Time passes and things change.
That game at Miskatonic University became the most praised and most regrettable game in the history of their school.
That was Miskatonic University's last on-campus ranking tournament.
The original purpose of establishing this competition was to enable students to clearly distinguish the gap between their own strength and that of others, so that they can judge how much room for improvement they have by their ranking.
Similarly, one of the purposes of the competition is to motivate students.
It is customary to demonstrate one's strength by competing for higher rankings.
Students will try their best to show themselves in the competition. Boys with higher rankings will naturally have the right to pursue the girls they like, and vice versa.
Arthur, the president of the student union who has won first place in several competitions, is naturally always surrounded by starry-eyed admirers.
With his eye-catching golden hair, dignified and elegant temperament, and impressive overall strength, all the mentors were attracted by him.
But, in that competition, a dark horse emerged.
Jobtran appeared out of nowhere like a meteor streaking across the sky.
Breaking Arthur's academic records in various departments in a high-profile manner is a silent declaration of war.
Although the ending is sad, it is also talked about with great relish.
——
On the campus of Miskatonic University, student union officials and staff are busy setting up the venue according to the specifications of previous competitions.
Everyone knows that this game will definitely be exciting.
They turned their eyes to Arthur, the student union president, but could not see any trace of nervousness on his face.
His calmness and indifference seemed as if he had already secured victory.
He was still in public, sitting quietly on a bench under a tree in the corner of the playground, drinking Darjeeling tea from a gold-inlaid porcelain cup elegantly.
Several pretty girls gathered together. One of them blushed and, encouraged by everyone, slowly approached the bench where Arthur was.
The girl lowered her head and spoke as softly as possible, with trembling hands, and handed over the pink envelope that she was holding tightly in her hands.
Every word and sentence in it was written down with gritted teeth after she thought about it day and night and considered it over and over again.
The thin piece of letter paper expresses the girl's love for love and her admiration for President Arthur.
"Please accept it, President."
The girl said softly, and after she finished speaking, she wished she could find a hole in the ground to bury herself.
Arthur saw this and raised the corners of his mouth slightly.
He put down the teacup in his hand and took the envelope handed to him by the girl with both hands.
"Okay, classmate, go get busy."
After that, the girls left with laughter.
Completely unaware, Arthur didn't even open the envelope, and handed it to the vice president beside him, Hull, who was Fok's brother.
"See if there's any useful information. If not, I'll leave it to you."
Arthur didn't even turn around and continued to pick up the teacup.
When the girl looked back, Arthur responded to her gaze with his own smile.
Vice President Hull opened it, took a look at it, and then tore it into pieces.
"It's just a piece of waste paper."
Hull said softly.
“As expected.
Any news about that person?"
Arthur used his white hands to gently brush the hair beside his ears and asked.
“After he successfully broke all the records you left, he has not made any other moves in the past few days.
Apart from daily morning exercises, I basically spend all my time in the dormitory.
I haven’t even contacted my close friends who came to Miskatonic University with me, it’s like...”
Hull paused and thought carefully.
“It’s like being cut off from the world.”
"There is no information exchange on the ID card?"
Arthur frowned, feeling a little weird.
"He only divided the credits on his ID card into five equal parts.
One for himself, one for Professor Rob of Microbiology, one for Howard of General Literature, one for his roommate Columbia of Archaeology, and... "
Hull reported this, but when he got to this point, he felt a little embarrassed.
"It's okay. I understand."
Arthur, who was as intelligent as a demon, naturally understood the difficulty of Hull's pause in this sentence. He took the initiative to say it, which meant that he did not care about this little thing.
Vice President Hull's position is actually very embarrassing.
He was loyal to President Arthur, but his foolish younger brother Fok was favored by Jobtran and got a large amount of enviable credits.
This kind of thing happening to him made Hull feel that his family had been brought disgrace.
Although the president didn't seem to care much, it was like a thorn in Hull's heart.
