Chapter 476 - 417: Haiper: Seventeen Years Prior

Chapter 476: Chapter 417: Haiper: Seventeen Years Prior

’This is a nightmare,’ Haiper thought.

Just a few minutes ago, she had been sound asleep in bed with her husband beside her, and Damian was in his own room. Just a few minutes ago, it had been a perfectly ordinary night.

She looked down at her white nightgown, speckled and stained with what looked like fragments of blood.

She looked up. Damian’s bedroom was in total disarray.

Outside Damian’s bedroom window, the blinding lights of an ambulance flashed, stabbing into the dim room again and again. One moment, they washed the bedroom in bright red; the next, they dyed it blue; the next, they faded, revealing the vast splatters of blood on the floor and walls.

’This has to be a dream. I’m sleepwalking. None of this is real.’

But for some reason, she couldn’t wake up.

She wanted to go to Damian’s bed and check on him. ’If I can just see him sleeping soundly under the covers, feel the rise and fall of his breath, and put my mind at ease, I’ll be able to wake up.’

Barefoot, Haiper drifted toward Damian’s bed, one step at a time.

As she passed the wooden fortress in the middle of the room, a sharp pain shot through her foot. It was so clear and real that it made her want to scream, to go mad.

In the end, Haiper just numbly lifted her foot. She saw a wooden splinter lodged in her skin, a small shred of fabric dangling from its other end.

By the time she pulled the splinter out, her vision had completely blurred.

Through the endless layers of tears that felt like they would never run dry, she couldn’t see anything clearly, but she still knew. It was a piece of Damian’s pajamas.

’It has to be a dream,’ Haiper thought. Every step she took after that pressed on the wound in her foot, the pain sharp and distinct. ’It has to be a dream.’

It wasn’t a dream.

On the bed was only a spray of blood. It was only later that she realized the blood must have been Chaisi’s, and the thought that she had touched it made her scrub her hands furiously. Damian was not in the bed.

Only Damian’s phone lay there, cold in the night.

’It’s not a dream. It’s not a dream.’ When her husband had torn out of the room like the wind moments ago, the one cradled in his arms was indeed her critically injured, dying child. ’It’s not a dream. My child is in the ambulance downstairs—’

Barefoot and still in her nightgown, Haiper spun around and bolted out the door.

She seemed to be screaming and stumbling the whole time. She couldn’t remember anything clearly. All she recalled was that when she arrived at the hospital with the ambulance, she was still clutching Damian’s phone in a death grip.

As Haiper waited numbly outside the emergency room, Kai Luonan sat beside her, holding her shoulders tightly. He didn’t tell her to put the phone down, nor did he once stand up to ask about Chaisi’s condition in the other emergency room.

In that moment, Haiper felt a little grateful to him.

Because at that time, Haiper’s mind was still in turmoil, completely unable to figure out what had happened. She kept asking if a burglar had broken in. Had the two boys been playing late at night and just happened to run into the intruder?

Kai Luonan mumbled that it didn’t seem like it, then refused to say any more.

Haiper cried until she was lightheaded. It wasn’t until he got up a while later to fill out some forms that the realization belatedly dawned on her.

’...Oh, it’s related to the Nest.’

She had been an Illusion Hunter’s wife for so many years. Even though Kai Luonan disliked talking about his work, and even though she had never set foot in a Nest, she had always been a detached observer, committing every little detail and scrap of information from their daily lives to memory, piecing together a clear picture of the Nest.

But clearer to her than the Nest was Kai Luonan himself.

’What happened tonight is related to the Nest, and it seems to be related to Chaisi, too.’

Thinking about it, Kai Luonan’s failure to ask about Chaisi’s condition even once was proof. He suspected Chaisi was inextricably linked to Damian’s injuries. Not checking on Chaisi was a small clue, a leak of the anger he couldn’t suppress.

’Did Chaisi harm Damian? Why?’

Chaisi had everything Damian had. Sometimes, when she saw how Kai Luonan treated Chaisi, she would secretly feel it was unfair to Damian. If she hadn’t been certain Kai Luonan didn’t know Chaisi’s mother before, her imagination might have run wild.

’So why would Chaisi still go after Damian?’

As she mulled this over, she subconsciously lit up Damian’s phone. She just wanted to see his favorite cartoon character, but when the screen came on, she saw a message.

! URGENT NEST NOTIFICATION !

The Unknown Nest Dominance Game

Congratulations! You have opened the most supreme Path in the world.

Now recruiting

"Damian, young but not naive"

to be the first contestant in this round of the Nest Dominance Game.

Most of it was in the Nest’s script, like distorted ink blots, interspersed with fragments of human language. Reading it only left her with more questions.

’...What? Damian has a Path?’

’Hunters aren’t supposed to get notifications when they open a Path, are they?’

Haiper suddenly remembered the wooden splinter that had pierced her foot and that scrap of pajama fabric.

She remembered that on the pajamas stripped off Damian during emergency treatment, there was only one hole, and it was on the back. Damian’s back was injured, so a hole there wasn’t strange, but the rest of the pajamas were intact. This proved that the torn piece of fabric had also originally come from the back.

’So the clothes on his back were just snagged by a splinter... Is that Damian’s Path?’

’Just tear off a piece of clothing from his back?’

But even knowing this was meaningless.

Haiper prayed and swore over and over that once Damian was out of the emergency room, she would risk her own life to never let him have anything to do with the Nest ever again.

That heartfelt vow, compared to what she later did, was laughably ironic.

She knew the exact moment the Nest began to transform from a demon she loathed and wished she’d never encountered into her last sliver of hope in the world.

