Chapter 356: The Fountain of Youth (13)
There had always been a photograph sitting on the desk in Everly’s bedroom.
The young girl in the photograph had golden hair and blue-gray eyes. With a rebellious, defiant expression, she stared stubbornly into the camera, her appearance carrying the contradictory combination of youthful vitality and a hint of weariness.
That was Everly’s biological mother, Rachel.
The woman appearing on the theater screen had fewer of the prickly defenses of a hedgehog and a softer, more maternal air about her, but her facial features were essentially identical to those in the photograph.
Therefore, Everly recognized her at a glance.
It was her mother, Rachel.
The woman was covered in bruises, her left arm broken. Her maternity clothes were stained with blood, and she looked as though she had just walked out of a car wreck—disheveled and haggard. Yet there was not the slightest trace of pain on her face.
Through the screen, she gazed at her daughter with tenderness and reluctance to let go, a faint smile appearing on her face.
“Everly, I’ve always wanted to see what you’d look like when you grew up… To me, the fact that you’re alive is already such a wonderful thing. Thank you for growing up safe and sound.”
As her voice faded, several sharp cracks rang out.
A few of the wooden dummies seated around Everly suddenly exploded like overheated popcorn, with large amounts of strips of film spewing outward through the cracks.
Before long, those wooden figures were completely swallowed by the film and disappeared.
This was the first time Everly had ever seen moving images of her biological mother beyond the photograph. She stared at the woman on the screen with curiosity and longing. Although she had never actually interacted with Rachel, an intense sense of closeness and yearning welled up inside her.
Unfortunately, the footage lasted only a little more than ten seconds before disappearing.
The screen briefly went dark. When it lit up again, the setting of the movie had changed from the hospital to the fog-shrouded town of Pukati.
Everly watched as a hideous, snake-bodied Lamia slipped into the home of a down-and-out painter through the fog and carried away a fragile baby girl. When the baby uttered a vague little “Mama,” the Lamia abandoned the idea of eating her and instead took the infant as her own, indulging her without limit and caring for her with painstaking devotion.
That was how Everly and Lamia had first met.
Everly gazed at the sea monster on the screen with deep affection, eagerly hoping that the scenes of their time together would last a little longer.
However, the baby’s disappearance soon attracted an exorcist. After a fierce battle between the two sides, the Lamia was ultimately petrified on the spot and turned into a statue, then sealed away by the exorcist.
More than a decade passed in the blink of an eye.
Out in the Atlantic, the temporal-spatial ring shattered and an evil god awakened. Everly watched herself come under attack and plunge into the sea, the Lamia’s eyeball still clutched against her chest.
Sensing through the seawater that Everly was in danger, the sleeping Lamia was awakened. To protect the baby girl who had grown up, she appeared before the world and engaged in a desperate battle to the death against the evil god Dagon and his followers.
In the end, this story, which had spanned more than a decade, came to a sorrowful conclusion with the Lamia’s death.
During the final moments of her life, the Lamia finally broke free of her curse after swallowing the eyeball, returning to her original form as the Queen of Libya.
“Thank you, my child…”
On the screen, Lamia weakly coughed up a mouthful of blood, tilted her head back, and gently kissed Everly on the forehead.
That kiss landed not only on the forehead of the Everly from the past, but also on the heart of the Everly sitting outside the screen.
Witnessing Lamia’s body dissipate once again after all these years, Everly could not hold back. A crystalline tear quickly slipped from the corner of her eye.
The Lamia’s body dissolved into foam, and her soul descended into the underworld.
Click!
It was at this moment that the frozen hands of fate were shifted in a different direction, and the tragedy of history was rewritten.
From that day onward, there was no longer a man-eating sea monster named Lamia in this world. She would repent for her past sins and atone for them in the underworld.
“Crack! Crack-crack-crack!”
Explosions rang out around her as more than a dozen wooden dummies suddenly burst apart, transforming into rolls of film.
By this point, the scene on the screen had shifted to a highway at night.
Several cities along the highway were shrouded in the shadow of death due to a series of disappearances involving young women.
That night, an infant’s cry awakened Old John from his sleep. By sheer coincidence, he happened to spot a suspicious vehicle outside his window and, through a twist of fate, rescued two trapped police officers and a girl named Lina from inside a refrigerated truck.
“Thank you, little baby. You’ve allowed my dream of becoming a police officer to continue.”
On the screen, the rescued policewoman Sharon lay in a hospital bed. Although her face was pale and haggard, her eyes shone with an almost frightening brightness.
“Yes, thank you…”
Other voices followed. Two of them belonged to Officer Mike and Lina, while the rest were unfamiliar female voices.
“Crack! Crack!”
More wooden dummies exploded in response, transforming into strips of film.
After the policewoman came hundreds of familiar, beloved faces.
They were the residents of Lemot Town who had survived the cockroach disaster. They gathered in the town square, their faces radiant with smiles as they enthusiastically waved at Everly from beyond the screen.
At the very front of the group, Misha was smiling especially brightly, her warm brown eyes seeming to melt into sweet maple syrup.
“Everly, it was you and Old John who saved us!”
“You saved our town.”
“Thank you!”
“Crack! Crack-crack-crack!”
The scene shifted again.
The witch Natalie and the b*llied girl Kelly stood side by side, holding hands in front of the bloodstained Kingsley mansion. Their faces were splattered with blood, and both wore identical smiles of exhilaration.
“Crack!”
