Illusion Report

"You’re with the Kai Family?"

The moment Mai Mingle finished speaking, Robert had the strongest reaction.

He shoved Emily against the wall, took two steps to get in front of Suo Beihua, and demanded, "Is what she said true? Did you know about this stairwell? Since you’re from the same Family Faction, you can contact people on the outside, right? Tell them to let me out!"

Suo Beihua closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

"The stairwell was an accident. I can’t contact them. Right now, we can only rely on ourselves to find a way out—but before that, there’s something I have to figure out."

She was clearly suppressing her irritation, only bothering to offer Robert a curt explanation for the sake of the cardboard gun—the moment she finished speaking, her full attention snapped back to Mai Mingle. "You said Brother Chaisi recognized me. What do you mean?"

’That form of address... Does that mean she’s admitting it?’

Mai Mingle rubbed her face hard a few times.

When she briefly closed her eyes, that translucent face was still floating behind her eyelids; in the darkness, it looked a little clearer than before.

After guessing who he was, looking at that face—which seemed to be sculpted from spatial folds—felt strange. ’His features are so distinct, how could I not have realized it was Chaisi from the start?’

"Don’t be in such a hurry to rush out of my face... Anyway, my face is attached to my neck. It’s not going anywhere."

Mai Mingle whispered, not knowing if he could hear her. "Why don’t you listen to what we have to say first."

A glint flashed in Suo Beihua’s eyes. "Who are you talking to?"

Before answering, Mai Mingle collapsed onto the steps as if her body had fallen apart—she was simply too exhausted.

When it came down to it, all of this was because she wanted to resist the ultimate law that governs all living things, to obtain something that emperors and generals throughout human history had exhausted themselves to acquire, but never could.

’Compared to such a greedy, such a monumental goal, perhaps the hardships I’m suffering right now are nothing.’

’...They might not even be nearly enough.’

Sitting there, Mai Mingle could count seven or eight different kinds of pain in her body. But compared to the very end of life, the pain she felt now was vibrant, and there seemed to be something about it worth cherishing.

"I thought I’d escaped in time yesterday, but now it seems you’ve discovered I was the one who infiltrated the mansion?"

Suo Beihua nodded.

"To be precise, we hadn’t confirmed it was you. We don’t have cameras inside the mansion, only at the entrances and exits, and you happened to avoid their range. We narrowed the suspects down to the people who came for interviews that day, and you were the most suspicious because you were the only one who returned to the mansion."

’No wonder they didn’t just grab me the moment they saw me today...’

"Besides a few garrisoned Hunters and some weaponized furniture, there’s nothing in the Kai Family Mansion. After thinking it over and over, we concluded that you could have only one main objective for sneaking into the mansion—Brother Chaisi."

Suo Beihua’s expression remained calm, but when she mentioned Chaisi, her voice was like a sword suddenly drawn from its sheath, revealing a thin, cold, and sharp edge.

’...Nothing at all?’

’Doesn’t the Kai Family keep Illusions in the mansion?’

’Then what about my lipstick?’

"The appearance of this stairwell was a complete surprise. Originally, I was supposed to enter the Kai Family with you as part of your ’cohort,’ to monitor your actions and uncover your objective."

Suo Beihua took a deep breath and smiled.

"But this situation now has saved me a lot of trouble. So, tell me, what’s your purpose in looking for Brother Chaisi? How did you know about him—and how much do you know about his current state?"

Robert’s eyes were wide, and even though he knew this had nothing to do with him, he couldn’t help but listen in.

Suo Beihua glanced up at the wall he had just dismantled.

"If you think you have any room to be uncooperative, then I assure you, the one who gets thrown down the stairs as a lab rat definitely won’t be Emily."

Mai Mingle waved her hand dismissively—the other woman’s hostility was perfectly understandable, but she still wasn’t used to it. ’I’m not famous, I don’t have money... In my whole life, I’ve never been hated by anyone.’

"If I tell the truth, will you even believe me?"

"You can try telling me first."

For a moment, Mai Mingle truly didn’t know where to begin. The emerging Nest information, the scene she had witnessed at the Kai Family’s, the Dominance Game and her analysis and speculation... things she could say and things she couldn’t, things that were certain and things that were not, all jumbled together. After thinking for a while, she finally decided to take a risk.

"I didn’t sneak into the Kai Family’s for Chaisi, but it is related to him."

She sat on the steps, looking at the patch of sky visible upstairs, and said, "By accident, he took an Illusion that’s very important to me. I went to the Kai Family’s place just to get my thing back—"

Suo Beihua let out a "Ha!" clearly not believing a word. Before she could speak, Mai Mingle cut in, "It was only just now that I suddenly understood the kind of situation Chaisi is in."

After she closed her eyes, the translucent face in the darkness seemed to lift slightly at her words, as if a little surprised.

’...Does he even know what kind of situation he’s in?’

"Do you know about ’Nest Dissociation Disorder’?" Mai Mingle asked.

"Of course."

"Then do you know where one dissociates *to* when ’Nest Dissociation Disorder’ becomes severe?"

