Toyokawa Shoko doesn't want to become a witch

Until an army sacked the place.

A coup occurred in a small country near a mountain village. In order to consolidate its position, the new regime attempted to centralize the entire population in the only place in the country that could be called a city.

Her hometown was drawn within the new national border, and naturally, she and her mother were also brought into the so-called "city".

The new residences could hardly be called homes. Everyone in the village was separated and scattered to different "residences," which, to use a more "international" term, should be called... concentration camps.

The new regime had no experience in ruling, and they used only the simplest method to deal with all those who resisted them: massacre.

Those who disobeyed were killed.

Those who do not speak a unified language are killed.

Those who tried to escape were killed.

Later, the reasons became increasingly bizarre. Those who didn't get up on time were killed; those who talked while eating were killed; if you seemed likely to resist, what, no evidence? No problem, better to kill the innocent than let the guilty go free, kill them all, including everyone else in the room…

The air was filled with the smell of blood and other excrement. Every morning, people were called out of their rooms, told they were being moved to newly arranged accommodations.

In reality, those people were eventually buried in a pit outside their "residence," executed and buried nearby.

In order to deceive those who had not yet been brought out, the executioners would turn up the volume on radios during the execution. The distorted music from many radios would overlap and drown out the sound of bones being crushed and screams.

The iron bunk beds were reduced to mere frames, used to bind people for interrogation or dismemberment; in the small garden, a jar filled with excrement was placed under a horizontal bar, and a person was hung from the bar, their head repeatedly pushed into the jar by constantly tightening and loosening the ropes binding them; there were no toilets in the living quarters, and everyone had to use a box provided for personal hygiene, which they would then take out at the daily assembly and empty into the jar. If they spilled anything or anything, they would end up hanging on the horizontal bar...

She herself started to feel nauseous from saying it.

Fortunately, this new regime lasted only a few months before being destroyed by the resistance forces.

However, the number of people who ultimately died in the massacre reached a quarter of this small country, and countless innocent skeletons are buried outside their former homes, with no justice ever served.

She survived, but her mother did not.

My mother collapsed on the last night before liberation, all because of my protection.

The fire in my memory was the last frenzy of those bloodthirsty madmen before liberation. They fought each other with the prisoners in the concentration camp, and their "residences" were engulfed in flames, with blood and ash covering the entire land.

The mother stood in front of herself, stopping the crazed executioner.

When she was rescued the next morning, her mother was nowhere to be seen.

That chaos destroyed the entire country, and even now, the average age of the people in this country is only in their twenties. Many people who experienced that massacre are still unable to escape its shadow and choose to leave their homeland.

Of course, she was also one of those who left for distant lands, albeit passively.

Why could she recount these cruel events that she had personally experienced so calmly? Because she was less than five years old at the time, and all the information she had was learned by actively researching and revisiting those places after she grew up.

In her memory, all that remained were the fire, her mother's back, and hatred for the world.

After that horrific massacre, she was adopted by a Greek volunteer from an international volunteer organization and given a new name, Median Hermes.

Her talent was fully discovered when her adoptive Greek family found that she had learned Greek and English in just one month and could communicate with others very fluently.

After that, she followed this Greek man to several countries, and in the process, she became familiar with and mastered the languages ​​of each country.

According to her adoptive father, the Greek Hermes, she learned eight languages ​​in just one year.

Moreover, his overall demeanor has changed from that of a wild child to one of refinement.

After that, her adoptive father took her traveling all over the world for a while until she reached school age, at which point he brought her back to Greece and sent her to school.

She has used the name Medine for many years, learned many languages, and at a young age was able to work as a multilingual simultaneous interpreter, earning a very good reputation in the industry.

She attended primary, secondary, university, postgraduate, and doctoral schools in different countries, and spoke different languages ​​in different places.

In each country she stayed in, the opinions she received from the people varied. Sometimes she was a good classmate of ****, sometimes an unapproachable aloof beauty, and sometimes a troublemaker who liked to lead the charge... It seemed that she became a different person in every place she went.

But no matter how things changed, the one thing that never changed was her desire to find her former home.

Over the years, she has devoted a great deal of energy to searching for the tragedy that occurred in that small country and trying to find clues about the nameless village where she was born and raised.

Although she did not end up with nothing, she received news that was even more devastating than nothing.

No one survived except himself.

By the time she fully understood the matter, she had already obtained a master's degree in linguistics and was over twenty years old.

More than a decade has passed, and she thought she had almost forgotten the hatred she once felt.

She opened her mouth, trying to use her mother tongue to reminisce about her hometown, but was surprised to find that she had forgotten how to say it.

With her exceptional talent for languages, she forgot her mother tongue.

The village was too backward, leaving no sound or image information. The written language was someone else's, and everyone who had ever spoken that language except for her was dead.

Standing in the ruins of a small mountain village that had been deserted ever since, she finally realized that a language had been completely wiped out from the world.

That was her mother tongue.

She is a person without roots.

The hatred that had been almost forgotten reignited, nearly burning her to ashes.

But the brutal regime that had destroyed her hometown had long since collapsed, and she had no one left to seek revenge.

There are two kinds of people in the world: one kind is those who have experienced misfortune and hope that others will not suffer the same misfortune as them; the other kind is those who have experienced misfortune and hope that the whole world will suffer the same misfortune as them.

The foster father, Mr. Hermes, was undoubtedly the former.

He too was a victim of war, and he traveled all over the world to save those who were also caught in the chaos of war.

She spent many years volunteering with her adoptive father, working as a simultaneous interpreter. She has seen all kinds of good and bad, and experienced a lot of coldness and warmth.

