Illusion Report

The morning sky was the color of the hollow exhaustion under someone's eyes after a sleepless night.

When Fu Tailan walked out of the manor's main building wearing a middle-aged woman's face, stepping into the early dawn light, the entire Westley Manor had already descended into a fog of confusion and disorder.

The vanished annex and all the staff inside it were like a vast stretch of severed nerve endings — commands could no longer be sent out, let alone carried out.

On top of that, when Westley's body was discovered, it landed like another blow to the head of an already-reeling brain. The manor convulsed in Fu Tailan's wake — shuddering, struggling, groaning as it tried to hold itself together — too consumed by its own crisis to spare any attention for monitoring the comings and goings of personnel.

He had left Ivan unconscious alongside an unconscious maid in a storage room, and left the door to Westley's study wide open behind him.

Deep inside the study, Westley had been returned to the position Brianna had last left him in — slumped over the desk, as though no one had ever touched him.

Fu Tailan headed straight for the staff parking lot. He pressed the maid's car key, followed the answering beep, and found the old Toyota.

He opened the door, got in, and sat quietly for a while.

The most important history had already been nailed into place, immovable and irreversible. What remained now was the cleanup — repeating the history that most needed to be repeated, and laying the groundwork for his past self.

Sometime after seven, Ivan woke up in the room he'd been left in and slipped out of the manor in the chaos.

Fu Tailan watched Ivan's car disappear down the road, waited a few more minutes, then started the engine. The staff parking lot was tucked behind the manor — to get out, he had to loop halfway around and pass the cluster of buildings near the main hall.

As he drove past the spot where the security center annex had once stood, Fu Tailan's heart lurched. His hands slipped on the wheel and he nearly drove straight into a tree trunk.

He braked sharply and stopped the car. He knew the window for slipping out unnoticed was narrow, and yet he sat there, staring blankly, for a long moment.

…What on earth?

Ivan had said the entire building was gone. Naturally, Fu Tailan had assumed that meant nothing would be left — just an empty patch of ground. Anyone would have assumed the same, wouldn't they? Ivan had said as much — that the spot was empty, hadn't he?

…Then what was that vast, dense mass of absolute darkness hanging in the air where the annex used to be?

It wasn't quite fog — it didn't drift or dissipate. It wasn't quite a black hole either, because Fu Tailan could see fallen leaves passing straight through it, drifting gently to the ground on the other side.

The strangest thing was that something this striking should have drawn a crowd — and yet there was only one person nearby: Brianna.

Brianna stood motionless, staring blankly at the great dark mass.

Fu Tailan lingered, taking the risk to wait a little longer. Staff members and security guards came by to find her from time to time, but every single one of them looked straight through the darkness as though it weren't there. Occasionally someone would pause, glance toward the empty ground, and murmur something — but whatever drifted in through the half-open car window never once mentioned the darkness.

"…A whole building that size… torn down overnight, really…"

"What happened to everyone inside…"

"Just… gone…"

A mass of darkness that only he and Brianna could see — as tall as a three-story building, completely occupying the space where the annex had stood, floating beneath a pale grey sky. Fu Tailan drove on for quite some time before it finally disappeared from his rearview mirror, swallowed by the trees.

…Brianna was probably still standing there, staring at it blankly.

He left the maid's car on the public road just outside the manor's first gate and switched back to his rented Mercedes.

On the drive back to Blackmoor City, Fu Tailan had no little eyes for company. As he moved along the highway, the closer he got to the city, the more it felt like rising from a dream back into the waking world.

Reality was setting around him, slowly, like curing concrete.

Fu Han was still waiting to be saved. Ever since he was twelve, it seemed like no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, nothing felt like it meant anything — he just did what he had to do.

Not one thing had ever been done because he wanted it.

By now, Fu Tailan no longer knew what he wanted at all.

It was not yet ten in the morning when he arrived back in Blackmoor City. He was bone-tired, but he still had to stop by the Morgan Family's place first and return the three Illusions he had borrowed — after all, on the 16th, no internal theft had occurred at the Morgan Family's residence, and he still had a few more days to put in as Hunter Chief.

After that, Fu Tailan checked into a hotel room, ate what passed for lunch from room service without really tasting it, and collapsed into bed. He slept straight through until the early hours of the 17th.

When he woke up, news of Westley's death was everywhere.

Television coverage showed a brief glimpse of Westley's wife waving away a reporter's microphone. There were photographs of the manor. There were police spokespeople saying they couldn't share further details. But — perhaps unsurprisingly — not a single media outlet mentioned "Secretary Green," and there was no public reporting of any kind on the missing annex building.

What was that darkness, really…

He let it go. Without information, there was no point in thinking about it — no amount of cleverness would get him anywhere.

Fu Tailan turned off the television, called a few Hunters who were good at digging up information, put out a price, and bought what intel he could on Havier. Then there was nothing left to do but wait.

Wait for the intelligence. Wait for the right moment. Wait for the days to turn over, one by one.

He could not board a Nest train back to the 26th. All he could do was remain hidden in this day — the 17th, which was simultaneously the present and the past — and let time carry him forward, until it delivered him back to three o'clock in the afternoon on the 26th.

