Super Righteous Player
Chapter 688 - 229 Elle’s Fear_1

Chapter 688: Chapter 229 Elle’s Fear_1

"...So, as you can see."

The sound of Dragon Well tea and Selicia’s conversation rose up from beside her.

Elle looked down at the coffee in her ceramic cup.

She wasn’t quite accustomed to it and carefully pinched the exquisitely patterned spoon, imitating the way Dragon Well tea was stirring the coffee, watching the snow-white sugar cube quietly dissolve within.

She recognized it as the "Highland Wine" from the United Kingdom, a specialty from Highland Island. It could be used to make a natural energy concoction that resisted drowsiness and prevented nightmares, without needing any transformation or synthesis.

In the Kingdom of Noah, some old nobles would consume it in very small quantities—of course, only as a kind of brain-enhancing medicine; nobody would be extravagant enough to drink it as a beverage. Of course, whether it really had any brain-enhancing effects was another matter entirely...

Highland Fruit was scarce in yield, produced by only one island yet needing to supply many countries. Its price was even higher than an equivalent volume of silver.

Elle knew it because Amos had once been given a small box when painting for the wife of Viscount Roth Fort. She had counted them; there were eighteen grains... but she couldn’t bring herself to eat a single one.

In the month when Amos’s mental state first started to decline, Elle had carefully roasted and ground up the entire box of Highland beans and mixed them with sugar, mint, and pepper before giving them all to Amos to drink.

She didn’t know whether the remedy had taken effect, but Amos’s spirits were indeed much improved for those two weeks. Regrettably, she had too few Highland Fruits...

Thinking of her foster father, Elle felt somewhat distracted.

What kind of emotion was that?

Was it nostalgia? Hatred? Love? Admiration? Fear?

...She couldn’t tell.

But that experience was certainly unforgettable.

At least... during the time when her mother, Clara, had died and Amos had not yet fallen into immorality, truly were the happiest days for Elle.

Amos poured all his heart into loving her, postponing his work to care for her thoroughly, fearing she would grieve and shorten her life due to her mother’s death.

...But in fact, Elle wouldn’t.

She had seen her mother use herself to threaten and extort Joseph, aware of how limited her "love" for Elle was. She was merely an instrument for her mother to extort more "love" from her biological father.

She had also seen how Joseph ruthlessly abandoned her and her mother, even using a Decree Spell to immobilize them... She was filled with disappointment towards her biological father as well.

Clara had turned into a "Spider Whisperer" after reading the mystical books given to her by Joseph.

After she began to worship the Black Widow, she concocted one bottle of poison after another using toads, bats, and rats... She even tested her poisons on the neighbor’s dog and feral cats. She even murdered Amos’s younger sister—partly perhaps out of jealousy, but also because she worried that those close to Amos might enter her study and discover her secrets while she was out committing murder or acquiring cursed materials.

Amos was obedient, never going to places she forbade him... but others might not be the same.

So, unnoticed by Amos, his sister "died of illness" unexpectedly. While comforting Amos, Clara also threatened Elle not to reveal the truth.

Afterward, she exhumed the body of Amos’s sister and destroyed it completely, hiding the evidence of her peeling off a small piece of skin as a sacrifice to the Black Widow.

Elle witnessed all of this and was very frightened of her own mother.

She was a truly venomous woman—Elle had hardly any love for her mother, only fear.

For Elle, still a girl, both her fatherly and motherly love... came from Amos. Back then, although Amos had a certain level of fame, he wasn’t yet at the later level of, say, demonic prowess, and their family’s life was prosperous but not extremely wealthy.

Most of the time, Amos didn’t have much work. Especially when Elle was quite small, it was him who accompanied her...

And Elle’s mother, still refusing to admit defeat, continued to practice her apprentice-level spells and went off to purify nightmares. But indeed she had no talent for being a Wizard... Later, she would huddle alone in the study, reading one book after another, each thicker than Elle’s arm, and researching gloomy and terrifying rituals in the basement.

Whenever her mother was at home, Elle always felt fearful—she never dared to approach her mother’s study alone, let alone the basement. Only when her mother needed an assistant for a ritual would she be taken down to the basement.

Whenever she saw those bottles of poison and the corpses of various animals killed by poisoning, she worried that someday she too would become a corpse... and Amos didn’t even know who had killed him.

Clara’s death, rather than causing her sorrow,

actually brought her a sense of relief.

She no longer had to worry about being poisoned out of the blue one day and could now enjoy Amos’s love alone.

And in this nightmare,

...as soon as Elle woke up, she saw the young Amos.

He was still a painter—and quite a well-known one at that, very busy with his work. He didn’t interact with Elle much... Of course, if there was too much interaction, Elle might have felt uncomfortable.

In that case, she might have been reminded of how Amos had sacrificed her to the Skeleton Lord, and how she had watched Amos die over and over again in her nightmares hundreds of times.

This level of "just seeing each other" was just about right.

However, Amos told her... that her mother would be coming home tonight. He asked her to come home early tonight.

...Elle didn’t want to go back.

She didn’t even want to see that woman.

Even though she was now an Angel, she still felt fear of her...

The kind that on waking in the middle of the night, if she imagined her mother standing by the bed, could still sweat Elle’s spine.

—She hoped she would never come back.

But to say... did Elle still have any affection for her?

It couldn’t be completely nonexistent.

Especially after being immobilized by Joseph, the moment when her mother gripped her hand tightly and left in silence... at least in that instant, her mother was the entire world to the anxious Elle.

And when, during the intervals of learning rituals and spells, Elle worked hard to play dumb to make her mother laugh, the joy that sprouted in her heart upon seeing her mother’s relaxed smile was not false.

So it was not just pure hatred and fear.

Of course...

This fear, hidden at the deepest part of her heart, even she couldn’t be certain of, let alone explain, was naturally not something she would mention to others.

She hoped to see Amos again but didn’t really want to see him again; she didn’t want to forget her mother completely, yet she didn’t even want to recall her name...

She wished to spend this day quietly in this "future world"; yet didn’t want time to reach tomorrow.

If tomorrow came... she would have to see her mother again.

Thinking this, Elle clutched her coffee cup tightly.

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