Xia De thought:
"Ready, huh? No problem."
"Of course, it's not just you who has gained something, I have gained something too."
The doctor smiled and said:
"I have also dealt with the corrupted gardener's body you brought. How about we take a look at the deceased's memory while we still have time? We may find something useful. Of course, this won't take too much time. After reading the memory, we can go to lunch together and talk about the preparations to fight against Goethe."
It was not difficult to enter the memory of a corpse corrupted by the devil. The doctor brought a copper basin and placed it on the bonfire in the fireplace, waiting for the water to boil. Then, he took out two glass bottles, each containing a pure black eyeball, and handed one to Shade. They both dripped their blood into the bottle.
The eyeball in the bottle immediately began to spin, and when the blood color faded, they poured the eyeball and the slippery liquid in the bottle into the boiling water basin. Immediately, some faint smelly green smoke spread out and soon enveloped the entire room.
The two found a place to lie down in the room, the doctor lay on the stylish leather chair behind the desk, and Xia De lay on the sofa. When Xiaomia saw Xia De lying down, she immediately jumped on his chest, and then looked down at Xia De as he slowly closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Shade had entered more than one dream with Dr. Schneider, so he was very experienced in this. But this time, when he realized that he was dreaming, he immediately felt that something was wrong with the scene around him.
I felt cold in the dream and there was a dark sky above my head.
Looking around, this is undoubtedly the Oxenfort Manor in the Randall River Valley, and the more precise location is outside the fence gate of the manor. It is night, but there always seems to be a white shadow dancing at the edge of the vision in the night. Looking inside from the fence gate, the semi-deserted manor reveals a sense of weirdness in the silent night. Looking up at the sky, among the three moons, the red moon and the yellow moon each have a huge eye in the center that keeps blinking, as if looking for something, and the silver moon has turned into a weird human face with closed eyes.
The stars were dim, and the few that remained in the sky formed a complete sentence in Kasenric:
"You're going to die, I'm watching you!"
Xia De wondered if he had entered into some horror story.
“Alienation is really serious.”
At this moment, the doctor's voice came, and Shade noticed that the doctor was right beside him. Shade's clothes were still the same, but the doctor had changed into a more detective-like outfit.
"I am good at the power of dreams. I can change my outfit at any time in dreams. Isn't it normal?"
The doctor said, and then introduced the surrounding situation:
"The original scene in the dream was definitely not like this, but because of the torture suffered by the soul and body, the memory has also changed, resulting in the scene we see now... ... What a poor guy, he must have suffered a lot before and after his death."
"I did not see the soul of the gardener."
"He is probably still imprisoned in the manor you mentioned. Since his body has been transformed into a demonic corpse, there is no reason to consume his tormented soul directly."
The doctor pushed the gate in front of him, and with a slight creaking sound, the door was pushed open:
"Let's go and take a look at this last memory before death."
Even the most brilliant horror writer probably couldn't describe the scene in the manor courtyard at this moment. Blood from an unknown source flowed on the cobblestone path, and the laughter and whispers of crazy women kept coming from the surrounding bushes. The cold night wind mixed with the stench of corpses diffused around, and in the mansion, the windows with lights on kept flickering, and figures stood behind the curtains, as if they were looking at the people in the yard.
But the doctor told Shade not to worry, just as he said, they were not in danger. The owner of the memory, the unfortunate gardener, lived in a small hut in the corner of the garden behind the courtyard, and the two found him easily.
Compared with the seriously alienated courtyard scene, the gardener's cabin seemed much more normal. He did not fall asleep that night, but huddled beside the dim oil lamp the size of a grain of rice on the wooden table, reading a... ...pirated book with more pictures than words.
This was not the gardener's dream, but his memory, so he had no reaction even when Shad and the doctor broke into his house.
Before Shade could exchange views with the doctor about the book, the gardener put the book down sleepily. He stood up and looked at the window, then picked up his coat and walked into the garden.
Xia De thought he had something to do, but he just found a corner and whistled uncivilizedly while watering the flowers. Suddenly, the ground shook, as if an earthquake had occurred in memory, and the gardener looked up at the front yard:
"Is Mr. Oxenfurt back?"
"It wasn't an earthquake, it was the sound of horse hooves. But in my memory, it was distorted into an earthquake by the intense pain."
The doctor explained to Shad.
