Her forehead felt a little cold.

  Pandora subconsciously reached up to touch it, her hand coming away damp with a cold sweat.

  Strange.

  Why was she sweating?

  Pandora didn’t understand.

  In the corridor outside their compartment, the orderly sounds of people disembarking could now be heard. Inside, everyone else was silently gathering their meager belongings.

  Pandora casually flipped through a few pages of the heavy tome. A journey of over a day, spent wholly engrossed in reading, had indeed yielded significant gains. She found that the foundational theories of Alchemy in her mind seemed to have become much clearer and more systematic.

  Wait, why had she used the word “seemed”?

  And what was it she was just about to do...

  What was it?

  The line to disembark had reached their row.

  Pandora remained seated, unmoving.

  Everything around her was proceeding normally, except for her. It was as if she had frozen in this moment. Because she felt something was wrong, a voice in the back of her mind was screaming—

  Something was very, very wrong.

  “My lady, it’s time to go.”

  Elsa had already risen. She reminded her in a low voice.

  Pandora’s body stood up on instinct, her hands moving automatically to close the book and stow it away.

  And at that moment,

  her fingertips, between the pages, brushed against something foreign.

  It was—a folded, rough-edged slip of paper.

  She froze. Her mind raced, but no matter how she searched her memories of the train ride, she had no recollection of this note that had appeared out of nowhere.

  She slowly unfolded the slip of paper; its edges were rough, as if crudely torn from a larger sheet. There was no signature on the note.

  Only, drawn with some kind of deep red, long-dried pigment, was a crooked, wobbling smiley face. The artwork was as crude as a child’s doodle, yet it somehow radiated a spine-chilling horror.

  Beneath the smiley face, written in the same deep red pigment, was a single line in a messy, fancy script.

  “I see you.”

  A spine-chilling feeling, like countless icy ants, crawled up inch by inch from the gaps between the vertebrae, slowly climbing up her spine—no, not hers, but Betty’s nape.

  “So... so scary...”

  Betty’s trembling voice suddenly sounded from behind her, interrupting Pandora’s nearly frozen train of thought. The little chef had, at some point, edged close to her side, curiously staring at the note.

  “My lady, is this something you just wrote?”

  Pandora stared at the note and shook her head. “Not me.”

  “Then who left it?” Betty guessed curiously. “Could it be the book’s last owner?”

  No, obviously not.

  Almost without thinking, Pandora had already dismissed the idea. But this time, after a moment of stiffness, she answered:

  “Perhaps.”

  She didn’t say anything more, immediately following Elsa to join the line disembarking. Seeing this, Betty lost interest and turned her excited gaze toward the world outside... the outside, which would be a new world for her.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  How could she not be excited?

  Pandora “should have” been excited as well,

  but right now, she felt none of the mood of someone arriving in a new world for the first time.

  Because just now,

  the moment she saw the smiley face and the message on the note,

  she remembered again. All the illogical moments; the disjointed feeling of time skipping.

  That strange, surreal feeling was back!

  But—

  why her?

  Why was it only after seeing this note that she could remember everything?

  Pandora gripped the note tightly, forcing her eyes away.

  And when she did...

  that feeling vanished again.

  She couldn't even remember what was on the note anymore. It was only because she had, beforehand, consciously decided to look at the note again, that she was able to see the note and once more recall everything.

  What on earth was going on?

  Memory... the note... the time-skip the train was experiencing...

  For a moment, Pandora had the urge to find that “conductor” and demand an explanation, but after a deep breath—she abandoned the idea.

  You can’t judge a thing by its appearance.

  The note seemed strange, terrifying,

  but to her, it was “friendly.”

  Perhaps the being that wrote it, the entity, had no concept of human “goodwill,” but at least from the results, it couldn't be called an enemy. It made her different from the other “passengers.” It allowed her to clearly perceive what had just happened. It gave her a choice, a chance to see the truth,

  even if that truth was as ephemeral as a soap bubble.

  In the same way, this experience was seemingly strange and horrifying, but objectively, she was lucky.

