Chapter 479 - 420: Chaisi: A Different Kind of Rain

Chapter 479: Chapter 420: Chaisi: A Different Kind of Rain

Soon after sitting down face-to-face with Mai Mingle for the first time, Chaisi had realized something. That vague, uncanny "otherness" about her was like a feather sticking up from the back of a collar—not a big deal, not overly conspicuous, yet impossible to ignore.

He had played a few games in his youth, especially back when World of Warcraft was popular.

Mai Mingle’s demeanor always reminded him of a video game character: a soul piloting the avatar of a "younger Mai Mingle," roaming the world with tireless enthusiasm.

"You’ve returned to your peak, and you’re not even... thirty? You have decades of life ahead of you now," he had asked back then. "Why get mixed up with the Nest? You could do anything you want."

Mai Mingle looked like she was about to speak, but she swallowed her words.

Two seconds later, she suddenly smiled. "You might not believe it, but this is the very thing I want to do."

Chaisi raised an eyebrow.

"The Nest is dangerous, bizarre, and sometimes disgusting," Mai Mingle had said, yet she let out a sigh of almost-satisfaction. "But even if I had to choose ten times over, I would still want to become a Hunter. Because only in the Nest have I seen the kind of wondrous world a person might never otherwise witness in a lifetime."

At the time, Chaisi’s first reaction was to sever all emotion, to keep himself from having any reaction to her words.

But tonight—perhaps at the most inopportune time—Chaisi thought of Mai Mingle and those words.

’The kind of thing a person might never otherwise witness in a lifetime.’ He had finally seen it now... Chaisi sat on the ground, raised his head, and stared blankly at the night sky.

’Mai Mingle, is this the Nest that you could never forget once you’d seen it?’

’Is this the Nest that has summoned countless Hunters time and again, until one day they never return?’

’Is this the world my mother saw before she died?’

’Or was this all just a phantom image created by Damian with an Illusion, designed to drive me to pain and despair?’

No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a phantom image—at the very least, the ground was rising smoothly and slowly amid the CLICK-CLANK of gears and clockwork from deep within the earth. That part was definitely not a hallucination.

Chaisi swept his gaze across the area. Besides Damian, everyone was trying to maintain their balance while glancing back and forth between the sky and the ground, their faces filled with confusion and terror. ’My own face probably looks the same, doesn’t it?’

Only Damian looked as if he had just pulled off a successful magic trick. When he smiled, the black-hole-like eyes under his shell seemed to glow faintly.

He raised one hand into a loose fist, pretending to wind an invisible machine. With every turn of the "crank," the parking garage floor rose a little more. In no time at all, the underground parking garage had vanished completely.

Everyone was back on solid ground. There was no longer an "underground parking garage."

"With the ???, I can physically edit and modify this Human World. Impressive, isn’t it?"

Damian clapped his hands with a laugh. "Of course, this alone isn’t enough to bring the Nest into the Human World—"

He pointed an index finger toward the sky.

Like a band conductor, like a movie director; at that moment, not just Chaisi, but everyone else, cast their gazes back into the night sky.

"So what’s the deal with the Nest you’re all seeing in the sky now?"

’It really... it really isn’t a phantom image.’

This wasn’t because of what Damian said, but because of an almost animalistic intuition—

A mirror image of Blackmoor City was cast down from high above.

Skyscrapers, avenues, roads, streetlights... it was as if they had grown out of the sky, hanging upside down over the Human World.

The spent, weakened rain clouds drifted sluggishly along the streets of the other Blackmoor City in the sky, floating past skyscraper windows like a sorrowful visage hanging from a lamppost.

A white crosswalk jerked its way, segment by segment, across a patch of the black night sky.

A humanoid shadow was pushing open the door of a shop on one of the streets. Sensing something amiss, it hurriedly looked up; from its great height, it looked down upon the Human World. After a few seconds, it suddenly began waving its arms frantically, as if overcome with joy.

"Don’t doubt it. What you see in the night sky is the Nest. The Nest can come from any and all directions.

"The Human World, already riddled with holes by you players of the Nest Dominance Game, was already on the brink of collapse... Once it has absorbed enough Original Liquid, the holes torn in the Human World can never be repaired.

"You might ask, why go to all the trouble of opening holes in the Human World? Because I found someone with a rare gift. I have now used her physical characteristics to firmly stitch the Nest and the Human World together. The connection is complete. Now it only takes a little bit of force to pull a part of the Nest through—watch closely."

Chaisi sucked in a sharp breath, a dark, heavy pain flaring in his waist and abdomen.

Damian’s hand, raised but not yet pulled down, paused in midair as he glanced over at him.

"Oh? Did something occur to you, Brother Chaisi?"

