Chapter 394 - 343: Mai Mingle: 30 Minutes, 30 Years, 26 Days

Chapter 394: Chapter 343: Mai Mingle: 30 Minutes, 30 Years, 26 Days

What truly surprised her, however, was that still, nothing happened.

Lan Zhui just gave an embarrassed laugh. ’That man... he hasn’t changed a bit his whole life.’

"Oh, right. Young as I am, it’s time for my blood pressure medicine," he said, standing up and walking slowly toward the kitchen.

Mai Mingle looked at her own palm. She had touched Lan Zhui, but there had been no consequences.

’What on earth is the Nest trying to do? Is it really just trying to make me relive my past? Giving me thirty minutes to grow old with Lan Zhui?’

Throughout all these "years," the infant Ivan had never once come out of his room. It was as if the moment Mai Mingle closed the door, he became nothing more than a background character.

At some point, the baby monitor had also fallen silent, grown dusty, and eventually disappeared completely.

Only through Lan Zhui’s stories did she hear updates about Ivan: he started school this year, joined a team, got a summer job, left home for college... But he never once appeared.

’It can’t really just be trying to mess with me, can it?’

She looked up at the closed door of the baby’s room—or had it become a storage room again?—and could faintly hear the sound of a toy wind chime stirring. It seemed it had never been taken down, even after the baby grew up.

...Wait a minute.

’That thing that felt wrong... When I went into the baby’s room and saw Ivan, there was something very wrong, more wrong than anything else...’

The toy wind chime.

Mai Mingle had heard it the moment she entered the apartment. It had also been chiming intermittently when she shut the baby’s room door tight.

’But what was I thinking when I left the baby’s room?’

She had distinctly imagined the scene of Ivan slowly climbing out of his crib in a room with the "door and windows shut tight," hadn’t she?

’The window was closed. There was no wind. What was making the wind chime ring?’

Without realizing it, Mai Mingle had already leaped up from the sofa and was striding toward the tightly closed door of the baby’s room. Lan Zhui, startled by the commotion, called out from the kitchen to ask what was wrong, but she didn’t have time to answer. She twisted the doorknob and burst into the room.

There had never been a baby.

A figure with the appearance of an adult Ivan was curled up inside a dilapidated crib with a missing rail. A long, dark, deep chasm split his face open. He slowly turned his head toward her.

...She and Lan Zhui had prepared a crib back then.

It never welcomed its owner, so Mai Mingle had gotten rid of it later, along with the toy wind chime.

The crib, the wind chime, the clothes, the pair of glasses Lan Zhui left behind after he died... Whether she had thrown them away or kept them, everything was present before her now.

It was as if everything that had ever been in the storage room had also been left behind in time—leaving behind a scent.

Staring blankly at the gaping, deep hole of Ivan’s mouth, she suddenly remembered the phone in her pocket. She hastily pulled it out and, following the method Hai Luwei had taught her, shined a beam from its flashlight at him.

In the dark, unlit room, the beam of light washed everything stark white. Ivan’s face was brightly illuminated, but his eyes still didn’t blink.

Countless translucent particles were drifting out of the hole in his mouth. It was as if a small fan was mounted deep inside, blowing out gusts of wind that scattered them. The particles floated lazily into the air, and as they grew dense, they bumped against the wind chime, causing it to ring softly.

’What are these things?’

Mai Mingle instinctively clamped her hands tightly over her mouth and nose. ’Did I inhale any of the floating particles?’

’The apartment I saw, the old TV, the dinner, and—and Lan Zhui... were they all formed from these particles?’

"Are you a resident?"

"Ah, you’ve found out. I’m not a resident." The hole of Ivan’s mouth remained wide open, his lips and tongue unmoving, yet he spoke as if nothing was wrong. "No need to be afraid. I was planning to stop in a few minutes anyway. A pity you figured it out one step too early."

’What?’

