Chapter 403 - 351: Fu Tailan: Time Puzzle

Chapter 403: Chapter 351: Fu Tailan: Time Puzzle

On the afternoon of November 26, 2026, Brianna was clutching a paper bag containing the Path Illusion and had just pushed open the café door to leave when Fu Tailan called out to her from across the room: "Green!"

Brianna turned around, along with a few other nearby customers.

"I forgot to ask — what happened to the manor?" Fu Tailan stood up and made his way leisurely through the maze of café tables.

"What do you mean?"

"I’m just curious." Fu Tailan lowered his voice — both a hint and a reminder of the scheme the two of them had hatched together. "...There was quite a mess left behind at the manor that night. I never saw a word about it in the news."

He was so careful not to set Brianna off that he was holding his breath as delicately as he could, terrified she’d notice he was on the verge of gagging from the smell coming off her — actually retching would be a surefire way to make a permanent enemy of her.

Brianna let out a short, dismissive sound.

"Who do you think cleaned it all up? I took care of every last bit of it. The manor’s completely shut down now — no press can get anywhere near it."

...So that meant the place was empty, then.

Fu Tailan seized the moment and piled on a string of compliments — things like "You really know how to handle things, sis" and "not a single loose end, sis" — clearly calculating to leave Brianna in that awkward sweet spot of feeling both too flattered to back down and quietly suspicious, with just a thin undercurrent of genuine pleasure. All those tangled feelings eventually curdled into impatience, and Brianna finally hissed under her breath: "I’m leaving. Sit back down, and don’t even think about following me."

Not that she needed to worry.

What she had to do next was purely an internal affair within the Westley Family. The time for her and Fu Tailan to clash hadn’t come yet — there was no rush.

His target was Chaisi.

Chaisi held too many advantages right now. Someone needed to cut him down a peg, and Fu Tailan figured he was just the man to do it — practically a public service.

Besides, the Nest Dominance Game seemed to genuinely despise Chaisi. If he could squeeze the target Illusion out of him — or better yet, kill him — maybe the Nest would be pleased enough to let him back in as a player.

Once Fu Tailan was a player again, he could use that to keep Carter Morgan temporarily at bay, before the man’s impatience and suspicion got the better of him and he decided to go after Fu Han.

Fu Tailan turned it over in his mind.

Strange. He genuinely didn’t know what was wrong with him.

If Fu Han were to be hit by a car on the street one day, Fu Tailan might shed a few tears, then breathe a quiet sigh of relief. After that — open sky in every direction, go wherever he pleased, do whatever he wanted. He probably wouldn’t think of the man again for the rest of his life.

But the moment he imagined Fu Han suffering — hurt and humiliated, smeared with false accusations, thrown in prison and ground down day after day — it was like a million ants hatching inside his gut, a gnawing, restless ache that wouldn’t let him be.

His father had a small, faint love for him. He had the same for his father.

There was only one way to go numb to this last thin shred of something human still left in him.

Fu Tailan bowed his head and lit the cigarette between his fingers, drawing in a long, deep pull.

"Hey, you can’t smoke that in my car," the driver glanced back at him, protesting. "The smell will stick around..."

"Another two hundred."

The driver said nothing more.

Fu Tailan rolled down the window and watched the highway scrolling endlessly backward outside, then exhaled a long breath of white smoke into the open air.

His tolerance had been trained high — two or three drags was enough for most people, but he’d nearly finished the whole thing by the time the car finally pulled to a stop on the narrow lane outside Westley Manor. Fu Tailan pushed open the door, ground the butt under his heel, and stood in a white, foggy daze, staring at the iron gate at the junction not far away.

The road he had walked that night — he would have to walk it again today. The difference was that this time, he no longer needed to break through the iron walls Westley had built.

There were still security guards keeping watch over the manor, of course, but neither the tightness of the defenses nor the caliber of the guards came anywhere close to the night Westley died. Fu Tailan just had to put in the legwork and make the long trek on foot — and he didn’t see a single patrol the entire way.

