Chapter 500 - Circus

In the bathroom, Bologue leaned his head against the showerhead, letting the warm water wash over his body. On the bed in the bedroom lay some new clothes.Due to frequently encountering similar incidents, Bologue stuffed a lot of his own clothes into the room at the Undying Club.

Thanks to the convenience of the Key of the Crooked Path, Bologue found a door in the alley and arrived here; otherwise, walking onto the street covered in blood would have caused widespread panic.

After cleaning himself, Bologue picked up a towel and meticulously dried himself before putting on clothes and heading to the bar on the first floor.

"Hell, did you go out killing people first thing in the morning?" Serey glanced at the clothes piled in the corner and screamed, "Dismemberment? Or beheading? Why is there so much blood!"

Bologue couldn’t be bothered to waste words with Serey, "I encountered not one, but two demons."

After the battle ended, Bologue didn’t leave immediately but carefully examined the corpses. From their flesh, he smelled an unmistakable stench.

The reason Bologue was able to spot them in the crowd was precisely because of the demonic stench they carried.

Serey said, "Well, that’s really unfortunate for those two demons to have bumped into you."

"No, they came looking for me, just like they were stalking me."

As Bologue spoke, he walked to the pile of clothes. Something seemed wrapped inside the black coat, and then Bologue took it out and tossed it in front of Serey.

After a night of drinking, Serey’s mind was a bit blurry, and his vision wasn’t very clear. At first glance, he couldn’t make out what the thing was but still held it in his hands. ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʟᴀᴛᴇsᴛ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀᴛ ????????????????????•????????????????•????????????

It was heavy, slightly damp, and carried a sticky, fishy smell.

Serey lowered his head—a blood-stained human head was cradled in his arms.

"Do you have some kind of fetish?"

No wonder he was the Night Race Lord who had seen much turbulence—Serey remained calm yet slightly repulsed, placing the head on the bar and picking up a tissue to wipe his hands.

"No, I just wanted to ask if you’ve seen such strange eyes."

Bologue came over and pried open the tightly shut eyelids, exposing the man’s pupils.

Serey took a look and said, "What’s this? Isn’t it quite normal?"

"Normal?"

Bologue turned the man’s head around. The eerie black pupils disappeared, and now the man’s eyes were no different from an ordinary person’s.

Serey asked, "Is there something wrong with his eyes?"

"His eyes..." Bologue paused, "were completely black with a sheen, like a surveillance camera."

"Really?"

Serey crossed his arms, thought for a moment, and shook his head, "I really have no impression of such eyes."

"But why are you so concerned about these things?"

"I’ve been feeling lately like someone is watching me, and today I encountered these guys. Before they died, they kept saying ’saw it,’ as if... as if someone was observing me through their eyes."

When mentioning these things, Bologue couldn’t help but clench his fist. He preferred to fight his enemies openly, rather than do sneaky things in the shadows.

"Oh... is it unsettling?"

Serey spoke straightforwardly, nodding in complete agreement, "I’ve experienced this too. I couldn’t stand those lunatics’ incessant harassment, so I hid in the Undying Club."

Bologue felt he had heard some crucial information, but Serey had no intention of explaining further and continued with the topic at hand.

"Based on your description, I really can’t think of anything. Maybe it appeared after I moved into the Undying Club. Why not ask the Order Bureau? You guys are in charge of these things, right?"

"I’m planning to ask, but since you’re awake, I thought I’d ask you too."

Bologue wrapped the head up again with the coat. He felt there was no need to keep this head. With the man’s death, the sinister power he carried vanished, and now it was just a cold corpse.

"But being targeted feels really bad, and we don’t even know why they’re targeting us." Palmer, sitting nearby, spoke up, feeling uncomfortable after this experience.

The downside of living outside the Cultivation Room is that you always have to be wary of potential crises.

"They seem to be using their actions to please someone, and that action is observing me," Bologue recalled a movie from last night. "This sounds odd, but they seemed to be... filming me."

Bologue felt he had grasped a clue. He carefully recalled standing on a rooftop, watching the two of them fighting each other for amusement.

If their purpose was observing him, why fight each other? And when they were fighting, Bologue didn’t sense any anger, only a bit of joy, as if it was some release.

Saw it...