Mai Mingle’s mind was filled with panicked confusion, but her reflexes were fast. She took a few steps back, turned and lunged for the apartment door, and snatched her bag from the small cabinet—thankfully, the gun was still inside.

Even not knowing if shooting Ivan would do any good, she charged back into the baby’s room, gun in hand. She slammed the half-open door hard against the wall. The echo seemed to shake time itself, as thirty years of fragments cascaded down from the ceiling, revealing a corner of the 2026 storage room once more.

...The room was empty.

This time, the window had indeed been opened. The cold December wind blew into the apartment, slowly dissipating the past that had been formed by the particles.

Mai Mingle struggled to push and kick aside various junk, rushing to the window to look. Outside, there was only a deep purple night and people walking to and fro under the streetlights. Ivan was long gone.

’Why go to the trouble of creating this illusion?’

’He said I figured it out "one step too early"—one step too early for what?’

Mai Mingle lowered her gun and walked out of the room in a daze.

In the apartment she hadn’t seen for thirty years, she wandered around like a lost soul and called out, "Lan Zhui?"

There was no Lan Zhui anymore.

...The only response was a boundless void and dead silence, like the ruins that life inevitably leaves behind.

Mai Mingle collapsed onto the floor, utterly defeated. The gun fell a few feet away, but she didn’t have the will to care.

She buried her face in her hands and sat in silence for a long time. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to cry, to sigh, or if she had been soothed by the Nest.

After a very long time, Mai Mingle finally wiped her face and got to her feet.

She was no fool.

The Nest had deliberately sent Ivan to her to stage tonight’s scene. There had to be a purpose.

Even if the experience of "living half a lifetime with Lan Zhui" seemed to hold no malice, Mai Mingle wouldn’t be naive enough to believe the Nest simply wanted to soothe the guilt and regret lodged in her heart.

Thirty minutes... thirty years.

She hoped she wasn’t overthinking it, but after considering it from every angle, there seemed to be only one answer.

Mai Mingle found her phone and called Emily.

"Can you come to my place now?"

Hunters who didn’t have to enter a Nest in the near future had plenty of free time. Less than an hour after she hung up, a wary-looking Emily knocked on the apartment door. As Mai Mingle had instructed, she had also brought Hai Luwei.

Emily fired off a barrage of questions the moment she walked in, making it hard to know which one to answer first.

"What’s wrong? Are you okay? Did you run into danger? Where’s that Ivan guy?"

"There’s something I need your help with."

Mai Mingle sat on the sofa, speaking as steadily as she could. She was afraid that if her emotions surged, she would break down in front of them and scare the two younger people. "I might not be able to do it myself... or rather, I’m afraid that if I do it and something goes wrong, it will be very difficult to reverse."

Emily stared at her, then slowly sat down, seeming to realize the gravity of the situation. "No problem... What is it?"

"The ’Snake Belt’ on my body," she said, pointing to herself. "Can you help me take it off?"

The moment the "Extracellular Telomeres" were removed was the moment she was at death’s door. Mai Mingle could feel almost nothing except the world rapidly slipping away, refusing to turn back.

Only when the "Extracellular Telomeres" were wrapped around her body again did she finally have the strength to get back up. No matter how many times she went through it, she could never get used to the chasm between the two states—the gap of an entire lifetime.

"Well?"

The word had barely left her mouth when she looked up, saw the expressions on their faces, and understood everything.

They saw it. ’It must be just as I guessed.’

"I-I don’t understand..." Hai Luwei’s voice was muffled as they clutched their mouth tightly. "Did Fu Tailan lie back then? But why would he tell that lie?"

Emily looked between the two of them. Although she didn’t understand what Hai Luwei was referring to, her expression was also extremely grim.

Mai Mingle let out a breath.

"No... Fu Tailan probably didn’t lie," she said in a low voice. "The Snake Belt’s countdown he saw back then really did have nine months left."

"Nine months?" Emily couldn’t help but blurt out. "That’s not right. When we just looked, the countdown only had 26 days left."