Cyber Era Witch
Chapter 338 - 308: Calculation Scam

Chapter 338: Chapter 308: Calculation Scam

If you cannot conquer emotions with reason, you will blindly spend your life.

Farosa sunk into the depths of the hot water, the high temperature of the bath giving her a sense of mental clarity as if melting her within it. The massage tub’s pump was highly effective, large volumes of water jets from various angles brushing her body, making her feel as though she was being lifted high by a dozen skilled maids.

She closed her eyes, feeling different levels of power settling themselves within her.

Farosa had consumed the deep-sea power of Orcian and digested a portion of Yan Duo’s solar power. The two could not harmonize, and once they collided within her soul, they would trigger quite adverse consequences. To better channel them, Farosa needed to construct the concept of the Witch Goddess to ensure she could tame these two divine forces.

—So close.

There was a sound of footsteps, very light, but Farosa could hear them; she opened her eyes to see Xu Yang standing by the dark brown patterned wallpaper, trying not to disrupt her meditation.

"No need to tiptoe; I know what I’m doing," Farosa said, reaching for a towel.

"How goes it?" Xu Yang asked.

"Soon."

"According to Mond’s warning, an overpowering divinity will erode your self," Xu Yang settled down on a parchment-colored armchair, "so you need to craft a more heterogeneous image for yourself... to prevent the witches from forming a strong collective consciousness."

"Thanks to your help, I’ve almost finished," Farosa said.

"You mean..."

"—Up until now, the young witches you have brought, amounting to 239 children, call me mother. These gentle reflections construct another layer of illusion."

"All these imaginations are quite mystical," Xu Yang said, "I found that the Corporate Alliance once made a film, ’The Mond Legend’, portraying Mond as a very frail fellow, trying to use the imaginations of people around the world to suppress it. But Mond seems still very powerful."

"How could that work, Moonfire Mond isn’t its true name either," Farosa scoffed, "Only the secret script can correctly call its name, but that’s also unreliable, as language distorts our thoughts."

"Distorts?"

"What we observe is ’this,’" Farosa said, "what our eyes see, what our ears hear enters our thoughts and becomes ’that’, and when we try to write it down or—as you say—make a movie, what we create is ’not that’. In short, it’s entirely different from the original, so there’s no point in influence."

"So people can’t understand each other," Xu Yang realized, "because language is an unreliable tool for communication."

"There’s something that can replace language," Farosa rose from the bathtub, her wet hand landing on Xu Yang’s mask, "and that is the intersection of the hearts and emotions. Thanks to the infinite adoration of the young witches, these sincere fantasies have created a new projection."

"Suit actors," Xu Yang said. "Suzukawa Kiyo isn’t even broadcasting anymore."

"What suit actors," Farosa flicked Xu Yang’s mask with her finger, "nevermind, let’s just say suit actors then—four suits, mother, seeker, maniac, and the detached high-ranking authority, these four images will emerge when I step onto the starting point of Ascension, and they will attack each other."

"Which one is the real you?"

"None of them." Farosa opened her hands in front of Xu Yang and then clenched them, "I won’t be covered by illusions; I will use the real me to devour all falsehoods. I cannot be overshadowed by illusions constructed by my worshipers, like Sally, becoming a servile deity bound by her worshipers."

Speaking of which, Farosa took a deep breath.

A difficult step.

The imaginations of the witches composed the source of her divine power, but all she wanted was the divine power itself, not the divine husk imagined by the witches. She refused to give up her nature, her magic power, or her original appearance, believing these to be the most crucial representations of self, not to be lost.

According to ancient texts, Farosa also had to reach a state of perfect spiritual resonance, where her thoughts were expanded and her philosophies clear, achieving enlightenment in mentality, with the history of mankind plainly visible at a glance, and stars and earth beneath her feet.

When that moment arrived, it would be the best time to perform the Seven Witches Ritual.

"You mentioned Sally; that’s the reason I came to see you," Xu Yang said. "A cat is devouring rats en masse, and Sally is panic-stricken."

Farosa’s brows furrowed.

"The trickster Mack," she said. "That’s the most cunning and powerful cat in the world."

"But Sally says the slaughter is happening close by; I checked, and Shangjing has recent reports of rat deaths," Xu Yang said.

"It last said it wanted to come to the Archipelago, I thought it was joking," mused Farosa.

"Any other information?"

"It said that since the victory of the Corporate Alliance, it has been posing as a journalist for over a hundred years in the Taixi Continent," Farosa recalled, "Taixi Continent has the densest distribution of Mystics, and with the successive awakening of the demigods, it was forced to flee overseas, seeking my protection."

"Did you refuse?"

"Of course, I refused," Farosa said dismissively, "just a Mystics cat."

"Was your refusal polite?"

"I mocked it thoroughly."

"What would you do if you were treated like that? If you went seeking help from someone and they responded with sarcasm and ridicule."

"One would think he’s tired of living," Farosa murmured with a sigh, "What you mean is that this Ratman creature will come to Anjiu City, but Lila is guarding Anjiu City."

"Lila guards the city, but being too rigorous in her ways might actually cause her to miss those flexible parts," Xu Yang nodded.

Lila cared too much about everything around her.

A few days ago on vacation, when Xu Yang and Little Fool stayed in a corner of the city, yet they were discovered by Pan Ruiyi, something Pan Ruiyi could never have done on her own, she must have been entrusted by Lila to secretly protect Xu Yang.

