Chapter 540 - 481: Kai Luonan: The Silent End of the Master Liar

Chapter 540: Chapter 481: Kai Luonan: The Silent End of the Master Liar

The entire process of Kai Luonan killing Fu Tailan took just over ten seconds.

At first, he just watched as Fu Tailan leaped up from the floor and bolted.

Even the most intelligent person will despair and panic when facing death. Even if running was useless, he still had to run.

Fu Tailan was completely consumed with escaping. Panicked, he didn’t even realize at first that he was running in the wrong direction, deeper into the hall and farther away from the stairs—

’Oh, I almost forgot. This is Fu Tailan we’re talking about.’

’So his ’running in the wrong direction’ was, of course, just a feint to conceal some other objective, wasn’t it?’

Kai Luonan let him run, unhurriedly drawing the gun from his waist.

Fu Tailan was injured, his steps heavy and labored. He couldn’t run far, let alone keep his balance—as he lunged toward the Candle Tears, his strength finally gave out. His legs buckled, and he collapsed, a whimper of what sounded like furious unwillingness catching in his throat.

That sound, at least, didn’t seem fake.

Of course, it didn’t matter whether he was acting or not.

Kai Luonan strolled over, watching Fu Tailan press his hands against the floor. He tried several times to push himself up, but his trembling arms couldn’t support his thin, wiry frame.

He looked at Fu Tailan, then back at the Candle Tears.

’...Ah, so that’s it.’

In a matter of seconds, Fu Tailan had seized the single possibility for survival in the current situation—a possibility that even Kai Luonan hadn’t considered just moments before. No, there were probably very few people in the world who could think of such a gambit when facing certain death.

The boy’s brain was a truly covetable thing.

Fu Tailan’s mind was likely even sharper than Chaisi’s, but unfortunately, his physical conditioning wasn’t even a tenth of that boy’s.

How far a person could go, how great an ambition they could achieve, didn’t just depend on their intellect. More importantly, it depended on when your energy and stamina gave out. Judging from the rumors in Hunter circles, Fu Tailan had lacked the guidance of a proper mentor.

If his stamina had held out for another ten steps, perhaps even Kai Luonan, holding the ???, would have been caught off guard and suffered a humiliating defeat.

"A little injury like that and you can’t run anymore?"

Kai Luonan sighed, suppressing the regret that he couldn’t just transplant Fu Tailan’s brain into his own body.

"You’ve only just reached the beginning of the Candle Tears. The more distant the history, the harder it is to change, isn’t it? You need to get to the end of the candle."

Fu Tailan, as expected, understood.

He opened his mouth slightly but couldn’t make a sound.

In the face of true terror and despair, Fu Tailan’s expression became blank for a moment, almost stubborn—as if so long as he didn’t acknowledge it, so long as he closed his eyes, the world couldn’t touch him, and things wouldn’t devolve to their worst.

Having raised two children himself, Kai Luonan was no stranger to such an expression.

"That’s right. I didn’t have time to close the fire channel."

He murmured, "Your only chance to live was to lunge to the candle’s side and kill the ’me’ inside the Candle Tears—the one who had just entered the underground hall and hadn’t discovered you yet. That was your plan just now, wasn’t it?"

’If I had died or been seriously injured the moment I entered the hall, history would naturally be rewritten. Fu Tailan would no longer be forced into a dead end.’

"I’m someone who deeply cherishes talent. Killing you... it pains me greatly."

Fu Tailan could no longer hear him.

Kai Luonan had always been a man of swift, decisive action and few words.

The more a person spoke, the more they revealed. The more they revealed, the less they were feared.

He didn’t need friendship or understanding, but he needed the fear of others.

He had spoken so much to Fu Tailan tonight, partly because the ??? was so special, and partly because every breath Fu Tailan took, every second he remained alive, was a generous loan from Kai Luonan.

A life that could be snuffed out at a whim was no different from a parrot or an AI chatbot.

Kai Luonan turned his head, watching the hazy, dim "entropy," visible only as clusters of faint shadows, as it surged and rolled, drowning the young man before him.