Maybe it was just in his head.

Only ten days had passed. The exterior of the manor buildings hadn’t changed in any visible way, and yet he couldn’t shake the illusion that the place had been abandoned — hollow, cold, left behind.

Fu Tailan stopped beneath the tree he had nearly driven his car into ten days ago, and sure enough, there it was again: a vast, dense mass of pitch black suspended between heaven and earth.

It had replaced the side building — motionless, congealed in place, like a blob of ink pressed still under a pane of glass.

Ten days had passed, and the darkness showed not the slightest sign of dispersing.

The last time he’d seen it, he’d been busy fleeing the scene and hadn’t gotten a good look. So he couldn’t really say whether it was the same size as before.

...Had it grown? Probably not, right? What the hell even was this thing?

While Brianna had been managing the cleanup and sealing off the manor, people must have wandered into it in the chaos — ordinary people who couldn’t see it. But when he’d checked with the local police, there had been no recent missing persons cases. Those people had probably passed right through the black fog like leaves blown on the wind, and come out the other side back on solid ground.

People who couldn’t see it walked in and walked back out just fine.

So what about people who could?

He couldn’t exactly send Brianna in to test it, which left him with exactly one option.

"...Hello?"

He stood before the black void, tilted his head back, and called out — feeling like an idiot even as he did it. "Is anyone in there?"

No one answered. Of course they didn’t.

Fu Tailan stood there for a moment, looked back over his shoulder — the manor grounds were desolate and still. Then he looked back at the darkness in front of him.

In this whole wide world, there was not a single person who would come stop him and tell him this was too dangerous.

So he could still feel uneasy about things... He’d assumed he’d long since gone numb to fear.

"This is all Chaisi’s fault," he sighed, and rubbed his face hard.

***

On the night of November 23, 2026, no one knew that there were still two Fu Tailans in Blackmoor City.

The original Fu Tailan had just been in a fight with Chaisi in the apartment and come out injured. He’d been rushed to the hospital, where he remained unconscious.

The future that awaited him — expulsion, humiliation, threats — had not yet arrived at his doorstep. It was still waiting quietly ahead of him, waiting for him to open his eyes.

The other Fu Tailan — the one who had already lived through all of it — was sitting on a street bench just past ten o’clock on the night of the 23rd, wearing a cap and a face mask.

Thirty-odd meters away, half-sunken below the sidewalk, was the Between the Backlight bar.

Every now and then, someone ordinary would pause at the top of the stairs leading down to the bar’s entrance, lean over and peer down, as if weighing whether to try this little place out and have a drink before moving on.

But whether it was some residual animal instinct in humans, or some trick the bar owner had worked — unless you were a Hunter, no matter how much you wanted that drink, you never actually made up your mind to go down the stairs and push open the door. It was as if that short flight of steps functioned as a natural filter, sieving out ordinary people and leaving only Hunters.

Fu Tailan pulled his gaze back from the direction of the bar and pretended to be on his phone, finger tapping idly at the screen, the glow from the display lighting up his eyes.

He hadn’t had time to get a haircut in a while. His hair had grown long, soft and loose, spilling into the hollow of his neck and covering his earbuds — tickling him.

"I found out — Megan was at the alley fight last night too." The male Hunter in his earpiece was speaking in a low, breathy voice. "What else do you need me to dig up? You’re the boss, you call the shots."

Fu Tailan adjusted his earbud. "Go find that waitress Megan and have her walk you through the whole fight herself. If she wants money to talk, don’t worry about it."

Truth be told, after buying the Path Illusion and then acquiring the Mouth Puppet and the "blank driver’s license" under a false name, Fu Tailan didn’t have a great deal left in his accounts.

He’d once been genuinely puzzled by it — he didn’t spend lavishly, so how had the money he’d earned over the years melted away as fast as ice in summer? Then he thought of Fu Han, and let out a long, drawn-out "oh," and understood.

