Chapter 49: The Witch (7)

The psychic in question specialized in communicating with spirits and knew nothing about combat.

After discovering Kelly’s whereabouts, he did not raise the alarm. Instead, he hid at a distance and contacted the team of exorcists hired by the Kingsleys.

The news spread quickly through the group. At the Kingsley estate, the long-waiting exorcists gathered to analyze the situation and concluded that Kelly had very likely been hiding in the abandoned teaching building all this time.

The corpse of the witch Olivia was stored in a secret chamber at the base of the building. That chamber had once been used to imprison the witch. On each of its six walls hung a sacred cross hand-carved during the Crusades by a renowned cleric known as Saint Antonio, ensuring that even with wings, the witch would have no escape.

After the witch’s death, the Kingsley family had sealed the chamber completely and filled it with holy oil, submerging the corpse within. The entire room was effectively turned into a crypt for preserving the body.

Both the crosses in the chamber and the holy oil poured into it possessed a natural suppressive effect against evil forces. With the witch’s corpse stored there, it was extremely secure. And since the body was the witch’s greatest weakness, once the chamber had been located, the exorcists had not immediately removed the remains. They intended to wait until Kelly was captured, force the witch’s soul out of her body and back into the corpse, and then burn both together in cleansing flames.

They suspected that Kelly had been hiding in the abandoned building all along in order to find an opportunity to breach the chamber, retrieve her corpse, and eliminate her greatest vulnerability.

Unfortunately for her, before she could discover a way to break through the sealed chamber, her movements were exposed.

It happened to be Saturday. With no classes in session, the school grounds were empty—an ideal time to act.

They decided to move immediately.

The plan was divided into three steps:

First, capture Kelly, who was possessed by the witch.

Second, force the witch out of Kelly’s body and drive her spirit back into the corpse.

Third, purify the witch’s corpse—along with her soul—by fire.

As a non-combatant, Rebecca stayed on the outskirts the entire time and didn’t participate in the initial capture at all. All of Everly’s information came from her, so she didn’t know the exact details of what had happened that day. She only knew that the exorcist team led by Wester had fought Kelly inside the abandoned teaching building for several hours—from dusk until deep into the night. It wasn’t until she was worn down by a prolonged battle and successive waves of attackers that Kelly was finally subdued and taken to the underground chamber.

“That long?! Isn’t Wester supposed to be very powerful?”

Rebecca sounded openly gleeful. “Oh, him? He was basically taken out by friendly fire. Remember that sorcerer from Thailand? The one who uses curse techniques? He was part of the capture team too. He tried to cast a spiritual curse on Kelly to trap her in hallucinations shaped by her painful past. But somehow Kelly turned the tables—the curse ended up affecting Wester instead. And Wester really disappointed everyone. Who knows what kind of hallucination he saw? He was under for over an hour!”

“Wester was the leader of the team. Without his command, no one else would listen to anyone. They were like loose sand, fighting separately instead of coordinating. Kelly picked them off one by one. Several of them were seriously injured. Serves them right—always acting so arrogant, looking down on us diviners and psychics…”

It was clear that, Wester included, the exorcists were not particularly well-liked.

“And then?” Everly asked.

“Then… although Kelly had set up all kinds of traps throughout the building in advance, once Wester regained his senses, he quickly regrouped the remaining exorcists. They broke through the traps, captured Kelly, and escorted her to the underground chamber.”

The first step was complete.

Next came the second step: forcing the witch’s soul out of Kelly’s body.

This step went unexpectedly smoothly. Led by the apprentice exorcist from the Vatican, several church-affiliated exorcists formed a tight circle around the bound Kelly. They splashed holy water over her and began reciting passages from the Bible.

As their chanting continued, Kelly’s expression gradually twisted in pain. Raised black veins surfaced across her face and the backs of her hands. When she opened her eyes, her pupils dilated until the whites were completely swallowed by black. Wherever the holy water touched her skin, wisps of dark smoke began to rise.

“Ahhh… AHHHHH—!”

The girl opened her mouth and let out shriek after shriek of agonized screams. The exorcists remained unmoved. Heads bowed, solemn and austere, they continued their recitation. The sacred scripture resounded like the tolling of a holy bell, striking against the eardrums of everyone present—cleansing minds, purifying souls, and searing the very essence of the evil presence with unbearable spiritual pain.

At last, the witch possessing Kelly could endure no more.

A black shadow tore free from her body. The screaming girl seemed as if someone had pressed a “power off” switch—her eyes rolled shut, and her body collapsed limply.

Meanwhile, preparations for the third step had already been completed.

While the exorcists were chanting, the psychics and diviners had not been idle. They opened the chamber door and used pulleys to hoist the witch’s corpse—long submerged in holy oil—up to the surface, placing it beside Kelly.

After nearly a century steeped in holy oil, the body still looked vividly lifelike.

It was the body of a young woman in her early thirties, with black curly hair and strikingly beautiful features. Her eyes were closed. Her eyelids and mouth had been crudely stitched shut with coarse hemp thread, the seams still marked by unhealed blood crusts—clearly injuries inflicted while she was still alive. Both of her ears had been pierced through, dried blood clinging to the torn holes. When her body was laid on the ground, people noticed that her limbs were splayed in an unnaturally twisted posture, as though her bones had been deliberately broken.