Suo Beihua seemed to chew on the question twice, still not understanding what she meant. "It’s a psychological condition. You don’t go anywhere—"

Mai Mingle shook her head.

"No, when it becomes severe, the Hunter’s body also begins to show symptoms of dissociation. This doesn’t mean the body breaks into pieces... What I mean is, the boundary between the physical body and reality starts to blur. Hmm, let me think of an analogy to help you understand."

She tilted her head in thought for a moment before saying, "Take a watercolor painting, for example. When it’s dry, the watercolor exists clearly on the paper, right? Our physical bodies are like the watercolor, and the paper is the Human World we live in. In a normal state, we all live clearly and completely within the Human World.

"But when the dissociation becomes severe, or when a person’s human essence is attacked in some way, it’s like someone splashed water on the watercolor painting. As people, we start to become unstable.

"...The watercolor dissolves again, its edges blurring, and it gradually seeps through the paper. If you then place another sheet of paper underneath the watercolor painting, you’ll see some of the color pass through the first sheet and bleed onto the blank one below—our physical bodies are like that watercolor. They dissolve and blur, with a part of them seeping through the Human World and into another place."

The analogy wasn’t perfectly accurate, but it was the most fitting one Mai Mingle could come up with.

Once watercolor bleeds through paper, the lost pigment can’t return; but a person’s ’Nest Dissociation Disorder’ is still reversible, and the physical body can become clear and stable again.

Suo Beihua was still skeptical, but she played along. "And where does it seep into?"

"...The ’Black Abyss Belt’."

Mai Mingle explained, "It’s a name I came up with myself. Whether it actually has a name, the Nest information—I mean, I don’t know either. It’s a pitch-black space, with no direction and no matter, like a maze with no exit, separating the Human World from the Nests.

"A Hunter’s ’Path’ is like a wormhole that bypasses the Black Abyss Belt, allowing people to go from the Human World to a Nest. The residents of the Nests don’t have Paths and can’t get around the Black Abyss Belt, which is why they can’t enter the Human World."

The translucent face suddenly turned, as if it had tugged on a nerve, causing a slight pang of pain in Mai Mingle—for some reason, Chaisi seemed to have reacted to her last sentence.

"The Black Abyss you mentioned... a dark space..." Suo Beihua began, her lips trembling a few times before she stopped, as if she didn’t know what the rest of her sentence was supposed to be.

"You’ve probably seen it."

Mai Mingle glanced at her and said, "I’ve seen it too. It’s just that when I saw it, I had no idea what it actually was... because from the outside, it just looked like a human-shaped black hole, standing in the middle of the air, bottomlessly deep."

Suo Beihua sucked in a sharp, cold breath.

Back then, Mai Mingle had been trapped in a corner on the third floor of the Kai Family Mansion, caught in a pincer attack with nowhere to run.

When the door behind her was suddenly and gently pulled open from inside the room for some unknown reason, Mai Mingle had no choice but to duck inside, slipping into the room that had been secured with a keypad lock.

In the center of the room stood a motionless, human-shaped black hole.

"I realized then that the rug in the center of the room was a tongue-shaped Illusion, so I didn’t dare get close. I hugged the corner of the wall, inching my way to the window, and from there I climbed down to the balcony below to escape. The entire time, I was both too scared to look at the human-shaped black hole and too scared not to."

She was paranoid, constantly afraid that if she turned her head away, the human-shaped black hole would be standing right behind her, so she couldn’t stop herself from glancing at it out of the corner of her eye.

It was just as Mai Mingle was climbing out the window and casting one last glance back into the room that she suddenly realized there had been another person inside all along.

From three different angles inside the room, that person was invisible. Only after climbing out the window could she barely make out a silhouette to the side, because the person had been perfectly blocked by the human-shaped black hole—

No, "blocked" would be the wrong word.

She couldn’t tell who the person was.

In that fleeting glimpse, quick as a flash, Mai Mingle only got the impression that it was a man, seemingly very tall. The human-shaped black hole was about 1.7 meters tall, but the man had to bend over to stick the entire upper half of his body into it.

He reached into the black hole, and then he was gone.

From the moment Mai Mingle entered the room until she escaped through the window, a total of several minutes, the half-vanished man remained completely unaware of her, frozen and still, as if he had slipped through the cracks of the Human World.

She couldn’t tell who the man was, but she could guess. What she never knew was where his vanished upper body had gone.

It wasn’t until Mai Mingle saw the shattered "EMERGENCY EXIT" sign, saw the deep darkness that had dragged Li Stan in, and the Nest information was force-fed into her brain, that the answer finally surfaced, almost reluctantly. Mai Mingle suddenly realized that the tall man, who was probably Chaisi, had also vanished into the "Black Abyss Belt."

But why would a rift suddenly appear in the "reality" of a room in the Kai Family’s mansion, revealing the Black Abyss Belt?

Suo Beihua suddenly lowered her head and wiped her nose forcefully.

"Brother Chaisi... that human-shaped black hole you saw wasn’t a black hole. She’s a person. She has a name." She said with her eyes closed, "Her name is Han Liuyue."