Three minutes and twelve seconds later.
Next, members of the Fixer Association arrived. The scene before them shocked everyone. Pure white, beautiful butterflies filled the entire concert hall, seemingly representing the peaceful lives of countless people. The luminous dust falling from thousands of butterfly wings reflected beautiful and happy scenes from people's lives. Faces frozen in relieved smiles told a silent story: they had not experienced any pain before they died.
The grand, tragic beauty of it left everyone present speechless for a long time. It wasn't until moisture traced paths down their cheeks that they realized they were silently weeping.
"Are they... all dead?" someone whispered in a trembling voice. He saw a tiny butterfly land on his finger. Though separated by the boundaries of life and death, he recognized it; this butterfly was transformed from his lover. She had left peacefully, heading to an Eden where there would be no more suffering or sorrow.
People were immersed in this tragic emotion, forgetting that hundreds of their companions had been wiped out in just three minutes and twelve seconds. Not even a corpse remained; they had all turned into these beautiful, tragic butterflies dancing in the air.
Calamity Whale, a prism grade fixer, was unaffected. He could no longer bear to watch. Focusing his energy and grounding his stance, his abdomen swelled as he let out a massive roar. All the white butterflies dancing in the air were annihilated by the sound waves, turning into a sky full of falling luminous dust. People were released from the sorrowful emotion, looking at each other, not understanding what had happened.
"Where is the Artist?" someone asked in confusion.
From a distance, Calamity Whale looked like a small hill, nearly four meters tall. His body was covered in explosive, rippling muscles, his sturdy frame truly living up to the name of a whale. With a giant ship anchor resting on his shoulder, this man was capable of stirring up an oceanic disaster on the Star of Art.
"Who knows? Probably self-annihilated."
This was already the second time the Artist had manifested on the Star of Art. The association had dispatched nearly every fixer they could mobilize immediately. During the first manifestation, they had engaged him in the King's District; fifty grade 4 fixers were killed, and over five hundred were severely injured. The entire King's District was turned into a living hell. At that time, human limbs that had spontaneously disintegrated into musical notes fell over Starlight Avenue, souls were torn into wisps like soul wisps, and people's screams and wails became visualized, outlined in the air in a painterly fashion.
Countless civilians were caught in the disaster, and economic losses reached tens of billions of inspiration, severely wounding the Star of Art. Ultimately, it took the price of one rebirth for the prism grade fixer Sparrow Feather to "kill" the Artist.
To be precise, it was the Artist's self-annihilation after the performance ended. Calamity Whale would never forget the image of that monster wearing the silent mask bowing to him even as half of its body was blown apart, as if paying tribute to the end of a grand performance.
It felt like the announcement of a world-scale performance beginning.
The disaster was far from over, and reconstruction had yet to begin. Countless urban eldritch creatures crawled out from the city's ruins. Ordinary people who had heard the music fell into madness, committing suicide or attacking others and blowing up critical transportation routes. This made the association's post-war search, rescue, and cleanup efforts a distant dream. People could only watch as the daily casualty counts on the news continued to rise, leaving those in suffering to fend for themselves in the purgatory of the King's District.
At first, people thought it was just an ordinary terrorist attack, but they never expected it to become the most severe, malicious, and dangerous urban legend event in nearly a hundred years, second only to the Red High Heels incident.
No one expected this monster to manifest again after only a little over a month. Fortunately, the scale this time was nowhere near the last, indicating that through the association's encirclement operations, the Artist's power had been suppressed and weakened....
As Calamity Whale was lost in thought, someone pointed at a severely injured fixer in the corner and shouted, "This guy is still alive!"
The man's expression was unusually serene and happy, even though his lower body was missing and his internal organs were scattered across the floor. The bullet hole in his forehead was prominent, his entire face resembled a shattered mirror, and his body was continuously dissolving into drifting butterflies.
Countless happy images flashed in the man's eyes. He was recalling the best moments of his life—his wife holding him, his daughter who had just learned to draw spinning around him, and his young son sweetly uttering his first word: "Dada."
Calamity Whale squatted in front of the man and roared, "Hey, pull yourself together! Don't you dare sleep! Wake up, Li Si! Think of your wife and daughter! Tell us what happened!"
The man turned his head but didn't answer directly. His eyes were full of happiness as he whispered softly, "Decaying grass turns to fireflies, shining bright in the summer night; withered rot turns to a lamp, lighting the way toward tomorrow."
"The Butterfly Burial Celebrant is not our target. He brings peace and happiness to everyone....
"And you all... must keep moving forward... for everyone's tomorrow."
With that, the flame of happiness in the man's eyes flickered out, and the blood at the corners of his mouth dried.
"Damn it!!!" Calamity Whale roared, his eyes nearly bursting from their sockets.
Night gradually deepened.
A blue-haired girl sat by the hospital window, gazing at the distant starry night. Tang Xin was writing a letter to a far-off place. The content was blurred, but the name of the girl at the beginning was very prominent under the yellowish light—Yuzu.
Where are you now?
Are you looking at the same night sky as I am?
Can my gaze cross the distance of many light-years and meet yours on some distant star?
Will you receive my letter?
Will we meet again?
Tang Xin smiled softly, bundled the letter in her hands, and reached out the window. Many birds gathered in a rush, picking up the letter that carried the girl's countless longings and emotions before flying into the distance.
She didn't want to cry over these things anymore. She had sent many letters over these past few days; every night before sleep, she would record what she thought about during the day to share with the girl far away, even if the probability of the other party receiving them was slim.
She knew everything that had been happening on the Star of Art recently. The most widely circulated theory was that the Artist could be born from any act of artistic creation. People's feelings toward art had evolved from resistance to fear. The curtain was filled with overwhelming panic, which escalated into heated arguments as people vented their repressed emotions. Tang Xin didn't want to see that anymore.
The only thing people could do every day was pray before sleep—pray that the Artist wouldn't manifest tomorrow, that the association's power could solve everything, and pray that they wouldn't be affected and turn into ugly monsters due to a depletion of inspiration.
The day before the new year, the finals of the Starry Art Competition would take place at the Starry Art Academy. Before that, she had things she had to do.
Just dealing with the mess left behind at Dream-Chaser Media after Xu Xiaoyou left was enough to exhaust Tang Xin. She was trying many things for the first time; the burden and hopes of the hundreds of artists in the entire company rested on her shoulders alone.
The investors who used to greet her with smiles had all turned into cunning foxes wearing masks, setting countless traps for her and waiting for her to fall in. One wrong move, and she would drag the entire company down with her into an irrecoverable abyss.
She had to be careful, then more careful, then even more careful....
But she was just an ordinary girl sitting in a wheelchair, unable to sing or speak her sorrows to anyone.
For that reason, she had to use her family's power.
Rate on N.U.
