Chapter 51 Witch: The Gears of Fate Began to Turn Again

Chapter 51: The Witch: The Wheel of Fate Begins to Turn Again

Witches are a people blessed by the will of the world.

They are beautiful, intelligent, and born with extraordinary abilities—commanding wind and rain, living with wild abandon, and possessing formidable vitality. Mere physical death doesn't kill them; only when both body and soul are destroyed can a witch truly be killed.

Even after becoming a mannequin, the owner of the memory was still alive. Everly followed her perspective, drifting further through the memory fragments.

The next morning, the nanny came to feed her as usual, only to find the girl gone from the bed, replaced by a wooden mannequin. Panicking, she moved the pajama-clad mannequin from the bed to the floor, rummaged through the attic searching, and finally hurried out of the attic to call her employer, to report that the hostage had "escaped."

Through a mirror in the corner, Everly saw what "she" looked like now—a wooden mannequin just over three and a half feet tall, similar to the child mannequins commonly used in clothing stores back in the last century. It had blue eyes, red lips, a black wig, and thick fake eyelashes—very lifelike, yet deeply uncanny.

A mannequin can't move. She just sat there, watching her employer York argue with the nanny, watching the nanny threaten York with what she knew about the witch, watching York roar and beat the nanny to death with a low stool. When the nanny's warm blood splattered onto her, a surge of power flowed into her body, and her stiff thoughts sharpened slightly.

"Damn it, how the hell did she escape... No, that witch can't stay alive. I need to get rid of her fast..."

After hastily disposing of the nanny's body, York Kingsley stood in the attic, blood-soaked, muttering to himself.

No, don't! Please, no!

No matter how the soul inside the mannequin screamed and howled, the wooden body stayed motionless. It kept its eerie smile, standing stiffly in the attic, watching York clean up and hurry off, watching the sun rise and set beyond the skylight, the light outside brightening and fading, watching dust motes drift down one by one, gradually veiling the mirror... It was impossible to say how much time had passed. When York appeared again, he had transformed into the wealthiest man in the area, with a gold-trimmed necklace. Cigar in hand, he waved lazily and sold the entire house, attic included, to someone else.

What followed was a chaotic jumble of memories.

As a child mannequin, she was sold, displayed in shop windows, stored in warehouses, sold to a school, used, set aside... Over the long years, countless joys and sorrows played out around her. She witnessed family love, romance, friendship—and jealousy, hatred, and death.

She discovered she could draw power from people's negative emotions—as natural as birds singing or fish swimming.

Yes, of course. She was a Cursed Witch—the more resentment, the stronger she grew.

Yet here she was, trapped in this body, forced to watch her enemy's descendants feast on her mother's blood and reap fame and fortune.

So useless. So pathetic.

The Cursed Witch suffered agonizingly under her own curse, every moment, every second. Until one night, a group of people snuck into the storage room where her body was kept. A girl with witch blood took out a spirit board and summoned the lingering souls around them.

"Click." On the girl's third inquiry into the air, she heard the sound of chains snapping. The power binding her suddenly loosened, and she slipped out of the wooden body, into "her."

And so, from that day on, the wheel of fate, stalled for nearly a century, began to turn again...

...

"Huff... huff..."

Everly gasped as she wrenched herself out of the memory fragment.

The sheer volume of information made her head throb. She had to put down the pendant and clutch her forehead, sitting in a nearby chair to digest it all.

This memory explained every strange thing she'd encountered so far.

So the one possessing Kelly was never the White Witch Olivia, but the little girl history had all but forgotten—the true "Cursed Witch," Natalie—Olivia's biological daughter, Natalie Sara, the "N·S" who appeared during the séance.

"You love your mother a lot too, don't you?"

The question the girl had asked her when they first met suddenly flashed through her mind.

At the time, it had seemed random, but now she realized the one truly asking was Natalie, inside Kelly.

Mother, huh...

Everly looked down and pulled out the necklace she wore. After leaving home to board at school, she'd sewn a small cloth pouch, put the eyeball inside, and worn it as a necklace. When Natalie asked that question, her gaze hadn't been on Everly's face but on her chest—right where the eyeball pendant hung. Had she sensed the eyeball's existence?

Sharp witch.

Everly rested for a bit, then tried picking up the pendant again, wanting to see what happened after Natalie possessed Kelly. But the moment the pendant touched her hand, she was plunged back into six-year-old Natalie's memories, and the scene from before replayed.