The gardener was curious about his master's return at night, so he walked carefully to the front yard in the strange night. It can be seen that he is quite familiar with the yard he takes care of. He walked around the path to the front yard and hid in the bushes to secretly watch the conversation taking place.
At this time, all the lights around him dimmed, and the moonlight, like a spotlight on the stage, focused on Ossenfurt standing next to his horse in the courtyard. This time, without the doctor's explanation, Shade knew that this was just a distortion of his memory.
To be precise, there was not one Stone Oxenfurt standing next to the black horse, but two. One was the man that Shade knew, and the other was wearing the same clothes as the first one, but his skin was slightly darker, and his eyes were pure black, with no whites visible at all.
"The demon's true form? Appear in the form of Oxenfurt."
Xia De asked the doctor, who also appeared in the description of the old curator Fernandez.
“It should be.”
The doctor nodded cautiously.
“You did a great job.”
The abnormal Ossenfurt said to the normal one, while the normal Ossenfurt covered his forehead, looking exhausted:
"I will do what we agreed to do. You don't have to come to see me often."
"You are not a person who keeps his promises. I will always urge you to fulfill our contract."
said the abnormal Oxenfurt.
"How dare I break my contract with you? You are a demon."
Stone Oxenfurt said this tiredly, and the gardener who was peeking at this scene actually screamed in fear after hearing the word "devil".
So, the two Ossenfurts looked towards where he was.
The scene was completely frozen, as if the world was covered in a layer of gray, and as if someone had stopped time.
The doctor and Shade did not stop. The blue-eyed psychiatrist sighed softly:
"Originally there should have been another part, which was what happened after he was discovered. But the torture he suffered was too great, and he subconsciously forgot what happened next. Fortunately, the remaining memories are enough for us to judge that the demon's true form, or something close to it, looks like Stone Oxenfurt. The Stone Mirror Demon likes to appear in the image of its contractor, which can be regarded as evidence of its identity. Next, the focus of your investigation is how to lure out the other party and make him appear in front of you on his own initiative."
Xia De nodded, but he didn't expect that a third voice would appear in this still world:
"I never thought that I would encounter such an interesting thing."
"Um?"
Shade and the doctor looked towards the center of the courtyard. Ossenfurt, who had slightly darker skin, was looking at them.
"Doctor, this..."
"There is a small amount of demonic power attached to the gardener's body. Don't worry, I can handle it."
"Will the demon itself discover it?"
"If others take action, they will. But if I take action, I won't. This is the dream I built."
As they spoke, the demon walked towards the two of them, as if he had not heard their previous conversation at all:
"So, you two, do you want to play a game with me? If you win, I can give you a great gift, a longer life, an everlasting fire, a stone that turns everything into gold, or do you want something else?"
The demon looked at the two with a smile that Shad had never seen on the real Oxenfurt's face.
"It's just a little power of the devil. It can't give us anything. Of course, even if we lose, we don't have to pay the price. Detective, play with it and see what its game is."
The doctor said, stepping back and coming behind Shad, who nodded to "Oxenfurt":
"Okay, I'll play with you. What do you want to play?"
"It's simple, guess the cards."
As the demon spoke, three glowing cards appeared in front of it. They were three Rhodes cards, namely Sun 1, Moon 1, and Star 1:
"I'll change the position of the cards, and you guess where Star 1 is."
As he spoke, the three cards overlapped and quickly moved in the air, exchanging positions.
Xia De watched this scene in silence. After the three cards separated and floated in the air with their backs facing up, he reached out and uncovered the one on the far left:
“This one isn’t.”
When you open it, you will see the beginning of darkness.
Then he opened the middle one:
“This one obviously isn’t either.”
Opening it is Creation and Death.
Xia De smiled and revealed the last one:
“This last one is even less so.”
After opening, it is the creation and balance:
"So my answer is that Star 1 is not among these three cards at all.
The demon was stunned for a moment, then burst into laughter.
The laughter was extremely sharp and piercing. In the laughter, the surrounding scene collapsed like glass. The doctor put his hand on Shade's shoulder:
"Detective, it's time to wake up from the dream."
Only the laughing devil was still standing there:
"How interesting! I look forward to your meeting my true self."
Its entire body, in the dream that was about to disintegrate, turned into a black stream of light and rushed towards Shade's face.