A brave man may not live, but he cannot die

Chapter 122 Recorder

When I opened my eyes, I saw an unfamiliar ceiling.

Amemiya Ningning sat up from the bed in a daze, the quilt on her body had a nostalgic smell.

She lowered her head and saw that she was still wearing the clothes she wore when she went out.

Because she was going to the forbidden forest, Amamiya Ningning, who loves stepmother-style skirts, rarely changed into a pair of pants that were convenient for movement. She was dressed in black and looked like a dashing female soldier.

She felt in the secret pockets of her clothes, but her wand, potions, scrolls, divination cards, and White Cult bracelet were all gone.

She looked around confused, trying to recall what had happened.

She and Quinn, along with four students, were launched into the Forbidden Forest in a traction cage, but the cage fell into the gray fog and kept falling.
The fortune teller's mental strength might not be strong, but because she often interprets mysteries, her resilience and resistance to curses are extremely high. She remembers far more details than Quinn and several students.

The cage was pressed towards Quinn's end. He seemed like a huge rock weighing tens of millions of tons, pulling everyone down with him.

The abyss is a deadly place for ordinary people, but it has both advantages and disadvantages for arcanists and extraordinary people.

Although there is a risk of contamination, while fighting against the interference of the abyss, human mental strength will quickly become stronger - provided that they can hold on.

This is also the reason why the academy allows first-year students to enter the Forbidden Forest. The study of arcane arts can be accelerated due to talent, but the enhancement of mental strength requires real accumulation over time.

When students adapt to the interference of the first layer of the abyss and can stay in the forbidden forest for a whole day without getting lost, the improvement in the quality of their mental strength will be equivalent to ten years of hard training.

But for some reason, the forbidden forest had no effect on Amamiya Ningning. Even after going down to the second level of the abyss, her mental strength did not increase at all after coming out. The principal no longer allowed her to enter, saying that it had no effect on her.

The most obvious difference between the second and first layers of the abyss is that strange things appear from time to time. For example, there are metal bicycles with long seats, glass plates that flash colorful images, and various metal creations that are either sophisticated or simple.
If those things were brought to the human world, they would become relics of the Abyss that could be used to make Abyss extraordinary potions.

When Amamiya Ningning saw items found only on the second level appear in the Forbidden Forest, she knew something was wrong. The entrance to the Abyss was unstable, and the second level would sometimes erode into the first level. But in that case, it was clearly not due to the instability of the entrance. The cage dragged everyone down, and the students fell unconscious as soon as they entered the second level. Quinn remained in a daze, as if he had lost his soul, and no matter how he called, he would not wake up.

Amemiya Ningning was not so panicked at first. After all, the cage was a safety measure invented by the research and development department of the academy, and it had never gone wrong in thousands of years. But when the cage sank to the bottom and the chain broke, she knew that something bad was going to happen.

Endless thick gray fog swallowed the iron cage until Amamiya Ningning also lost consciousness.

When I woke up again, I was already in this bed.

This is a small room, about 20 square meters, and a bed, a desk, a wooden chair, and a wardrobe almost fill the space.

From the window in front of the desk, she could see the brilliant golden sun and the shadow of a building in the distance. The light shone in through the cross-lattice glass, casting a warm glow on her body. She could not help but lean back against the headboard, listening to the rustling sound of the wind blowing through the old banyan tree. She pressed the quilt against her nose, her eyes gradually becoming confused.
这 是
The taste of dad.

My mother always says that my father has a stinky masculine smell, but she knows that she is just saying one thing and thinking another. When I was a child, he often carried me to the harbor to watch the sea. When the girl buried her head in her father's shoulder to sleep, she could always smell a hint of soapberry, which made her relax involuntarily, as if she was surrounded by tenderness.

Even though she had forgotten the name, she still remembered the smell.

Is this dad's room?
She sat up in bed, her boots neatly placed by the window, but she couldn't remember when she had gone to bed.

This room has a youthful feel. There are anime posters with curled corners on the wall. Most of them are of a brown-haired girl standing on a huge red robot. She always feels that this character is a bit like her stepmother, with a kind of tsundere feeling.

There was a pile of test papers and exercises on the table. Amamiya Ningning walked over and flipped through them, but she couldn't understand them. The text was very unfamiliar to her.

But she knew that these were the characters from her father's hometown. Brave men had left similar characters in the world, but because there were too few of them, they had not yet been deciphered by scholars.

