I Became a Witch in a World Full of Urban Legends

Rain and stones flew backward into the sky.

Stars were beneath her feet, the city above.

The old banyan tree was upside down, absorbing nutrients with its branches and leaves, letting its roots flourish.

In the distant reaches, countless people whispered, bringing drifting echoes, like waves crashing against rocks.

……

Lu Yibei had no idea what she was seeing or hearing at this moment.

Everything was so absurd, it felt like a bizarre and fantastical dream.

Countless dreamy bubbles surrounded her, dazzling streams of light outlining an illusory yet real torrent.

Three people-two men and one woman-screamed as they flew past her, swept into the torrent, vanishing without a trace.

Suddenly, a gust of wind from nowhere blew away everything before her, like a breeze dispersing the morning mist.In the remaining golden, brilliant light, a figure stood far away, quietly gazing at her, seemingly smiling, making her feel warm and comforted, as if…

She was home.

All of a sudden, Lu Yibei inexplicably felt a moment of clarity, followed by a deep frown.

Am I about to transmigrate?

Damn, which idiot wrote this script? If you’re going to transmigrate me, do it earlier!

After all this, three years after another three years, I’ve even made it onto The Midnight Watchers Society’s Wanted List, and now I suddenly transmigrate-don’t you think it’s a bit late?

Lu Yibei grumbled inwardly, then the golden light ahead suddenly intensified, radiating over and enveloping her body.

In an instant, her mind seemed to crash, her vision went black, and her consciousness fell into silence……

—-

2:21 a.m.

A thunderclap shook the sky above Hua City.

Layer upon layer of dark clouds seemed to have been pierced, letting tens of thousands of tons of water pour down. The once fine, silky spring rain suddenly turned violent, pelting rooftops, streets, and windows like steel needles, making a “tok tok” sound.

Deep within the Amber Mansion, in a spacious study, Jiang Li was asleep atop a mountain of documents on her desk.

Her long lashes trembled, a few beads of sweat appeared on her forehead, and she occasionally murmured softly in her sleep, clearly not resting well.

“Boom–!”

Thunder crashed outside again, coating every corner of the dilapidated manor in silver. Jiang Li suddenly woke, sat up, and gazed out at the hazy rain, lost in thought.

“Tap tap tap–!”

The sound of heels striking marble echoed down the corridor, growing closer. The brass handle of the study’s door turned gently, the dark wooden door opened, and Ah-Hua hurried in.

“Miss, something big has happened!”

Jiang Li frowned slightly. “Oh? What is it? Tell me in detail.”

“News just came in, there’s been a serious collapse at the old cement plant’s mining area…”

Jiang Li glanced at the rain outside, which seemed to be intensifying, steadied herself, and calmly asked, “What level of psychic energy fluctuation alert?”

Normally, after a disaster like a collapse, it should be handled by the land or water authorities. Since The Midnight Watchers Society was notified, it must involve a haunting incident.

“The psychic energy fluctuation alert is…” Ah-Hua hesitated, her expression turning odd. After a few seconds, she continued, “Miss, there’s no excessive psychic energy fluctuation detected at the scene.”

“Uh, Miss, although it’s not excessive, the entire mountain where the mining area is located has residual psychic energy fluctuations, and there are many strange phenomena on that mountain as well,” Ah-Hua added.

Hearing this, Jiang Li’s watery eyes flickered thoughtfully.

It’s like talking about toxicity without considering dosage-talking about residual psychic energy fluctuation without considering Night Corrosion Level is just playing games.

According to The Midnight Watchers Society’s standards, only when the Night Corrosion Level caused by residual psychic energy fluctuation exceeds 0.1 is it considered excessive.

But even if it’s not excessive, for an entire mountain to be covered in faint residual psychic energy fluctuation is bizarre enough, not to mention Ah-Hua said there are many strange phenomena at the scene.

Jiang Li rubbed her brow and said, “I remember Gu Xiliu is on night duty tonight, right? She must have found a bunch of excuses to take leave again, right? Has anyone contacted her?”

