Chapter 525: Chaisi: Two Pairs of Earrings

It was a long time before Chaisi realized he was no longer in the Nest.

He realized he wasn’t leaning against the butcher shop wall, but the riverside guardrail.

A lone, orange streetlight floated in the endless darkness between heaven and earth. Behind him, the sound of the Haisen River’s waves rolled on, indifferent.

The only car on the road was the one he had driven here. Kai Luonan was nowhere to be seen.

Chaisi sat motionless for a while.

He jolted when Damian’s intimate voice suddenly rang out, and he realized Damian had been sitting quietly on the railing not far from him the whole time. “Your mother became a resident, and in that form, no less. How are you feeling right now?”

Chaisi slowly turned his head.

“…You don’t hate him?” he asked softly.

Damian leaned down, his face still holding a smile—one of glee—and the glistening traces of tears. “Hate Kai Luonan?”

He wasn’t really asking Chaisi. He clearly had a lot to say.

“I always used to think… he brought my murderer home, raised him as his son in my place… Of course I’d hate him. But tell me, what reason do I have to hate him now?”

Chaisi wasn’t trying to drive a wedge between Damian and Kai Luonan—he just wanted to know.

“Turns out the price of being raised by him was so steep, and what I thought was parental affection was all just calculation. Rather than hating him, I should probably be pitying you, big brother.”

Damian sighed, then suddenly clapped his hands and smiled. “If only the one who killed me wasn’t you.”

Chaisi swallowed hard.

He didn’t speak, just pushed himself up slowly, using the railing for support.

“Oh, or are you saying that because the resident that killed me had your mother’s appearance, I should direct my hatred toward Kai Luonan?”

Damian clearly knew exactly what to say now that Chaisi was lucid, how to twist the knife deeper into the mangled flesh.

“Think about it. If the resident that killed me wasn’t actually your mother, what difference would it have made to me if it took the form of Daiju Monroe, Rose Monroe, or even Dogtail Grass Monroe?”

Damian’s gaze was hard to describe. Those eyes, like deep, dark abysses, seemed to melt and evaporate, wafting out of their sockets like mist.

“The one who dragged me over back then, letting the resident pierce my body with a single blow… was you.”

Chaisi glanced at him. “It’s not enough.”

Damian paused.

“If I’d known it would come to this… just letting you die back then was far from enough,” Chaisi said slowly. “I should have minced your corpse and thrown it in the river to feed the fish. Then Haiper would never have had the chance to find you and send you to the Nest.”

Damian was silent for a few seconds, then suddenly let out a laugh—”HA!”—and applauded loudly.

“Now *this* is more like the Chaisi I remember! You’re the one who should be filled with hatred. That’s more like it.”

He licked his lips. “If you’d collapsed after one blow and never gotten back up… watching you lie there like a pile of filth would get old, no matter how much I enjoyed it. How could one moment of satisfaction be enough? Because of you, I spent seventeen years in the Nest. The best part of the show, of course, requires you to get back up again and again…”

When Damian’s voice deepened, it was reminiscent of Kai Luonan.

“…only to be knocked down again and again.”

‘Is that so?’

Chaisi gritted his teeth, the muscles on his face standing out. “Then you and your father can come and try.”

Damian slid silently off the railing and stood up straight.

He watched Chaisi’s body tense up and laughed. “Don’t be so full of yourself. No matter how good your Body Techniques are, you’re no match for a resident. And I’m not a barbarian.”

Chaisi glanced around. “Where did he go?”

There was no doubt who “he” referred to.

Chaisi had called him “Uncle Kai” for twenty-five years, but now it was as if the name had left no muscle memory at all.

Even just thinking about saying the name “Kai Luonan” felt like being force-fed a mouthful of filth.

But Damian was different.

“Where else would he go? He has no unfinished business with you and me. He wants to win his game of dominion, so of course he’s gone to find his next target Illusion. And I happen to know someone holding an Illusion who’s very easy to deal with.”

Damian shrugged, his tone sharpening.

“I asked our dear father where that half of the heart is, and where the resident your mother became went. He said the resident that Daiju Monroe became didn’t live long and died of natural causes a few years ago. The heart became useless, so he just threw it away in the Nest.”

Chaisi could only receive this information mechanically. Hatred had hollowed out all his other emotions; he had no capacity left for any other reaction.

“But, you should know better than I do by now what our dear father is like.” Damian grinned, revealing a row of white teeth, like a gash opening in the night. “Do I believe everything he says? Of course not. So… I’m planning to go back to the Nest.”

“For what?” Chaisi asked, though his heart was already crystal clear on the answer.

“What else?” Damian said with a smile. “To find your mother myself, of course. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones and arrange a little mother-son reunion. It’s truly—”

Damian didn’t get to finish his sentence.

