Illusion Report

She hadn’t gotten nearly enough of the sleep she desperately needed after returning from the Nest. A man’s voice in a dream had startled her awake.

After a heart-pounding night spent rescuing Chaisi, Jin Xueli was shocked to find it was only four in the morning when she finally got home. She found it incredible—’how could so much have happened in just a few hours?’

If she hadn’t been outside and seen that the sun never rose, she would have believed it if someone told her a whole day had passed.

Jin Xueli stumbled into her apartment like a zombie, collapsed onto the sofa, and buried her face in a pillow, playing dead for a while.

When she felt the pillow growing damp from her breath, she scraped together what little strength she had left, revived herself, and got up to check her belongings.

Thankfully, everything that should be there was. At least she hadn’t lost anything important. Her new custom-made hammer was also tucked safely inside her backpack.

She never expected to use it right after having it made. Getting her first real combat experience in the relative safety of Blackmoor City was certainly a surprise.

’Hey, maybe my luck is actually pretty good?’

Jin Xueli tossed her backpack aside, stripped off her filthy, damp clothes, and took a long, hot shower, feeling every kink in her body soak and unwind. Afterward, wrapped in a towel and steaming, she GULP GULP GULPed down a large glass of iced juice before finally crawling into her bed.

’...Being a Hunter is exhausting. You’re tired in the Nest, and you’re tired when you get back.’

Hugging her phone, she checked the new deposits in her account, mentally tallying each one: a payment for selling information on Vulture, a payment for the cemetery job, another for spreading information... The odds and ends added up to nearly twenty thousand dollars.

The life-saving fee from Chaisi, however, was nowhere to be seen yet.

’Not bad, earning this much in a day or two without even having to go to a Nest...’

The danger of following Chaisi these past two days was on par with a trip to a Nest, but there was one key difference: no one could guarantee you’d find an Illusion on any given Nest run. If your luck was bad, you could go a dozen times and still come up empty. From that angle, the job with Chaisi was slightly better.

’I didn’t curse him out too badly, did I? I’m still getting that life-saving fee, right?’

’Speaking of which... where did that voice in my dream come from?’

’It was almost like it was specifically offering me a paying job... pretty generous of it... I wouldn’t mind that happening a few more times...’

With a faint sense of satisfaction, Jin Xueli groggily closed her eyes.

It wasn’t until the next day that she realized she was, in fact, just an ordinary person who had never truly encountered real wealth.

After waking up, she did as she always did: reached for her phone and scrolled for a while with bleary eyes.

The first thing she saw was a major progress notification from the Nest regarding the previous night. She had no idea why the Nest hated Chaisi so much. Seeing that he’d obtained two target Illusions, it was as if the Nest wanted to send its denizens into Blackmoor City just to slap him around and knock the items out of his hands.

’If you hate him that much, why invite him to join in the first place?’

’Isn’t it afraid Chaisi will actually end up the final winner of the ruling game?’

The Nest even took a few jabs at her, spouting some nonsense about her using her body to block a gun barrel, which ticked her off just reading it.

Being noticed by the Nest, whether with favor or hatred, was never a good thing.

The Nest never treated anyone well. In its eyes, all humans were just trash that should have been broken down and recycled long ago, to be reused as raw material for its own construction.

The source of the Nest was human, and what the Nest hated most was also human.

In fact, it seemed to *only* hate humans.

She had once heard a story about someone falling into a Nest while holding their pet cat. The person, unsurprisingly, died. The cat, however, was cared for by the Nest’s various denizens and lived to a ripe old age. Rumor had it that it continued to live on in the Nest even after its death. It sounded unbelievable, but in the Nest, anything was possible.

Of course, this was just a Hunter’s urban legend. No one would actually test it by taking an animal in with them.

Jin Xueli sighed.

She wasn’t what you would call an exceptionally talented Hunter.

A large part of a Hunter’s talent depended on what their "Path" was.

The simpler and easier the Path, the greater the talent. An easy Path to a Nest allowed one to maintain maximum alertness, focus, and energy. It also meant a quicker escape when faced with danger.

It was like a snowball effect. Starting with the foundation of their Path, and provided the Hunter was competent, their advantage would only grow.

The understanding, observation, and experience a Hunter who could enter and leave a Nest at will could accumulate was on a completely different level from what a Hunter with a garbage Path like Jin Xueli’s could ever hope to achieve.

And what about her?

