Chapter 404 - 352: Fu Tailan - I Am Fu Tailan, I Am Fu Tailan, You Are Han Liuyue

Chapter 404: Chapter 352: Fu Tailan - I Am Fu Tailan, I Am Fu Tailan, You Are Han Liuyue

...So familiar.

Fu Tailan stood in the darkness for a moment, dazed, his mind and body warm and loose, as if he were drifting in amniotic fluid.

He knew he’d never walked into a black hole before, yet he couldn’t explain why it felt like coming home.

Where was this place?

He glanced back over his shoulder.

He could still see the entrance he’d come through: beyond the drifting banks of murky fog, the lawn, the hedges, the driveway of Westley Manor... like a painting submerged at the bottom of a dark sea, swaying, growing farther and farther away.

Just as he’d suspected — he hadn’t passed through the black mist and come out the other side.

He was going deeper, yet the darkness ahead remained boundless, layered upon layered, tangled and intertwined, like life itself — no clear path forward no matter how hard you looked.

Fu Tailan raised his hand and watched as the first knuckles of all five fingers slowly began to come loose. With a soft pop, his index fingertip was the first to sever its relationship with the rest of the hand, drifting languidly outward.

Well, that won’t do.

He still needed his hands.

He reached out with his other hand to catch the rogue fingertip, but his left hand was already wobbling, on the verge of spreading apart and dissolving — this was definitely not right.

If he wanted to hold his body together, he’d probably need a different approach.

He looked at his hand, then at the floating fingertip.

It was dissolving like an egg yolk soaked in water, breaking apart into tiny particles and bleeding into the darkness... and even his emotions and thoughts seemed on the verge of dissolving too...

It was as if Fu Tailan himself was about to dissolve here, break apart into particles... cease to exist, merging into the dark...

This... isn’t...

Pretty nice... actually... pretty nice...

No need to... no need to... think anymore...

Look, I... I myself... like a falling firework, scattered across every hillside...

Not thinking... somehow... faster... scattering... scattering apart...

Oh?

Then by that logic, if I do the opposite and accelerate my thinking, would it slow the dissolution and reconsolidate my body?

Fu Tailan snapped his eyes open.

He hadn’t even known they were closed — or rather, to be precise, his eyelids had been in the process of coming apart, dissolving into countless tiny scraps of darkness that had momentarily blotted out his eyes entirely.

I see so I have to keep thinking without stopping keep confirming my own existence over and over to resist dissolving and pull myself back together wait actually the way I’m thinking right now is kind of like one of the Residents

Do I even want to resist let me think high-speed thinking is easy enough the real question is whether I want to resist at all

Hmm I’m Fu Tailan I’m seventeen years old I live in Blackmoor City I only have one father — right, Fu Han, someone has him in their grip and is using him as leverage against me he’s still waiting for me if I just dissolve into this warm darkness

Fu Tailan could almost hear it — somewhere behind him, along the path he’d come from, an invisible chain gave a sudden, sharp clank.

He let out a sigh.

Sometimes he genuinely hated his own brain. There were things that, if he could just forget them — or never understand them in the first place — he’d honestly be a lot happier.

If he could dissolve into this dark, amniotic warmth without a single tie holding him back, what would be so wrong with that?

Complaints aside, inside Fu Tailan’s head, a torrent of thoughts and ideas were spinning like fast-moving wheels, cycling over and over without pause, turning so rapidly they had nearly blurred into a vortex. The vortex churned and generated its own pull, one thought hooking onto the next, dragging more and more fragments back in.

He looked down. His right hand was whole again.

Fast. Did that mean he was actually a little afraid of dying after all?

Fine, whatever. He was back, and honestly, only he could have bounced back that quickly.

Fu Tailan planted both hands on his hips and swept his gaze around, searching through the layered, interwoven darkness for some indication of where to go next.

What was he supposed to do now? Every direction looked more or less the same.