Chaisi’s upper body twisted, his shoulder, arm, and fist swinging toward Damian like a whip carrying immense power. He moved so fast that not even a resident could have dodged. The rock-like fist smashed into Damian’s head with a dull THUD, shattering bone and caving in flesh.

Yet Damian’s body remained standing firm, only his head lolled to the side as if it had suddenly bowed.

He sucked in a sharp breath through his still-intact mouth.

“My, my. I can’t believe a human punch can be so destructive. Hmm, that actually hurt a bit.”

As Damian spoke, his caved-in cheekbone began to inflate, bit by bit, as if being pumped with air, until it was perfectly whole again. “…Unlike the earring, it seems you don’t wear that ring just for looks.”

“Earring”—that’s right. Kai Luonan had given him these earrings, too, telling him they were an heirloom from Daiju Monroe.

Kai Luonan hadn’t lied.

When Chaisi, sitting at the butcher shop entrance, had looked up at the shadow emerging, he had seen it.

On the ears of the figure that blocked out part of the sky, a similar, faint silver light had been glinting.

Two identical pairs of earrings, facing each other from afar after twenty-five years.

‘When she was still a corpse, she clearly hadn’t been wearing any jewelry; all her accessories were removed during the autopsy. But after she became a resident, it’s as if she suddenly remembered how she used to dress…’

Chaisi’s lapse in concentration lasted only a split second, but for Damian, it was more than enough.

The next second, a force comparable to the front of a car slammed into his stomach. He was sent flying backward, landing on the ground with a BANG.

Chaisi struggled, gasping as he half-turned his body. But for a moment, the intense pain plunged his vision and his mind into darkness, and he couldn’t get up.

“I told you I’m not a barbarian. But I’m not enough of a gentleman to just laugh it off after being hit.”

Damian walked over to Chaisi step by step and looked down at him.

“Did you think I can only appreciate your mental suffering? It’s not enough yet, of course… But once you’ve been tormented enough mentally, do you really think I’ll let you live?”

As if to demonstrate his point, Damian abruptly raised his arm high, twisted his body, and threw a punch down at Chaisi. Chaisi managed to roll over just in time to protect his organs, but the heavy blow landed on his back, knocking the air out of him. It felt as if his flesh and bone were about to split apart inch by inch.

However, this was only the beginning.

Damian didn’t want him dead just yet, but that didn’t mean he was unwilling to make Chaisi suffer a little.

The resident’s strength and speed were precisely calculated, landing on Chaisi’s body like a rain of blows from one vicious angle after another.

“Aren’t you a great fighter? Weren’t you always praised in your Body Techniques classes? Don’t they say all the Hunters in Blackmoor City are wary of you? Why don’t you get up?”

Damian panted, laughing. “If you don’t get up, how are you going to mince my corpse and feed it to the fish?”

Gritting his teeth, Chaisi finally found an opening. He endured the pain and swept his leg out, kicking Damian hard in the shin. The shinbone caved in abruptly, dislocating and fracturing the kneecap with a sickening CRACK.

Even though Damian was a resident, he still had the structure of a human body. Just like the resident that had walked into Damian’s bedroom all those years ago, if his leg lost its support, he still couldn’t stand properly.

Chaisi scrambled to his feet. Even though his vision was dark, he relied on memory and slammed several punches into Damian’s face. The ring sank deep into the crooked, broken nose bone, and when he pulled it out, the sticky, wet stench of blood clung between his fingers.

‘So residents bleed too,’ he thought distantly.

Even though what Chaisi wanted most right now—no, what he wanted most in his life—was to pummel Damian into a bloody pulp and go find Kai Luonan with his fists covered in his flesh, a sliver of reason still remained.

The brief advantage would be fleeting. He was, after all, facing a resident.

Through the waves of darkness brought on by the intense pain, Chaisi gritted his teeth, turned, and staggered toward his car.

He didn’t expect Damian to stay on the ground for long, but if he could just get to the car before Damian caught up, Chaisi could shake him off for now and go find Kai Luonan.

Chaisi was rounding the front of the car when a heavy force struck the back of his head.

The last thing he remembered was the hood of the car suddenly rushing toward him, growing larger, and swallowing his entire field of vision.

…Chaisi didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. When his hazy consciousness struggled to surface from a tortured body that felt broken in every inch, his vision hadn’t yet caught up.

He just felt a pair of warm arms wrapped around him, and someone softly calling his name.

Chaisi suddenly thought, ‘Perhaps these past twenty-five years were actually a dream.’

‘He’d just been in a car accident at age five, and his mom had just gotten out of the car, was holding him, trying to wake him up.’

‘…How could that be possible?’

When Chaisi slowly opened his eyes, the face he saw was, of course, not Daiju Monroe’s.

A strange old woman—no, he recognized her. He’d seen her before.

Seeing he was awake, Mai Mingle let out a soft sigh of relief.