Chapter 391: The Inescapable Loop

“It wasn’t entirely luck.”

As if she had seen right through Jack’s thoughts, Pandora suddenly spoke.

Jack blinked, looking up.

Pandora’s gaze wasn’t on him, but toward the gray-white mist, as though she were mulling something over.

“At least you were one of the ones who put more faith in my methods.”

“The Wizardry Crystal I made… has certainly shown no shortage of flaws this time.”

She paused briefly, as if choosing her words.

“Thankfully, the results also show that this thing’s effects are still a bit better than my worst-case expectations. You were even able to use a single Wizardry Crystal to kill a Rank-3 Anomaly of normal intensity. That’s already quite good.”

Pandora smiled, offering this explanation to Jack, who had only just snapped out of his deep self-reproach.

The corner of her mouth lifted just enough to bring a touch of life to that pale face.

“Alright. This isn’t over yet, so don’t just stand there.”

Her smile faded as her gaze swept over the three remaining members.

“Tell me what else you’ve been through.”

Jack drew a deep breath and recounted everything in detail.

He told them how the assistant squad leader had gone looking for Betty and died along the way, how Betty was still nowhere to be found, and how they had repeatedly reached the mist boundary yet could never find a way out.

Every incident he recounted felt like retelling an absurd nightmare.

His voice was tight at first, but it grew steadier as he went on.

It was like delivering a detailed report.

Getting everything out in the open was far more bearable than letting it fester inside.

“Can’t find your way out?”

After hearing this, a trace of interest surfaced in Pandora’s eyes.

It was the look of a researcher who had spotted something interesting—the cold detachment receding, replaced by a kind of focused scrutiny.

“Interesting. Let me see it for myself…”

………………

Several minutes later.

With a soft creak, they pushed open the door before them, and the familiar mist boundary came into view once more.

The gray-white fog was cut cleanly there, hanging in a sharply defined line at the corridor entrance.

The outline of the corridor entrance was identical to before—even the crack in the wall corner was in exactly the same position.

Pandora came to a halt.

She didn’t turn back immediately, but quietly studied the mist boundary for a while, a faint, half-smile touching her face.

“I see… So this is what you ran into.”

A few minutes earlier, at Pandora’s request, they had set out once more.

And the same result had presented itself again—here they were, back at the starting point.

The support squad members’ breathing quickened.

The stocky squad member was especially agitated, his voice cracking as he spoke:

“This is it! No matter how we walk, we always end up back here! Forward, backward, left, right—no matter which way we go, the next door we open always brings us right back here!”

His arms gestured wildly, as if his body were trying to express some absurdity beyond words.

Pandora gave a slight nod. From the corner of her eye, she could just make out the assistant squad leader’s corpse in the side room.

That pale skeleton curled inside the blood-red bone armor, set against the gray-white mist, looked like a forgotten exhibit.

She had already examined it: the assistant squad leader had indeed not died from external injuries.

The blood-red bone armor was fully intact, its surface pristine, with no signs of violent damage.

But the body inside had been hollowed out by something, from the inside out.

Not a scrap of flesh or blood remained on the skeleton—even the marrow had been sucked completely clean, and every bone bore an unnatural sheen.

Combined with the other eerie experiences—

Betty’s strange disappearance, the support squad’s repeated attempts to leave only to return to the starting point…

None of it was all that hard to understand.

“Ma’am, do you know what’s causing this?”

Jack couldn’t help but ask.

His voice was steadier than before, but his eyes still held a lingering unease.

“Mm, I have a rough idea,” Pandora said with a nod.

“I can’t confirm it entirely yet, but that’s fine—a quick test will settle it…”

With that, Pandora turned aside and casually raised a hand.

Condensed shadow instantly twisted and stretched in her palm, as if some liquid darkness had been given will and shaped itself.

The next second, the shadow coalesced into a black, long-handled scythe.

The blade was half a person’s height, thin as a cicada’s wing, its edge glowing with a faint, eerie cold light, as if it could cut through light itself.

Pandora brought her hand down.

The scythe sliced through the air without a sound, then sank deep into the wall before her as if through butter.

The blade met no resistance, and the cut was clean and smooth, not even a fleck of debris flying loose.

“Ma’am… what is this?”

Watching Pandora’s actions, the support squad remained bewildered.

They peered closely at the wall. Beneath the black fur, it looked rough and cold.

The cement surface had a fine, granular texture—no different from a normal wall on the surface…

No, wait!

Jack rubbed his eyes.

Within the fissures of the wall, something seemed to be squirming faintly.

Black, minuscule—like countless tiny tendrils slowly extending and withdrawing inside the cement cracks.

But as they looked more carefully, the sensation quickly faded.

As if it had been nothing but a trick of light and shadow.

As if it were just an ordinary wall, and within it nothing more than common building materials.

Jack blinked, uncertain what exactly he had seen.

But the amused curve on Pandora’s face grew more pronounced.

She had clearly seen something they could not.

With a thought, she once again demonstrated her mastery of Umbral Weaving.

The shadow scythe twisted into a new shape. The pitch-black blade, like melting ink, rapidly contracted and reassembled, transforming in the blink of an eye into a rapidly spinning grinding wheel.

Its black, gear-toothed edge whirled madly, emitting a low hum as it spun up against the wall.

“Zzzt—”

A teeth-grating scraping sound rang out.

The sound was sharp and piercing, like countless fingernails scraping across a blackboard at once, or bones being slowly ground to powder.

The stocky squad member instinctively covered his ears, face turning pale.

Soon, the outer layer of finish had been ground away, revealing the wall beneath.

Gray-white cement, dark gray brick, interlocking cracks…

Even at this stage, nothing clearly abnormal.

But Pandora wasn’t done yet.

The shadow grinder in her hand dispersed in the blink of an eye, dissolving back into the shadows behind her as though it had never existed.

In its place, a quiet, crimson-red flame appeared in Pandora’s palm.