It was when the doctor called them both in to see Damian one last time.

"What do you mean? What do you mean, ’one last time’?"

She stood by the bed, glaring at everyone surrounding her, including Kai Luonan. She pointed at the electrocardiogram on the machine’s screen, her whole body trembling. In that instant, she was almost certain the entire world was lying to her. "Doesn’t Damian still have a heartbeat? Shouldn’t you keep trying to save him?"

The doctor had clearly been through this scene before. His attitude was perfectly measured, his words gentle and tactful, but the meaning still came across: it was the machine forcing Damian’s heart to beat, one pump at a time.

Damian was brain-dead. That was the final medical definition of death.

"You don’t have to decide to turn off the life support system right away," the doctor said finally. "You can absolutely spend more time with him..."

The moment they cut the power to the machine, he would become a corpse.

He would fade from her life into gray silence forever. For the rest of her life, she would never again see the child she had created and raised with her own life and flesh, the child who had been growing so vigorously, so full of passion.

Her child.

"I understand,"

After who knows how long, Haiper heard herself speak. "All of you, get out. I want to be alone with him for a while."

Everyone, even Kai Luonan, was driven from the room by her. Her husband, usually not one to be easily persuaded, only raised a slight objection before complying with her wish. Having shared a bed with him for twenty years, Haiper sensed it almost instinctively: he felt guilty.

’...How interesting.’

Haiper sat beside Damian, looking at his sleeping face, gently smoothing his golden hair.

"You’re so amazing, Damian,"

She cooed softly, using a tone that would have made a twelve-year-old Damian blush, as if he were a little baby. "I knew you were an incredible kid. Did you know you have the most supreme Path in the world... Isn’t that incredible? Not your dad, not any of the other Hunters out there, no one can compare to you. Mommy is so proud of you. If you survive, you’ll find out you’ve become a contestant in some kind of game... Don’t you love playing games?"

Haiper buried her face in the crook of Damian’s neck, her tears soaking his clothes and his soft hair, which he hadn’t gotten a chance to cut.

Leaning on her son, she whispered, "With such an amazing Path, you’ve already stunned everyone. Now, can you stun Mommy one more time? Because Mommy doesn’t want to let you go."

She waited for a moment, faintly hoping for the kind of miracle that only happens in TV dramas, but Damian’s eyes remained closed.

"Look, your heart is still beating. With every beat, it pumps blood through your vessels to your whole body... Every cell in you is alive because of it. But they say you’re dead."

Haiper had to stop, taking a long moment to compose herself.

Once her breathing evened out, she very carefully lifted one of Damian’s shoulders to expose his back. She bent down, bit into the fabric, and, using her teeth and hands, tore off a piece of his clothing.

Haiper waited for a long time.

When she finally saw a faint black mist begin to gather in the tear, as if a Path was about to form, Haiper wanted to both laugh and cry.

’The most supreme Path. The most gifted child.’

She pressed the fabric back into place and watched as the faint black Path gradually lost its strength and vanished. The Path seemed to be affected by Damian’s condition, on the verge of death itself.

Haiper thought for a moment.

’It has to be done in absolute secrecy. It would be best if I’m the only one in the world who knows.’

But she had never meddled in the Kai Family’s affairs, nor did she have any connections in the Hunter circle. She didn’t have a Path and didn’t even know a single Hunter she could bribe. If she asked a Hunter from the Family Faction, it would be difficult to hide it from Kai Luonan.

Besides, this was something Damian could do himself.

Haiper leaned down and whispered to Damian, "Mommy has thought of a way. You have to prove it to them. You have to stun the whole world again, okay? Help Mommy one last time, okay? I don’t want you to just disappear like this. This is something only you can do."

She kissed Damian’s forehead, once, then again.

"No matter what you become, I won’t regret it. Even if only a tiny piece of you remains, even if it’s just a strand of your hair or one of your catchphrases... No matter what you become, as long as a small part of you is still Damian, even if I never see you again for the rest of my life, I’ll be so, so happy."

Haiper called Kai Luonan and the medical staff back in.

She gripped her son’s hand tightly, feigning composure. "I agree to turn off the machine, but on one condition."

"What condition?" Kai Luonan asked.

"He’s the child I gave birth to, and now I will be the one to see him off. I’ll handle all the funeral arrangements. You don’t need to get involved. No one is to argue with me about this." Haiper glanced up at the life support system and asked, "How much is this machine?"

Before the doctor could answer, she said, "I’m buying it. My condition is that I want my child to stay alive with me until the moment his coffin is closed and buried."

The depth of Kai Luonan’s guilt was beyond her expectations.

No, perhaps a small part of him also wanted to escape—to escape facing Damian’s death.

Haiper thought pulling it off would be difficult, but it seemed no one besides her wanted to look too closely at the living dead boy whose heart was still beating in the coffin. Even Kai Luonan, unable to persuade her, stormed off several times in frustration.

She said she wanted to spend one last moment with Damian before the funeral. She sent everyone away, cut a large opening in the back of Damian’s suit, and waited quietly.

When the Path finally emerged, barely there, Haiper stood up. She placed her hands on her son’s chest and pushed him, bit by bit, deeper into the coffin.

The tears falling on the back of her hands and on Damian’s chest were endless, like the torrential rain pouring over Blackmoor City that night.

Haiper watched as Damian gradually disappeared into the bottom of the coffin. She yanked the wires connecting him to the machine, finally revealing a smooth, clean coffin floor.

The coffin was empty.

Trembling, she closed the coffin lid and walked out of the church.

For the next seventeen years, Haiper had only one thing left to do: wait.