Chapter 132: A Box of Dirt and a Hallucination

“Sorry, little kitties. My luck wasn’t exactly stellar today. I only managed to swipe a box of literal dirt. This is all I have for dinner, so please don’t be too picky.”

Haze helplessly held up half a piece of shriveled, rock-hard black bread, standing on her tiptoes to offer it to the few strays perched on the brick wall.

This meager half-ration was a leftover from last night. She had been starving all day, her stomach twisting into painful knots, but she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to eat it. Unfortunately, the alley cats of Caladon, accustomed to scavenging fine dining scraps from the city’s wealthier districts, clearly hadn’t learned to make do like her. They merely gave the bread a passing sniff before turning their heads away in utter disinterest, gracefully dropping to the cobblestones to carefully groom their paws.

Haze let out a disappointed sigh and pulled the bread back. She swallowed dryly. Cupping the stale crust in both hands, she tried to soften it with the faint warmth of her palms, hoping a slightly better texture might make the arrogant felines change their minds.

People always divided their own kind into rigid social classes, but cats never bothered with such trivialities. They would approach a person for no reason and abandon them just as quickly, entirely indifferent to whether the hand feeding them belonged to a wealthy noble or a destitute Infected.

Just like right now. Aside from these stray cats, absolutely no one in this sprawling city was willing to get close to a severely Infected Feline who looked like she might collapse from an Originium Arts backlash at any given second.

The crust in her palms finally yielded a fraction of an inch. A scrawny white cat lightly hopped onto her shoulder, leaning in to inspect the offering. Haze subconsciously held her breath, her eyes brightening with a sliver of hope.

The white cat sneezed directly onto the bread and jumped down without a single backward glance.

Left with no other choice, Haze resigned herself to her fate. She tore off a small chunk, shoved it into her mouth, and chewed with tremendous effort. It felt exactly like gnawing on compressed wood shavings.

No wonder the cats refused to touch it. These speechless little companions were often far more perceptive than she was.

As the crude, heavy lump of sustenance hit her empty stomach, her freezing body finally began to generate a faint trace of warmth. Her brain, which had been hovering on the very edge of shutting down from sheer caloric deficit, barely managed to reboot its cognitive functions.

She wondered how her fellow Feline at that shop was holding up. Haze bit down hard on the bread, her sharp canines grinding against the stale crust. Her decision to pickpocket that strange young man today hadn’t been a random whim.

The employee at Green Spark, a girl named Susie, didn’t remember her. But Haze remembered Susie perfectly—a fellow Feline Infected who, just like her, had come to this unforgiving city entirely alone to scrape together a living.

Susie was like a mirror reflecting a past version of Haze, one that hadn’t yet been unjustly thrown into a Victorian prison: optimistic, painfully kind, and endlessly hardworking.

Haze rarely stopped for people like that anymore. She had already watched too many bright-eyed companions break under the city’s cruelty and leave her behind. But she didn’t mind offering a subtle helping hand in passing. When she saw that strange young man seemingly giving Susie a hard time, she had smoothly used her professional specialty, slipping the heavy supply box right out of his hands to relieve the pressure on the poor girl.

Although she had somehow ended up stealing a box of premium dirt.

Haze glared at the bread and took another angry bite. Why on Terra was a man carrying around a locked security case filled with soil?!

Anger was an emotion that consumed far too much precious energy. She quickly finished off the black bread, which was dense enough to double as a blunt-force weapon, and clapped the crumbs from her hands. Standing up, her thoughts drifted back to the warm lights of Green Spark.

She genuinely hoped she had managed to help that pink-haired girl out of a tight spot.

“No! Really, absolutely not!”

Goldenglow stared at Phantom with wide, tear-filled eyes. The dark-clad assassin had immediately ducked behind the Doctor the moment he heard he was supposedly being ‘sold’, and was now watching her with the vigilant intensity of a cornered beast.

She weakly raised her hands in defense. “We are just a normal shop! There is literally no way we can sell you!”

Phantom calmly took two measured steps backward, maintaining a strict safe distance to prevent this terrifying monster—currently disguised as an emotionally unstable pink-haired Feline—from launching a sudden ambush. At the same time, he rigorously dismantled her flawed logic.

“A pet shop that caters to birds, fish, and insects sounds infinitely more logical than a hair salon that also functions as a liquor store,” Phantom stated, his voice a smooth, deadpan whisper. “Since you possess the authority to distribute alcohol here, why is it structurally impossible for you to traffic in pets?”

Goldenglow felt her vision physically darken at the edges. “Even if I were running a black-market pet ring, who would I even sell a grown man to?!”

While shrinking further into the Doctor’s shadow, Phantom didn’t forget to tightly clutch the hem of the man’s coat. The Doctor was standing there so perfectly still and unbothered that Phantom had instantly concluded this entire scenario was a high-level cognitive hallucination.

His internal logic remained airtight: How would I know? Cats do not comprehend the socio-economic concepts of buying and selling.

As long as I strictly adhere to the narrative rules proposed by this mimetic monster herself, she will lack the necessary trigger conditions to attack me!

Goldenglow stared at him, utterly defeated. You remember you’re supposed to be a cat now?! Is this guy actually sick in the head?!

