Illusion Report

’Is it really up there?’

Every breath Mai Mingle desperately sucked in felt like inhaling wet cement. No matter how hard she tried, the air refused to enter her body.

She’d lost count of how many floors she had run since they were trapped. A raging fire seemed to have ignited in her lungs, and what little air she managed to force down only made the blaze burn hotter and more painfully.

Mai Mingle refused to consider whether this was because she had climbed too many stairs, or because her mouth and nose, the very things she used to breathe, were slowly turning into a mirror.

"How much longer?"

Suo Beihua was panting so hard that every word came out as a sharp hiss, making her sound more like a snake than a person. "Is—is it up there?"

After leading them for so long and narrowly escaping several attacks, Mai Mingle found it hard to say those three words: "I don’t know."

’Have we already passed it? What if my guess is wrong?’

’What if the floor where I appeared was pulled out and randomly inserted somewhere else?’

The more she ran, the less certain Mai Mingle became.

"I—I ran down from above," she said, enduring the sensation of having her insides doused in kerosene. "If we keep running up... we should be able to get back to the floor I entered on."

"How will you recognize it?" Robert demanded from the side. "Do you have any idea how many of my cardboard bullets you’ve made me waste, just running all the way up here like this?"

He had already asked several times, and this time Mai Mingle felt it would be difficult to be evasive again.

In the ten minutes since passing the floor where Li Stan had died, they had faced several life-threatening situations. If Mai Mingle hadn’t been so adamant that she could lead them back to her entry floor, and that they all had to stick together, Robert probably wouldn’t have fired a single shot to fend off enemies for anyone else.

She pushed Emily, who was coiled in the snake tail, upward with both hands and took another strained breath.

"It—it has to do with my mirror..."

It wasn’t a complete lie, but it was only a guess.

"What do you mean?"

’My mirror... I’m afraid it’s the result of the Nest tampering with it.’

The thought had been sitting like a lead weight in the pit of her stomach.

For a while, Mai Mingle had wondered if she was a victim of her own confirmation bias. Once an idea takes root in your mind, everything starts to look like evidence, and even the most unrelated details begin to seem suspicious.

But she couldn’t argue herself out of it, nor could she ignore that first, crucial piece of supporting evidence.

Her mirror... rather than reflecting some characteristic of Mai Mingle, it seemed to provide a "function" for the Nest. Her transformation was fundamentally different from the others’.

The Nest hadn’t even bothered to hide this fact.

From the very beginning, before the physical mutations had even started to become reality, hadn’t her mirror already provided a passageway for "Jones" and the "Transparent Face"?

"Jones" could hide in the passageway; the "Transparent Face" could charge out of it.

"Hey!" Robert suddenly roared, grabbing her by the arm. "Are you sure about this or not? You haven’t just lost your mind, have you?"

Mai Mingle stumbled, quickly grabbing the step above her to steady herself and keep from tumbling down the stairs.

"Let go of me,"

Even with her good temper, Mai Mingle couldn’t help but forcefully shake her arm free. "I told you, I—"

A sudden pain shot through the back of her eyeball. She doubled over, the rest of her sentence turning into a groan.

"What’s wrong?" Suo Beihua asked, looking back from the landing. "Are you hurt?"

Mai Mingle couldn’t speak.

She staggered down a few steps. Just as Robert was about to follow, she waved a hand, forcing the words out through gritted teeth. "No... don’t move. The floor I came in on is just up ahead... Suo Beihua just has to go up one more flight of stairs."

Aside from the motionless Emily, the other two looked up—the floor above them looked no different from any other.

"How in the world do you know?"

’How was she supposed to answer that?’

What if she told him the truth? That right now, a semi-transparent face had just emerged from deep behind her eyeball, reverse-imprinted on her retina, and was now lingering, waiting for a chance to burst out of her face...

’Robert would really think she was crazy then, wouldn’t he?’

In truth, she should have realized it sooner. The fact that she had escaped the Transparent Face by frantically running downstairs proved it couldn’t follow her. It was "fixed" to a single location: the very floor where Mai Mingle had first been trapped in the "Find Jones" trial. In other words, the reality she and the others had come from.

In that sense, the "Transparent Face" had become a landmark.

As long as she found it, she would find the floor she had come in on.

Now that this had been proven true, Mai Mingle couldn’t feel happy about it.

For her, this stairwell was a deathtrap with no exit. She could no longer tell if this was by the Nest’s design or a simple coincidence.

So what if she found the floor they came from?

She couldn’t go up there.

The semi-transparent face was still some distance away from her, not yet able to batter her retinas and facial bones like it had before.

But if Mai Mingle went any higher, she would be right back in the same situation as before. Even now, two flights of stairs away, whenever she moved her eyes, half of a faint, ethereal shadow would drift into her peripheral vision, like a persistent floater just waiting for her to get closer.