Chapter 481 - 422: Chaisi: Father-Son Affection and the Power Drill

Chapter 481: Chapter 422: Chaisi: Father-Son Affection and the Power Drill

"Chaisi!"

By the time Kai Luonan’s furious roar rang out, it was too late.

Four consecutive bullets tore four sharp wounds through the rainy night. In an instant, they plunged deep into a human body, landing with a series of sickening, fleshy thuds.

Chaisi’s body was nearly lifted off the ground, as if he might ride the bullets’ kinetic energy high into the sky—but the next second, his frame crashed heavily back onto the concrete. The impact sent a spray of water into the air, shattering the lights and shadows.

The SUV didn’t slow for a second. Once all four bullets had left the chamber and hit their target, the vehicle was already speeding away. It took a sharp turn and vanished around a street corner.

"Chaisi!"

Kai Luonan rushed forward and crouched beside Chaisi. His slightly clouded eyes were wide as he reached out to check Chaisi’s pulse, then suddenly spun around.

"What happened?"

he demanded, though no one present could—or would—answer him. "Did a rule from the car take hold? Why would they go after Chaisi? Damian, do you have anything for saving people—"

"You don’t know the reason either?"

Damian sauntered over, looking down from his full height at Chaisi Monroe’s body for a few seconds. "I was about to ask you the same thing. Why the sudden kill?"

"I’m semi-retired now. The Family Faction is run by Chaisi... Never mind that. Do you have anything that can save him?"

"Why would I have anything to save him?"

Damian paused, then turned and snapped at Haiper, who was standing a short distance away. "Stop screaming!"

Haiper clapped her hands over her mouth, barely managing to stifle her shriek, but she was still trembling in terror. It wasn’t the first time she had seen a dead person, but it was the first time she had witnessed someone—someone she knew so well—being killed right before her eyes.

"You didn’t carry on like this when I died," Damian grumbled. "I can’t even hear myself think."

Kai Luonan dazedly rose from Chaisi’s side. He seemed a little unsteady on his feet and instinctively grabbed Damian’s shoulder for support.

Damian lowered his gaze to look at his father’s hand.

Kai Luonan realized what he was doing and pulled his hand back, forcing himself to remain calm. "That Illusion of yours... can’t it alter the Human World? If you used it on Chaisi..."

"No matter the Illusion, no matter the resident, not even a ruler who has won the game of domination—there’s one thing they can never, ever do. It’s the most absolute, most unbreakable rule in this world."

Damian looked at Kai Luonan and grinned, revealing a set of overly white, dense teeth that seemed to crowd his mouth. "...And that is, ’the dead cannot return to life’."

He glanced at Chaisi and added, "Assuming he’s actually dead, that is."

Kai Luonan closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

He crouched down again and gently checked for Chaisi’s breath.

"He won’t die," Kai Luonan’s voice was filled with something akin to hope. "He won’t die. He can’t die."

Something about him shifted. Though his facial hardware hadn’t moved an inch, Damian’s two pitch-black eyes gave the impression they were about to swell and bulge from his face, to reach out and slowly probe inside Kai Luonan’s mind.

"...Oh?" He seemed to be suppressing some emotion as he chuckled. "Such a deep father-son bond. If Brother Chaisi’s spirit is watching from the great beyond, he must be so comforted knowing how you’re grieving and clutching at straws."

"Let’s just wait..." Kai Luonan said in a low voice, not looking up at his son. "Don’t you want to wait and see? You’ve always been a smart kid. Do you really believe he’s dead?"

Damian didn’t answer.

"But... wasn’t he shot to death?" Haiper asked, her voice trembling.

But neither her husband nor her son responded. For a moment, only silence remained on the concrete ground that was once an underground parking garage.

Five or six minutes later, as both the rule and the rain began to subside, the body of Chaisi on the ground suddenly took a soft breath.

In response, Kai Luonan let out a long sigh of his own, his shoulders slumping in relief.

Damian’s smile remained fixed in place, as if nailed to his face.

"Wh-what’s happening?" Haiper asked. "He’s alive? I don’t understand..."

"It’s an Illusion,"

Kai Luonan answered in a low voice, reaching out to check Chaisi’s gunshot wounds and bones. As Chaisi’s eyelids fluttered open, he whispered, "Don’t move yet. Sha Xue just fired four shots at you... That gun, is it a new healing Illusion you acquired? The wounds on your torso are already completely healed."

Chaisi’s face was blank, like someone waking from a long dream, momentarily unable to remember where he was.

His gaze shifted slightly, landing on Damian’s face.

"Don’t worry, I won’t let him hurt you," Kai Luonan said quietly.

Damian’s smile didn’t waver.

"Not the gun..." Chaisi opened his mouth. His voice was still weak and hoarse, but it was steadily growing stronger. "It’s the bullets."

He sat up bit by bit, catching his breath.

