Chapter 624

The sealing proceeded very smoothly.

The black rune had already drifted directly above the salt jar and began to descend slowly.

The humming sound of the incantations grew louder and louder, and the air in the storage room was resonating along with it.

Everything was going according to plan.

Then, an accident occurred.

"Ugh——"

The Cursed Witch suddenly let out a muffled groan.

Her right arm——from shoulder to palm suddenly twisted in an unnatural posture.

As if someone were wringing a rag, the entire arm and palm were twisted in the opposite direction.

Muscles, bones, blood vessels, nerves——all tissues emitted faint tearing sounds under the twisting of that force.

The Cursed Witch's face instantly became ugly, because she hadn't discovered the attacker.

Her left hand quickly raised and pressed onto her twisted right shoulder, and a black light surged from her palm, attempting to resist the twisting force.

Other wizards subconsciously looked at her and alerted the surroundings.

This was human nature.

When a teammate is suddenly injured, anyone will pay attention to what happened at the first moment.

But at this very moment, the moment everyone's attention shifted from the finger to the Cursed Witch, Jie Ming's spiritual sense captured the change in the salt jar.

The finger was still there.

But the strange force attached to the finger had dissipated.

A moment ago it was still there, emitting that indescribable "sense of abnormality"; the next moment, there was nothing left of it.

The finger turned into an ordinary dead person's finger covered in age spots.

Jie Ming reacted almost instinctively.

His spiritual sense exploded at full power, and the Fate System overclocked, attempting to track where that dissipated force had gone.

But that force dissipated too thoroughly, leaving no trace, as if it had never existed.

"It ran away." Jie Ming said in a deep voice.

The air in the storage room solidified for a moment.

The twisting force on the Cursed Witch's right arm rapidly weakened under her resistance and finally stopped.

Her right arm was severely deformed, the bones were broken into several pieces, and the muscle fibers were torn over a large area.

But she just frowned, and her right arm began to recover automatically, the bones emitting clicking sounds of resetting.

Her gaze fell on that finger, and her pale gray eyes narrowed.

"Tsk."

A dissatisfied tsk sound came from under her hood.

"Just one step away." She stared at the finger, her tone carrying a hint of annoyance. "That arm twisting was to create chaos; at that very moment, it broke free from the finger."

The dark-blue-robed wizard's face also didn't look very good: "Can it still be tracked?"

"Unlikely." The Cursed Witch nodded. "The main body of that ghost thing was never an actual existing thing to begin with."

The atmosphere in the storage room became subtle.

The Cursed Witch's right arm had already recovered under the effect of self-healing wizardry.

She moved her fingers, confirmed that the function was not damaged, and then raised her head, her pale gray eyes sweeping over everyone present.

"That force that twisted my arm, did you feel it?"

The burly wizard nodded: "Felt it. Very sudden, without any warning."

"It didn't seem to come from the finger." The young witch frowned and recalled. "My spiritual sense has been locking onto that finger; before it dissipated, the finger itself had no abnormal energy fluctuations. That force seemed more like——coming from somewhere else."

The blue-robed wizard looked at the finger: "According to our analysis of that salty finger, its ability should be limited to the concept of 'salty': making food salty, causing kidney failure, making the victim taste saltiness. It shouldn't possess the ability to twist limbs."

"So, either we missed something in our analysis——" The thin wizard narrowed his eyes. "That anomaly has characteristics we haven't discovered yet."

"..."

"Or——" The life-system wizard took over the conversation, his body having already transformed back from the elemental state to the flesh form, his complexion returning to normal. "Something else intervened."

A wizard's eyes lit up: "In other words, there is actually another anomaly here?"

This sentence caused the air in the storage room to suddenly become scorching hot.

The salty finger had already proven the research value of such things as anomalies.

For wizards, naturally, the more the better!

And the person who understood the situation that just happened best was, of course, Jie Ming, who had been observing the surroundings since just now!

So everyone's gaze turned to him.

Jie Ming was standing next to the stone table at this time, his gaze not falling on the salt jar, but on an uncertain position in the void.