There was a large banner on the desk. If Quinn were here, he would definitely laugh out loud—

[Work hard for 100 days, and fight for the college entrance examination. I want to take the civil engineering exam!]

Standing in front of the table, Amamiya Ningning's eyes moved slightly, and she whispered, "Sorry, Dad, let me look through it." Then she opened the drawer under the table.

There are still test papers in the drawer.

A large number of question books, exercise books, and error books.
It seemed that they were all used by the man when he was a teenager. Amamiya Ningning could not understand the titles and handwriting inside, but she still stacked them neatly on the table as if they were treasures.

And in the big drawer at the bottom, there are three thick photo albums.

The cover had turned yellow, and it was obvious that it was more than ten years old. She took a deep breath, suppressed her excitement, and opened the album.

Immediately, his eyes dimmed in disappointment.

Like the photos at home, there was a blank space in these photos, as if they had faded, erasing a person's appearance into a blank.

But the people next to him were still there. This couple smiling cordially should be his grandparents. His father once said that his grandfather ran a restaurant and his grandmother was a teacher.
The photos record my father's appearance from childhood to adulthood, in the cradle, in the park, in front of the kindergarten, in the elementary school classroom
But his existence was erased, and the center of all the photos was empty, which made Amamiya Ningning's heart a little painful. Her life was also empty, her mother's, her stepmother's, her sister's
Not everything that is missing can be laughed off.

She closed the album, stood up, and checked the wardrobe, bookshelf, and every corner of the room.
There was not much gain, but she did regain some of her gradually lost memories of her father.

It turns out that my father was such a person when he was young.
Hardworking, serious, and a little off-key, there are several straight sword-like branches under the bed, which seem to be hidden away for fear of being scolded by family members. Tape is wrapped under the branches to form a sword handle for easy grip.
When Amamiya Ningning was a child, her father loved to play knight games with her using branches. She was always beaten by the four or five-year-old child and ran around everywhere. She laughed happier when she lost than when she won.

Amamiya Ningning opened the door.

In front of me is a small but very cozy living room. There is a bamboo mat on the sofa, a tablecloth on the dining table, and a bright red Chinese knot and a large family portrait on the wall.

The family photo was still the same as the other albums, with a blank space. The parents were standing at the entrance of the amusement park holding their non-existent child, smiling brightly.

Amamiya Ningning's gaze fell on the table.

Her eyes suddenly flickered. There was an old-fashioned tape recorder and a cassette tape.

Slightly larger than a palm, this tape was used by students to practice English listening before smartphones became commonplace. Although Amamiya Ningning didn't know what the small silver box was, she saw a stick figure on the tape.

Like a family portrait, it shows two adults holding a child.

But the difference is that the child in the picture was not erased. It was a girl holding a branch in her hand, and her father also held a branch in his hand.

The mother was painted very beautifully.
She ran to the table in two or three steps, picked up the tape carefully and looked at it.

This is what my dad left behind.

Amemiya Ningning looked at the family portrait casually drawn on the tape and was almost certain that it was left to her by her father!

After studying it for a while, she found that there was no text on the tape except for pictures, and Amamiya Ningning didn't understand how to use it. Could this be the medium her father left for her for divination?
All the available props were gone, but that didn't bother Amamiya Nene, Grindelwald's fortune-telling teacher. After opening the empty rooms and searching carefully, she scooped up a handful of sand from the bottom of the fish tank and broke off four pointed leaves from the green plants on the balcony.

A circle of fine sand was sprinkled around the tape, and the tip of a leaf was used to represent the direction. Finally, Amamiya Ningning bit her index finger with her canine teeth without hesitation, endured the pain and pressed her finger on the sand. The blood mixed with the sand and stones, and she began to draw a divination circle.

Her brows were tightly furrowed. Although she could still use arcane magic in the Abyssal Pollution Layer, she couldn't use it at all in this place.

He sent out his mental power, but there was no trace of mana in the air. He tried to use the mana stored in his own circuit to construct a spell, but as soon as the mana left the circuit, it scattered everywhere uncontrollably, like air leaking into space, disappearing without a trace.

But Amamiya Ningning didn't stop. Even if her arcane skills couldn't be used, she still had magic.

Arcane magic is subject to interference from the world, but magic comes from the imagination of the soul. As long as the spell is outlined in the mind, mana can be transformed into an extension of fantasy.