"...Han Liuyue?"

Fu Tailan froze.

Even his mind — which had to keep spinning at full speed without a single break — went blank for just a beat. When a person suspects they’ve gone crazy, the brain tends not to cooperate very well.

How was that possible? He must be hallucinating.

He stood there with his mouth half open, unable to tell which direction the voice had come from, and looked blankly around in a full circle.

Silence. So he really had just —

"Han Liuyue? Can you hear me? Where are you?"

Every hair on Fu Tailan’s body stood on end.

It was Chaisi’s voice. There was absolutely no mistaking it.

What was he doing in here — wait, the word "black hole" he’d heard earlier, was this where it applied? Did the Kai Family Mansion have a black hole too? My name is Fu Tailan, I’m seventeen years old

But even if a black hole had appeared in the Kai Family Mansion why would Chaisi walk into it and on top of that it sounded like he was in here looking for someone my name is Fu Tailan my father is Fu Han the Seventeenth

He couldn’t afford to pour his full attention into thinking about someone else, or he’d come apart before anything else happened.

Fu Tailan steadied himself and ran through the full confirmation again.

His origins, his body, his appearance — appearance most of all, he could afford to lose anything except that, it could not sustain even the slightest damage — and even the hollow, perpetually unfillable void somewhere inside him had to stay exactly as it was.

Good. Stable enough.

So... Han Liuyue went in first? Han Liuyue, already compromised by the Nest, saw a black hole and walked into it, and Chaisi followed her in?

She’s already been turned into a face-wearer by the Nest what is there to save the world is hardly short on people Core Hunter or not does he really think a Core Hunter from the Kai Family couldn’t possibly have divided loyalties couldn’t betray them I am Fu Tailan

My luck is unbelievable I can’t get away from him anywhere I’d figured he knew the black hole had some kind of value if I’d known this would happen I never would have come — then again, maybe he’ll dissolve in here and never make it out?

I am Fu Tailan I am Fu Tailan I am Fu Tailan

"Han Liuyue, is it you in here?" Chaisi asked, his voice appearing without warning right beside his ear.

Fu Tailan nearly let out a shriek.

He spun around, fully expecting to find Chaisi standing right behind him — but all that met his eyes was the same churning, tangled layers of darkness.

He couldn’t see anything with his eyes, but he had the faint, vague sense that somewhere behind those layers of dark, a thin, weightless outline of a figure was there, leaning forward slightly, looking in his direction.

"Han Liuyue?"

So it really was him.

Had Chaisi been so fixated on calling out Han Liuyue’s name that he’d never figured out he needed to keep thinking — keep confirming himself — to stay from dissolving?

That would explain why his outline looked like it was already melting. Especially his legs, which were so faint they barely seemed to exist at all.

If Chaisi hadn’t figured out how to preserve his own wholeness right when he first entered, there was no way he’d manage it later — the logic was straightforward: once your capacity for thought was compromised, it became nearly impossible to come up with the idea of using constant thought to resist dissolving in the first place. From that point on, it was all downhill, a vicious cycle with no exit.

Honestly my luck might not be bad at all — looks like Chaisi might be done for on his own, no help from me required.

Now that Chaisi was already mid-dissolution, Fu Tailan figured he might as well lend a hand — give those scattered fragments a little push to come apart faster, spread further. Don’t mention it.

Fu Tailan had barely made up his mind before he was already moving, closing the distance in two steps and swinging his arm in wide, vigorous circles in Chaisi’s direction —

The 10:36 train carrying the Illusion came roaring out of the tunnel and bore down on Chaisi at full speed; the blinding headlight lit up one half of his body and the platform just inches in front of him.

As Chaisi hauled himself up onto the platform and rolled desperately clear, the train screamed past, grazing his back as it pulled into the station.

