“I don’t want milk anymore. I drink milk every day. I think I’m tired of it,” she said.
Alice quietly instructed him to prepare some yogurt.
She asked the girl, “Is yogurt okay?”
“Yes, that works too.” Natalia nodded, looking as if she were no different from her usual self.
But Alice shuddered. This girl before her now didn’t seem to be much different from the usual Natalia. However, the cold expression on the girl’s face at the moment of waking was heavily impressed upon her. Could all this be her disguise? Alice had to wonder. Was Natalia putting on an act?
She made an assumption.
Natalisa was familiar with Natalia’s personality. Therefore, she would deliberately imitate Natalia in words and actions. She was even familiar with what Natalia liked… Yogurt, ham, comic books, swings…
However, when the actor held the yogurt out to her, the girl clearly hesitated. It was only after a short while that she picked up her cup and took a sip from it. She knew Natalia’s likes and dislikes well enough to play the part of Natalia without batting an eyelid.
Alice acted like everything was normal in case it aroused the girl’s suspicion.
After a day, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Natalia was clearly not close to her. After breakfast, she went back to her room. Through the surveillance screen on her phone, Alice saw Natalia sitting at her desk, quietly reading a comic book. She was engrossed in it and didn’t seem to have changed much from before.
Unless… Had she imagined the scene this morning?
Alice remained skeptical, and soon the day passed. As usual, Natalia went to bed early. Except, Alice made the shrewd observation that the girl did not touch the crystal ball again before bedtime. Instead, she marked a circle on her calendar before she went to bed early.
Alice sneaked into her room while she was asleep. By then, the room was unnaturally quiet apart from Natalia’s quiet breathing. She was obviously asleep.
Having made sure of this, Alice flipped through the calendar. She was shocked to discover that only certain dates on the calendar were marked with a circle. On average, there were only two dates circled out of a week. At most, there were three. This phenomenon had been going on for two months.
Was she to understand that this was Natalisa’s mark on the calendar? If it was Natalisa who woke up, she would leave a circle on the calendar as a mark. In that case… Natalisa would have made an appearance about nine times in a month.
And on these nine occasions, Hua Jin hadn’t been the least bit aware of it. Did that mean that Natalisa’s uncanny disguise was so good that even the people around her didn’t realize it?
Alice could not help feeling horrified.
So why was Natalisa imitating everything Natalia said and did? What was her motive for doing this? To disguise herself so that no one would notice? Could this be a means of self-preservation?
Then, if the hypnosis did indeed take place, what purpose did Natalia have, to hypnotize Hua Jin and Gong Fan? More importantly, how did a child, even if it were a second personality that had been created, come to acquire knowledge of hypnosis?
It was too shocking!