She had to drink herself into a stupor just to work up the courage to jump off a building. No matter how many times she did it, she needed a long time to recover after landing before she could even move normally.

Jin Xueli was well aware that compared to people like Brianna of the Westley Team, Chaisi, and Fu Tailan, she held no advantage whatsoever.

If she tried to win the ruling game, she would be the first one eliminated.

The risks and rewards were completely disproportionate. The best strategy was to secure tangible, real-world benefits for herself during the course of the competition. Whether Chaisi would ultimately win the game was an ethereal uncertainty, but the money flowing into Jin Xueli’s account right now was very, very real.

If Chaisi didn’t prove to be a reliable patron, she could always switch to Brianna.

If she couldn’t get to Brianna, Tailan would do... but Tailan was just a manager hired by the Morgan Family. He probably wasn’t as flexible with resources as the other two.

Jin Xueli had been supporting herself since before she was an adult. Sometimes, when she looked at others, and even at herself, she was a bit like that Black Cube: she would break people down into numerous resource packets.

She understood which packets could be exchanged for what, and which ones had certain needs.

Ever since she was drafted, she had acquired a new resource packet that was extremely valuable to the other contestants: "a contestant who can access a different set of information about the ruling game."

’How to maximize its use while ensuring her own survival—now *that* was the real strategy to adopt after entering the ruling game.’

’...How strange,’ she thought, her mind wandering as she prepared lunch for herself.

When she went out with her friends, she was genuinely happy. When she saw others meet with misfortune, she was genuinely worried for them.

She liked people, and she liked beautiful people even more. She liked the scent of their skin, the feel of their touch, and was always curious about what was happening in their lives, what they were thinking, and what they would say. She found it all endlessly fascinating.

She even liked Chaisi. She could happily talk his ear off, not to mention he was easy on the eyes. In short, all of it was genuine.

But the moment she turned away, she could forget it all.

As if none of it had ever been genuine at all.

Jin Xueli popped a few potato chips into her mouth, the CRUNCH CRUNCH temporarily drowning out the sound from the television.

Her thoughts had a tendency to run wild like a runaway horse, and she often lost track of where they were headed. After munching on chips distractedly for a while, she finally processed what she’d just heard on TV. She whipped around so fast she nearly twisted her ankle.

"Mayor Oliver Mason is about to sign and approve a four-billion-dollar allocation for a welfare housing expansion project. This project will provide a significant number of..."

Jin Xueli stared at the television, dazed for a moment.

’Did Chaisi go see the mayor?’

Looking at the mayor’s snow-white, puffy, stiff, and massive face, she couldn’t see any difference from usual.

’Ah, speaking of which, after Han Liuyue was afflicted by something in the Nest, she started to look a bit like the mayor... It must be a coincidence, right?’

’I wonder if they successfully met with the mayor? Probably not, since the mayor hasn’t changed at all.’

’So what happened to Han Liuyue? Has she recovered?’

Besides being easily distracted, Jin Xueli had another fatal flaw: curiosity.

She picked up her phone, hesitating for a moment before calling Han Liuyue first. No one picked up.

’I forgot,’ she thought. ’The Kai Family never answers their phones.’

She sent a message, but Han Liuyue didn’t reply to that, either.

’So... should I ask Chaisi?’

’But I just chewed him out yesterday, and I still haven’t seen the money. Crawling back to him now would be a bit humiliating...’

"Huh?"

Jin Xueli couldn’t help but make a sound as she looked at her phone.

She realized that at some point, Chaisi had sent her a short text message. It simply told her to contact a lawyer and included the lawyer’s contact information.

"What for, is he suing me?" Jin Xueli muttered under her breath. "Did I damage his reputation?"

She wiped the chip crumbs from her mouth, put down her phone, and went back to preparing lunch. Not five minutes later, she drifted back like a restless spirit, hands hovering. After turning it over and over in her agitated mind, she finally picked up her phone again.

The lawyer who answered the phone was an unremarkable man with a flat tone who sounded to be in his fifties.

"Hello, I’ve been waiting for your call, Miss Jin Xueli."

’Waiting for me for what? Did you want to send a demand letter but didn’t have my address?’

"I will be handling the partial equity transfer process between the company’s founder, Mr. Scott, and you. Please, allow me to explain..."

What?

For a moment, Jin Xueli thought she had dialed the wrong number. What company? What equity?

’Scott... who’s that?’