Illusion Report

"What did you see?" Damian asked.

Chaisi narrowed his eyes and didn’t answer right away. His throat felt thick, as if it were clogged with glue.

He wasn’t sure if he’d seen it wrong. The room was dimly lit, and it was just a mass of dense, rolling, undulating darkness...

He thought he’d seen a human figure a moment ago, but when he stared intently, there was only a shifting black mist, fine as ink strokes. After a few seconds, there was still nothing out of the ordinary.

’Don’t people often see faces in wood grain or in the clouds? What was that phenomenon called again?’

Pareidolia.

Chaisi tried to reassure himself it was just a case of pareidolia, but he spoke aloud anyway. "...Where’s your phone?"

"On the nightstand."

As Damian spoke, he couldn’t help but glance back at the darkness. Then he turned more fully, staring intently at it, as if he too had begun to distrust his own eyes.

"Don’t move," Chaisi instructed. "I’ll get the phone."

The Kai Family Mansion had three floors. The two boys’ rooms were on the top floor, while Uncle Kai and Aunt Hai’s master bedroom was on the second.

It was unthinkable to shout loud enough to be heard through the hallways, the game room, the living room, and the indoor garden... to have his voice travel over a hundred square meters and reach the master bedroom door. And he couldn’t possibly run downstairs and leave Damian alone.

The fastest way was to call Uncle Kai. However, the phone, though in the same room as Damian, was over ten meters away. His little brother’s "nightstand" was actually a low bookshelf built along the wall, with a platform extending out from it, clear at the other end of the room.

Chaisi kept his eyes fixed on the mass of darkness as he walked toward the head of the bed.

’Why didn’t I just take down the fabric and close the Path back then?’

It wasn’t that his thirteen-year-old self hadn’t thought of it.

’If he had closed the Path that night, would everything that followed still have happened? Would Damian still have died in the end?’

’Which life would have been more bearable? The one where he repaid kindness with betrayal, living with the guilt of killing his brother for the rest of his life, but getting to be Uncle Kai’s only son?’

’Or the one where, constantly compared to Damian, he was deemed useless and incompetent, a person with no Path, suffocating under Uncle Kai’s disappointment, gradually losing his parents and the right to even step foot in the Kai Family Mansion?’

Chaisi didn’t know.

He only knew one thing. The reason he hadn’t taken down the fabric and closed the Path was due to a very common human weakness. It was like knowing a car crash is gruesome, but being unable to resist looking back as you pass by; or knowing it will be disgusting under your shoe after you’ve crushed a bug, but still having to lift your foot to look.

He wanted to know what was really inside that mass of darkness, and whether he had truly seen it wrong.

He just had to get around Damian’s bed to reach the phone—but just as Chaisi hurried toward the foot of the bed, Damian suddenly cried out in alarm.

"Who are you?"

Chaisi spun around, his mind going completely blank.

From his angle at the foot of the bed, the mass of darkness was mostly blocked by the wooden fortress. He couldn’t see a thing.

He didn’t know who Damian was talking to, but he didn’t need to guess.

It was as if someone had ripped out a floorboard he never knew existed, sending him plummeting straight down through his own body. It was a Resident. A Resident had come.

’The Resident was about to enter.’

"Don’t talk to it... Get out of here," Chaisi said, realizing his voice was trembling. "Go, close the door. Let me handle it."

Damian didn’t seem to hear him.

He just kept staring at the mass of darkness, his eyes faintly gleaming, his feet rooted to the spot.

’There was a lamp on Damian’s nightstand, a heavy one just like in his own room. Get Damian out first—use the lamp to defend myself—call Uncle Kai—’

A storm of chaotic thoughts swirled up, and his feet stumbled over themselves. His body felt torn in two: one half wanted to shove the disobedient Damian out of the room, while the other wanted to grab the phone and the lamp.

The storm came to an abrupt halt the very next second.

"Hello there," a woman’s voice said. "I’m Chaisi’s mother."

’...Huh?’

’What did it just say?’

Moonlight seeped through the curtains. The night held its breath.

Out of a thousand possible choices, Chaisi made the worst one.

He didn’t grab the phone. He didn’t grab the lamp. He didn’t scream at Damian to run from the room again. No, that wasn’t right. In that moment, he had no choice but to walk toward the source of the voice.

"You must be his little brother, right?"

A voice he hadn’t heard in eight years, a voice he thought he would never hear again for the rest of his life, was now gently questioning Damian.

Chaisi wished he would never reach her, so he could listen to that voice speak forever.

This bedroom had suddenly become both the most terrifying and the most hopeful place in the world for him.

Damian let out a scoff. He was clearly both nervous and excited, and his laugh trembled.

"What are you talking about? You’re a Resident, aren’t you? His mother died a long time ago."

It was a fact, he wasn’t wrong, but Chaisi hated him for it all over again.