Hearing her Miss mention Gu Xiliu, Ah-Hua sighed bitterly. “It’s precisely because that ancestor is on duty tonight, and the special task force members are involved, that they told me to contact you.”

Completely opposite to Hua City’s queen of leave, Gu Xiliu, Jiang Li was known as a model worker in The Midnight Watchers Society. If there was an emergency and no main operator could handle it, finding her was always a safe bet.

Of course, they could also look for the other model worker, Mr. Li.

However, in recent months, every time Li Xuan was on night duty, he encountered a massive number of haunting sightings-very strange.

He was nearly driven to a nervous breakdown, and even the old members of the special task force felt sorry for him, so unless absolutely necessary, they tried not to bother him at night.

“I understand. I’ll change and head over. Go to the garage and get the car ready,” Jiang Li nodded.

“Understood, Miss.” Ah-Hua replied, bowed slightly, and left the study, hurrying toward the garage.

Watching Ah-Hua leave, Jiang Li finally fished her phone out from the pile of documents on the desk and sent a message to Lu Yibei.

Jiang Li: “Emergency, get up and work! [Location]”

After waiting a moment and seeing no reply from Lu Yibei, she shook her head slightly, got up, picked up her cane, and limped toward the dressing room.

Looks like it’s a haunting transformation-probably not convenient to show up? Jiang Li thought.

—-

Twenty minutes later, Hua City, old cement factory mining area, at the foot of the mountain.

After a severe landslide, the road leading to the mining area was almost completely destroyed.

The old hands of the special task force drove their vehicles halfway up the mountain and could only set up camp temporarily, then split up to begin a thorough investigation of the entire mining area.

On a wind-sheltered clearing halfway up the mountain, inside a hastily erected tent, Jiang Li looked solemnly at the animal and plant samples collected by the special task force during their investigation, laid out on the table.

Inside a sealed plastic bag was an immature wild jujube, as if eroded by some filthy, corrupting force-its shape twisted, covered in countless uneven protrusions, clustered together, making its once smooth surface look as if afflicted by a malignant tumor.

On the other side, a white porcelain tray held the corpse of a sparrow, its feathers disheveled and split, its head as if two skulls had each lost a third, then spliced together at the cut, and one eye even showed double pupils.

In the adjacent tray, a mountain toad’s body had swollen into a sphere, some nerves and blood vessels burst out, thick and long, dangling like aerial roots of a plant.

……

There were many similar cases; all kinds of deformed, twisted creatures appeared before her, making it feel as if she were staring directly into a nightmare.

If these bizarre creatures hadn’t all appeared suddenly tonight, and if the old hands of the special task force hadn’t found any radioactive material in the mountains, nor any excessive psychic energy fluctuation residue-

Jiang Li would have suspected they’d been exposed to nuclear radiation or severe nocturnal erosion, causing their bodies to mutate.

However, she still connected these twisted creatures to something else.

“……”

It was too strange-how could things turn out like this?

All their tissues showed varying degrees of abnormal proliferation, seemingly similar to the symptoms found in the three Nocturnal Syndrome patients’ corpses discovered earlier?

But could animals and plants actually show symptoms of Nocturnal Syndrome too?

Jiang Li pondered, sighing heavily.

Since the nights grew longer, it wasn’t unheard of for non-human creatures to contract Nocturnal Syndrome.

Yet, so far, while tens of thousands of humans had been diagnosed, among the far more numerous animals and plants, fewer than ten thousand cases had been found-truly rare.

But tonight, in just over an hour, the old hands of the special task force had collected a large number of animal and plant Nocturnal Syndrome samples. What Jiang Li saw was only a portion, but the sample count had already reached eleven-shocking.

Was it because the daytime hours had shortened again recently, causing some unknown, terrifying change? Jiang Li worried.

As the operator responsible for monitoring and recording daytime changes in Hua City, she knew that compared to the same period last year, this year’s daylight was about fifteen seconds shorter.

