Chapter 455 - 397: Fu Tailan: A Headless Pair

Chapter 455: Chapter 397: Fu Tailan: A Headless Pair

Fu Tailan had been watching Carter Morgan carefully — studying him as he slept trapped inside the dream.

For Carter Morgan, nothing in the world mattered more than his own life.

Fu Tailan had been the one to request this meeting, which meant Carter would never drop his guard. He’d brought several Hunters and bodyguards — clearly elite, well-trained, fully armed. And in places Fu Tailan couldn’t see, there were almost certainly surveillance setups and defensive Illusions as well.

Really, all this fuss wasn’t necessary, Fu Tailan thought.

They’d met once before, hadn’t they? And that time, he hadn’t done a single thing to Carter Morgan.

He’d only asked to see Fu Han — just to confirm Fu Han was still alive. Once he had, he’d left like a good boy.

And yet Carter was just as cautious this time around.

He stood at the far end of the underground parking garage, as if the car carrying Fu Tailan were some kind of massive biohazard. The moment the car door opened, the bodyguards flanking him stepped forward in unison, hands on their weapons, positioning themselves half in front of their charge.

"What is that?" Carter narrowed his eyes and peered into the car from behind his bodyguards. "That thing in your hand — is that a... dream?"

Fu Tailan’s eyelids still hung heavy with sleep. He gave Carter a drowsy, half-formed smile and raised his left hand.

The dream — formless, indescribable, impossible to put into words — drifted out through the open car door like a cloud of mist at the lift of his hand. Thousands upon thousands of human desires left unfulfilled swirled through a thousand shifting hues and scenes, flowing slowly across the black surface of the car. In that instant, every Hunter protecting Carter Morgan snapped to attention — weapons raised, Illusions flared.

Fine. Let them be on guard.

Those so-called "powerful Illusions," in the conventional sense, were generally designed to prevent a protected target from being attacked or harmed.

But a dream? Everyone had dreams when they slept. How could a dream count as an attack or harm?

"Relax," Fu Tailan said slowly, lowering one foot out of the car. "This is one of the things Carter asked for. Look at him — he’s thrilled."

Professional bodyguards were professional bodyguards. All four of them — three didn’t even glance around. Only one stepped quickly forward and called out, "Mr. Morgan."

See — the lead guard had taken the bait himself.

Even if that guard looked straight at Carter’s face, he wouldn’t be able to tell anything was wrong. That sounded a little smug, maybe, but everything unfolding right now was exactly what Fu Tailan had anticipated.

Carter and his people would be on their guard. And after he slipped into the dream, they would notice something was off.

So to keep the bodyguards from catching on, all that was needed was to calibrate the dream — to make Carter respond at the right moments. Simple enough, wasn’t it?

Like a rehearsed performance, Carter Morgan murmured right on cue: "Yes... yes, this is exactly what I wanted. Stand down."

The lead bodyguard immediately swept another glance at his employer.

Was it because Carter had previously told them not to leave his side?

Still — they probably didn’t suspect anything yet.

Carter’s eyes were vacant, glazed, fixed on only one point: the dream in Fu Tailan’s hand.

He stared at it and walked forward, step by step. The bodyguards had no choice but to ease back a pace or two to get out of his way, though they kept close, right at his side.

Knowing the truth, it might have been easy to notice that Carter Morgan looked a bit like a sleepwalker.

But without knowing — he looked for all the world like a man who had waited a long time, and had finally, today, come face to face with the one thing he had always longed for. A little dazed when a desperate wish was about to come true? Perfectly normal.

"What are you so worried about? My father isn’t home yet," Fu Tailan said. "Don’t just stand there — did you bring a towel? No? Not even water for me? Honestly, no hospitality whatsoever."

The bodyguards, naturally, didn’t move. Four burly men in their prime, faces still and unreadable, staring at Fu Tailan without a word.

"This is it, isn’t it?" Carter stopped a few steps in front of Fu Tailan and asked. "So that’s how it is... so a target Illusion really does look like a dream."