Inside the theater, the people Everly had rescued emerged hurriedly from the sewer entrance, their bodies covered in grime. They threw their arms around their anxious family members, their dirty faces filled with the joy of having survived a catastrophe.
“Crack-crack-crack!”
A high school auditorium, the shores of Emerald Lake, a university campus, a Native American village, vast snow-covered mountains…
One new location after another flashed across the screen. One familiar or unfamiliar face after another appeared, sincerely thanking Everly for plucking the strings of fate and rewriting the destinies that had once been set for them.
“Crack! Crack-crack-crack!”
With every expression of gratitude, another wooden dummy exploded where it stood, transforming into a pile of strips of film.
As time passed, fewer and fewer wooden dummies remained around her, and the entire theater gradually became an ocean of film.
Everly had already realized that the necessary condition for clearing this trial was to watch the entire movie.
Filled with emotion, she watched the screen intently, earnestly looking back on the long road she had traveled to reach this point.
These were all experiences she had personally lived through. As she watched, Everly gradually became immersed in the film, her emotions rising and falling along with its events. Her feelings were a tangled mess—sometimes she rejoiced when someone in the film escaped danger, and sometimes she felt regret over an imperfect ending.
At last, the final scene ended, the image freezing on a cannibal camp strewn with corpses and a helicopter rising into the sky.
Click.
The ceiling lights came on, and the dim theater instantly became brightly illuminated.
Under the bright lights, Everly looked around and discovered that, aside from herself, the theater now contained nothing but piles of black strips of film. Not a single wooden dummy remained.
The strips of film were packed tightly together, occupying every seat and completely surrounding Everly’s chair in the very center.
It was easy to imagine that if they had not transformed into film, then the moment the lights came on, Everly would most likely have been turned to wood amid a frenzy of dancing wooden puppets, becoming a new wooden dummy herself.
It was them… The people in the film had protected her!
Everly’s nose stung, and her heart felt like a balloon about to float into the sky—warm and light, filled to the brim with overwhelming gratitude.
Summoning her courage, she squeezed her way out from between the seats packed with film and stepped into the aisle.
The moment her feet touched the soft, thick carpet, a row of brightly colored EXIT signs suddenly flickered on with a click.
Their brand-new casings stood in stark contrast to the old, dilapidated surroundings, immediately drawing her attention.
Was she supposed to follow the signs?
Everly thought for a moment, then followed the signs along the wall all the way down the aisle until she reached the theater exit. She grabbed the heavy blackout curtain and pulled it aside—
A blinding white light suddenly crashed into her eyes.
Everly was momentarily dazzled, squeezing her stinging eyes shut.
Once her eyes had adjusted, she opened them again.
The theater and the blackout curtain had both vanished without a trace.
She was standing in the exact same position she had been in before entering the theater, at the edge of the saucer-shaped platform, her hand still resting against the statue of Coyote.
[Lost one from another world, you defied fate and reshaped cause and effect. You are immortal because you refused to yield.]
That clear, authoritative voice from earlier rang out from the sky once again.
Hearing herself referred to as a “lost one from another world,” Everly’s heart skipped a beat. She had lived in this world for more than twenty years, yet this was the first time she had encountered someone who could identify her origins so precisely.
Then again, this was an ancient ruin left behind by a god. It was understandable that a being on a divine level might possess greater insight…
“Rustle… rustle-rustle…”
While Everly was still puzzling over the words that had descended from the sky, a faint scraping sound suddenly came from ahead.
Everly followed the sound with her eyes and discovered that, at some point, dozens of brown-black strips of film had emerged outward from the base of the statue in front of her.
Looking closely, she saw that every strip of film contained a record of some moment from her life. Like the tangled roots of a plant, they twisted and intertwined with one another, forming a suspended road just wide enough for one person that stretched all the way toward the floating mountain in the distance.
Everly stood there and waited for a while.
After delivering that obscure, awkwardly worded assessment, the voice in the sky did not say anything else. Once the film road between the platform and the mountain had formed, nothing else happened either.
So Everly braced herself against the statue and tentatively placed one foot onto the road of film.
It was strange. The film itself was soft and fragile, yet when dozens of strips were twisted together to form a road, it was surprisingly solid and stable beneath her feet.
Judging from what that voice had said, Everly felt that she had probably passed the trial.
Summoning her courage, she let go of the statue and cautiously made her way forward along the film road.
As she walked, the voices from the movie continued to echo in her ears.
Rachel, Everly’s biological mother who had died during childbirth, gently told her that as long as Everly grew up safe and sound, that alone would be the best thing in the world.
The lamia who had dissipated to protect Everly called her “my child” with both relief and reluctance.
Her university classmates crowded around her, marveling at Everly’s outstanding performance during the shooting.
The girls who had died during the live-streamed massacre thanked her one after another as they watched their enemies die, one by one…
These voices accompanied her and lifted her up, filling her heart with courage and strength. With every step, her resolve to move forward grew firmer.
One step, then another, and another.
Everly walked steadily along the road made of film.
Beneath her feet was her past.
Ahead of her lay the future she was searching for.
Ten minutes later, as she took her final step, her vision blurred.
She discovered that she had left that pure-white floating world and returned to the enormous hollow containing the vast projection of the planet.
Beneath her feet was a flat stretch of earth.
A silver-white figure stood not far away, silently gazing at her.
Behind the figure, a long staircase rose upward, extending all the way to the mountaintop.
That was the staircase leading to the Fountain of Youth.