At first, the small acts of kindness shown to the victims and the acts of charity that helped them escape danger brought her to tears countless times, but over time, she became numb to these things.

On the contrary, all the bad things were deeply engraved in my heart.

The adoptive father said they were doing what they could, but Medine felt it was all in vain.

Even if a campfire is lit amidst the snow and ice, providing warmth to those nearby, the icy landscape remains icy and snowy—an undeniable fact.

When did I become so extreme and pessimistic?

She sighed, feeling that she had let her adoptive father down.

I vaguely remember the meaning of my mother tongue name: "a little bird that flies freely".

The little bird flies through the azure sky, soaring towards the colorful heavens: the pink of the breeze, the orange of a smile, the beautiful purple. With each world it passes through, it is tinged with a different color, becoming a beautiful rainbow-colored bird.

But the little bird wanted to see more and more colors, so the colors gradually mixed together, becoming murky, and the color of its wings became dull, until soon it turned completely black.

The little bird fell from the sky and opened its cloudy, dark eyes.

Her hatred no longer stopped at that small regime that had been reduced to dust in history; the flames continued to spread, spreading throughout her body and the whole world.

She was jealous of the world.

She envied those elderly people who could lie in bed and tell their descendants about their past, while her hometown had long since lost its past to tell.

She was envious of the young people who could sit and chat in pizzerias and cafes; sitting among them, she found it all very noisy.

I envy those children who speak the world's most popular language while still in their mother's womb; they will never understand the feeling of losing their mother tongue and their past.

Jealousy... clouded the colors that had once clung to her, turning the vibrant hues into an oil-black turbidity.

She thought he wasn't a great person, incapable of doing great good or great bad, and that such jealousy could only remain buried deep in her heart for a lifetime.

But one thing ignited her jealousy completely, turning it into a raging fire that could engulf the entire world.

It was a letter, a letter inside an iron box.

Both the letter and the box were strange; they flew into my hands without warning while I was visiting the ruins of my hometown.

After fully experiencing the mysterious world called "Magical Girls," they realized that it was a box from "the other side," containing a letter sent back from the future.

Rather than lingering on, burn brightly. Use what you have to ignite the world.

The signature is Nirvana.

There was only this one letter in the tin box, but this letter changed everything for her.

Everything I can use?

What can she do?

I don't understand.

But the letter inspired her, prompting her to rack her brains and try every possible solution.

She even recalled a time when a certain doll-like "creature" frequently appeared around her, but she selectively ignored it.

"Are you Kyubey?" She approached the plush toy, the contractor of which was a magical girl, and asked, "May I make a wish?"

"'No, you're too old.' That's what they said." The magical girl shrugged helplessly.

"......"

Although she could no longer become a magical girl, this encounter allowed her to successfully experience another side of the world.

Through the world of magical girls, she came into contact with a lot of information that she, an ordinary person, could not access, and learned that many tragedies that happened between people were caused by a creature called "witch".

At first, she blamed all the bad things on the witch, just like most people who are new to them.

But later, she discovered that witches were just another form of magical girls, and magical girls were just people—even if they weren't biologically, they still spoke their own mother tongues, were influenced by their homeland's culture, and had values ​​shaped by human society; their roots were still human.

"So in the end, it's still a problem with people themselves, isn't it?"

With this in mind, she began to rethink what exactly constituted "something she could use".

It wasn't until she needed to present her doctoral dissertation that she finally realized what "what she could use" truly was.

She flipped through various reports, advertisements, recordings, and movies bearing the swastika symbol, a faint smile appearing on her face.

"Language is the motherland, language is culture, language is a tool, language... is a weapon."

"Weapons can ignite this world."

The Tale of Reincarnation: The Path of Fall, the Road of No Return: Chapter 635 We're Going to Limbo

Xiangzi rubbed his eyes, trying to open his sore eyelids.

"..."

She sat in the middle of the wasteland, staring blankly at the desolation before her.

"here it is......"

As time went by, her blocked thoughts gradually cleared up, and she held her forehead, slowly recalling what had happened before.

"By the way, I should be in Limbo now."

Xiangzi recalled the whole story and let out a long sigh.

Meanwhile, in the first layer of the dream, the carriage fell off a cliff; in the second layer, everything floated in the air; in the third layer, there were only three people lying on the ground and a suitcase placed between them.

Where to begin, about why I ended up in Limbo, and not in the third layer of the dream? Should I start from when they opened the vault containing only the boxes of fright, or something earlier?

Let's start from a higher level of the dream, back to when Rebecca was counting down ten seconds.

Time began to reverse, and the carriage that had fallen off the cliff was pushed back up onto the cliff. Rebecca began a ten-second countdown.

Chu Hua pulled the carriage, breaking free from the wolf pack's encirclement. It smashed through countless trees and enemies in its path, charging headlong towards the cliff like a war chariot.

Ten seconds passed in the blink of an eye, and soon the carriage rushed towards the end of the cliff.

Facing the cliff so close at hand, Chu Hua quickened his pace. When Rebecca had only one "1" left to count down, he pushed off with his front hooves and accelerated off the cliff.

They have done all they could.

Under the torrential rain, everything became a slow-motion shot, delayed twenty times.

=================

Just as Chu Hua leaped off the cliff and the carriage soared into the air...

The fall occurred.

Mu had timed it perfectly, waiting for the fall to happen.

Her finger hovered over the large red detonator, trembling incessantly, as she listened to the song from the first layer of the dream and silently counted down the time.

Last second.

She was almost about to press the detonation button.

But......