“Unlucky! Unlucky! Unlucky!”
Vivian scrambled up from the heap of broken violin bows, rolling and crawling in a panic. The racist “Inquisitor Model III” was already tossed at her feet; now all she had left in her hand was the hissing, leaking, modified gas lamp.
“This crappy lamp! This crappy gun! This crappy boss!”
Vivian looked up in despair at the descending shadow overhead, her complaints firing out like a machine gun.
“Cicero, you greedy capitalist! Did you make this gun’s rifling out of macaroni?”
“This design has no sense of aesthetics! This shoddy construction! This isn’t even a gun, it’s just a soulless lump of scrap metal!”
Suddenly, that unstoppable white giant hand froze in midair.
It began to shudder violently, as if electrocuted, and cracks started to appear across its once-smooth, jade-like surface.
“Huh?” Vivian kept her head ducked and her hands over her head, peeking through her arms. “Why did it stop?”
The black arms that had been writhing around the area all recoiled beneath the water’s surface at the same time, as though some terrifying incantation had been spoken, letting out bubbling, fearful noises.
Vivian was stunned for a second, then her mind began to race.
What had just happened? What did she do?
“Shoddy construction? Soulless?” Vivian shouted tentatively at the white giant hand.
Crack!
The hand’s pinky finger broke off with a snap, turning to white powder and dissolving into the air.
Vivian’s eyes lit up instantly, glowing like two hundred-watt bulbs.
She understood!
These things were the spirits of down-and-out artists who died in the Paris underground, madmen who’d sacrificed their souls to “Beauty”—an amalgamation of all those rejected, mocked, and forgotten.
For these sensitive types in life, and even more fragile in death, spiritual attacks caused real damage!
They thought Vivian’s curses were directed at them!
“Ha! Hahaha!” Vivian stood up from the pile of wigs, placing one foot on the edge of the boat.
“Your structure is looser than Swiss cheese! Your concepts are even flimsier than a paramecium!”
Bang!
The hand’s ring and middle fingers burst apart simultaneously, twisting in agony.
“Your emotional expression is like constipation! Pretentious! Affected! Utterly illogical!”
“Who designed the shape of this hand? The proportions are off! The lines are stiff!”
With every venomous critique from Vivian’s mouth, the giant white hand kept collapsing further. It tried to retreat into the water, but Vivian refused to give it a chance.
“Trying to run? No way!”
Vivian snatched up a rotten sheet of music from the boat and unleashed a barrage at the lake.
“Look at the garbage you’ve written!” She grabbed a handful of sheet music and flung it into the air.
“If this kind of trash gets passed down through the ages, then the paper mill is humanity’s greatest criminal!”
“You call that foreshadowing? That’s just digging your own grave! Your plot twists are as forced as my boss’s excuses when he doesn’t want to pay overtime!”
“Do you know anything about color coordination? Red with green? You trying to plant a Christmas tree on a duck?”
The entire underground lake began to boil.
Countless black bubbles surged to the surface, emitting shrill screams—the pain of having their very souls denied.
“Aaaah—I don’t want to hear it! I don’t want to hear it!”
It was as if the sound of countless fragile hearts shattering echoed in the air.
The once-proud white giant hand had now collapsed completely, leaving only a bare wrist still twitching in the air.
“One last strike!”
Vivian lifted the scribbled-over booklet and pointed at the Eiffel Tower with an X drawn through it.
“Admit it! You don’t hate steel—you’re just jealous! Jealous that rivets are tougher than your words! Jealous that the torrent of a new era doesn’t care about your outdated rags!”
“Your works aren’t even worth criticism—only being ignored.”
Boom—!!!
The entire surface of the lake exploded. All the resentment, all the black water, all the arms—everything disintegrated in that instant, dissolving into countless motes of ash.
The world fell silent.
“Huff… Huff…”
Vivian slumped down in the boat’s cabin, feeling as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of sand.
“So… so tired…” She rubbed her throbbing temples.
The adrenaline that had been coursing through her faded away, replaced by deep exhaustion.
The little boat gently rocked with the waves, drifting slowly toward the shore. Vivian struggled to climb out, her legs feeling heavy as lead.
“I need to get out of this damn place fast.”
She straightened her bedraggled outfit and prepared to pick up the gas lamp on the ground.
Just as she reached out, the lamp’s light illuminated her wrist.
Vivian froze.
A new mark had appeared on the inside of her pale wrist.
It was a black pattern. The lines twisted eerily, looking like an elongated musical note.
“What is this?”
Vivian rubbed at it with her fingers—it wouldn’t come off. She tried scrubbing it with spit on her sleeve until her skin turned red, but the mark didn’t budge. The ink seemed to seep into the skin’s texture, throbbing faintly with her pulse.
Vivian shivered. It didn’t hurt or itch, but it definitely looked ominous. At the very least, she could forget about ever becoming a civil servant.
“That reaper stick should know how to get rid of this… right?” Vivian muttered to herself, “Maybe soak it in holy water?”
Whatever, first things first—get upstairs.
Vivian clutched her wrist, took one last look at the deathly still underground lake, and ducked into the slanting passageway without looking back.
When she pushed open the secret door leading to the backstage, Vivian had already braced herself for Madame Armand’s wrath. After all, as a menial worker, she’d vanished for two whole hours. By the opera house’s rules, that was enough to fire her three times and hang her on display at the entrance.
“Sorry! I just had diarrhea—uh?”
Vivian’s apology got stuck in her throat.
She pushed open the door but didn’t hear the expected noisy clamor.
The entire backstage was as silent as a tomb.
But it wasn’t empty—everyone was there.
The conductor, usually roaring, was holding up his baton, frozen mid-swing in the center of the corridor like a wax statue.
Several girls in ballet dresses stood on tiptoe, caught at the peak of a leap, their skirts floating in the air as if defying gravity.
Even the dust motes in the air hung suspended, no longer drifting down.
“What the…?” Vivian waved a hand in front of one girl’s face.
The girl’s eyes were open, but she showed no reaction at all, as if her soul had been pulled out.
Not just people—the whole space was shrouded in a faint golden mist.
The gold gave everything a weathered oil painting’s texture, as if time had reversed, sealing this moment inside a block of amber.
“Cicero?” Vivian called out softly.
Her voice went out, but there was no echo, as if swallowed by the golden mist.
A chill crept up Vivian’s spine. She slowly walked out of the corridor and into the stage wing.
From here, she could see the entire audience.
The seats were full. Gentlemen in tailcoats and ladies adorned with jewels were frozen mid-applause, laughter, or whispering to one another—not a single one moving.
And within that golden mist, at the very center of the empty stage, someone seemed to be standing.
Vivian squinted.
It was a man in a black tailcoat, wearing a half-white mask over his face. In his hand was… a violin bow, dripping blood.
He seemed to sense Vivian’s gaze and slowly turned his head.
Under the mask, Vivian saw a pair of golden eyes.
At that moment, the black musical note on Vivian’s wrist suddenly turned searing hot, burning with excruciating pain.