Deep in his pupils, golden light was slowly circulating; that was a sign of the All-Seeing Eye and the Fate System operating simultaneously.

"I have been paying attention to the fate situation around here just now." Jie Ming said, his tone neither hurried nor slow. "I did capture an abnormal fate line."

"What direction? Is it related to the finger?" The dark-blue-robed wizard asked immediately.

"Your guess is correct; the force behind it didn't come from the finger." Jie Ming affirmed. "That finger is 'dead' at the fate level; it has no active fate output. That force that twisted the arm came from outside. The specific direction——"

He closed his eyes and traced the trajectory of that fate line in his consciousness. "Northeast direction, about one kilometer away from here."

"One kilometer to the northeast." The young witch quickly outlined the town's map in her mind. "That is the garden area on the edge of the town. There is an abandoned noble manor, and there is a long corridor behind the manor."

All the wizards' spiritual senses surged toward that direction together, and soon, everyone discovered the strange point.

"Eh?!"

"Let's go take a look." The dark-blue-robed wizard made a prompt decision.

Nine figures swept out of the fruit storage room, flying toward the northeast direction along the rooftops.

A distance of one kilometer was nothing but an instant for a wizard.

Jie Ming landed above the manor garden, observing this area from a high vantage point.

This was a manor that had clearly been abandoned for many years.

The roof of the main building had collapsed for the most part, stone walls were covered with vines, and the courtyard was overgrown with weeds.

But the structure of the garden was still vaguely discernible, with regular paths, broken stone carvings, and a corridor covered by wisteria.

The corridor was very long, about a hundred meters, and the stone pillars were carved with exquisite patterns.

The ground of the corridor was paved with stone slabs, and the slabs were covered with dust and withered leaves.

But what really caught Jie Ming's attention were the walls on both sides of the corridor.

The walls were covered with graffiti.

Those were very common child-like graffiti lines, crooked and twisted, with unevenly applied colors, as if something a child had casually drawn on the stone wall with a rough brush.

Jie Ming's spiritual sense swept over those graffiti, his brows furrowing slightly.

He landed at one end of the corridor, and the other wizards also landed one after another.

"These graffiti——" The young witch walked close to the wall, observing carefully. "They look very old. The pigments have seeped into the stone; it's been at least a few years."

"But not all of them are old." The Cursed Witch pointed to a section on the wall. "This part wasn't here before."

Jie Ming looked in the direction her finger was pointing.

That was a relatively clean section of the wall, the graffiti pigment looked newer, and the colors were more vivid. There were several human figures in the picture.

A total of nine human figures, each with different postures, some standing, some sitting, some with arms crossed, some sitting cross-legged.

Although the drawing style was childish and the lines were simple, the characteristics of each figure were surprisingly clear.

The color of the clothes, the outline of the body, and even some subtle posture characteristics were highly consistent with the nine wizards.

Jie Ming found himself.

That human figure was sitting cross-legged on the ground, leaning against the wall, and the posture was indeed very similar to his.

The face of the figure was not drawn with facial features, just two dots drawn at the position of the head.

Jie Ming remembered that he had been keeping his eyes open to maintain spiritual sense scanning in the storage room.

The Cursed Witch's figure was also easy to recognize, wearing a black cloak with a hood covering her head, exactly the same as her image in the storage room.

But what really made everyone's pupils shrink was the right arm of this figure.

The right arm representing the Cursed Witch's figure, from shoulder to palm, had been painted over by some dark pigment.

Just like someone had used black pigment to roughly smear it, erasing the entire arm from the picture.

"This——" The burly wizard showed an interested look. "When was this drawn?"

Jie Ming squatted down, activated the All-Seeing Eye, carefully observed the dryness and penetration depth of the black pigment, and then analyzed the chemical composition of the pigment with his spiritual sense.

"Newly drawn." He said, his tone flat. "The pigment hasn't completely dried yet. Judging by the penetration speed and evaporation degree——it was drawn about a few seconds ago."