...Crafting a dream for him had been almost embarrassingly easy.

All it took was thinking through the meeting in advance — imagining what would be said, what would happen — and building that into a dream, scene for scene. In the dream, the "dream" in Fu Tailan’s hand was simply one of the target Illusions.

People never question their dreams while they’re having them.

No matter how absurd, how fantastical something might be, inside a dream it becomes a reality that a person believes in completely, body and soul. So even though Carter Morgan had obviously seen diagrams of the target Illusions and the dream matched none of them, his breathing had grown ragged and his face had flushed with rising color.

Carter raised one slightly trembling hand, reaching toward the dream — then stopped.

Because Fu Tailan was the conductor of this performance.

He had set the tempo long before any of this began. Carter Morgan was meant to pause here, so that Fu Tailan could deliver his line.

"Mr. Morgan, only a player in the Nest Dominance Game can actually take hold of this," Fu Tailan said quietly. "Where do you want it kept? I’ll have to be the one to place it."

The bodyguards around them had been watching every movement with professional intensity — their focus well worth every penny they were paid. But it was clear none of them had even begun to consider that everything they were seeing, including their employer’s excitement and surprise, was fabricated. A performance. A lie.

...If you were going to make a move against Fu Tailan, you’d better be prepared to get tangled up in lies. Wasn’t that obvious?

"Only a player? You mean —" In the dream, Carter’s face broke into wild, barely-contained elation. "So you really were reinstated after all?"

"That’s right," Fu Tailan said, lifting a shoulder. "Just as you predicted — once all the target Illusions were obtained, the Nest Dominance Game had no choice but to restore my standing as a player."

"Good, good," Carter said naturally, picking up the thread as though they were having a perfectly genuine conversation. "Excellent. What about the other Illusions? Let me see them."

Fu Tailan glanced at the bodyguards first.

"What I’m about to take out is something your boss wants," he said with a smile. "So please — don’t be trigger-happy and put a bullet in me."

"Wait —"

Carter’s line came in a beat late, but the timing was still passable. Well — one couldn’t demand perfection. He waved a hand at Fu Tailan and said, "Don’t move. Tell them where it is. Let them retrieve it."

Fu Tailan let out a long, heavy sigh, raised both hands, and allowed one of the bodyguards to reach in and pull out what he had prepared in advance.

That bodyguard was a Hunter. He placed everything into a brown leather bag and, before handing it to Carter, couldn’t help stealing one more look inside — his expression heavy with doubt.

Understandable that he was confused.

An experienced Hunter could sense something of an Illusion’s "presence." But inside that bag right now were nothing but a few disposable phones, some scraps from a billboard, and other ordinary odds and ends. To fill it out, Fu Tailan had even picked up half a brick off the side of the road.

But however suspicious they were, the moment Carter looked into the bag and his face lit up with pure, unbridled joy, they had nothing left to say.

"Wonderful. Truly — I never imagined you could actually pull it off." Carter seized the bag tightly, clutching it as if the junk inside were his lifeline. "This dream — can it go into the vault?"

The dream hadn’t spoken, but Fu Tailan was holding it, and he could almost sense that at those words, it seemed to "look" at him.

It had nothing to worry about. This was too useful a resident to lock away in Carter Morgan’s vault.

"Of course," Fu Tailan said with a smile. "I can deliver it there myself."

"Good." Carter nodded without hesitation. "Once we’re there, you add me in, and I’ll let you take Fu Han. We leave now. Go — get the car."

One bodyguard immediately turned his head and issued a quiet command into his earpiece. The car Carter would be riding in certainly wouldn’t be the one Fu Tailan had just stepped out of. That much had been easy to predict, and building that line into the dream hadn’t been much of a gamble.

The one genuinely tricky part was that Fu Tailan had no idea where Carter was keeping Fu Han, and he couldn’t have Carter bring Fu Han out in the dream — because he didn’t know who to have Carter call.