Everly didn't want to go through that again—that memory was too oppressive, too long, suffocating just to witness. Before she got pulled in too deep, she quickly dropped the pendant, stuffed it back in the plastic bag, and leaned back in her chair, thinking about what this pendant really was and why Natalie had given it to her... And most confusing of all, why Natalie had let the Exorcists burn her mother.

Didn't Natalie love her mom more than anything?

After thinking it over and coming up empty, Everly finally chose to contact Rebecca.

"You're saying the witch inside Kelly is actually Olivia's daughter Natalie? Impressive—you've gathered that many clues in such a short time. Actually, West just proposed the theory that the witch is Natalie too, but that girl's information was deliberately erased, and with so much time having passed, it's been incredibly hard to find. We've only just located her name." Rebecca's energetic voice came through the receiver.

Everly: "But I can't figure it out. Assuming the witch is Natalie, why would she pretend to be her mother Olivia and lead the Exorcists to burn her mother's body and soul? Wouldn't that rob her mother of the chance to be resurrected?"

Rebecca thought for a moment, then guessed: "Probably hoping her mother can finally rest in peace."

"Huh?"

"Assuming the intel you gave is correct, and Olivia really was a White Witch, then when she was forced to curse others to death, her soul would have suffered backlash, causing irreversible erosion. After her death, her tongue was made into a lucky talisman. For that talisman to work, it also consumed the witch's soul. With both factors stacked, the soul remnant left in Olivia's corpse was already extremely weak. If the soul is too badly damaged, even if resurrected with the enemy's blood, what awakens would only be a walking corpse. Moreover, White Witches are mostly noble in character and indifferent to life and death. To them, death isn't terrifying—it's returning to the embrace of Mother Nature. On the contrary, forcing a White Witch to resurrect through dark witch methods would be a desecration."

"..."

Everly didn't know how to describe her feelings.

A mother loves her child, so she was willing to go against her own nature and use her power to kill. A daughter loves her mother, and to avoid burdening her, she cursed herself, turning into an immobile puppet. Decades later, when the daughter finally regained the ability to act, between resurrecting her mother at the cost of her suffering and sending her mother to rest, the daughter firmly chose the latter...

"Fate has been truly unfair to them... If only Olivia and her daughter could have been born in your homeland." After a long silence, Everly forced the words out through a hoarse throat.

"Yeah, truly unfair."

Rebecca let out a long sigh as well.

With her most pressing question answered, Everly composed herself and began consulting Rebecca about the pendant.

For certain reasons, she didn't tell Rebecca where the pendant came from, only saying she'd bought a magical pendant from some channel and that touching it revealed a memory of its previous owner.

"There's something that amazing? Do you have a photo? Send it to me."

"Hold on."

Everly hung up, took a photo of the pendant, and sent it to Rebecca. Phones back then couldn't send messages while on a call—how inconvenient.

After sending the photo, it took about ten minutes before Rebecca called back.

"Hey, Little Miss, I couldn't figure out what it was, so I asked around and finally got an answer. The droplet in your pendant might come from the 'Memory Spring.' As the name suggests, this kind of droplet can store the memories of the living. Legend says that if a soul drinks it, they can retain the eternal memories preserved in the water. Because the droplet is a product of the underworld and cannot touch anything in the mortal world, it has to be contained in white crystal. But these are just guesses—the person wasn't entirely sure either, since the Memory Spring is in the underworld, and the living have only heard it as a legend."

Memory Spring?

Everly was well-read, but there were too many myths and legends in the world for her to remember them all. After asking Rebecca, she learned that the Memory Spring was the spring of Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, language, and writing. Located in the underworld, it stood in opposition to the Western "River of Forgetfulness," the Lethe. Every soul arriving in the underworld would encounter both springs.

The memory fragment didn't say how Natalie had obtained this droplet. Perhaps after cursing herself, the little witch had once stepped into the underworld.

But if it truly could carry the memories of the living, then Everly understood why Natalie had given it to her.

Thinking this, she took a deep breath, removed the pendant from the bag, held it in her palm, and following Rebecca's advice, while another person's memories invaded her mind, she silently recited the new memories she wanted to infuse.

She succeeded.

Half an hour later, all of Natalie's memories in the pendant were overwritten. When she touched the pendant again, the scene that appeared before her eyes became...