And Lila never once mentioned this incident from beginning to end.

When Xu Yang inquired, Lila’s reply was succinct, specifying that the violent crime rate in Anjiu City had surged, and therefore she had to send people to protect Xu Yang.

With a large crowd of unemployed people loafing around and the streets becoming highly dangerous, Lila had already detected and thwarted a great number of criminal schemes harmful to society in these days, while continuing to recruit and expand the security personnel team.

"An exceptional ability to perceive Magic Power, capable of efficiently distinguishing the activity of a large number of people," Lila stated, "All crimes and harm will be detected and assigned to various mobile units for resolution."

Mayor Oohara Nobuhiko very much appreciated the responsibility Nestor Corporation demonstrated for the city’s security. Currently, Lila’s Magic Power was more efficient than any surveillance system, and the people held no objections, seeing as they were completely oblivious.

"Lila is too smart, too powerful," Farosa mocked, "Mack might have already entered Anjiu City, and we wouldn’t know anything."

"It’s a cat?"

"Originally, it’s a silver gradient fat cat with white fur, but it has many human forms, like an old man with a cat’s head, a curvy girl, a flute-playing shepherd boy, and the like..." Farosa explained, "It’s hard to figure out, after all, its honorific is a trickster."

Xu Yang leaned back in his armchair, contemplating.

Integrating the information from Sally and Farosa, a being known as the trickster Mack, one of the Ancient Mystics, was likely harboring some hostility upon its arrival in Anjiu City. It enjoyed eating rats and had been the butt of Farosa’s jokes, so there was little foundation for cooperation between them.

Thus, Xu Yang’s side had to treat the other as a hypothetical enemy, and begin a search and focused surveillance.

What should he do? Xu Yang quickly calculated.

Farosa was right, language was an unreliable tool, based on her few words of description, there was no way to know what this trickster Mack looked like.

"You’re saying it’s a journalist?" Xu Yang asked.

"Yes," Farosa nodded, "It’s probably working at a newspaper office somewhere in the Taixi Continent."

Xu Yang closed his eyes, connected to the internet with Digital Mind, and searched for relevant information on both surface web and deep anonymous networks, continuously excavating with different keywords to collect and capture related news.

The web was vast as the sea with information, a treasure trove that could yield any intelligence if skillfully utilized. After a search lasting 4 seconds, Xu Yang sifted through 2000 text records and multimedia materials related to it.

Dismissing the rest as unreliable, after filtering, Xu Yang found the most credible source to be a 69-year-old woman who had died, named Emira. A month earlier, during a major shutdown and market closure event in Constantinian, Emira’s newspaper was shut down for reporting the incident fairly, she fell during the conflict and tragically died.

This Emira had posted 5 stories on the internet regarding a mystical little cat, detailing how she had built a friendship with a cat in the newspaper office.

She began recording 50 years ago, and most of her accounts had been archived. Xu Yang had to delve deep into the servers to excavate them. Every 10 years, the archival depth was downgraded, from complete images and text at the start to brief text, and finally to scattered snippets of phrases to compress size.

He successfully extracted all 5 log entries.

Log 1: "The cutest little cat in all of Constantinian! Such a surprise on my way to work, I want to keep it! [...]"

Log 2: "Time to celebrate my 28th birthday! With the little cat. Yesterday, it took me cycling to the scene of the crime, faster than anyone else! In doing so, I [...]"

Log 3: "I was supposed to meet a few good-looking guys at a singles party, but the kitten fell ill, and I had to accompany it. Another year spent with the little cat, with so many years gone by, it hasn’t aged at all, truly a miracle. Perhaps it’s okay to keep accompanying it into the future [...]"

Log 4: "The editorial work is hectic, only now do I have time to celebrate my 49th birthday! Who needs a family when there’s such an adorable little cat for company? Most of my salary is spent on it, not surprising at all, it’s fine if you treat a cat as a family member. Everyone keeps asking its age, but all I can say is, its longevity is truly miraculous, look at this amazingly docile [...]"

Log 5: "Indeed, whenever I look at this cat, I feel strange, it doesn’t have any extra needs, it’s such an easy cat to care for, I just need to provide it with food and a place to live. It might even outlive me, which is unusual for a cat. In fact, it feels odd, as if my whole life’s meaning has turned into providing it with cat food and a place to stay. Forgive my late realization, I must ask people for help."

Farosa watched Xu Yang.

"Have you found a clue?"

"Found a woman online who was feeding Mack at the newspaper office," Xu Yang said, "Left a lot of logs, the last one posted a week before her death."

"An oversight in perfection, trickster Mack," Farosa murmured, "It didn’t see this coming. Surely there are photos of Mack in there, we just need to block it according to the photos."

Xu Yang projected the lone log with a picture, Log 3, onto the screen in the chamber, and Farosa looked up, startled for a moment.

In the photo, a cheerful middle-aged female journalist is holding an animal in her arms, which under normal circumstances, should have shown what Mack looked like. But the entire image appeared to have been edited at some point, with the animal in her embrace transformed into a pure mosaic of pixels.

"The mosaic is a hyperlink." Xu Yang clicked on it, leading to a different webpage that displayed a looped video.

In the video, a completely cartoonized white cat sits on a table meowing, with a piece of paper beside it bearing some text.

"Are you looking for me, Mr./Ms.? Please take the first letter of each of the 5 logs and read them together."