He thought for a moment, gritted his teeth,
"President, Hull wants to deal with that unscrupulous traitor personally."
Arthur looked sideways when he heard this, then he blew gently to blow away the hot steam rising from the cup.
"If you don't drink the tea, it will get cold if you leave it alone."
Hearing this, Heer showed a trace of embarrassment on his face. He stretched out his fingers and propped up the frame of his glasses on his nose.
"The president wants me to stop interfering?"
Arthur did not answer, but looked ahead quietly.
That's the building that houses the Department of Archaeology.
"The tea is cold."
Arthur said to himself.
Hull behind him didn't quite understand.
The tea in the president's hand was still steaming.
——
Joet Brown in the dormitory was now standing in front of the bathroom mirror.
After he completed the act of breaking Arthur's record, he began to examine his own strength and details.
He has already missed it once, and he can't let the people around him get hurt to any extent again because of his own mistakes.
He looked at the mirror, at himself in the mirror, but felt a sense of disobedience.
This sense of incongruity is not caused by the mirror reflection being opposite on the left and right, but because the person in the mirror looks a little different.
Jobtran couldn't tell the specific difference at the moment.
This slight sense of disharmony, like an alarm bell, kept ringing in his mind, forcing Jobtran to calm down and figure out where he had gone wrong.
He looked at himself in the mirror carefully. There was no difference in his facial features or expressions.
Whether it is a slight movement or an exaggerated and funny scratching, there is no flaw at all.
But when he looked carefully, broadened his vision and stopped concentrating on himself, he saw the poster on the wall behind him.
The poster should have been a poster of Selena's support group printed by Columbia himself, but in the mirror, what was seen was Columbia surrounded by a long string of thorns, with pain on his face, and he was even on the verge of dying.
Meanwhile, Columbia, who was attending a lecture in the Archaeology Department with a funny red headscarf that said "Serena-sama is the most beautiful" on his head, smiled a weird smile.
"Finally discovered it?"
Columbia smiled and said to himself,
"But it's a little late."
Professor Bolt on the stage noticed the strangeness in Columbia's expression, but did not point it out immediately. Instead, he kept it in mind.
He continued to teach on the stage about how to properly excavate the mysterious specimens buried deep under the rock, but his eyes drifted towards Columbia from time to time.
Teaching had not erased his years of experience in exploring the wild, and he instinctively sensed something strange about Columbia.
The reason why he didn't expose it on the spot was that there were still many students sitting around Columbia who were thirsty for knowledge and were listening to the lectures with great fascination.
——
When Joe Butran noticed this anomaly, he immediately shouted in his heart,
"not good!"
He had previously broken Arthur's record, which could be considered a declaration of war, but Arthur did not retaliate at all. This was something that Joet Brown could not understand.
Jobtran thought that Arthur would fight him in the competition openly and honestly, but he didn't expect that Arthur had already made a plan to target the people around him.
Columbia's previous abnormality made Jobtran think that Columbia was influenced by Selena's succubus blood and became so obsessed with Selena. But now thinking back, based on his understanding of Columbia, he was not a person with such weak willpower.
"I just took it for granted."
No matter how charming Selena is, how could someone as introverted as Columbia do something so outrageous
The dormitory was filled with Selena's posters, and even a Selena fan club was set up. This kind of fanaticism should not appear in Columbia.
Presumably, this was the foreshadowing that Arthur had laid long ago.
Joe Butran stood in front of the mirror and immediately recalled the knowledge in his mind.
The words "Mirror Ghost" come to my mind.
"Mirror Ghost is an evil spirit that has no physical body, but changes people's minds through psychological suggestion over time.
The initial phenomenon will only brainwash the victims imperceptibly, the most common way being to exaggerate their inner desires.