Thoughts sparked through Bologue’s mind as he tentatively said, "I suspect they’re doing all this for someone to see, like actors on a stage, striving to perform and please the audience below."

Serey said, "That sounds quite strange."

Palmer agreed, "I find it strange too, just like a live broadcast on TV... no matter how you think about it, it’s weird."

"Filming? That reminds me of something from a few hundred years ago."

Serey squinted his eyes, thinking hard. Fortunately, he was the undead; if he were a normal human, under such a terrible schedule and alcohol’s influence, he would have become an idiot long ago.

Palmer corrected, "Filming? A few hundred years ago? The concept of movies has only been around for a few decades."

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that these deeply ingrained concepts, when compared to the grand history of humanity, are but a fleeting moment.

"No, I meant similar concepts," Serey said, "Movies, novels, poetry, they’re all vessels for storytelling in themselves."

"Go on."

Bologue raised his hand, signaling Palmer to shut up. Even after becoming a Prayer Believer, Palmer’s habit of talking nonsense hadn’t changed.

"I met a group of lunatics like that many years ago."

Serey began to recount the past. As an undead, he had lived a long life with plenty of stories worth telling.

"How should I put it? I think they had extremely severe psychological issues; everything they did was illogical, but if you have to say there was logic to it, maybe it was... looking for fun?"

When he mentioned this, Serey was momentarily dazed. He mused aloud, "That does seem a bit like us."

Bologue rubbed his forehead slightly. So these undead were self-aware of their own nature?

Bologue still remembered not long ago, an extremely terrible speeding incident happened on the streets of Opus. Some damned guys were racing at midnight, completely ignoring the traffic laws.

Actually, they didn’t have any accidents since there was a professional racer in the car, but the noise from the engine made the city hall’s complaint hotline blow up.

"It was all Serey’s idea, nothing to do with me, I was just driving."

When Geoffrey stopped the car at a crossroad, Palmer, who was in the driver’s seat, rambled nonsense, while Serey in the passenger seat excitedly handed Geoffrey a bottle of alcohol, praising Palmer as a good driver.

Bologue thought that, if there was a chance, he should let Serey ride in a car he drove himself.

"Those people were like a pack of frenzied bandits, plundering villages and castles, burning fields, toppling high walls, holding wild banquets in front of the blazing fires.

Sometimes they would treat villagers with extreme cruelty, staging all sorts of twisted and crazy bizarre performances."

Mentioning these things, Serey’s expression twisted. Even a well-experienced Night Race Lord would find those lunatics intolerable.

"I followed them for quite a while," Serey explained for himself, "I was pretty bored at the time, so I just wanted to see what more they could do.

Sometimes they would capture a group, give them a script, and make them perform plays or something. Occasionally, when attacking some castles, they would shout strange lines and do things that made no sense.

Like... like..."

Bologue said, "Like a battle turned into a live performance?"

"Exactly, that’s it!"

Serey clapped his hands vigorously, giving Bologue a thumbs up.

Palmer said, "Sounds crazy enough..."

"The weirdest part is, they left large amounts of gold untouched, choosing instead to loot libraries, sometimes capturing minstrels on the road and forcing them to recite the poetry they sung, which they’d then record.

What’s hard to understand is, they pillaged and plundered, yet never harmed the poets.

In the cruel raids, sometimes they’d let the villagers go just for telling a joke."

"A joke?"

Bologue was shocked by the incongruity of the story.

"Yes, a joke. If it was funny enough, they were even willing to pay for it."

Serey reminisced with longing and sighing. Even to a well-experienced Night Race Lord, that period remained incredibly peculiar in his long life.

"Wait a minute! Serey, how do you know all this so precisely?"

Palmer realized something was amiss. The way Serey narrated was so detailed, as if he had been one of the plunderers.

"Ah? That, well, I was quite bored, so I hid my identity and worked in a circus, and then I ran into that group of lunatics. They thought the circus performances were quite interesting, so they took us along. Everything I described is what I witnessed and heard along the way."

Serey nostalgically said, "To talk about it, back then my performances were particularly popular in the circus."

Bologue asked, "What did you perform?"

"Catching flintlock bullets with my head."

Bologue and Palmer were dumbfounded, only to hear Serey saying with a smile, "Because I could revive each time, my performance was flawless, they even called me the Undead... though I was already one, hahaha."