Chapter 36
Chapter 36: White Lilies in the Cemetery
That day, rain poured down.
It was Sera who was pushed out to notify Charlotte, as Mr. Conrad’s most outstanding and successful student.
That golden-haired girl, doll-like, had been expecting her biological father’s smile and embrace upon his safe return.
But instead, it was him standing outside the door.
A guy with a worried expression, a guy at a loss, a guy who had lost his soul.
He didn’t know how to get along with a girl, much less how to explain the truth to one. He just stood there outside the door, soaking wet, exactly like a stray old dog that had wandered to the wrong door and had nowhere to go.
That girl took his hand and guided him to crouch down.
Then she hugged him.
She was equally at a loss, equally lost. She was Mr. Conrad’s only relative—she should have been the one hurt most deeply.
Even the proudest cat would have times of sadness when it would lick its wounds alone, but she was always the strongest among everyone. Her pride wouldn’t allow her to be comforted by others. The way she wiped away tears would never be seen by anyone else.
Funis worried about her, yet didn’t worry about her.
Funis worried that Charlotte couldn’t take good care of herself, but she never worried that Charlotte would be defeated by losing her adoptive father. That golden-haired girl would always secretly wipe away tears and then stand up again to face tomorrow.
Charlotte still had a bright, beautiful future.
She shouldn’t waste too much time on Sera Flowed, a guy who was already no different from dead.
In the countless deep nights after their separation, Funis would tell herself that Charlotte was a strong, excellent girl. She could definitely take care of herself, she would certainly have an enviable future, she would absolutely live a stable, peaceful, happy life without setbacks…
She told herself she shouldn’t worry about Charlotte anymore, but if one day she really encountered Charlotte again in this appearance, what should she do?
Funis had never thought about this question, or rather, she simply refused to think about it.
Her name now was Funis.
A dream demon, a witch, the same kind as the murderer who killed Mr. Conrad. She wasn’t worthy of appearing before Charlotte again—she clearly, deeply knew this.
But when this moment truly became possible, Funis forgot all these concerns. She just wanted to catch up with that figure.
Dazed and confused, she ran through the maze-like shrubs. What should have been a few steps felt endlessly long and distant. That blurred figure vanished in a flash, and Funis had already lost direction and target before even running out of the cemetery.
Endless mist.
This wasn’t her hallucination or delusion—this cemetery had truly become a maze. She was trapped here.
Funis suddenly remembered that this cemetery had recently been the source of various strange rumors.
Although she was under house arrest by Cessia and forbidden to go out, she wasn’t prohibited from reading newspapers. The Barton News Agency in the Sid Clock District would report and publish Gray Cloud Fort’s major and minor events every half week, with occasional records of strange interviews resembling urban legends.
For instance, someone had seen a white-clothed girl in the cemetery. That girl carried flower bouquets as she walked among the forest of tombstones, but no matter how they called out, she wouldn’t turn back. She just walked forward on her own until her body became transparent and gradually disappeared.
Or someone had witnessed skeletons climb out of graves to carefully wipe coffin lids, gathering beside flowers to strike melodies with arm bones, as if holding a concert…
In any case, recent issues had become increasingly supernatural. No matter how you looked at it, it seemed haunted—the farther away, the better.
However, Funis had been focused solely on testing her new abilities and completely forgot about this. Now she had truly run into ghosts, and regret was too late.
She decided to explore this mist-shrouded maze.
The nearby structure and layout weren’t much different from the original cemetery, but several graves that Funis hadn’t seen before had appeared out of nowhere. The tombstones bore no inscriptions—completely blank.
Using soul perception, she could see clusters of ghostly blue undead beneath them.
People were really buried there, but she didn’t know who.
Funis guessed that when the mist gradually thickened, she had already entered a special space independent of the outside world. Many pathways possessed similar extraordinary traits—this wasn’t particularly unusual.
Unfortunately, Funis had been completely focused on chasing that figure suspected to be Charlotte at first, paying no attention to changes in her surroundings.
After circling around a few more times.
Funis picked up the thin needle she had dropped on the ground earlier—she was back at the starting point.
Frustrating and confusing. Funis remembered clearly walking in completely different directions, but she hadn’t given up and quickly began testing new route combinations.
This time she seemed to have found the right place.
After passing through mist so thick she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, Funis saw a low but sturdy old oak tree with several tombstones surrounding it.
But what was eerie was that she also saw numerous white spirits sitting on their respective tombstones, while the blue undead souls that should have existed in the graves were nowhere to be seen.
These bone-white spirits were perhaps what the ascetics of the Temperance Abbey often called living souls.
They weren’t true souls, but special forms created when undead were repaired and restored. They could act independently of corpses and couldn’t be seen with the naked eye by ordinary people.
They inherited thinking habits from life but lost memories from life, often lonely and helpless, sighing mournfully, only willing to wander around their own graves, guarding their own corpses and refusing to leave.
This extraordinary trait of repairing undead and transforming them into living souls belonged to only one pathway—the Patience pathway mastered by the Temperance Abbey.
Representing restraint and endurance, mirroring the Wrath pathway, the end of the Patience pathway was the Archangel Sariel, God’s moonlight, another angel symbolizing death. He completed the task Samael couldn’t complete, taking the souls Samael couldn’t take.
Had an ascetic from the Temperance Abbey come to this cemetery? Why would they create so many restless living souls in defiance of church prohibitions?
Funis didn’t understand the cause behind the scene before her. She gathered courage to continue forward, trying to approach those melancholy white living souls.
The closer to the oak tree, the thinner the surrounding mist became.
Pure white lilies bloomed beneath the tree. Funis saw a girl in a white gauze dress standing among the flowers. Her shoulder-length hair was snow white, her slightly curved long eyelashes also snow white.
Unlike Funis’s brilliant silver-white, this snow white was more pure and pristine, flawless and spotless.
Seeming to notice Funis’s approach.
That girl holding a lily bouquet quietly, ethereally turned around. Her snow-white skin had no trace of blood, light silver eyes glanced over gently, her somewhat familiar features delicate and soft.
She didn’t look like a living person, yet displayed a stunning pure beauty.
Funis couldn’t help but stop, gazing up, admiring.
She was deeply shocked by this indescribable beauty.
“You can see me?” the girl asked in a low voice.
She was puzzled.
Observing Funis not far away.
But before Funis could answer, the girl suddenly disappeared like a phantom.
The bone-white living souls that should have been sitting dejectedly on tombstones stood up stiffly like marionettes, gathering from all directions to surround Funis in the center. They laughed creakily, their teeth chattering against each other.
Legs, arms, waist, neck—those living souls bound and entangled Funis, making her unable to move.
Also drifting over like a phantom.
The girl suddenly appeared again in front of Funis, gently twisting a silver strand beside Funis’s cheek, slowly tapping the bell at the base of her horn. Her gentle, plain face came very close, light silver eyes shining brightly.
A faint lily fragrance.
“Then you must be able to see them too?” She smiled.