"They brought back a box of healing bullets," Chaisi said, head lowered, surrounded by his adoptive father and brother. "It’s an Illusion, but it has to be loaded into a real gun and fired at someone. The box also said that the person who gets shot will look like they’ve really died. The Nest’s way of doing things... Uncle Kai, you know it better than I do. We couldn’t tell if this box of bullets could actually heal, or if it was a trap designed to get people killed, so we could never sell it... Tonight was the first time it was ever used. On me."

Sha Xue was a Core Hunter, through and through; knowing when to take what risks was a mandatory lesson for every Hunter who wanted to survive the Nests.

She chose this Illusion because it could both conceal her true objective and heal from a distance. If Damian hadn’t been so vigilant, watching her every move and denying her an opportunity, she probably would have shot Chaisi much sooner.

"You have no idea how worried Dad was just now,"

Damian said with a beaming smile, as if Chaisi were lying in a hospital bed and he was just a younger brother visiting. "Even though he didn’t know about the bullets, he still refused to believe you were dead. Such deep affection. Tsk, tsk, it’s truly moving."

Chaisi climbed up from the ground, slowly straightening his body.

He was taller than both Kai Luonan and Damian. The shadow he cast fell over Damian’s pale face like a lunar eclipse.

"Don’t talk about Uncle Kai in that resident’s tone," Chaisi said in a low voice.

"Or what?" Damian said, unconcerned.

Kai Luonan glanced between the two of them and took a step back. Chaisi and Damian were staring at each other, face to face.

"There is no ’or what’," Chaisi said. "I’ll personally make sure you can’t."

"Oh? Do tell," Damian asked, his interest piqued. "How will you make sure?"

"Even if the Nest has entered the Human World—"

As Chaisi spoke, a muscle bulged in his cheek. He forcefully suppressed his emotions, took a breath, and said, "Even if the Nest has entered the Human World, my duty is still perfectly clear. Whether it’s residents or the Nest itself, you’ll crawl back to wherever you came from. Even if I have to banish you one by one, I’ll make sure every last one of you gets sent back."

He paused, then said with near-perfect calm, "Starting with you."

Damian raised his hands and began to clap, slowly, deliberately.

"Oh, impressive. It takes skill to talk that big. But what I want to know is ’how’ you’ll banish me." Damian spread his hands. "Do you have a gun? Are you going to use your fists? Don’t you know that with a wave of my hand, I can alter you on a physical level? What advantage could you possibly have against me?"

"Can you really?" Chaisi suddenly smiled.

Damian said nothing.

Kai Luonan raised an eyebrow, but didn’t voice his confusion.

"You wanted to kill Sha Xue and her group, and you wanted to reduce their chances of escape to zero, so you dragged a building from a Nest into the Human World and smashed a row of cars. Instead of going to all that trouble, why didn’t you just twist the cars into balls of steel? Why not just twist the people into balls of flesh?"

Chaisi stared straight at Damian. "If you say it’s because you wanted us to see your power, to see that a Nest really can fall into the Human World... then why didn’t you do anything to that SUV just now?"

Even though he had used the Mouth Puppet to make Kai Luonan plead for them, Chaisi was never naive enough to think Damian would actually spare Sha Xue’s group out of any familial sentiment. He had only done it to create an opportunity for them to escape.

"For a moment, I thought I’d made a huge mistake. I was certain I was about to see that SUV go tumbling into the air... but you let them go. Don’t tell me it was out of the goodness of your heart."

Chaisi let out a soft breath.

"Ever since you were a kid, you’ve loved drama. When you came home with your test scores, you’d even give Uncle Kai and Aunt Hai a suspenseful monologue as a preamble. In combat class, you were only ever interested when practicing the flashiest, most visually impressive moves."

"What are you getting at?" Damian was growing impatient. "Are you an old woman now? Why are you taking this trip down memory lane?"

Chaisi stood still for a second or two, as if slowly parsing the meaning of "old woman."

"You said you ’almost’ completely inherited Damian. I believe you," Chaisi said. "You pulled us from the underground garage to the surface, turned the garage into an audience stand, brought a Nest crashing down, and shattered its rules... These are all the grand spectacles you love. Every move bears your design."

He turned his head to look at the vast, empty expanse of concrete.

"You did all of this using the power of that Illusion. But when it comes to small, spontaneous matters that require improvisation, you don’t use it. Why?"

Damian shrugged. "Why?"

Chaisi looked at him and said, "Because you can’t, of course."

Damian laughed.

"You’re right,"

he suddenly raised his voice, so loud it made the eardrums of the three people present ache. "An Illusion with such unimaginable power—did you really think it would have no limits? The number of changes it can make each day is finite. Once the quota is used up, you have to wait for the next day. Before I appeared, I had already used up my entire share of commands... Now there’s just one last scene that you didn’t get to see with your own eyes."

Damian turned his head, looked at Kai Luonan, and said with a smile, "I call it... a ’Power Drill’."