High School of Demon Hunting-Chapter 1684 - 428 Audience Seats
Time winds backward.
When two suns rose in the Black Prison, causing the magic power of the entire world to change drastically, at the end of Beta Town Pedestrian Street on Buji Island, in a small shop facing the street, the owner and his cat were huddled around a tea table, staring blankly at the clear tea in the bowl.
The owner originally didn’t want to space out.
He preferred to lean back in his recliner, eyes squinted, taking a nap.
But the noisy sounds outside the house rose and fell, as shops on the street were swept away one after another by a black tide, the sky-high flames covering the sun, all these severely disturbing Mr.Wu’s nap.
Even worse, the Yellow Flowered Cat would occasionally get up to roar in his ear, urging him to fetch Zheng Qing from the Black Prison before the kid caused even more trouble.
Several times over, Mr.Wu got very annoyed.
Helplessly, he finally had to reluctantly open his eyes.
Then, the man and the cat huddled around a tea bowl and began to space out.
To pull Zheng Qing out of the Black Prison, he first had to find his whereabouts, which was not a very difficult task for the divination expert, Mr.Wu. Soon, the clear water surface in the tea bowl revealed the image of an adventure team trudging in the darkness.
Mr.Wu raised his arm, stretched out two bony fingers, ready to dip them into the tea bowl.
"Wait a minute!"
A pink cat paw blocked those two fingers. The Yellow Flowered Cat looked at Mr.Wu seriously, full of sincerity: "It’s pitch black, what if you recognize the wrong person? Wait a bit..."
It asked Mr.Wu to rescue someone mainly to find trouble for him, so naturally, it wouldn’t allow him to complete the task too easily. However, upon hearing the Flower Cat’s doubts, Mr.Wu pondered for a moment and actually nodded in agreement.
The Yellow Flowered Cat was greatly astonished and couldn’t help but take another closer look at the image in the water, believing it had really seen it wrong. But no matter how much its pupils narrowed into slits, it couldn’t discern anything unusual about the figures.
This astonishment quickly turned into curiosity.
Because Zheng Qing and the others had already entered a barren forest, and the strange colors lingering over the woods, even from a world away, had a familiar smell that stung the Flower Cat’s nose.
"Achoo!" It sneezed hard, its ears quivering with tears for quite a while until the fur on its neck softened: "Darn, the smell from the starry sky..."
Mr.Wu adjusted his glasses with interest and looked at the tea bowl a few times: "An evolved Color of Star to its extreme, probably comparable to a top-tier Big Wizard... quite a rare creature."
The Yellow Flowered Cat instinctively extended its paw to scratch the water — it always had an interest in rare things — unfortunately, it wasn’t Mr.Wu, so when its paw dipped into the tea bowl, it only disturbed the Water Mirror Technique’s image but did not, as it hoped, retrieve a Color of Star.
"Color of Star?" The Flower Cat held its breath, making its voice a bit sharp: "Is there such a thing in the Black Prison? Wasn’t it said that only a fleeing Black Mountain Goat is imprisoned in there?"
Mr.Wu reached out and smoothed the ripples in the tea caused by the cat paw.
"Black Mountain Goat calf, not a Black Mountain Goat." The old man first corrected the Flower Cat’s wording, then seriously explained: "Moreover, the Alliance is in protective custody of that calf, not imprisonment... after all, a follower capable of resisting instinct and refusing Nicolas’s command is still quite valuable."
As he spoke, several scenes rapidly flashed across the image in the tea bowl.
Including the white arc spanning the night sky when Zheng Qing fell into the Black Prison, the Black Mountain Goat calf chasing the boy, the blue big fish chasing the calf, and another Black Mountain Goat calf climbing out of the Extreme East Abyss in the Black Prison World, as well as the hunting team composed by teaching assistants projected from the Black Prison Castle.
After Zheng Qing and his party departed, the skirmish in front of the river valley plain turned into a war between two Black Mountain Goat calves, while the two wizard hunting teams instead became spectators.
The scene shifted back to the desolate woods above.
"As for this Color of Star," Mr.Wu’s bony fingers tapped the table, squinting his eyes as if trying hard to recall those ancient memories in his mind: "...Hmm, a bit unclear now... Probably some dirt I brought back from my first ’outside visit,’ at that time the school wasn’t even built, couldn’t find a place, so I buried it in the Black Prison first... back then this world wasn’t called the Black Prison."
"Haven’t seen it for a while, didn’t expect it to have grown so big... tsk, time, time truly is the best flame for refining everything."
The Yellow Flowered Cat had no time to care about Mr.Wu’s sentiments.
It focused on the strange color on the water surface in the tea bowl, its interest becoming more intense.
Mr.Wu’s mention of ’going outside’ was naturally not just another ordinary world, but somewhere far more remote ’beyond the universe,’ and life existing in such places was needless to say rare; if it could secretly sneak it, it could definitely trade for some nice bubbles from Yog-Sothoth.
While the cat was deep in thought, considering how to stealthily pull that Color of Star from the Black Prison,
in the image reflected in the tea bowl, Zheng Qing had already raised his Charm Gun, shooting around, blasting the barren woods into flying splinters, along with shredding many fragments of the Color of Star.
"That wasteful brat," the Flower Cat already considered that Color of Star its trophy, watching Zheng Qing mess around, it got so mad it jumped up, waving paws to scratch Mr.Wu here and there: "Confirmed, confirmed, quickly pull that boy out... isn’t he breaking the law by so casually using Forbidden Curse power?! You must properly scold him when he gets back."
Mr.Wu tilted his head, looking at Flower Cat with a strange expression in his eyes.
"Breaking the law?" he seemed to have heard a cold joke, momentarily unsure how to react: "Which article in the Wizard’s Code had any stipulation over individual wizard use of Forbidden Curse... the slightly related one is on constraints for high-power magic use, but that restraint currently has no effect in the Black Prison."
After analyzing "The Code", Mr.Wu’s gaze returned to the young warlock wildly firing his Charm Gun around, with a subtle look in his eyes:
"Speaking of which... it was never possibly regulated in the Code, Forbidden Curse is so-called because it has the effect of breaking all rules... paradoxically, the Forbidden Curse on Zheng Qing is precisely the reflection of ’Order’... this completely constitutes a paradox ... more interestingly, paradox is again the fundamental principle of another Curse Convergence... do you think this belongs to a cycle within some greater framework? Or a principle of another Curse Convergence... like dialectics?"
All this made the Flower Cat’s eyes spin with dizziness lines.
Seeing the topic veering deeper and deeper into some profound philosophical content, the Flower Cat quickly raised a paw to stop Mr.Wu’s further divergent thinking.
"Enough!" It slightly raised its voice, yelling: "Those questions, ponder them when you’re asleep... now first figure out a way to get Zheng back! They’re already running lost!"
Mr.Wu thought for a while, finally shook his head, giving up on following that fleeting inspiration, his gaze returning to the Water Mirror Technique.
In the tea bowl, reflected on the water surface, young male and female wizards were lying on a giant Black Cat, with the sun behind their backs, racing through a desolate world.