’...What does entropy actually look like?’

’Fu Tailan is quite lucky,’ Kai Luonan thought as he raised his pistol.

’One hundred and seventy thousand people die every day in this world. How many of them get to glimpse a sliver of the truth before they die?’

Even though he held the ???, Kai Luonan couldn’t perceive entropy clearly, a measure to protect the Illusion’s holder. To him, entropy was like the shadow of a fading morning dream—it would vanish the moment his concentration lapsed, always leaving a trace of regret and melancholy.

The thought was fleeting. He aimed the muzzle at the figure, which was now howling at the ceiling like a Resident, and pulled the trigger.

An enraged roar erupted from the muzzle, shaking the hall and stirring up waves of echoes.

Kai Luonan had once asked Chaisi for his impression of the Morgan Family’s Fu Tailan.

"An energy black hole."

That had been Chaisi’s assessment. "Because you can’t trust a single thing about him, from head to toe. Even if he burped in front of me, it could be a hint that the hot dog stand behind me is safe to eat at and won’t poison me. Having to constantly guess and be on guard against him is exhausting."

Chaisi wasn’t one for exaggeration or sensationalism, but at the time, Kai Luonan still found it hard to believe.

"Uncle Kai," Chaisi had said, sitting up straight and growing serious, "even if you see Fu Tailan die with your own eyes, never turn your back on his corpse."

Kai Luonan trusted Chaisi’s judgment implicitly.

As Fu Tailan’s head was knocked back by the bullet, the screeching howl stopped abruptly.

The thin, narrow, not-yet-fully-matured body fell from the depths of the phantom-like "entropy," hitting the floor with a heavy thud that sent a dull tremor through the ground.

Fu Tailan was not, in fact, dead.

But it wasn’t because of his cunning or deceit. It was simply because the bullet had gone wide and failed to kill him instantly. Kai Luonan had aimed for his head, but because he was being consumed by "entropy," it was a blessing in disguise. He had writhed and struggled at the last moment, so the bullet only struck his left shoulder.

The young man gasped for breath, his face soaked in blood, the faint glint of tears in his eyes. He still refused to let go of his empty, pallid life.

With his still-intact right arm, Fu Tailan dragged his body, inch by inch, toward the end of the candle.

Kai Luonan had never had any feeling for ethereal things like beauty and art, but at this moment, he suddenly realized that when a person who looked like Fu Tailan was on the verge of death, slowly dragging a river of blood behind him across the floor... that, too, was a kind of beauty.

’This time, there’s no need to use "entropy." ’

How ironic. A man who lived by lies didn’t even get the chance to speak a single word before he died.

Kai Luonan knew very well that Fu Tailan had "Vulture Particles" on him.

Even if you riddled him with bullets, even if you saw his flesh, brains, and bone fragments splatter with your own eyes, you could not let your guard down.

After all, wasn’t this the same trick Fu Tailan had used to nearly get the better of Chaisi in the hospital room?

Thankfully, that boy Chaisi always looked out for him, always remembered to tell him, to warn him of any danger he encountered... Kai Luonan hadn’t expected to use Chaisi’s judgment so soon.

"One shot isn’t enough,"

Chaisi had seemed to regret his lack of caution at the time. "Vulture Particles can block at least one or two bullets. But he’s still human, so there’s a limit to how many Vulture Particles he can hold in his body. If I’d just fired a few more shots back then, the third bullet onwards would have torn through Fu Tailan’s actual flesh..."

’Picking up that child from Luocheng back then was truly the best decision I ever made in my life.’

By the time this thought crossed Kai Luonan’s mind, he had already sent a fourth bullet into Fu Tailan’s head—shot after shot, bullet after bullet, piercing Fu Tailan’s face, blurring and erasing his features from the world, making endless, ceaseless blossoms of blood spray from the back of his head.

No human could withstand a full magazine being emptied into their face. Neither the Residents, the Illusions, nor the lies he lived by could offer him a path to survival.

Fu Tailan was dead.

But what happened in the next second was something that even Kai Luonan could not comprehend.