the end, it was Miss Broniaons who made the call, though Jenkins had already been leaning toward opening the door himself. After all, sending one visitor away would only summon another, and it was foolish to hope their luck would improve with each knock.
The two won followed Jenkins back to the foyer, where the temperature had plumted to what felt like thirty degrees below zero. The biting frost on the doorknob sent a sharp jolt through Jenkins as he touched it. He gave the listless, miserable-looking cat on his shoulder a gentle pat before turning the handle and pulling the door open.
"Oh... starving..."
The instant a crack appeared between the door and its fra, the darkness outside solidified, surging into the house like a physical tide and completely extinguishing the faint light behind them.
The two won beside him, the walls, and the floor vanished into the darkness in an instant. All that remained was Jenkins, enveloped in a faint golden glow, the cat on his shoulder, and the door in his hand.
But a mont later, an imnse force wrenched the door from his grasp, pulling it outward. Jenkins instinctively released the handle; otherwise, he too would have been dragged away into the distant dark.
He quickly shifted the cat from his shoulder into the crook of his arm, afraid it too would be snatched away, but the eerie darkness seed to have no interest in the animal.
Muttering and whispers drifted from the distant darkness. An unnatural sensation slithered across his skin, making Jenkins flinch with the phantom feeling of tentacles crawling over him, but there were no such disgusting things there.
"Starving... I need rice..."
The golden light emanating from his body illuminated his imdiate surroundings, revealing that the voice had co from just beyond where the door had been. Jenkins saw a pitch-black figure huddled a short distance away, a shape so dark it almost lted into the surrounding blackness.
"So welcoming the fourth visitor was the wrong choice... I've walked right into a trap, haven't I?"
The thought remained unspoken, but as it crossed his mind, the pitch-black thing stirred and rose to its feet.
Jenkins sighed, his hand closing around the block of divine tal concealed within his heavy cotton coat. He had tucked it away while gathering the divination materials, precisely for a situation like this.
"What terrible luck. Only the second door, and I've already made the wrong choice."
Muttering his complaint, he raised the tal block. It flared to life, illuminating the darkness like a torch. Jenkins hadn't even activated it yet; the divine power within was simply reacting to his godly soul and divinity, eagerly gathering its strength.
The light finally allowed Jenkins to see clearly what stood before him: a small boy in tattered rags, dragging a filthy rice sack. He was bone-thin, his hair so matted with filth that its original color was indecipherable.
He couldn't have been more than fifteen. His body was hunched, reminding Jenkins of the little forest monsters described in his own "Stranger's Story Collection". The boy was so severely malnourished that his bones seed ready to tear through his skin, as if his body contained nothing else.
"Starving..."
The boy repeated, then stumbled forward, lunging at Jenkins. He had been standing right where the doorway was, so the distance between them was short. Yet his lunge t nothing, as if he'd been stopped by an invisible barrier.
Jenkins frowned. If he recalled correctly, the invisible barrier was located exactly where the front door of the house should have been.
He considered using his divinity to resolve this lethal predicant. While Cursed Items held an incredibly high precedence in this world, the power of a god was still the ultimate force.
But ultimately, Jenkins held back. Sothing about the boy's appearance felt familiar... and that rice sack looked familiar, too.
He stared into the boy's pitch-black eyes. They had no sclera, just two light-devouring voids that seed to pull at his very soul. But it was impossible; Jenkins's soul had too much gravity of its own to be drawn in.
The boy struggled futilely to cross the threshold, to pass through the space where the door had been, but to no avail. At last, he stopped. He opened his rice sack, and from its mouth, a deeper, more profound darkness began to bleed out, slowly consuming reality...
"Peter?"
Jenkins called out the na, and the boy froze, his hands still on the open sack. The emaciated head lifted slowly, and those black eyes fixed on Jenkins's face.
This was the boy from the world Jenkins had fallen into when his [Astral Perception] had overlapped with the Starsea Badge. He was a native of that place, a world the [Magical Conch] had later identified as the [Shadow Kingdom].
In Peter's ho, Jenkins, then only a spiritual form, had used [Contact Healing] on a middle-aged man and created a sackful of grain for them with his [Psychography] ability.
It had happened last autumn, on the night after the incident with the [Twin Demons]. Back then, a much more naive Jenkins had gotten his first deep look at the worlds that existed beyond his own.
That night had also been his first contact with the Star Spirits. So much ti had passed since then that Jenkins had almost failed to recognize the boy's face.
"You're... a god?"
It was the sa voice, thick with an unfamiliar accent. Peter had thought Jenkins was a god back when he'd first been summoned. Jenkins had no idea how the boy recognized him now, but... calling him a god wasn't entirely inaccurate.
"Oh, it really is you?"
Jenkins asked. He noticed the rice sack had been closed, so while he kept the glowing cube raised in his right hand, he didn't imdiately absorb the divine power within.
Chocolate poked his head out from the crook of Jenkins's arm, watching the scene with curiosity. The cat wasn't glowing; instead, his dark fur blended perfectly with the lightless background, making it seem as if there were no cat there at all.
"Oh, god..."
The boy staggered back a few steps and then prostrated himself. Since the floor had also been swallowed by darkness, it looked more like he had simply curled into a ball, level with the soles of Jenkins's shoes.
"Oh, god..."
Repeating the words, the boy kept his head bowed and began to inch backward. Jenkins noticed that as he moved, the darkness receded. Soon, he could even sll the distinct scent of the neighborhood at night.
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