It was obvious that the witch had suffered inhuman torture before her death.

And yet, despite that, the first impression she gave was one of overwhelming, almost irresistible allure. Her curled eyelashes, her lips crusted with blood, her slender chin, her deathly pale skin… everything about her seemed to carry invisible hooks that tugged at the eyes of onlookers. It was hard to look away. One felt compelled to keep staring—watching, revering, surrendering to that strange enchantment.

“Perhaps that’s why, in medieval Europe, witches were slandered as ‘Satan’s lovers,’” Rebecca said thoughtfully. “In truth, they were simply people favored by nature, gifted with special powers. Some witches specialized in healing and were called white witches. Others were born with a mastery of curses and were known as black witches. Whether white or black, as long as their power was used in the right way, it could benefit others. So the fear and persecution of witches was completely unnecessary, it only pushed them further away from human society. In my hometown, witches are a deeply respected group. If Olivia had been born there, perhaps she would have had a different life.”

Everly deeply agreed with Rebecca’s view.

Unfortunately, there are no “what-ifs” in this world.

Breaking a person’s limbs while they were still alive, stitching their eyelids shut, piercing their eardrums, and cutting out their tongue—this was an incredibly cruel form of sorcery. Its purpose was to trap the soul within the body, leaving it unable to move, see, hear, or speak. In this way, those who caused the harm could escape any vengeance and continue living comfortably as exploiters, free from retribution.

The stitches on the witch’s body remained intact, which puzzled everyone. How had her soul managed to leave the corpse and be summoned by Kelly all the way from the new teaching building? Considering that Kelly herself carried witch blood, people speculated that some kind of bloodline connection might exist between them, allowing Olivia’s soul to bypass the many seals and enter the body of her successor.

The situation was urgent, leaving little time for contemplation. Following the original plan, one psychic took out an ancestral pair of golden scissors and carefully cut the stitches on the witch’s mouth. Another pulled the gold-edged “lucky charm” from a box made of ash wood and, with swift hands, placed the witch’s tongue back into her tightly closed mouth.

A complete body acts like a magnet, exerting an irresistible pull on the soul that belongs to it. After the exorcists from the church successfully forced the witch out of Kelly, the mediums joined hands and began to hum an obscure, ancient chant around Olivia’s corpse. The music coaxed the wandering spirit back to the fertile soil that had given it life.

“Return… return… return…”

It was the call of home to a wandering child, a mother’s summons to her child, an irresistible lure of “home” buried deep within the bloodline. As the chant swelled and layered, the witch’s eyelids began to tremble, and the coarse hemp stitches burst one by one.

Under the tense gaze of all present, the dead witch finally opened her eyes.

The moment her soul and body were reunited, Olivia was greeted by towering flames.

“The witch’s corpse and spirit were purified by the flames, reduced to a pile of ashes. At this point, the case seemed to have come to a close… at least, that’s how it appeared to us at the time.”

Under normal procedures, Kelly—the culprit behind the witch’s killings—should have been taken into custody by the church. Ordinary courts cannot handle supernatural cases. She would have faced trial in the church’s religious tribunal and spent the rest of her life atoning for her sins. But no organization is entirely unshakable. Corrupted by Mars’s wealth, the church’s exorcists allowed the Thai sorcerer to carry away the unconscious Kelly.

“To ensure the witch was truly destroyed, we waited by the fire until it burned itself out before packing up and leaving the scene. By the time we emerged from the abandoned teaching building, it was already past midnight. The moon peeked from behind the clouds, spilling an ominous red light across the land. Everyone looked up, meeting the gaze of a massive red eye in the sky… Yes, that night there was a rare blood moon. The moment they saw it, all of them remembered an ancient legend: under the blood moon, if a witch bathes in the blood of her enemies, she can be reborn in a new body.”

Wester’s face turned pale. He immediately urged everyone present to hurry to the Kingsley estate and pulled out his phone to call Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley, warning them not to let Elrond leave the safe house.

But they were too late.

The call went unanswered, endlessly ringing. And when they finally crossed half the city and arrived at the estate, the entire Kingsley mansion was bathed in blood-red light.

Everyone in the mansion with the surname “Kingsley,” including Elrond, was dead. Their bodies were mangled, limbs twisted, faces frozen in terror, lying on the floor like discarded trash, hanging from stair railings, or floating in the estate’s lavish swimming pool… thick blood pooled across the floors, turning the once-gilded mansion into a scene drenched in crimson.

The Thai sorcerer was dead as well. He hung on the living room wall like a shriveled gecko, impaled with a dining knife. Surrounding him were countless little demons he had kept as minions, hungrily clinging to his body, gnawing at his flesh, emitting a chilling, continuous “crunch… crunch” sound.

“The scene bears the mark of an incredibly powerful cursed witch. But we found no trace of her… Kelly—or rather, Olivia, who had taken over Kelly’s body—has successfully revived and left the scene.”

“Everly, we’ve lost this battle.”