“Da-da-da-da-!”

Urgent footsteps approached outside the tent, squelching through the mud.

A member of the special task force lifted the tent flap and entered, not bothering to rest, immediately pulling a night-vision camera from his coat and handing it to Jiang Li.

“Operator Jiang Li, these are photos our team just took at an abandoned elementary school halfway up the mountain. They’re so bizarre, none of us dared go in to investigate. Anyway… please take a look first?”

“Alright, let me see.” Jiang Li nodded, took the night-vision camera, operated it for a moment, and brought up the photos. After just two, her pupils contracted slightly.

The two photos showed the school’s playground and teaching building.

In the first photo, on the playground under the thick night, bulging, cracked mounds of earth of various sizes dotted the ground, as if something was about to grow up from beneath after the soil was soaked by rain.

In the second photo, a lonely two-story building stood halfway up the mountain. On its walls, all sorts of architectural features “grew”: gray spire-shaped rooftops, antique red stone columns, golden abstract sculptures… as if pieces had been cut off and grafted onto the old, cracked exterior, looking twisted and grotesque.

Staring at the two photos, the word “Nocturnal Syndrome” quietly surfaced in Jiang Li’s mind.

If the old building was like a dying elder, then now its body was covered in strange parasitic growths-undoubtedly, it was terminally ill.

But……

There had never been such a precedent before, right?

How could a building contract Nocturnal Syndrome? Jiang Li wondered.

Somehow, she felt something terrifying was about to happen in Hua City.

Setting down the photos, Jiang Li looked at the special task force member and said seriously, “Spread the word-call in a few more special task force teams, seal off the mountain immediately. Not a single detail of what happens here tonight can be leaked!”

“Also, notify the special task force teams investigating in the mountains: whatever intel they collect, report to me at once. I need to write real-time reports for the higher-ups from here.”

A mountain completely covered by faint psychic energy fluctuation, plus a large number of suspected Nocturnal Syndrome cases within-

If the abnormalities here became legend and spread, it wouldn’t be long before this place turned into a haunting breeding ground.

“Understood.”

The special task force member knew how serious things were, responded, and hurried out of the tent.

Meanwhile-

Under a distant tree shrouded in night, Qi Dong watched Jiang Li inside the tent, his gaze deep and meaningful.

—-

On the other side of Hua City, at The Underground World entertainment club, behind a half-drawn soundproof curtain at the end of a tunnel that seemed to lead to another dimension, it was the height of the party.

On the dance floor, Bai Kai wore a flashy deep purple fitted suit with a green shirt, swaying freely with a group of young men and women to the pounding rhythm of electronic music under the psychedelic lights. Before long, at the other end of the dance floor, a handsome blond man in a white suit squeezed through the crowd to Bai Kai’s side, leaned in and whispered a few words. Bai Kai frowned and followed the blond man toward the edge of the dance floor.

Leaving the dance floor, Bai Kai entered a luxurious private room, took the phone handed to him by the blond man, and quickly called back the missed number that wasn’t saved in his contacts.

“Hello? This is Bai Kai, may I ask…”

Before Bai Kai could finish, Qi Dong’s rough, angry voice came through the phone.

“Damn it, Bai Kai, didn’t you say Lu Yibei didn’t know anything, wouldn’t find out anything? Well, now there’s trouble at Ban Shan Primary School, he really went to that damned place!”

Hearing this, Bai Kai’s face turned instantly pale, as if he’d just heard something truly terrifying.

—-

Hua City Fifth People’s Hospital, Department of Psychiatry, Consultation Room 1.

The morning sunlight streamed in through the window, falling on the pale, delicate, slightly haggard profile of the young man. He stared blankly at the cluster of brightly blooming gerberas on the windowsill.

After a while, the metal door handle turned, the door opened, and a doctor in a white coat walked in, sitting down opposite the young man.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. Shall we begin?”