  She was like the chicken that saw the slaughterhouse...

  If she told the others what she saw, it would do her no good whatsoever. It would likely only incite the hostility of the flock, or even cause her anomaly to be noticed by the “farmer”!

  So—

  “Haaa—”

  Letting out a long breath, Pandora’s mind returned to order. Her gaze was clear and calm. She carefully refolded the note, treating it like a treasured object, and carefully tucked it back between the pages she had just been on.

  The truth, a bubble, dissolved again.

  She no longer even remembered the conflict, the hesitation she had just experienced. Like any ordinary passenger,

  she followed the silent flow of people and got off the train.

  Once again, she remembered nothing, save for one thing: the note was important. She must not lose it; she must not forget it.

  ..................

  Everyone got off the train.

  Around the platform, it was a sea of fog. They could only see, in the denser fog ahead, the faint, towering silhouettes of a city’s buildings. But for these “medieval people,” they simply couldn’t imagine what a real city looked like. What they saw, were just overly large, incomprehensible shadows. So what they feared was merely the excessive height of these shadows, and the sky, which appeared increasingly narrow as it pressed down.

  Even Arthur’s face, trying hard to maintain composure, looked a little... pale.

  In contrast, Pandora, free from the interference of the “truth,” was much more normal.

  She only felt a little surprised by it. Because ever since seeing that strange research institute of another era, full of steel and reinforced concrete, in the forbidden woods, she had some expectation of what she might see at the end of this journey.

  The silhouette before her now, more or less confirmed her prediction.

  However, she hadn't predicted everything.

  For example...

  the white fog before them, as the train silently departed and the platform slowly dissipated, also gradually faded, finally vanishing.

  Not only did the distant scenery gradually become clear,

  but the sounds that had been blocked by the thick fog and glass returned once more—

  that was—

  a familiar, low zombie growl.

  The familiar sound caused the hearts of everyone who had just begun to recover from the shock of the grand metropolis to tense up.

  Someone tried to break the deadly tension with a dry laugh.

  “Ha... ha ha... did you guys... hear that too?”

  Before the words had fully left his mouth,

  “ROOO—”

  another, clearer growl sounded directly from the fog in front of them.

  This time,

  everyone,

  fell silent.

  “Hooo...”

  The low, deep sound, from the depths of a thick throat, continued to emerge from the depths of the thinning white fog.

  Every syllable was like a hammer blow to the survivors’ already-frayed nerves.

  This sound was no different from the nightmare they had endured for seven days.

  The crowd instinctively huddled toward the center, the formation becoming cramped and chaotic in their panic. They looked at the white fog as if it were a giant beast slowly opening its maw.

  Every face was etched with tension,

  and a fear that had been suppressed to the absolute limit, teetering on the brink of collapse.

  The main reason this fear was still barely contained from a full-blown meltdown was the black-robed figure standing not far away—the Warden, Bradley Dulles.

  He was the one who had brought them here. Since he had done so, he must have a way to deal with these zombies, right? Of course! He had dealt with the zombies in the previous world, so he could undoubtedly do the same here!

  This was what everyone thought.

  And it was this very thought,

  that kept the emotions of these still-terrified survivors from immediately capsizing.

  However,

  the white fog that enveloped them,

  seemed to have no intention of letting them off so easily.

  Before their very eyes, it accelerated its collapse and dissipation at a visible speed.

  At the end of their line of sight, those grand, fog-shrouded silhouettes grew clearer.

  The surrounding scenery also slowly emerged as the fog receded. And when the full picture of where they were standing was clearly revealed to everyone,

  all of them,

  whether they were the strong knight-squires or the unarmed commoner youths,

  it was as if an invisible hand had clamped down on their throats.

  Even their hearts,

  seemed to skip a beat.

  Even Pandora couldn't help but let her pupils contract violently.

  This was a modern, dead city.

  The reason for calling it “dead” was that the city before them had now been completely reduced to a ruin, eroded by both time and forgetting.