Chapter Fifty: Life and Death

Andy, witnessing the scene before him, couldn’t help but recall the bomb-planting and defusing moments in the games he used to play. An overwhelming sense of danger made his hair stand on end. Without hesitation, he triggered his charge and dashed for the door.

With “Swift as the Wind” combined with his charge, Andy’s speed reached its zenith.

Boom! He had scarcely reached the doorway when a thunderous explosion erupted behind him. The entire bedroom was blasted skyward. Andy felt a tremendous force slam into his back, followed by a surge of searing flames.

With a whoosh, fire enveloped Andy, its intensity no less than the outburst he’d experienced during his battle with Carol. Although the baptism by fire had granted him resistance, sparing him from the worst of the flames, the violent shockwave shook his innards into a tangled mess.

He spat out two large clots of blood and collapsed to the ground, unable to rise.

“Villain! Prepare to die!” Bill suddenly burst into the yard, a fireball already forming in his hand.

“Mew!” came a sharp cry from Katherine. Bill’s mind was struck by a sudden daze, and the fireball in his palm fizzled out—this was a level-two spell, “Psychic Daze.”

At that moment, Jera rushed into the yard and, seeing the scene, grabbed Bill’s arm, preventing him from casting another spell.

“Are you out of your mind?”

At her rebuke, Bill roared, “I’m not crazy—he is! That cold-blooded lunatic actually used Katherine to create a Nether Cat! Do you even know what a Nether Cat is? It’s a demonic pet formed by forever imprisoning a girl’s soul within the body of a cat. Katherine is barely in her teens…”

Bill’s words left Jera stunned—and so were Katherine and Andy.

“Um, Senior Bill… What did you say? What’s a Nether Cat?” It was Katherine who finally voiced the question that had been burning in Andy’s mind.

…

Half an hour later, in Bill’s courtyard…

Andy had been wrapped up like a mummy; Katherine even directed Jera to tie a dainty bow on his bandages.

Truth be told, after two successive releases of the fire baptism, Andy’s injuries were not as severe as they appeared. Still, Katherine and Jera insisted on treating and bandaging him, so he let them have their way.

Now, Andy sat rocking in a deck chair like an old lord, while Bill hovered nearby, servile and eager, offering tea, water, and fanning him. Katherine, meanwhile, sent Bill scurrying in circles fetching snacks and gathering up every alchemical creation he’d ever made. Jera watched with a silent smile.

Once Katherine had explained her story through mimicry, the misunderstanding between them was resolved. Then it was time for Bill to atone for his rashness.

At last, Andy grew weary of the charade. He rose unsteadily to his feet, glancing sidelong at Bill. “Want my forgiveness?”

Bill nodded fervently.

“Alright, then. Let’s settle this like men!” With that, Andy grabbed Bill by the neck, hauled him outside, and strode off at a pace that gave no impression of recent injury.

“Andy!” Jera’s worried cry rang out from behind. Andy waved a hand back, replying, “I’ll be right back,” and disappeared into the night.

A quarter hour later, Bill, bruised and battered, sulked in his room, blaming Diga—after all, it was Diga’s information about Nether Cats that had led him to believe Andy had slain Katherine for such a purpose.

Within the necklace’s pocket dimension, Diga was baffled. “Impossible… a naturally occurring Nether Cat? The creation of a Nether Cat can’t possibly be so simple. Were those ancient researchers who tormented girls’ souls for millennia all fools? I must be overlooking something crucial. But what?”

Bill grumbled for a long time without receiving any answer from Diga and was about to call him out, wondering if he’d died of shame. Before he could, Diga’s voice thundered in his mind, “I understand now! So that’s it…”

Not long after, Bill, looking utterly dejected, knocked on Jera’s door.

When Bill departed, Jera stepped out and knocked on Andy’s.

“Andy, could you come out for a talk?” Hearing her voice, Andy was about to let his imagination run wild, but then he saw Jera’s serious expression. He glanced at Katherine, fast asleep on the bed, and left the room in silence.

No sooner had Andy closed the door than one of Katherine’s ears twitched. She stretched, leapt to the floor, and began rummaging through the treasures she’d taken from Bill, as if searching for something.

Andy followed Jera outside and was just about to ask her purpose when she spoke first.

“Bill came to see me just now.”

“What?” Andy instinctively assumed the little girl needed relationship advice about Bill, and, still annoyed, was ready to add fuel to the fire, but what Jera said next was nothing of the sort.

She told him about the Nether Cat.

According to Bill, the chance of a soul willingly merging with a cat to become a Nether Cat was less than one in ten thousand. Drawing from historical records, which described continuous torment of a girl’s soul during Nether Cat experiments, he proposed another theory.

In those experiments, the girl’s soul was already dead, and, having suffered endless torment in life, her resentment had condensed into a spirit. The crucial step followed: the spirit, being of the dead, was grafted onto the living body of a cat. But this would only result in a corpse possessed by a spirit, not a new being—the Nether Cat.

At this point, the experimenter would wipe the spirit’s memories and, by means of arcane techniques involving “quantum” manipulation, implant new memories so that the spirit believed itself to be a living being. Only then could the spirit and cat’s body fully merge. However, such constructed memories were extremely unstable…

“That’s enough!” Andy’s face grew darker as Jera explained. “You said yourself, it’s just a theory.”

“It’s true!” Jera insisted. “The moment Bill mentioned it, I knew it was true.”

Andy fell silent. Jera had never been wrong in her judgments, and he could find no words to refute her.

Jera looked Andy straight in the eye. “Andy, I can’t comment on your relationship with Katherine. But you must think carefully. The real Katherine died on the day of your coming-of-age ceremony. The one you see now is merely a spirit, unwilling to pass on, that by chance fused with a black cat to become a Nether Cat. Andy… Andy, what’s wrong?”

Andy’s mind was in turmoil for a long while before he regained his senses. He asked anxiously, “No, that can’t be right. If Katherine was dead, how could she not know?”

“That’s something we don’t understand either. Maybe the girl was too innocent to grasp the difference between life and death. She probably still thinks she’s the living Katherine, which is why her soul could perfectly merge with the cat. But if she ever realizes her true self is gone, the Nether Cat she’s become might…”

Jera watched Andy’s ashen face and said softly, “She really… might die.”

Crash! In the room, the receiver Katherine had been fiddling with shattered to pieces.