"Yes, I am a Resident."

The female voice said softly, "I’m not his real mother, it’s true. I am the Resident that came into being after his mother died... I’ve retained many of her memories and emotions. And Chaisi? Wasn’t he just here? I so want to see him... Is he willing to see me?"

Damian gestured with his chin in Chaisi’s direction. "He’s coming."

The scenes that Chaisi would spend the next seventeen years refusing to think about, he now had to recall repeatedly, to endlessly relive, in order to reclaim this piece of his memory, this piece of himself.

He stood a short distance from Damian’s side, watching as Daiju Monroe emerged, bit by bit, from the darkness.

First, half of a pale face.

The eyes on that face fell upon Chaisi, and a smile floated up from the darkness, like the face of a corpse slowly rising from the bottom of a lake.

Next came her upper body, her waist and legs, and one foot stepping out—a bare foot, landing silently on the floor of Damian’s bedroom.

She stood with one foot in the human world and one foot still in the Nest, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears.

Daiju Monroe said to Chaisi in a trembling voice, "...You’ve grown up."

’Mom.’

He didn’t know when he had started crying; he hadn’t noticed at all. It was only when he tried to speak that he found he couldn’t catch his breath, his words breaking apart into choked sobs.

Damian placed a hand on his shoulder, as if to comfort him.

Years later, whenever Chaisi recalled that gesture, he would think it held a maturity beyond Damian’s age—as if Damian knew his time was short, that he had little left, and so he had to grow up as much as he could.

"Why?"

Chaisi stared at her, blood rushing to his face, his skin burning. "You’re not my mother—are you?"

Daiju Monroe shook her head, her expression sorrowful.

"I’m not. I wish I were," she said with a sigh. "You are the son she left behind, and I am the Resident she left behind... But when I look at you, it’s just as she would have looked at you. I can’t help but feel that I am her, and you are my son."

She had clearly denied it, and yet in that moment, Chaisi was filled with a strange hope, almost as if he’d been redeemed.

’So he still had a mother after all.’

"Y-You’re what my mom left behind..." His head felt a little deprived of oxygen as he struggled to understand. "How did you find me?"

"I started looking for you after I died," Daiju Monroe said with a smile. "For the past few years, I’ve been watching you from the Nest... I’m so happy I can come in and talk to you tonight."

Damian suddenly asked, "How can you use my Path? Chaisi can’t use it."

"I don’t know either," Daiju Monroe said with a touch of melancholy. "Actually, I can’t use it completely. You see, I can only step in with one foot."

She pointed to the floor.

As the two boys looked down together at the bare foot, Chaisi suddenly became keenly aware that her dark, searing eyes were still glued to the tops of their heads, filled with expectation—

He wasn’t a fool.

No matter how strong the emotional impact, his mind was still managing to function.

Even at thirteen, Chaisi understood. The Resident left behind by Daiju Monroe was waiting for them to ask the natural next question—"Then how can we get you to come all the way in?"

’...Mom wants to come in.’

He slowly raised his head, frozen to the spot.

An indescribable, ineffable terror of unknown origin seemed to have temporarily frozen his bodily functions.

’The one who wants to come in is Mom. There’s nothing to be afraid of... right?’

’Some Residents are harmless, after all.’

Chaisi stood there like an idiot, letting the conversation between his mother and Damian wash over him. A few questions belatedly surfaced in his numb mind.

’Didn’t Mom die in the human world? Why would she produce a Resident?’

’Even if she did produce a Resident... shouldn’t that Resident be in the Luocheng Nest? Why would it come out of the Blackmoor City Nest?’

"So how can we get you to come in?" Damian asked.

’No, don’t ask her. Just let her stand there and look at me, that’s enough,’ Chaisi prayed.

He couldn’t turn his thoughts into words.

"As long as you keep the Path open, I can come in bit by bit. A moment ago, I couldn’t even poke my head through, but now half my body is in..."

His mother looked at Damian, her face glowing with the same bright admiration and pride that Uncle Kai and Aunt Hai showed him. "You’re truly incredible, to be able to open such a special Path."

Damian shrugged, pretending not to care. "I didn’t even want a Path."

He thought for a moment, then asked, "Why do you want to come in? And besides, how do I know you won’t kill us all after you do?"

Daiju Monroe shook her head again.

A few minutes ago, Chaisi had thought that Damian opening an unprecedented Path was the height of cruelty God could ever imagine. Now he knew he was wrong.

"We all want to enter the human world. It’s where we come from... Who wouldn’t want to come and see? Besides, why would I kill you? In the entire world, you are the one person no Resident would ever harm."

Damian laughed in surprise. "Why?"

"Because the Path is part of you," Daiju Monroe said, looking at him gently. "Even if I were to kill Chaisi, I would never kill you."