“Mm.” The young man nodded obediently in response.

“Name?”

“Lu Yibei.”

“How old?”

“Eighteen.”

“Gender?”

“……”

Strange, why do I have this sudden urge to make a sarcastic remark?

Lu Yibei grumbled inwardly, then answered truthfully according to his real feelings, “Sometimes male, sometimes female.”

“……”

Sometimes male, sometimes female?

The doctor put down his pen, looked up at Lu Yibei, tilted his head and sized him up for a moment, then bent over his notebook and scribbled a few messy lines before continuing, “Why don’t you tell me about your situation first?”

As a psychiatrist, he’d seen plenty of psychological issues like gender identity disorder, so he wasn’t surprised by Lu Yibei’s answer.

“……”

Lu Yibei looked into the doctor’s eyes, was silent for a few seconds, then began to recount the story he’d already told twice today, “It all started with a dream I had last night…”

Last night, Lu Yibei had a very strange dream. He dreamed he was born and grew up in a city that looked almost exactly like Hua City.

The difference was, in that city, whenever night fell, the streets emptied of people.

The darkness and ominous things lurking in the city’s corners would awaken, countless twisted, evil figures appearing in the alleys and streets, gnashing their teeth, sucking blood, lying in wait, hunting humans.

He also dreamed that his mother, who depended on him, died early, and the one who raised him was his father whom he’d never met, along with a strange man named Bai Kai.

Later, his father also died in a bizarre car accident, and from then on, he lived alone…

……

“Wait.” The doctor interrupted, “You mean you were kidnapped by a monster wearing a rabbit head and a man who controls cicadas to kill people, and then forced to swallow an egg…”

“It was The Witch’s Egg, condensed from all the psychic energy and power of a witch type haunting at the end of its lifespan,” Lu Yibei corrected.

“So after you swallowed that egg, you completely became female?” Clearly, the doctor hadn’t remembered all those prefixes, only the word “egg.”

Although Lu Yibei felt a bit embarrassed answering such a question face to face, in order to figure out what was happening to him, he blushed slightly and forced himself to answer, “I didn’t completely become female. I’m male during the day, female at night.”

The doctor nodded thoughtfully, wrote a few more lines in his notebook-the handwriting was standard “doctor script,” and Lu Yibei could only vaguely make out words like “rabbit,” “cicada,” “father.”

“Alright, you may continue.”

Hearing this, Lu Yibei withdrew his gaze from the doctor’s notebook and continued to describe his long and terrifying dream.

Two minutes later.

Lu Yibei spoke of Lin Yiqi personally killing Zhao Ke, dismembering his body into pieces, and sewing them into a doll for venting. The doctor’s forehead began to sweat slightly.

Five minutes later.

Lu Yibei described the entity lurking in the distant, pitch-black mountains, spreading a curse among its former people so that for generations none would have human form. The doctor’s hand holding the pen began to tremble.

Seven minutes later.

Lu Yibei talked about the animals at the southern suburb slaughterhouse that raised humans. The doctor finally couldn’t help but interrupt, “Let me ask, did you come here alone?”

As he spoke, the look in his eyes toward Lu Yibei was as if he were staring at a demon crawling out of the abyss.

Granted, as a psychiatrist, he shouldn’t discriminate against or be biased toward any patient, but the dreams Lu Yibei described were simply too horrifying, and so vivid it was as if he’d actually experienced them.

The doctor even suspected that the person sitting before him was a dangerous, cunning, highly intelligent individual whose mind had been twisted to the extreme, yet who disguised himself as harmless and innocent-a top-tier psychopath.

If not for the lack of concrete evidence, the doctor would have called the police right now to have Lu Yibei arrested, lest he walk out of here and harm himself or others.

“No, I came with my girlfriend. Is there a problem?” Lu Yibei replied calmly.

“Then please ask her to come in,” the doctor said gravely.

Lu Yibei shrugged, got up and walked to the door, opened it and called out, “Rao Hua, the doctor wants you!”