"Richard, where is he?" Anna asked. She sensed they would get nothing out of him if she left the questioning to Lu Li.
"I don't know," Hall answered. The rims of his bloody wounds began to knit themselves shut. His surviving crimson eyes narrowed to re slits before disappearing from his face altogether.
"Back in the psychiatric hospital, that guy was like a mole. If he wanted to hide, no one could ever find him. He was always the last one found when we played hide-and-seek, so we just stopped playing with him or made him be 'it'... That's why he survived the fire, while the rest of us burned to cinders."
Shedding his human guise, Hall beca a nervous, twitching creature. Perhaps this was his true form.
Lu Li wanted to draw his Spirit Gun and finish him off. A shot from the Spirit Gun would be incredibly loud, and the neighbors would soon be out to see what had happened. Explaining anything to them would be too much of a hassle.
"W-wait! I know sothing else. I can tell you anything you want to know!" Hall cried out, shielding himself with his arms.
After waiting a mont and feeling no pain, he heard a calm question: "How were you resurrected?"
"Resurrected?.." Hall lowered his arms, breathing heavily. He tried to stand but couldn't, so he sank back onto the wet ground with a bitter smile.
"You killed Yulissis... that fat man who tried to use you as a vessel. You must have seen the hole he ca out of. After we died, we found a creature in that hole... We had no idea what it was, but then Richard returned. He wasn't burned like the three of us... He told us, after we'd beco ghosts, what that creature could do... He had hidden it there."
"He tempted us with the promise of resurrection... And it worked; we couldn't resist. Yulissis took a piece of the creature's flesh, I gouged out its eye... O'Connor tore off a tentacle... Damn you, why didn't you find it first?!"
"Richard told us to eat those pieces we'd torn from the creature, and we did. Then we beca... different kinds of ghosts, but at least we had bodies. After that, he helped us, catching unfortunate people on the streets and giving them to us as vessels. At first, I thought it was possession or a body snatch, but then I realized it was more complicated than that... They would die, and we would beco like them, gaining their mories, as if we'd beco their exact copies..."
"What kind of creature was it?" Lu Li asked, confident that knowing its appearance wouldn't affect his Mind Level.
Hall broke from his thoughts and shook his head with an effort. "I... I don't know how to describe it."
"You don't know how to describe it?"
"Well..." Hall hesitated, fumbling for the right words. "I... I can't describe the creature, or its shape... It's indescribable... All I rember is that it was... different from us."
"What do you an by 'different'?"
"I don't know..."
"Another question, then." Lu Li decided not to press the point. Though Hall's description was too vague to identify the creature, it provided enough detail about its properties. "How many of you are there in total?"
"Including Yulissis, whom you killed, there were four of us. , Richard, and O'Connor," Hall said with a bitter smile. "Now it's just O'Connor and Richard left."
Lu Li remained silent. Thinking he wasn't believed, Hall hastily added, "I'm not lying! You can check at the psychiatric hospital. We were in the sa ward, we were roommates."
"Anything else to say?"
"I've told you everything I know." Hall shook his head, a flicker of hope in his eyes. "Can I see my wife before I die?"
"You'll scare her," Lu Li replied.
Hall's expression darkened, and he laughed bitterly. "You're right... Go on, kill ."
"Alright." Lu Li nodded and turned to Anna. "Go ahead."
"Um... how do I do that?"
"Use your ability."
"I'll try..."
The inexperienced Anna approached Hall. With Lu Li standing guard, she raised a slender, translucent hand and placed it on Hall's forehead.
Streams of energy seeped from Hall's forehead into Anna's palm. Her power grew as Hall's body beca increasingly transparent.
Lu Li had never seen Anna use this ability before. It was probably a common power among all ghosts.
Hall was on the verge of disintegrating. His consciousness fading, his body tipped backward, dissolving into nothing before it hit the ground. Only his voice echoed in the alley:
"My wife..."
Nothing remained but the drag marks leading out of the alley and Lu Li's footprints.
"Did you feel anything?" Lu Li asked, looking at Anna.
"He didn't seem like a bad person... it's a pity he made such a mistake," Anna said with a touch of sadness. The sensitive girl found it hard to pass judgnt on him.
"...I ant your power."
Anna looked flustered for a mont. She touched a finger to her chin, tilted her head, and said, "I... I think so."
Lu Li fastened his holster and headed for the carriage. "Did you really believe him?"
"What? You think he was lying?" Anna was taken aback; it seed unlikely to her. "I felt like he wasn't deceiving us... And he told us everything about his accomplices."
"A wolf, knowing it won't survive, tells the hunter all about its pack, their weaknesses, and their location... Would you believe it?"
Lu Li climbed into the carriage and said to the silent Anna, "Get in."
"It would probably... try to trick you," Anna floated into the carriage. Having always been sheltered by her mother, far from the cruelties of reality, she felt her worldview being challenged by the adult world.
"So I don't know if the wolf was deceiving the hunter," Lu Li guided the horses toward the mouth of the alley. Residents had already appeared on the street, drawn by the gunshots, but they didn't connect the noise to this carriage.
"But he was definitely deceiving us."
"But he seed so normal!" Anna protested weakly.
Lu Li turned onto another street and, raising an index finger, tapped it lightly against his temple.
"Don't forget, he's insane—a patient with a severe condition who was kept in a basent. The word 'normal' doesn't apply to him."
There was nothing normal about him.
Anna didn't know what to say, so she decided to stop thinking about it. From now on, she would just do whatever Lu Li told her to do. He wouldn't hurt her, after all.
The carriage, hooves clattering on the wet cobblestones, sped toward their next destination.
The reason Lu Li had reached this conclusion was simple: Hall had hidden the most crucial piece of information.
Touching that creature drove living people mad.
His words were not the deathbed confession of a repentant sinner.
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