In the split second of that roll onto the platform, Fu Tailan’s scalp exploded with alarm. He lurched back several steps on pure instinct, heart hammering, unable to tell in that moment whether the shock came from the train blasting past or from the sudden, terrifying flash of a thought — that he was Chaisi.

...What just happened?

That... that was Chaisi’s memory, wasn’t it? The memory of jumping down from the platform, crossing the tracks...

Fu Tailan understood now.

The moment he did, he felt like he’d stepped in dog shit. He shook his hand furiously, flapped his arm, slapped at himself, trying to beat off that little fragment of Chaisi that had stuck to him — he’d been planning to scramble Chaisi up even more, but if touching even a scrap of him meant suddenly thinking you were Chaisi, who would dare? God, that was revolting.

Fine. He’d leave him alone. Chaisi probably didn’t have much longer anyway.

His swinging had apparently unsettled Chaisi; from somewhere deep in the coiling darkness, that pale, softening outline seemed to hesitate for a moment, then gradually drifted away from Fu Tailan.

He didn’t want to get any closer to him either — but after a moment’s hesitation, Fu Tailan followed anyway.

There was nowhere else to go.

Chaisi seemed to have forgotten what had just happened almost immediately, and called out again: "Han Liuyue? Where are you?"

It struck Fu Tailan all at once — they’d both walked into the black mist, yet not only did nobody know he was in here, there wasn’t a single person who would keep searching like this, desperate to bring him back.

He didn’t like the thought, so he watched it drift quietly away and made no effort to pull it back — and sure enough, a little while later, he’d forgotten it entirely.

Chaisi seemed to have no idea where he was going either, drifting aimlessly through the darkness. Several times he went still, and Fu Tailan almost convinced himself he’d finally dissolved completely.

After all, everything here was a matter of feeling — nothing could actually be seen —

Fu Tailan hadn’t even finished the thought before he found he was wrong again. Without any reason at all, a light flickered to life ahead of him, and half a room rose up in a lopsided float — half a diner?

It was like someone had torn a photograph in two and shoved one half into a bundle of black cloth.

What on earth was this place?

It was a small diner, tables crammed close together. The "photograph" was even smaller — it showed only a corner booth, and a heavyset man sitting in it, staring blankly into nothing.

Even though Fu Tailan had known all along who he was following, when Chaisi Monroe’s face suddenly appeared reflected in the mirror on the diner wall, he still couldn’t help it — he flinched. Not his fault; Chaisi just had that kind of face. As it happened, the heavyset man in the booth was equally startled by Chaisi’s reflection.

The man sucked in a sharp breath and lurched to his feet, his belly slamming into the table edge, sending plates and forks clattering and rattling. A coffee cup sitting near the edge tipped, toppled, and plunged straight down.

That pale, translucent outline that was Chaisi flicked a hand on instinct and batted the cup away — and in the next instant, the little diner was swallowed up as if vacuumed out of existence, gone back into the darkness in the blink of an eye.

Fu Tailan was stunned, and Chaisi wasn’t the only one.

Hold on... he thought he’d just seen something important.

With his mind constantly occupied by the need to keep confirming himself, he had limited space left for other thinking, and could only puzzle at it in stolen moments. On top of that, his sense of time had gone hazy and diffuse, so Fu Tailan had no idea how long he’d been thinking — only that when he finally looked up, Chaisi had long since vanished.

He drifted for a while, directionless, until he sensed something ahead in the dark — a shape even more fragmented, even more faint than Chaisi had been. He stopped.

"...Chaisi?" Fu Tailan called out tentatively.

It didn’t matter if the other person recognized his voice. From the look of things, whatever was heard would be forgotten in an instant anyway.

In the darkness, the shadow — barely recognizable as humanoid — seemed to hear him. It rose and sank in a slow, weightless drift.

Perhaps a fragment that had broken off from the other person had brushed against Fu Tailan without him noticing?

He suddenly realized the figure in front of him was not Chaisi.

"Han Liuyue?"