For a brief moment during my fight with Aunt Hua, I foolishly thought her magical trick was to cast visual illusions solely upon herself to dodge my attacks.
But nope. She had played an illusion on everything! She had cast a spell over the whole entire forest, hijacking our brains and heavily warping our whole internal perception of reality itself!
Exactly three seconds after successfully cracking the magical trick like the undeniable genius I was, I heard Aunt Hua’s voice through the trees. It was delivered in a taunting voice.
"Playing a little game of hide and seek, are we?"
’Perfect fuckin’ timing,’ I thought to myself, leaning my head back against the tree trunk as an arrogant smirk played across my face.
I confidently stood up from the dirt, dusting off my pants, and boldly stepped out from behind the tree, intentionally showing myself directly to her.
"Ah, there you are," she said, floating down slightly. "You honestly got me for a quick moment there."
For a "moment"? The stupid bitch was about to learn that I was aiming to ruin her whole day!
I started to walk directly towards her, my strides heavy with the unshakable confidence of a man who knew he had already won the war.
Seeing my lack of fear, she frowned and immediately started to gesture her arms around in the air yet once again, summoning the massive trees and roots around her to attack me.
How did I retaliate against this onslaught of deadly wood, you ask?
By simply rejecting the illusion in my mind. Just like taking control during a lucid dream.
The roots shot forward and sure enough, they hit my body. But this time? They didn’t hurt in the slightest. There was no pain, no impact. I casually flicked the wooden spikes away with the back of my palms, treating them as if I was lightly flicking away a bunch of cotton ropes.
The visual world around me may have been a fake, but the sheer confusion blossoming on Aunt Hua’s face was very much deliciously real.
"How did you-" she started to speak, her voice wavering with shock as I interrupted her mid-sentence.
"A very thoughtful question, isn’t it?" I taunted, my smirk widening into a full-blown smile.
She got angry at the disrespect. She abandoned the magic and physically rushed towards me at full speed to strike me down herself. I simply crossed my arms, stood my ground, and peacefully closed my eyes, deciding to just let her do exactly what she does.
She unleashed a bunch of attacks. But because my brain no longer believed in the threat, her ferocious attacks didn’t even leave a scratch on my skin this time. I felt nothing but a light breeze.
I slowly opened my eyes to closely witness her desperate attempts to try and hurt me. Every single failed punch and every useless kick visibly pushed her mental state further and further toward her breaking edge.
Because her focus was shattering, the incredibly complex spell holding the world together began to fail. I could see her face beginning to lose its perfect symmetry. Her features started to heavily glitch and get deformed, like a reflection in a badly rippling pond.
She screamed out loud in frustration, but her rage only seemed to make her rapidly lose her grip on the delicate illusions even faster.
The trees surrounding us began to swirl and melt like hot wax. Aunt Hua dropped to her knees, holding her own body in agony, as her physical avatar shifted and glitched into various, deeply uncanny and horrifying forms.
Finally, after a deeply satisfying moment of watching her writhe in pain, all of the illusion completely disappeared into the void, forcefully dragging her right along with it.
It felt like I had just splashed my tired face with a bucket of ice-cold water.
I was back to reality.
"Ziyang!"
I could clearly hear the very real voices of my friends calling out my name. My head spinning slightly, I followed the direction of the sound, blinking rapidly to clear the spots from my vision.
I stumbled forward and finally met up with my group of friends. We were standing in front of the massive gates of the Bastille.
Aunt Hua laid unconscious right in the dirt directly in front of the gates, with Lai’s physical body having seemingly vanished.
"What the fuck just happened?!" Jian exclaimed, his hands checking his own intact body. "I literally just watched every single one of you die!"
"So did I!" Qinyue loudly added. Her eyes were wide with terror. "She brutally punched a massive hole straight through Liangyu’s chest, she forcefully ripped Jian’s entire head off his shoulders, and she slashed Mei’s-"
"Throat?" Jian interrupted, pointing a shaking finger at her. "It was the exact same horrific scenario for me, but in my version, it was you who got your throat violently slashed open! And it was Ziyang whose chest was brutally punched in! I genuinely thought we were totally done for!"
I turned my head. "What about you, Liangyu?" I asked. "What did you see?"
Liangyu didn’t even blink. He just blankly stared far off into the distance, not moving at all. It looked exactly as if he had just returned from a deeply intimate date night with death itself.
"I’d rather not say," he finally whispered, taking a very slow breath.
There was no way in hell any of us were going to try and investigate his trauma any further. We let it go.
Mei, still heavily trembling from the sensory overload, finally spoke up with a terribly fragile voice. "I honestly thought I had permanently lost you all. Thank God we’re all still alive."
And with that final release of tension, tears finally fell freely from her tired eyes. Qinyue immediately stepped forward and wrapped her arms around her, giving her a tight hug to try and console her.
"Thank ’God’?" I scoffed, crossing my arms over my chest. "You guys better intensely thank me. Look, I’m certainly not the type of guy who is going to stand here and brag about it or anything, but I’m the sole reason who got you all out of that mental prison."