Illusion Report

"First time seeing this, isn’t it?"

A smile played on the young girl’s face. "A whole, living person, turned into a Resident while keeping everything they had... Never seen that before, have you?"

Hai Luwei lay stunned on the ground. He knew he should get up and run, but as if possessed, he grunted an "Uh-huh" and said, "Y-Yeah..."

"If you’ve never seen it, then you should see it more often," the Resident said with a thin smile.

Hai Luwei felt he was probably agreeing to this suggestion with his life.

The scene before him was something that had never occurred even in humanity’s deepest nightmares: Mai Mingle was, bit by bit, crawling out of Mai Mingle’s head.

Two hands gripped the edges of the face. Forehead, eyebrows, eyes... gradually rising, revealing two overlapping human faces in the dim light.

It was terrifying, yet he couldn’t look away—it was as if his own gaze had tied him to the spot. His brain was using all its power just to process the visual signals, not even registering that he should be running.

Another head now perched atop the first.

The Mai Mingle whose neck was stretching out from the face slowly opened her eyes.

"How strange," the newly emerged face said in a low voice. "How very strange."

"What’s so strange about it?" the Dream Screenwriter asked from the side. "Hurry up and come out. Father is waiting for you."

"...Father?"

Mai Mingle turned her head to look at the Dream Screenwriter. The face underneath didn’t turn, so the two Mai Mingle faces were twisted, one to the left and one to the right.

The Resident seemed to have forgotten that its face still wore the likeness of a young girl.

"Yes, hurry and climb out. You’ve been reborn."

"Reborn..." she said, as if in a daze. "Right, I have been reborn."

Mai Mingle—was it still Mai Mingle?—looked at Hai Luwei on the ground again.

"Ah... Hai Luwei,"

she said in a low voice, her jet-black eyes devoid of light. The lips on both faces opened and closed in perfect sync. "I remember you... How strange."

"Wh-What’s so strange?" he heard his own voice ask, trembling.

The Resident Mai Mingle lowered her head, looking inside the shell of the Mai Mingle below. "The inside... and the outside. They’re the same, but also a little different."

’What is she talking about?’ Hai Luwei couldn’t understand.

Before he could ask, the other Resident grew impatient. "Hurry up and climb out of that body! What are you dawdling for?"

Mai Mingle paid it no heed, her gaze falling on Hai Luwei’s watch. "...What time is it?"

Hai Luwei jolted. He raised his wrist to look and stammered, "T-Twelve thirty-eight."

Mai Mingle’s head, the one emerging from her face, tilted to one side.

Beneath this newly emerged face, there seemed to be only an endlessly long, thin neck; her shoulders were still nowhere in sight.

"The outside is the real Nest, isn’t it?"

she said abruptly, then looked down into her original body’s interior. Her posture was like someone pulling open the waistband of their pants to look at their own legs. "This inside... it’s a small, man-made world... It’s twelve-twenty..."

’Describing a "lucid dream" as a small world seems plausible—but I’ll leave that discussion to Mai Mingle and the Dream Screenwriter.’

Perhaps his brain had finally recovered from the visual shock, because Hai Luwei’s sense finally returned.

’The smart thing to do is get out of here. What’s the point of chatting with a newly-made Resident?’

"You’ve been reborn, so you don’t have to worry about the world of the past," the Dream Screenwriter said, seeming to suppress its impatience. "You’re a Resident now. Hurry up and climb out."

"I can’t. I can’t climb out."

Those words made Hai Luwei, who was in the middle of backing away, freeze.

He pricked up his ears and tried to move toward the door as quietly as possible. The two Residents seemed unsure of the current situation, and neither paid any mind to his impending escape.

"Oh, could it be that this is your form as a Resident?" the Dream Screenwriter seemed to understand. "Hmm, the 1.7-face look isn’t bad. A very impactful sort of beauty..."

Mai Mingle stared at it grimly and said in a low voice, "No."

"What do you mean?"

"I understand now... The reason it’s so strange is because I was tricked, right?"

Hai Luwei’s steps faltered.

In the dim hall, he had put several meters between them and couldn’t quite see the expression on Mai Mingle’s face. He only heard her say, "The world inside here is man-made... Only after I finished filling out the Resident registration form did I see the way out... to come out as a Resident."

Compared to before, the Resident Mai Mingle’s thoughts and speech seemed very loose.

"Correct,"

the Dream Screenwriter said with a thin smile, clearly seeing no more need for deception. "That was a lucid dream I scripted. Did you like it? The script’s ending was you truthfully filling out the Resident documents and finally awakening as a Resident. Feels great, doesn’t it?"

It tilted its head back, the faces upon its own switching rapidly, like an actor about to finish a grand opera, head thrown back to sing the final high note.

"Being a Resident is so great, so happy, so blissful! Being a Resident is so great, so happy, so blissful! Ah, no worries, no worries, pain, or stress at all! You just get to be yourself! Yaaaaah!" 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

When its final shriek faded, Hai Luwei realized he had slid back to the floor at some point—even though he had desperately covered his ears, he still couldn’t stop the broken notes from piercing his brain through the gaps between his fingers.

...His brain felt like a piece of cloth riddled with holes, swaying in the dim hall.

"But I was thinking about other things," Mai Mingle said, calm as you’d expect a Resident to be. "While filling out the form... I kept wondering, why is it still twelve-twenty? Why do I know the guide’s name? Why am I missing an hour?"