No wonder the doctor at Nest Hospital had described buying a return ticket as "throwing up food you'd already eaten, then eating it all over again."

You didn't need a return ticket — time moved on its own, and naturally carried you back to the future. But if a return ticket actually existed, then Fu Tailan returning to the 26th would mean returning to a "future" that, for him, was already the "past," wouldn't it?

That half-bodied Hunter — if he could somehow return to that "past-future," what would he be? Still half a body, or restored to what he had been?

Forget it. The man was destined to become a resident anyway. The hypothetical was pointless.

After leaving the Key on the coffee table in his own apartment, Fu Tailan found himself with, for once, almost nothing to do over the next few days — so idle it bordered on boredom, just watching the time pass. On the evening of the 17th, he knew that somewhere in an apartment in Blackmoor City, an old woman named Mai Mingle was falling into the Nest for the very first time in her life.

For her, everything was just beginning.

Because of her, Jonah would ultimately survive — and yet every last shred of his courage to keep going as a Hunter would be destroyed.

Fu Tailan pushed down the impulse to go find Mai Mingle from back then. That would be far too reckless.

The one thing he did do during those few days was, after receiving the intelligence on Havier, make a trip to the hospital — stopping on the way to buy a stuffed toy bear for his daughter. But when he arrived, he found that he had walked in at the exact moment the little girl passed away.

No one told him what had happened, but he knew before he ever reached the room.

No one could fail to feel it. Death was unmistakable.

He sat down in the hallway outside, on a bench along the opposite corridor, watching the closed door, listening to the faint, piercing cries coming from within.

After a while, Havier came out.

He had both hands on his wife's shoulders, nearly carrying her out of the room. They must have known all along that their daughter's chances were slim — and yet the mother seemed utterly unable to accept it. She called her daughter's name over and over, clutching a small jacket to her chest with both hands, as though as long as she didn't let go, her daughter was still there.

Fu Tailan sat holding the stuffed toy bear, watching the two grief-shattered figures pass before him — accompanied by doctors and nurses, their steps stumbling and unsteady — until they disappeared around the bend in the hallway.

He sat there in plain sight, not hiding, not concealing himself at all. Havier never saw him.

After a moment, Fu Tailan wiped his face, and found his fingers were wet with cool tears.

…The little girl had died of her illness. He hadn't had to do a thing. Perhaps that was the one small mercy the world had left him.

Perhaps the world wasn't quite ready to push him to a place he could never come back from.

Even if it was already too late for that.

He gave Havier some time to sit with the grief, then consulted his own timeline and chose a moment when his past self would still have been inside the Nest — settling on one o'clock in the morning on the 20th — before going to find Havier.

At that point, he would still have been trapped in the Nest apartment, his jaw fractured by the resident Mai Mingle, swollen with a massive bruise. By the 26th, the Nest Hospital would have treated it clean and whole again.

No wonder, when Chaisi had first come to him, a single mention of being in the Nest on the 20th had been enough to convince him. Another piece of the puzzle had just clicked into place.

"The money doesn't matter," Havier said.

He turned out to be far easier to deal with than Fu Tailan had expected. There was nothing to persuade him of.

"Just cover my costs. Honestly, I can't wait for you to get it out of my sight."

"How many uses does it have left?"

Havier was soaked through with alcohol. His red, swollen eyelids lifted slightly. A trace of a Hunter's alertness seemed to be trying to push its way into his mind — but then his body dropped heavily onto the air mattress, and whatever alertness had stirred was knocked away to who-knows-where.

"Huh — so you know it works by uses. Can't say I'm surprised, coming from someone they call a genius."

His speech was still coherent, at least.

"Three transfers total. The first time we tried it was a test run — before it could work, someone interrupted us. After that… I left it alone and never touched it again."

Fu Tailan named a price. The number was large enough that even Havier opened his eyes, turned his head, and stared at him for a long moment.

He had no idea what sum of money could ease, let alone erase, the pain of losing a child.

But he knew what figure would make Fu Han sit bolt upright and snap back to himself — if it were his own death being compensated for. So he named that same number for Havier.

Though a mother who had just lost her daughter probably wouldn't think, even for a moment, that there was any silver lining in it.

Fu Tailan almost found himself envying that little girl.

"Why so much?" Havier asked, before giving his answer. "Are you buying my silence?"

"…No."

Fu Tailan knew exactly why he had been able to reach Havier smoothly — why he had gotten to the Path-transferring Illusion before Brianna could.

Westley had never trusted Brianna. When he had contacted Havier, he had done so under an alias, privately, without going through her at all.

Once Westley's body was found, Brianna would have no way of using the method Fu Tailan had used — accessing his computer to obtain the information. So something that should have been well within her reach had slipped through her fingers because of Westley, and landed in Fu Tailan's instead. Even so, she would find her way here eventually.

"If someone comes looking for you, feel free to tell them the Illusion is with me. I don't mind."

Fu Tailan turned to look back as he left.

Havier was lying on the air mattress, his back to the door. By rights, any Hunter who had just taken money should be watching carefully for a double-cross — but he had forgotten to care about that now.

"…Go home,"

Fu Tailan thought of the woman weeping in the hospital corridor, and said it softly.

Havier seemed to have passed out drunk. He didn't hear.