Phantom easily sensed her spiking frustration but couldn’t care less. Years of brutal experience dealing with Arts-induced hallucinations had turned him into a seasoned veteran of these infinite-flow psychological traps. He had encountered countless hostile NPCs just like her—entities desperate to kill him, but forcibly restrained by the overarching logic of the illusion.

Besides, there were no outsiders present in this twisted castle. The worst-case scenario of falling into a deep hallucination usually involved accidentally dismantling his own chaotic colleagues. But this was the first time he had encountered such a bizarrely mundane illusion. He absolutely refused to let this NPC succeed in shifting the genre from a surreal slice-of-life comedy back to his usual survival-horror channel.

Sitting quietly in the corner, Rosmontis slowly looked up, her wide eyes blinking in pure surprise.

Her Arts were passively picking up the surface-level heart sounds of Red, Goldenglow, Phantom, and the Doctor.

She was currently listening to five entirely different, violently conflicting misunderstandings originating from just four people. Language truly was a terrifyingly mysterious thing.

The little Feline’s brain spun. For a brief moment, she tried to manually sort out the tangled web of relationships and false assumptions bouncing around the room.

Ah… this is too hard.

Rosmontis shook her head vigorously, her oversized ears flapping against her hair with a soft patta-patta sound. As the sole individual in the room who actually grasped the entire truth of the situation, she made the highly irresponsible decision to welcome yet another bout of selective amnesia.

This is the Doctor… This is Steward… This is Yato. I remember them perfectly!

She didn’t know the others very well, and they weren’t written down in her current notebook, which meant she didn’t need to waste processing power worrying about them. Rosmontis pulled out her small, heavily encrypted diary and quickly jotted down the key points of the day. It seemed her memory loss this time wouldn’t be too severe.

Eventually, the sheer weight of the awkwardness broke. Goldenglow took the initiative to pay for the Doctor’s and Red’s drinks out of her own meager private stash. Even someone with a psychological shield as thick as the Doctor’s felt too embarrassed to keep loitering in her shop after that.

The supply box—which served as the physical token for his Rhodes Island logistics allocation authority—had been stolen. The bureaucratic procedures he had established for the landship were far too perfect. He absolutely refused to be the one to break the strict new requisition rules he had stayed up three nights in a row drafting.

So, upon learning that Quercus wouldn’t be returning to the shop anytime soon, the Doctor had no choice but to gather his operators and step back out into the streets of Caladon.

The biting autumn wind howled through the avenues. The elite strike team stood helplessly by the roadside, looking entirely out of place.

“Doctor, where exactly is our supply box?” Yato asked, her masked face turning toward him.

The Doctor casually spread his hands. “It was stolen.”

Red whipped his head around, his eyes widening in shock. Someone actually dared to steal from the Doctor?! Right under their noses?! When?!

Yato, however, had grown thoroughly accustomed to the Doctor’s unique operational style over the past few days—terrifyingly reliable in major strategic matters, but operating on a completely deranged wavelength when it came to minor daily inconveniences. “When did this happen?”

“Just now,” the Doctor replied smoothly. “That Feline girl who bumped into me on the way here.”

Not a single person in the group felt surprised that he knew exactly who the thief was.

The veteran operators present all shared the same silent understanding: if the Doctor hadn’t called out such a blatant theft on the spot, it meant the action had occurred with his tacit approval. It was a calculated indulgence.

The Playwright, always a sharp observer of human nature, took one long look at the Doctor’s unreadable expression and immediately realized something far more complex was at play.

Phantom and Mu Luo reacted in their own ways. Phantom remained convinced that whatever absurd events transpired were simply normal progression flags within the hallucination. Mu Luo, having endured extensive psychological conditioning under Bacchus, had long since resigned himself to the chaos. He was already mentally calculating what kind of degrading odd jobs he would need to take in the city to financially support this massive, dysfunctional group.

Only Red, watching the varied reactions of the elite operators, felt a deep wave of sorrow wash over him. It was like looking into a mirror reflecting his own naive self from a few months ago.

I knew it! This pervert just loves playing cat-and-mouse! He’s setting up another massive entrapment scheme!

Meanwhile, far beyond the towering walls of Caladon, a figure who absolutely shouldn’t have been in Victoria at this moment was making her approach.

She wore a thick, industrial-grade filtration mask and a heavy, insulated protective suit, yet the bulky gear completely failed to suppress the young woman’s overflowing vitality.

“Cough, cough… Ugh, such a heavy smell of industrial dust.”

The girl complained playfully, her tone light and teasing as she strode confidently toward the city gates. “I helped you out so much back in Kazimierz, Doctor. The least you could do is arrange our secret rendezvous somewhere a bit more upscale~”

She adjusted the heavy bag slung over her shoulder, her eyes curving into a bright, affectionate smile beneath the visor.

“Don’t be anxious, Doctor. Your loyal knight has brought enough money to play the hero saving the beauty!”

[Rhodes’s Note:

Enjoying the operation so far, Doctor?

(This daily grind literally pays the landship’s rent! 🙇‍♂️):

Massive thanks for reading and supporting the operation!]