Eldritch Horror Theatre

"What a shame. Can I ask why?"

Faced with this one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in Medea's love story, Fu Qian paused for a moment before asking in a gossipy tone.

"Hmm... there wasn't really a specific incident. We got along beautifully at first. Later on, I don't know if it was the stress of his studies, but he seemed to turn into a completely different person in a very short time. He became incredibly... irritable and anxious."

"All the traits that attracted me to him seemed to vanish overnight."

Medea traced a finger over the photograph, frowning as she reminisced.

"Anyway, after a few arguments over trivial things, he said we shouldn't see each other anymore, and I agreed."

"And then... he really never came looking for me again."

'I see. I can actually guess the reason behind his sudden irritability and anxiety.'

Recalling the contents of the diary, Fu Qian found it obvious. That was the point when Edral had realized the tasks were endless, and his Dao heart had begun to waver.

"And then, he transferred to another school and left."

Medea sighed.

"It was probably for the best."

'Transferred and left?'

Fu Qian thought for a moment.

"Did he tell you that himself?"

"Well, no. He left in a hurry. He only notified the school's teachers; he didn't say goodbye to me."

"Let me guess. He didn't go to you, he went to... Joseph?"

"How did you know?"

Medea was clearly shocked that Fu Qian had guessed correctly yet again.

"Can I ask how you two ended up together?"

Fu Qian lowered his head in thought, a certain feeling in his mind growing clearer by the second as he continued.

"How we ended up together..."

Fu Qian's abrupt shift in topic plunged Medea back into her memories.

"It's actually pretty funny when I think about it. It started with an accident. Before that, I had barely interacted with him at all."

"I was out running errands and accidentally left my bag behind. When I went back to look for it, I found him holding the bag, waiting for its owner. I bought him a coffee afterward to thank him."

"That qualifies as a romantic encounter."

Fu Qian listened with the expression of an eager audience member.

"Fate really is a wonderful thing. Otherwise, how would you have just happened to lose your bag?"

"Not exactly. I was just following a prompt."

Medea covered her mouth with a light chuckle and shook her head.

'A prompt...'

In that instant, the smile on Fu Qian's face didn't waver, but everything suddenly clicked into place in his mind.

'So that's how it is?'

For a moment, he felt like he understood everything.

"You received a prompt telling you to intentionally leave your bag behind? Like the kind of prompt that tells you to use a key to open a locked drawer?"

"Yes."

Medea nodded as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"The prompt told me that if I left my bag there, something exciting might happen."

"Do you get prompts like that often?"

"Messages like that? Of course they aren't very frequent. Though, after I started interacting with Edral, they did pop up a bit more."

"Does this happen to everyone?"

"Of course. Prompts occasionally appear to tell us what to do. Is there something strange about that?"

Medea gave Fu Qian a baffled look.

"Doesn't it happen to you?"

'Uh... it happens to me way too often!'

Fu Qian let out a long, silent sigh.

Medea's matter-of-fact words carried utterly staggering implications.

This world was far more sick and twisted than he had imagined.

At first, his focus had been entirely on the bizarre phenomena—like the feedback prompts for unlocking things, or those inexplicable doors that could only be opened from one side.

The existence of these eerie, rigid rules made this world seem broken and saturated with chaos.

In his understanding, those mechanical, crudely enforced logics were patches applied to the world to prevent its operations from crashing.

As for the doors that could effortlessly trap someone to death, those were just bugs to be avoided.

Because of that assumption, he had always believed that he needed to carefully dodge those anomalies to stay safe.

But looking at it now, the truth was far more surreal than he had imagined.

The people here actually had their behavioral logic guided by special prompts, and everyone reacted to them as if they were perfectly natural. They didn't doubt them at all, treating the prompts the same way someone would treat an ATM spitting out cash after inserting a card.

In a sense, the underlying logic of this world was barely a step above a simulation game.

Was it fundamentally unreal? Or was the world so hopelessly broken that it could only be maintained this way?

"Joseph."

Fu Qian looked at Medea and slowly brought up the name, leaving her looking bewildered and uneasy.

"Before yesterday, did you know he was constantly stalking you?"

"I had no idea! Never! Who would have thought that guy was sleazy enough to stoop that low!"

Even though she was talking about a dead man, Medea couldn't help but grit her teeth.

"Thinking back on it now, the way he usually looked at me was a little off. And he seemed rather hostile to the idea of me interacting with students. At first, I just thought he had an overwhelming sense of justice..."

Joseph had always been hostile to students interacting with Medea...

Listening to Medea's recollection, the individual events began piecing themselves together in Fu Qian's mind.

Edral, thrown into the Furnace, had received many trivial but effortless tasks...

Succubus Teacher Medea had received a prompt and left her bag behind...

Edral had picked up the bag and chosen to wait for the owner, and the two had interacted because of this coincidence...

Medea's secret admirer, Joseph, had not only stalked her constantly but had also harbored a deep hatred for all her "lovers"...

Ultimately, for some unknown reason, Edral was locked behind an unopenable door—an incident involving Joseph and Sheriff Stan...

Joseph had then told the school that Edral had transferred...

Fu Qian could almost see an invisible net that had surrounded the pitiable Edral, tightening around him until he was driven through that door to rot into a mummified corpse in utter despair.

This world seemed to possess a certain will of its own, operating in an eerie, cold manner.

Towards outsiders like Edral and himself, it used prompts to guide them on one hand, trying to keep them from interfering with the world's natural operation as much as possible.

Take his own first task for example. After he inexplicably appeared in Medea's office, the objective was simply to make him leave quickly.

If he had actually followed the instructions, he wouldn't have stumbled upon what happened next, and that entire series of conflicts wouldn't have broken out.

At the same time, it seemed saturated with a deep malice, harboring an intense desire to eradicate an anomaly like him—such as by making him go home on time to play games with Terica.

For the vast majority of people, surviving that game's difficulty would be a narrow escape from death.

Why was it like this?

There was a massive, glaring disparity between his earlier tasks and his current ones. The difficulty levels weren't even in the same realm.

What had caused this shift?

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