Sunders left Angor’s side to check the cottage. He was very curious about this strange house since he had never seen it during his previous explorations in Witch’s Town.
Left alone, Angor sat on his bed to think over Sunders’ words.
“That man is Angor, a projection of him in the Nightmare Realm...”
While mumbling the word “projection”, Angor did not think about himself, but another man with short, green hair, a handsome face, a slim-build dressed in a gentleman suit...
Younger Sunders.
Back at Nether City, the strange properties of the Nightmare Realm perfectly recreated Sunders in his early years, including a family dagger used by the younger Sunders, which Angor even took back to reality.
Angor thought it completely possible to find his own projection somewhere.
“The reality is projected into imaginary and gives birth to the truth... I guess humans can also get ‘copied’?”
He wasn’t sure whether this was a rare thing to happen. The only “projected human” he knew until now was Sunders. They had not ascertained the nature of that strange figure Sunders saw earlier, while the old witch didn’t look like a projection.
Angor didn’t believe that the Nightmare Realm would randomly choose people to copy. There should be a set of rules for this. Finding these rules would answer most of their questions.
Next, he thought about the names of the nightmare creatures he heard during Twilight Auction. Glenn, Dink, Farrounduer, Yorkshire, Auri... These names also belonged to people from Padt Manor. Were they “projected humans” too?
But they were monsters! Or at least Auri became a toy owl.
His train of thoughts slowly ran wild and reached a lot of strange yet seemingly possible conclusions.
If that man with long blond hair is really “me”, so how old is he? I never left my hair so long before, and it’s not that I want to do it any time soon.
Maybe it’s just a woman whose hair is of similar color?
He didn’t exclude Sunders’ last assumption yet, since it was completely possible for Nightmare Realm to create a “she-version” of Angor, considering how the maid Auri became an owl, while the gardener’s son, Fawkes, turned into a fox.
For now, he wasn’t going to regard the unknown figure as his own projection. Even if it was, “he” was not the real Angor, but someone alien.
With that in mind, Angor found his mental burden removed.
As for repairing his hand... he wasn’t sure what to do next. He wanted to ask for Sunders’ help, but it seemed the gentleman was more interested in this “new hand” than the good-old one.
Angor got up from the bed and pressed his right palm against the floor. Then he pushed downward, using only a small portion of his strength.
Crack!
The floor buckled under his hand and shattered into the shape of a spiderweb.
Angor was quite surprised to see the strange hand as strong as certain bloodline-enhanced cases, but he wasn’t really happy about it—such strength did not belong to him, and it might go out of control sooner or later.
Also, what are those green patterns?
He stared at the flying green lines as best as he could, until he started getting a delusion that he saw a pair of crimson eyes from them, which went away very soon.
After some further testing, he discovered another merit for owning a “real” hand inside the Nightmare Realm; he could cast cantrips now.
Using cantrips required mana, and his soul couldn’t contain a mana pool. Forcefully drawing in mana at his current condition would hurt him by disrupting his soul energy instead.
However, he just found out that this new hand could be used as a medium for containing mana. At the same time, the cantrip he used had to leave from this hand as well.
He wondered what would happen once he returned to reality and ejected his soul. What would his right hand on his soul form look like then?
Well, gotta find out later.
Sunders had not returned yet. Feeling bored, Angor began to ponder over the reason why Sunders took him here in the first place.
He wanted to see if I can take stuff from reality, no?
He already finished the test. The scrolls he received from Sunders were all “fake” in this world. Although the test was very brief as he was in a hurry back then.
Sunders did not ask for his result probably because the man already saw the condition of the scrolls. The gentleman had determined that the test failed.
But I did take my tablet to Nether City once!
Of course, he couldn’t tell Sunders about the biggest secret as it might give away Jon’s identity.
Angor believed that there was a way to bring items here since he did succeed once. He wanted to find out now that he had time for it.
First, he thought about checking on something that also came from Earth—the Alien Eye.
It was fake.
This meant the secret had nothing to do with Earth technologies.
He kept trying. Eventually, he found a clue at night just as Sunders came back from checking the strange cottage.
...
Sunders returned to Angor’s room with his suit covered with dust and cobwebs.
When the mist in Witch’s Town went away, he left his student in one of the houses he explored before, which he believed to be the safest.
Sunders went away mainly to examine the strange painting mentioned by Angor. It seemed the old witch had returned into the painting, so Sunders planned to destroy it so that the witch couldn’t cause further troubles.
However, what Sunders found in the said cottage was just an ordinary painting. At least his eyes told him so.
Besides, the painting did not have the “girl’s room with another painting inside”, which was described by Angor. What Sunders saw was the first “castle under the moon” picture, which was the one Angor saw in the “first” cottage.
Sunders also tried leaving and entering the cottage repeatedly, yet the painting remained the same.
He took a guess that there was a small world or special dimension hidden inside the painting, which was the witch’s hideout.
It reminded him of a truth-finder wizard titled the “Magic Painter”, who could use his painting brush to connect reality with worlds that existed on papers.
Is this painting perhaps created by him?
If that were the case, Sunders would not be able to destroy the painting at all. He might have to temporarily seal it and wait for another solution.
Once he did so, he went to the other parts of Witch’s Town and collected some items. Even though Angor failed to take the magic scrolls here, Sunders still wanted to find out what the boy could bring back.
Sunders looted a lot of things this time, from the most common necessities to wizardry items of different types. He wanted to cover all possible selections in order to ascertain Angor’s “carry limit”.
For this reason, it took Sunders an entire day to move around the Witch’s Town even though it wasn’t a big place, especially without the mist blocking their views.
Sunders returned and realized his student brought him yet another surprise.
He saw Angor collapsed on the bed with an ill expression.
Sunders immediately noticed that Angor’s soul wasn’t in good condition. It appeared that Angor somehow exhausted his soul energy again.
But what could possibly happen in his room?
Next, Sunders glanced at an object beside Angor’s position.
It was a scroll, the “Aster Barrier” he gave Angor before entering the Nightmare Realm.
Delighted, Sunders move ahead and picked it up. Both the glowing runes on the scroll and the solid touch on his hand suggested that the scroll was ready to be used.
What happened just now? All of Angor’s scrolls were fake phantoms when I checked on them earlier...