Chaisi pressed down hard on his wound, struggling to keep his breathing steady. "What... what do you have to do with the Illusion Report?" he asked in a low voice.

Damian maintained the smile on his shell, staring intently at him.

"Everything we players did... we were just following the lead of the Illusion Report. Now it seems like every single step was to... to pave the way for your return to the Human World."

Once he said it aloud, it seemed blindingly obvious.

"In the Nest Dominance Game that took place in 1960, there was no such thing as an Illusion Report. The Illusion Report seemed designed to help players acquire the target Illusions, but in reality, it was all to allow... for your return." He gasped for breath. "The Nest Dominance Game isn’t something you can control, but you took the opportunity to add the Illusion Report to it... didn’t you?"

"Wrong," Damian chuckled. "This year’s new game already had the Illusion Report as a new rule. I was simply responsible for writing and distributing its content."

That white hand of his rose slowly toward the dark sky, like a grotesquely shaped snake.

"Brother Chaisi, I noticed a detail. You’ve said twice now that the Illusion Report was meant to lead me back... yet you refuse to admit that it also brought the Nest into the Human World."

Involuntarily, Chaisi’s gaze followed Damian’s hand upward.

"Seeing this ’Blackmoor City’ above you, you still won’t admit it?"

Damian extended his arm out into the night sky.

He splayed his five fingers and made a grasping motion in the night air, as if he had seized something. His fingers hooked around it, tugging, as he slowly twisted his palm.

Chaisi’s gaze followed his hand and saw that it corresponded remotely to a building hanging upside down in the sky.

The building was not tall, nor did it have a large footprint; it looked like an old structure from a century ago. But as Damian’s hand gradually closed into a fist, the building began to twist, layer by layer, like a loaf of bread being wrung, its surface distorting into a textured pattern.

Chaisi dropped his gaze and looked at the corresponding spot in the Human World, directly beneath that building.

He could no longer spare a thought for the wound in his abdomen.

As Damian abruptly yanked his hand downward and the building blurred into a phantom streak, Chaisi was already roaring at the three Kai Family Hunters: "Run!"

Sha Xue and Chebri broke into a run at the same instant, and Chebri shoved the other Hunter’s shoulder—an entire building smashed straight down, obliterating the row of Kai Family cars. The earth, as if in pain, shuddered and trembled. Brick, stone, and ash surged into the air, instantly drowning heaven and earth in a roiling cloud of dust.

Chaisi fought through the searing pain, clamping a hand over his mouth and nose as he squinted. Through the smoke and dust, the red brick building looked like an ice cream cone a child had dropped, smashed crookedly onto the ground.

"Sha Xue—!"

The moment he opened his mouth, dust and smoke flooded his throat, choking him with the urge to cough. But he absolutely dared not, afraid the violent convulsions would be enough to kill him. "Che... Che..."

Damian clicked his tongue, displeased.

That small sound, however, sparked a sudden hope in Chaisi—only then did he finally see figures pushing themselves up from the ground amidst the flying brick shards and clouds of dust.

The three had barely managed to escape being crushed, but they were all injured to varying degrees, staggering forward on unsteady feet. Before they could reach Chaisi, Damian laughed. "Got your brains rattled? Didn’t I tell you? You’re not allowed to come over."

"Our cars..." Kai Luonan said, stunned.

It wasn’t that he truly cared about the cars—it was more that, in the face of incomprehensible shock, he had subconsciously latched onto something trivial to say.

"Changing the Human World on a physical level, changing the Nest on a physical level, it’s all possible..." Damian chuckled. "This is just one function of the ???. Once you become the game’s final victor, this becomes just the most unremarkable little piece of a ruler’s power."

From afar, Chaisi and Sha Xue exchanged a look.

They had closed half the distance, but it wasn’t enough.

Sha Xue was no fool; Chaisi could guess which healing Illusion she had chosen. But even with the most suitable choice, she couldn’t make a reckless move right under Damian’s nose.

"Ah, but it would be a little boring if it were only about physical changes, right?"

Damian once again raised that hand—the one Chaisi desperately wished he could chop off.

He had already done so much, yet from start to finish, Chaisi hadn’t even caught a glimpse of what the ??? looked like.

"A building from the Nest falling into the Human World—to be blunt, there’s nothing that special about it."

Damian made a gesture as if knocking on a door. Without looking up, he used his knuckles to gently tap on the night sky, once, twice.

Even though God only knew how much distance separated the inverted Nest city in the sky from its counterpart in the Human World on the ground, Chaisi still felt as if Damian had truly knocked on the Nest.

He just didn’t know what part of it Damian was knocking on.

In the next second, that question became completely irrelevant.

Because mixed in with the strands of rain, falling from high in the sky into the Human World, were the rules of the Nest, one after another.