Chapter 483 - 424: Fu Tailan: An Undeserved Disaster

Chapter 483: Chapter 424: Fu Tailan: An Undeserved Disaster

"Please,"

Carter Morgan’s full, well-proportioned face now looked like a half-deflated balloon. Though the flesh and bone were all there, it seemed to have shriveled, taking on a dull, lifeless quality.

He was slumped in the passenger seat, his head lolling against the headrest. His light-colored lashes framed a pair of watery, bright eyes. He looked at Fu Tailan with the expression of a child gazing up at his father.

"Please... just let me treat my foot... I’m going to bleed out. It hurts so much..."

Fu Tailan found him utterly ridiculous. "Stop being so unreasonable. You’re a grown man."

"H-How am I being unreasonable?!" Carter blurted out anxiously, then quickly lowered his voice, pleading, "I’m about to pass out... If you let me treat my wound, I can take you to your father..."

"You’re in no position to withhold the address from me."

Fu Tailan said calmly, "Either you die, or you give me the exact address. Once I have the address, I can go there myself. I won’t need you. And if I don’t need you, why should I let you treat your wound? You’re not qualified to make demands, yet here you are, making them. Isn’t that the definition of unreasonable?"

Carter’s mouth hung half-open, his lips as pale as parchment. He was speechless.

He squeezed his eyes shut, as if fighting off a wave of dizziness. A few seconds later, he said, "No—you need me. I have a lot of bodyguards and Hunters stationed there..."

"Then I’ll just have to kill my way through," Fu Tailan said matter-of-factly. "Even Chaisi Monroe couldn’t kill me. The people you hired had better be stronger and more dedicated than him."

’Besides, I’ll just make Carter walk in front. What do I have to be afraid of?’

Carter Morgan was stunned for a moment.

In the end, he gave up the address. Carter silently took off his shirt, revealing a paunch that even a middle-aged man’s workout routine couldn’t eliminate. He used the shirt as a bandage, wrapping another tight layer around his foot—the makeshift bandage from his jacket was already soaked through with blood.

"Fu Han really deserves to die..." he mumbled. "To raise a demon like you... he has no one to blame but himself."

A few seconds later, Fu Tailan laughed so hard that tears almost streamed from his eyes. Carter stared, dumbfounded. He even mustered the courage to ask, "Are you insane?"

"Maybe he really has no one to blame. We’ll just have to wait and see."

Fu Tailan finally managed to stop laughing. He raised his pistol and used the dark muzzle to wipe away a tear. Turning to look at the building silhouetted against the night sky, he asked, "This is it?"

It was just an ordinary apartment building, hardly the kind of place you’d expect a high-risk individual to be held captive.

’Compared to the last time he threw Fu Han into a state prison, this is a little lacking in creativity.’

"As the saying goes, the best place to hide is in plain sight," Carter said, his face sullen. "I bet you never expected Fu Han to be locked up in a place with so much traffic, with so many people coming and going."

"It seems you still haven’t learned your lesson about underestimating me." Fu Tailan jutted his chin at him. "Get out."

Perhaps it was because Fu Tailan was covered in injuries, his consciousness beginning to blur at the edges.

But he was still certain—well, eighty percent certain—that when he had first stepped out of the car, the sky above Blackmoor City was still just the sky.

He couldn’t remember how he’d noticed, or who had noticed first. But when Fu Tailan now looked up at the night sky, he didn’t see clouds and a curtain of rain.

He saw the Nest.

The streets, buildings, roads, and alleys of the Nest... had become a new celestial vault, inverted and pressed down over Blackmoor City.

Blackmoor City, in turn, seemed to have become the Nest’s reflection, swaying unsteadily in the drizzle that had slowed to a fine mist.

No... that wasn’t right.

’It’s not Blackmoor City that’s swaying...’

Fu Tailan steadied himself against a nearby lamppost, taking a couple of deep breaths.

"What’s going on?" Carter asked, his mouth agape as he stared at the night sky. "H-How can there be a city’s reflection in the sky? Is it a reflection? Do you have something to do with this?"

He would soon find out it wasn’t a reflection.

From the Nest high in the sky, countless buildings stretched downward, reaching for the Human World. Several small shadows poked their heads out from the buildings, pointing down at the earth below.

After a moment, one of the shadows leaned its body out of a window.

It began to descend, bit by bit.

Even Carter, who had never seen one of the residents, couldn’t help but gasp, his voice changing pitch. "Wh-What is that thing? It’s coming down! Hey, Fu Tailan, it’s coming down!"

"I’m not blind. This area is huge. It’s not going to land right in front of us, so what’s there to be afraid of?"

Though they were two people locked in a life-or-death struggle, they now stood shoulder-to-shoulder, watching the sky and the dark shadow gradually descending from it, as if they were admiring the moon together.

If one were forced to call it humanoid, it wouldn’t be entirely wrong—it did have a head, shoulders, and a torso. It wasn’t lacking any of the basic shapes of human anatomy.

But it was by no means human in form.

This "humanoid" was abruptly cinched at regular intervals, squeezed into narrow connection points. To make an analogy, it was like a long string of sausages that hadn’t been cut apart yet, all linked together.

