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“Must we possess the masks to leave this place?” Han Fei asked, “The meat packing plant has already been destroyed, the rules here might have changed.”

“No one knows who the manager of Cattle Alley is, he is the maker behind all the rules. As long as he is still alive, we need to obey his rules.” Xu Qin brought up something important. All the unique locations in the cryptic world had their own individual manager. If the manager was still alive, they controlled everything within their realm. They were the rule maker and the executor.

“No one know the real identity of the manager?”

“No one has seen him before or rather no one has managed to survive an encounter with him, that should tell you how dangerous he is.” Xu Qin voiced her concern. “To be able to control such a big location and still keep his identity a mystery, the manager at Cattle Alley has to be incredibly powerful.”

“Understood, then what should we do now?”

“We’ll go check the writer’s room first. If we really can’t complete the mission, then we’ll have no choice but to deal with the person who gave us the mission.” Xu Qin said directly. The trio left the room. With Xu Qin’s help, they avoided all the traps and came to a room on the 4th floor. “This is the writer’s place?”

When the door opened, Han Fei was stunned. The writer’s room was completely different from the one in real life. On the walls, inside the cupboards, on the tables, there were butterfly specimens everywhere. The writer appeared to have captured all the butterfly species in the world and turned them into his collection. There was nothing related to the Butterfly in the writer’s room in real life but it was the complete opposite in the cryptic world. It appeared like all the important clues had been left by the writer inside the cryptic world. ‘Looks like the writer has managed to predict that the Butterfly would come to eliminate any trace that might be related to them in real life.’ In reality though, the Butterfly had gone further than that, they not only removed the trace of their existence, they had also murdered everyone who tried to snoop into their secret through the Spider.

Only in the cryptic world that Han Fei would be able to visit the writer’s real room and get to know his real self. The writer’s pen name was Spider but there was nothing related to the arachnid in his room, instead there were a wealth of books and samples related to the butterfly. The writer’s obsession and research into the Butterfly could only be described as madness. He not only chased after real butterflies but also everything symbolic about the butterflies like their legends and stories.

“Seeing all these, wouldn’t you think this is a place of an entomologist?” Xu Qin entered the room with Han Fei. “Don’t be fooled by appearance. The profession of this room’s owner has nothing to do with butterflies at all, one day, he just became insanely obsessed with them for some unknown reason.” Standing inside the room, wherever you turned, you would be greeted by the pretty patterns of the butterfly wings. Eventually you’d lose yourself among their alluring and fearsome beauty. The pattern on the wings appeared to form pairs of eyes, looking into your heart.

After checking the living room, Han Fei entered the study. When he opened the door, he was given another shock. The walls of the room were painted with a giant butterfly wing. Standing inside it, you’d feel like you’re being enveloped by a giant butterfly. The dreamlike, color-bursting wings almost took Han Fei’s breath away, and not in a good way. He could not imagine how the writer managed to work in a place like this. ‘The House of the Butcher is the Spider’s inner self, these patterns should be a manifestation of something inside the writer’s heart.’

Rummaging through the drawers and cupboards, Han Fei noticed something strange. The writer’s place was filled with many different types of literature but there was none written by him. ‘The people here refer to the owner of this place as the writer, they do not seem to know that his pen name is the Spider, that is quite strange.’ Turning to the window, Han Fei noticed yet another strange phenomenon. At the location where the wind chime sat in real life, there hung something that resembled a talisman here.

Stepping on the stool, Han Fei attempted to pull down the talisman. As he put his hands against the ceiling, he realized part of the ceiling was hollow on accident. He pushed harder and a painted wooden board eased out of place and a waterfall of dead butterflies showered down on Han Fei. ‘How many butterflies has the man killed?’

Among the pile of dead butterflies, Han Fei found what appeared to be a manuscript.

“Notification for Player 0000! You’ve found a hidden mission object—Unnamed Hope (Broken).”

The manuscript was not named and had no list of content. Blowing away the broken butterfly wings that had fallen on the cover, Han Fei turned the page over to read.

“From god knows when, the world in my eyes started to change. I wrote down everything that I saw. This is supposed to be non-fiction but everyone who read it said that it is clearly fiction. Perhaps you too will be curious about what I’ve seen? Well, it all starts with a dream…”

The front half of the manuscript was similar to the experience of the 8th persona, the butterfly appeared in the writer’s dream and tried to enter real life through him. But different from the chef, be it in dream or real life, the Butterfly never once succeeded in killing the writer. He escaped the murderous attempts again and again, until eventually he thought about the need to kill the Butterfly or else this would never end. After endless interaction, the writer slowly realized something, the Butterfly existed for real. It came from the deepest corner of the dream world and the corner seemed to be connected to a world filled with pain and despair.

The Butterfly was not really a butterfly. The writer slowly traced out the image of a person hiding behind the butterfly wings. Initially the writer suspected that this was someone who could see the other world like he did but as they interacted further, the writer had a different conviction. The Butterfly appeared to have flown out from that world of pain and despair.

Han Fei believed that he was getting close to the real identity of the Butterfly. When he read the manuscript, he memorized every single line. When the story reached its climax, Han Fei realized the most important later half had been torn off and taken away. Someone had been here before he did. ‘It can only be the other personas who had done this, but who could it be?’ Now there were two choices placed before Han Fei, to kill all the personas to find the other half of the manuscript or to share this secret with all the personas at the building.

“So? Did you find anything?” Xu Qin pointed at her mask, Han Fei grasped her meaning instantly.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to locate the writer in a short amount of time, I think we should adopt the other plan.”

Since the system had identified the manuscript as a mission object, Han Fei kept it inside his inventory. He took one last glance at the room wrapped in butterfly wings and then followed Xu Qin back to the 6th persona’s room.