The moment the bloodstain was drawn, Amamiya Ningning opened her eyes.

Her magic is "divination".

She picked up the tape with some uncertainty, aligned it with the cassette slot of the recorder, adjusted the front and back, and inserted it.

Then, close the recorder cover.

She didn't dare to use too much force, but the crisp "click" sound seemed to tell her that she was doing the right thing.

She wanted to divine her father's whereabouts.

But the divination results only told her how to use the machine in front of her.

There was a button with a triangle mark on it, the second one from the left on the top. Amamiya Ningning placed her finger on it and pressed it down.

"Hey Hey hey?"

A lazy, somewhat distorted voice came from the speaker of the repeater.

For a moment, Amamiya Ningning's body seemed to go numb.

".Dad?"

The tape was spinning, it was just playing a recording, a tape naturally couldn't respond to her. But the person who recorded the voice seemed to know what she was going to say -

"Hey, my dear daughter, long time no see~ Are you going to ask me where I've been?"

"Dad, where have you been all these years? Why did you lie to us and say you were dead?!"

Amamiya Nene's voice was filled with anger.

"Ah, sorry, you may say something in the future, but this is just a recording, and it can't be long - time is running out now, just do what I say."

"Pick up this tape recorder—Okay, my dear daughter, take it back to the room where you woke up."

Amemiya Ningning held the recorder in both hands, afraid of dropping it, and returned to the small room.

"There are several branches under my bed. Take out the longest one. Compare it. The longest one among the branches. Okay, be careful not to break it."

"You can clip the repeater in, so you don't have to worry about it breaking. It's a BBK brand heirloom. I've used it for ten years and it's still working. It's more reliable than a damn holy sword."

Amamiya Ningning found the branch. It was indeed very long, almost as tall as she was. A thin, straight branch of this length was a rare find, and could be sold to an elementary school student for twenty yuan.

"Okay, look out the window. Do you see the tallest building in the distance?"

Amamiya Ningning nodded subconsciously.

"My dear daughter, this is the third layer of the abyss, the 'Falling Layer'. You must leave before sunrise. The way out is in that tall building. There is only about an hour left, and you must hurry there now."

Amamiya Ningning was stunned.

The tall building was at least thirty or forty kilometers away from her house, and even farther if you took into account the winding roads in the city.

Arcane magic cannot be used and magic can only be used for divination. How could she possibly make it in time?
"Don't worry, Dad, I know you can't make it, so I came back to recharge. Now, right now, open the door and go downstairs--"

Amemiya Ningning hurriedly tried to take the photo albums.

The voice in the recorder became stern: "Except for that branch, you are not allowed to take anything from the room."

Amamiya Ningning was a little hesitant.

My mother hasn't truly laughed in many years since my father disappeared.

She wanted to take these photos back to show her mother, she would definitely be very happy.

"obedient."

After hearing what her father said, she finally left the house without touching anything, grabbing the branch.

This is an old residential complex, without even an elevator. Luckily, I live on the second floor, so I was outside in no time.

The devastated world made Amemiya Ningning slightly stunned. The residential buildings in these communities looked like they had been bombarded, with only charred ruins left, standing silently in the sunset.

But the building she walked down was intact, and she could even see clothes and quilts hanging outside when she looked up.

"Come, look to the left. There's a garage—see? It has a white roller door. It's not locked. Pull it up from the bottom. Pull it hard."

Amemiya Ningning did as she was told. The mechanical structure of the garage door allowed her to raise the roller shutter with a light pull, and a parrot green coupe appeared in front of her.

The sharp front face and carbon fiber air intake grille, as Amemiya Ningning approached, the headlights automatically lit up, shining brightly.

"Go to the right, where there's a big plate. There's a handle on the door. Do you find it? Pull it outwards and the door will open automatically. Then get in."

Ningning Amamiya sat in the driver's seat, closed the electric suction door, and pressed the vehicle start button according to her father's instructions.

"Xiao Ai, start Xiaomi SU7 Ultra, smart driving mode, and set the destination to preset location 1"

Along with the man's voice, the car slowly slid out of the garage and drove out of the community.

"Before you leave, that guy is in some trouble. You have to give him this branch."

"We don't have much time left to record. Next, you need to remember one sentence. I will repeat it many times until you memorize the pronunciation of this sentence."

"Remember? Dad believes in you."

"Okay, don't cry."

"Daddy loves you, always."

(End of this chapter)