That was precisely why the dream had to end after everyone got into the car.

When he’d fired a shot to shatter the dream before, Carter had snapped awake with no transition at all — the gap between dream and reality had been stark and absolute, a wall between two worlds.

So what about the opposite extreme?

If the dream and reality could be stitched together seamlessly enough — if, say, Carter drifted into the car inside the dream and then gradually came back to himself while still seated in it — would he even notice anything was wrong?

On that question, even the dream hadn’t been able to give him a definitive answer. According to it, it had never once tried to ease someone gently back into reality. Once the objective was met, who cared whether the dreamer lived or died?

"Worth trying," Fu Tailan had told the dream at the time. "Besides — there’s no other way."

"Aren’t you afraid he’ll take another look at those ’target Illusions’ you prepared once he comes to?" the dream had asked.

For something acting under duress, it seemed oddly invested — apparently this was its first time playing a role in a trap like this, and it was thoroughly enjoying itself.

"Terrified," Fu Tailan had said. "One look after he wakes up, and he’ll know everything I gave him is garbage."

"So what are you going to do?"

No clever solution — only a blunt one.

In the few minutes it took for the car to arrive, Carter Morgan seemed like a man with ants crawling under his skin. He kept murmuring questions at Fu Tailan — asking how he’d gotten hold of each target Illusion, one by one — while repeatedly snapping the bag open, running his hands over those "target Illusions" again and again.

Of course, he was still in the dream, and every time he checked, it sent another wave of delight through him.

"Mr. Morgan," the lead bodyguard said after one more opening of the bag, "the car will be here shortly. You can look again once we’re inside."

"Surely you’ve had enough of a look by now," Fu Tailan said — and this time, he genuinely meant it. "How many times are you going to check? Everything in there is what you asked for, isn’t it?"

"It is — exactly what I asked for," Carter murmured, and said it again several more times.

Hold onto that feeling, Fu Tailan prayed silently.

From somewhere deep in the parking garage, the distant sound of an engine rose and grew, along with the low rumble of tires rolling over concrete. Soon, headlights cut through the air — two straight beams like taut ropes pulling two gleaming, rain-slicked SUVs into view.

Including Fu Tailan, there were seven people in total. He would of course need to ride with Carter.

The lead bodyguard opened the door for Carter, followed him in, and then gestured for Fu Tailan to sit beside him — at which point the guard reached into his jacket and produced a pair of handcuffs. "No offense intended. You don’t mind wearing these for now, do you?"

Fu Tailan froze.

He looked at the lead bodyguard. He did not look at Carter, who was still adrift in the dream. He looked at the other bodyguard in the front passenger seat.

He took half a step back, his gaze sliding through the open door of the second SUV.

"...Mr. Fu?" The lead bodyguard called out. "What’s wrong? Please get in the car."

Fu Tailan turned back at the sound of his name, and stared at the guard for a long moment.

"I apologize, but the handcuffs are non-negotiable," the lead bodyguard said, clearly misreading the situation.

So... he genuinely couldn’t see it?

Fu Tailan walked toward the SUV one step at a time, paused at the door, and finally couldn’t help himself — he glanced at the driver.

Yes. That one too.

Two cars. Two drivers. And not a single one of them had a head.

In place of where their heads should have been, above their shoulders, was nothing but a mass of dark mist, endlessly shifting and swirling — exactly like the Black Abyss Belt he had once seen at Westley Manor.

What was going on? How was the Black Abyss Belt swallowing people’s heads and appearing on their shoulders?

Why had no one else noticed?

How were those two drivers still driving???

"Mr. Fu?" The lead bodyguard’s face had gone completely dark. One hand moved to rest on his hip. "What exactly are you doing?"

Fu Tailan stood there for a few seconds, thinking in a vague, slightly drifting way.

"Nothing," he said.

He let out a quiet sigh, and with the dream in tow, slowly lifted his foot and climbed into the car. "...The more I think about it, the less it matters right now."