The two of them watched as the sausage-link "person" dangled longer and longer from the window, drawing ever closer to the Human World until, with a final "PLOP," it seemed to be squeezed out of the window completely. It fell straight down, landing somewhere two or three streets away amidst a block of buildings.

’Is this also the effect of the Original Liquid?’

’The Nest’s methods of invading the Human World are certainly... interesting.’

"W-We should hurry. It’s only safe inside the building," Carter said, wiping his face vigorously. He was suddenly much more proactive than before. "What if something else falls nearby..."

Fu Tailan raised an eyebrow slightly.

’Only safe inside the building?’

If this building was just an ordinary residential tower, used to hide Fu Han in plain sight with only some Hunters, bodyguards, and Illusions for security—what gave Carter the confidence that it could withstand the residents of the Nest?

Was Carter just being naive, or had he unintentionally revealed a piece of the truth?

Fu Tailan was a genius of lies; he had an almost unnatural sensitivity to all forms of deceit and trickery.

He watched Carter limp hurriedly toward the apartment building, his hand already tightening around his gun.

Perhaps it was because Fu Tailan was so focused on observing Carter and pondering the hidden dangers within the building at that moment that he was a step too slow.

When that rule, wrapped in a strand of rain, landed gently in Carter’s sparse, drenched curls, Fu Tailan didn’t even register what he had seen.

’...What was that?’

’Why did it look like rain, but text appeared in my mind?’

"The first human to receive this rule within any 24-hour period will be protected by the Nest Humane Act of 1998, hereinafter referred to as the Act. The purpose of this Act is to save humanity and make humans realize the absurdity and fallacies of the Human World. To this end, the Act will provide the following protections and guarantees to qualified humans:

"One, the tranquility of faith. You shall convert to the Nest, believe in the Nest, and spread the light of the Nest across the land.

"Two, material abundance. Each person may request one Illusion and one Human World weapon, to be distributed randomly by type.

"Three, freedom from fear, threats, and physical or psychological harm.

"Four, the freedom to inspire fear in others, threaten others, and inflict physical or psychological harm upon others may be exercised to its fullest extent.

"Five, this protection lasts for one hour."

Fu Tailan was utterly dumbfounded.

’What kind of luck is this? It can’t be, right?’

He stared blankly at Carter. Carter had clearly noticed something was amiss, too. He had stopped at the entrance, patting the top of his head.

"Huh?" Carter hadn’t quite processed it yet. "What was that? What Humane Act?"

He hadn’t looked up at the "rain;" only his scalp had come into contact with the rule.

But even though Carter hadn’t seen it, he seemed to have learned the contents of the rule all the same. ’Could it be that these rules still take effect even after falling into the Human World?’

The thought jolted Fu Tailan, snapping him back to his senses.

He had less than a few seconds to react. To be more precise, whether he stood a fighting chance depended entirely on that fleeting moment between Carter understanding the situation and turning around to face him.

Without waiting for Carter to turn, Fu Tailan bolted. He dove toward a car parked on the side of the road, ducked down behind it, and without pausing, began to sneak toward a nearby alley.

"Fu— Huh? Fu Tailan?"

Carter’s surprised voice came from the apartment building entrance. "Ah, my foot..."

Cursing under his breath, Fu Tailan quickly glanced up at the sky.

...That’s right, it was raining from the Nest. But wrapped in the raindrops, shimmering with a silvery-white light in the darkness, were all rules.

A new rain, composed of hundreds, even thousands of assorted rules from different sources, was drifting down into the Human World.

Fu Tailan watched as a rule fell toward him. He quickly dodged to the side, taking a few steps back and crouching behind another car. The alley beside the apartment building was now only a dozen or so steps away.

"Strangely strange, twistedly twisted, swaying and swiveling, bestows upon the admirer a strange, twisted, swaying posture."

’...What the hell?’

The preceding and succeeding parts of the rule were lost, scattered to who knows where, yet this fragment could still take effect on its own. If you ran into it, you wouldn’t even know how to abide by it.

Fu Tailan stealthily raised himself up a little and peered toward the front of the apartment building.

Carter was still standing at the entrance. As long as he was there, Fu Tailan couldn’t get onto the sidewalk without being spotted instantly.

At some point, Carter Morgan had turned around and was now facing Fu Tailan’s direction.

His face was flushed, glowing with an expression that was hard to place—was it excitement, madness, or the ecstasy of having one’s faith finally validated?

"So quick on the uptake!" Carter laughed, clapping his hands emphatically. "So quick! Just as expected of the genius young Hunter... The moment I figured out what was happening and turned around, you were already gone! No wonder you’ve been to the Nest so many times at such a young age, and it still couldn’t claim your life."

He lifted his foot, ripped off the shirt he’d used as a bandage, and tossed it aside.

"Honestly... you really gave me a scare. Some lowlife who crawled out of god-knows-what backwater hole actually made me think the world was about to change."

His voice softened as his gaze swept across the night street. "Didn’t I tell you?" he said softly. "This world... it exists for people like me. This world is just one big fraternity."