"Sure," the Hunter in his earpiece said, with the rustling sounds of someone getting to their feet. A minute or two later, he suddenly called out: "Megan? Let me get a drink. Yeah, yeah — it’s been forever, hasn’t it..."

The shootout in the back alley of Between the Backlight in the early hours of November 22nd was the kind of thing no Hunter could be kept in the dark about. Never mind who’d been involved — the Hunters Fu Tailan had hired had even tracked down the exact style of hospital gown Chaisi had been wearing that day, and reported it back to him. Not that he’d had the slightest desire to know.

"...Right. Hm? Why would that be a secret? He never told me to keep quiet about it."

Megan’s voice was a few steps further away, a little muffled, but Fu Tailan could still make out the shape of the words. "He did refer to that woman with the Noh mask face as ’Han Liuyue.’"

A Noh mask face? Han Liuyue?

Now that was interesting.

He knew Han Liuyue — her looks were bright and clear, like light through glass. Some people in Hunter circles quietly called her the Crystal Lamp: as dazzling as she was when she smiled, that was how ruthless she was when she struck, just like the shadows cast beneath a crystal lamp.

Her face had absolutely nothing to do with anything that could be described as a "white dough ball."

Where had it happened? How had she gotten caught?

Word was that the two of them had gone back to the Kai Family Mansion — but the moment they set foot inside, it was as if they’d vanished into a black hole, not a whisper of news since.

The Kai Family’s Core Hunters, on the other hand, had become like flies buzzing obsessively around a pile of shit — not a single one of them willing to stray from the mansion. They had the place locked down tight, with at least four or five people patrolling inside and out at any given time, checking every entry and exit point... They even had their meals delivered.

Something had clearly gone wrong with Chaisi and Han Liuyue...

***

Over the following two days, Fu Tailan delivered takeout to the Kai Family Mansion four times.

The private driveway outside the Kai Family Mansion, as it turned out, was tremendously convenient for his purposes — all he had to do was wait at the end of it, and he could stay out of the mansion’s line of sight while still intercepting any delivery car that pulled up.

Once a window rolled down, he’d take a moment to size up the driver. If the person looked like a working student, the easy-going type, or someone too worn out to care, only then would he make his move.

"Those pizzas — my friend ordered them," Fu Tailan would say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the Kai Family Mansion, then giving the roof of the car a light, casual tap, like a kid with a prank up his sleeve. "I’m gonna mess with them a little and deliver it myself. Just hand me the stuff."

Some drivers were cautious and pushed back a little — but after Fu Tailan, playing the role of a wealthy young heir, produced two hundred dollars in cash, that resistance tended to disappear.

He’d even worked out the formula: too much and they got suspicious; too little and they wouldn’t bite. Two hundred was exactly right.

"Hey, do me a favor and take a look at this,"

Once he’d taken the food, Fu Tailan would hold the blank driver’s license up in plain sight without any fuss. "Is there a watermark on this thing? I’ve been staring at it and I can’t make it out — can you take a look for me?"

The moment the words began to surface on the blank license, Fu Tailan would turn and walk away without a word, clean and quick. When he glanced back, the driver — stripped of their identity for the time being — would always be sitting right where he’d left them, staring blankly, unable to remember who on earth they were supposed to be.

The Kai Family Hunters let him through the gate every single time.

Fu Tailan usually found a reason to exchange a few words with them. He’d even picked up, from snippets of conversation here and there, that the Kai Family was considering taking on new recruits.

He couldn’t recall which delivery run it was when he happened to catch that particular word.

"Black hole."

***

On the afternoon of November 26th, Fu Tailan stood inside Westley Manor, in front of the dense, fog-like black void that had swallowed the place where the side building used to be. In the complete silence surrounding him, he exhaled softly.

There was nothing he needed to leave behind. No one to leave it behind for.

He lifted his foot and walked, step by step, into the darkness.