A few seconds ago.

It was exactly the time when the Cursed Witch's arm was twisted.

"So." The dark-blue-robed wizard's voice was very slow, as if he were chewing on every word. "There is something we don't know about that drew our portraits on the wall of this corridor. Then, it painted over the Cursed Witch's arm on the portrait. And then, the Cursed Witch's arm twisted in reality."

"Very likely." The thin wizard said. "This graffiti——or rather, the thing that created this graffiti, can rewrite reality."

Everyone's gaze fell on those graffiti again.

Nine wizards, nine portraits.

Except for the Cursed Witch's right arm being painted over, the other eight portraits were complete.

But Jie Ming noticed that there were some subtle incomplete modification marks on the edges of some portraits.

For example, the fingers of a certain portrait had been traced, and the feet of a certain portrait had been lengthened a little, but those modifications were later erased.

It looked like it was testing.

"This thing seems to have intelligence." Jie Ming pointed to those modification marks. "Look here, here, and here.

It has modified the portraits more than once. It is trying, experimenting, testing how much influence its power can have on wizards."

His gaze became solemn: "And judging from these traces, it has tried many times. It's just because the wizards' resistance to laws is too strong, so those minor modifications didn't produce obvious effects before."

"Until it took advantage of the time when we deliberately lowered our resistance to experience the effect of the curse, it increased its intensity, painted over the entire arm, and finally caused substantial damage."

"Although it was just an arm twist, it's not a serious injury for a Tier 6 wizard." The Cursed Witch moved her fingers, which could already bend and stretch normally. "But what if it increases the intensity next time? What if it paints over my head next time?"

"I actually don't think it's that it doesn't want to paint over your head, but that it can't; after all, you can't expect this thing to have any kindness." Jie Ming shook his head.

Others thought about it and nodded in agreement silently.

The ability of this thing was actually already very obvious, which was to modify reality through graffiti.

But unfortunately, wizards all knew very well that no matter how strong a mechanism is, it must have numerical support.

In the case of insufficient numbers, when facing stronger numbers, the mechanism will not work.

Judging from the previous situation, it was clear that the wizards' numbers far crushed them.

"Looking at it this way, although both are anomalies, the salty finger and this graffiti have obvious differences." The young witch walked to the other side of the corridor, looking at the graffiti in other areas of the wall. "The salty finger's way of operating is mechanical; it will kill people family by family, but it won't adjust its strategy according to the situation. It is just executing some fixed rules.

"But this graffiti is different." Jie Ming took over the conversation. "It will test us, and then according to the situation at the time, it chose the Cursed Witch as the first target."

After all, the Cursed Witch was the main force of the seal.

If she was injured, the seal would be interrupted, and the salty finger could run away.

"So it is helping the salty finger escape?" The dark-blue-robed wizard's brows twisted into a knot. "Can such things cooperate with each other?"

"I actually think it might just be a coincidence; after all, I didn't think about the possibility of a second anomaly before, so when I mobilized the fate lines, I mobilized all fates that could possibly be related to the anomaly." Jie Ming shook his head.

"So this thing was essentially led there by us. The real point to pay attention to should be the strength of this thing."

He looked at the Cursed Witch's right arm.

"It can hurt a Tier 6 wizard. Although the injury is not heavy, and it only hurt her after the Tier 6 wizard let go of her own protection, it did hurt her. And its ability is the type of 'modifying reality'——the danger of this power is several levels higher than that finger."

Jie Ming turned his head to look at the crooked child graffiti on the corridor wall, his expression serious, his gaze carrying some prudence.

Other wizards also nodded in agreement.

"The problem is——where is it now? Is it attached to these graffiti, or is it hiding somewhere else, remotely controlling these graffiti through some way?" A wizard asked.

Jie Ming reactivated the Fate System, his spiritual sense spread at full power, attempting to capture any abnormal clues in the surrounding fate network.

A few seconds later, he opened his eyes.

"The fate lines are very messy." Jie Ming shook his head. "I can't find its main body for the time being."