In the middle stage, the victim's soul will be slowly assimilated, and in the later stage, the victim's body will be completely replaced by the mirror ghost and become its puppet. "
The mirror ghost is an extremely rare spiritual creature, and only a few records of its horrific deeds have been found in some documents.
Most of the records are exaggerated by the ancients, such as the mirror ghost forcibly running into reality and tearing people into pieces.
In fact, the mirror ghost cannot do this, but it can use psychological suggestion to make the victim cause harm to his own body.
In the library of occult knowledge research, one of the victims once suffered a dislocated jaw, and the intense pain became the medium used by the Mirror Ghost to give him psychological suggestion.
The victim, under the suggestion of the Mirror Ghost, used his own hands to forcibly separate his jaw from his face and then bled to death.
The family members found psychological hints written by the deceased after he was influenced by the mirror ghost in his notebook.
"Now that my jaw is gone, it won't dislocate again. Dislocation is so painful."
Presumably, the Mirror Ghost began to slowly influence Columbia after Columbia met Serena.
The Mirror Ghost magnified Columbia's feelings of being affected by Serena's charm in the health room, making Columbia an apparent Serena fanatic.
The logic of these changes was now clear, but what troubled Jobtran was that the records of the mirror ghost did not mention how to get rid of it.
There have been precedents where the idea of breaking the mirror was considered, but the victim's soul was pulled into the mirror world, and the real body became a useless shell.
There are even precedents recorded in the literature where traditional exorcism rituals were used but to no avail.
Regardless of whether these precedents are all true, there is not much that Choate Brown can do in theory at this point.
Joet Brown was not the kind of person who would just stand there and complain without taking any action. When he realized that the Mirror Ghost was the key, he ran towards where Merlin was like lightning.
People on the roadside only noticed a gust of wind and a vague figure.
Jobtran came to the building where Merlin was, and without even knocking on the door, he stretched out his foot and kicked it hard.
“Crack!”
Merlin's door flew backwards. Merlin was sitting on a chair behind the door. He stretched out one hand to catch the flying door panel, while with the other hand he stretched out his little finger to pick his nose.
"What's the hurry?"
Merlin pulled his little finger out of his nostril, and a small piece of green booger on his fingernail seemed to be mocking Joet Brown's impatience.
"Mirror Ghost! How to solve it?!"
However, Jobtran ignored Merlin's loss of composure, went straight up to him, grabbed Merlin's hand that was holding the door, and pulled him out.
Joet Brown used force with both hands, and the joints of his fingers turned white because he used too much force.
Merlin's hands and body remained motionless.
"Let go."
Merlin shouted softly, and Jobtran loosened his hand involuntarily. Merlin then casually threw the door panel in his hand right onto the door frame.
Merlin calmly took out a tissue, wiped his hands, and threw the tissue into the trash can before asking,
"Mirror ghosts have long been extinct, where did they come from?"
"In my room."
Jobtran looked at Merlin with a serious face, while Merlin changed his original playful smile and became serious.
"Are you sure?"
"I am quite sure of that."
Merlin took a deep breath.
“The turmoil has begun.”
The next second, he grabbed Jobtran's wrist and took out the staff from his chest pocket with his other hand.
The staff grew from the size of a toothpick to a length as tall as a person, and then a flash of light appeared on the ground.
As the light faded, Joet Brown found that he had been teleported back to his dormitory by Merlin through his extremely advanced spatial magic.
Merlin looked at the posters of Serena all around the dormitory with a strange look, and muttered,
“This support meeting is quite interesting.”
Having said that, Merlin's grip on Joet Brown had loosened.
He didn't need Jobtran's instructions and walked straight to the only mirror in the bathroom.
He narrowed his eyes and saw Columbia howling in the poster.
Jobtran's heart tightened. Columbia's face in the poster was paler than when he had discovered it before, and even had a hint of deathly gray.
If he had discovered it later, Columbia's soul would have been erased by the mirror ghost.
Merlin frowned and cursed softly.
"brute!"