The Dream Screenwriter’s face froze into a blank slate.

It tilted its head up, looking at Mai Mingle’s high-up face, and said, "What?"

Two—no, 2.7 Resident faces—stared at each other for a moment before the Dream Screenwriter spoke. "So what? You still filled out the form."

"Yes, because ordinarily, it’s hard for a person to realize they’ve suddenly entered a dream for no reason, so they can’t discover the truth."

Mai Mingle tilted her head, and this time, the face below tilted along with it.

"By the time I realized I wasn’t actually a Resident, the form was filled out, and my transformation had already begun... Ah, so ironic, so ironic, so ironic."

Hai Luwei couldn’t help but grimace.

"The last question on the form was, ’As a Resident, do you still possess the human body you had at the time of your death?’" Mai Mingle said, suddenly calm.

The Dream Screenwriter laughed.

"That was a special question I designed so you could become a Resident directly from a complete human state! A complete human, once turned into a Resident, will surely be stronger than anyone else."

Mai Mingle raised a long, slender hand and scratched her head—her other hand still rested on the face below.

"When I saw that question, because I was still thinking about everything, I just went ahead and filled in ’Yes.’"

The Dream Screenwriter seemed to be speaking patiently to its own creation. "So what? I told you, you can only write down the true answer. Only a truthful answer can turn you into a Resident."

"Mm... I was deceived by your lucid dream. I thought I had died of a heart attack in the Nest’s sick ward."

Mai Mingle said in a low voice, "But that’s where the problem is... At the moment I answered the question, I both possessed and did not possess the body from my ’time of death.’ So my answer was both true and false."

"What do you mean, you both possessed and did not possess it?" the Dream Screenwriter asked, standing rooted to the spot, its face a blank canvas.

For the first time since she appeared, the Resident Mai Mingle let out a soft laugh.

"The body I had when my heart attack struck was that of an eighty-six-year-old. But the ’me’ who thought she was a Resident was only in her twenties. The same body, separated by sixty years because of an Illusion."

Hai Luwei’s eyes went wide.

"So, that eighty-six-year-old body... I ’both possessed and did not possess’ it."

She murmured, "Is this your first time turning a person into a Resident? The answers you seek are all black and white... but that one question couldn’t be answered with a simple ’yes’ or ’no’..."

The Resident Mai Mingle raised her hands, looking at them, then at the body below.

"It seems because of the dual state of that final answer, I’ve become this strange thing... I am, it seems, both a Resident and a human... The states have been superimposed."

The Dream Screenwriter was speechless for a moment.

"I see..." It stroked its chin like a person and mumbled, "But, as long as you’re a Resident, the rest doesn’t seem to matter..."

’Can she still turn back into a human?’

But Hai Luwei understood that it wasn’t his business.

’What happens to Mai Mingle isn’t my problem. The only thing I should be doing is getting out of here. Even if she needed saving, it’s the responsibility of her Family Faction, not mine.’

’I have to go. I have to go now. I have no obligation—’

Neither Mai Mingle nor the Dream Screenwriter noticed Hai Luwei slipping quietly out the main doors of the library; or perhaps they did, and simply didn’t care.

...This trip into the Nest had been utterly agonizing from start to finish.

He burst through the doors, rushed down the steps in a single breath, and was striding past the abandoned car when he suddenly heard someone call out softly from inside it, "...Hai Luwei?"

Hai Luwei broke out in a cold sweat. He stumbled back two steps before realizing the car’s radio had lit up again.

"Our lucky listener today is a Hunter from Blackmoor City, Hai Luwei," the host said in a low voice from inside the car. "Ah... thank you so much for calling in. May I ask what you’re doing right now?"

Hai Luwei froze, looking from the library to the car.

The next moment, he heard his own voice coming from the car radio—slightly breathless from panic and running.

It was definitely him, not an impostor, because every word that voice spoke was a thought from inside Hai Luwei’s own head.

"In the Brooklyn Public Library... a Hunter I just met, Mai Mingle, she seemed so nice, so gentle... but it looks like she’s beyond saving. I’ve never encountered Residents like that... I can’t fight them. I had no choice but to abandon her and run, just like that time years ago..."

"Oh, my. The fate of man..."

The host sighed softly. "I hope you won’t take the twists and mockery of fate to heart. This time is different, I promise. You see, someone is already on their way to save her... She’s quite a lucky person, isn’t she?"

Hai Luwei didn’t catch what the radio said after that—because the moment his own voice began to speak, he was already running.

He still had enough sense to know that no matter how bizarre the night got, he couldn’t just run around the Nest like a headless chicken. Every step had to be taken with care, testing and checking the path, only putting a foot down after confirming a safe route.

Because of this, Hai Luwei naturally couldn’t move very fast.

He raised his wrist to check his watch and saw it was already 12:49. But when he looked back, he could still see the library and the plaza. He hadn’t gotten far at all.

"Excuse me,"

When a soft, indistinct voice suddenly rang out from the darkness ahead, Hai Luwei even forgot to be scared—he had suffered far too many frights tonight, and his nerves were numb.

"I see you seem to have come from the library. Are you by any chance Hai Luwei?"

A thin figure nearly six feet tall, his head covered by a hood, emerged step by step from the night on the road ahead.

Judging from his build and voice, he seemed to be a teenager.

"Mai Mingle... she’s in that library, right?"