Illusion Report

To test her theory, Mai Mingle glanced at the clock and called out softly, "Xiaowei?"

Xiaowei turned its head. Its face was expressionless, but its cheeks bulged and pulsed, as if the piece of broccoli was still struggling and resisting inside its mouth.

"What is it?" It didn’t look very happy.

"You... you don’t like pain-meat?"

"No, pain-meat is fine."

"Then you must really like broccoli?"

"Broccoli?" Xiaowei said. "Oh, you mean that green thing I was just eating? It’s not broccoli. It’s a steamed, porous, poly-nodular human face tumor, dyed with edible coloring."

Mai Mingle desperately wanted to scrub her ears—they felt unbearably tainted just from having been touched by those words.

"...So you really like that steamed... steamed whatever-it-is?"

"Nope." Xiaowei pointed to its face and said, "It’s tough to chew. The sinews are too thick. See? It’s still thrashing around in my mouth."

The possibility of personal preference had been eliminated. Now she could move on to directly testing her theory.

"When you’re invited to eat something, can you refuse?" Mai Mingle asked softly.

Xiaowei swallowed what was in its mouth with a GULP and smiled.

"...That depends on you," it replied. "As long as you’re willing to pay the price, you can certainly be a rude and discourteous person."

"What price?"

Mai Mingle pressed immediately. But she had momentarily forgotten that during the first half-hour, the diners would only tell her either "nonsense" or "clues." The woman applying makeup had never said she would get an answer just by asking.

Xiaowei had just opened its mouth, but before it could speak, the other two young people called out to it with a laugh, "Hey, it’s your turn! Which celebrity makes you want to devour them and take their place the most?"

Its attention was immediately diverted. It began to think with great interest, "Hmm... can I pick two and combine them? I want Robbie’s eyes, and..."

The group of young people’s conversation returned to the topic of celebrities and stars. Mai Mingle tried to interject several times, but to no avail.

She only had five or six minutes left and couldn’t waste them all on Xiaowei—especially since Mai Mingle already had a rough grasp of the second rule.

’Who should I ask next?’

A sudden burst of laughter from behind made Mai Mingle jump.

She turned and saw that at the stooping couple’s table, only the husband’s laughter remained, yet it was twice as loud as their combined laughter from before. The wife’s hands were clamped tightly around her own neck, apparently with great force. Her face was purple and swollen, veins bulging violently, and her eyeballs were protruding so far they nearly surpassed her brow bone. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

"Yes, yes, just like that," the husband said, sounding delighted. "It’s the exact same face you made when you received your gift this morning. But your eyeballs need to bulge out a little more, enough to pop out of their lids."

The wife finally let go, tidied her long, flowing hair, and said, "You’re still better at strangling. When I do it myself, my eyeballs can never bulge out that far."

Having no time to marvel at how sick the Nest’s residents were, Mai Mingle was now doubly sensitive to any word related to "face." She quickly walked a few steps closer and discreetly studied the wife’s eyes—but no matter how she looked, they seemed to be its own. They probably couldn’t be taken off.

’There are supposed to be seven faces, so how can I not find a single one?’

Mai Mingle couldn’t help but want to sigh. She silently grumbled about the Nest’s inexplicable themed activities. Just as she was about to move to the next table, the wife suddenly glanced at her from the corner of its eye.

Then, it quickly looked at the clock on the wall.

When the couple resumed their conversation with a laugh, the hair on the back of Mai Mingle’s neck stood on end.

’...So I’m not the only one who’s been watching the time.’

’Are all the diners in the restaurant secretly waiting for the first half-hour to end?’

The woman applying makeup had said they couldn’t attack her directly... They had to wait until after the first hour to set up "bombs," "dead ends," and the like.

In other words, for the next thirty minutes, as long as she stopped listening to the diners and focused on uncovering rules and clues, she would be safe for the time being.

’So where are those seven faces?’

Even knowing there were clues in the diners’ conversations, finding the seven faces was still difficult.

Take this moment, for instance. As Mai Mingle walked slowly through the restaurant, apart from the lone male customer staring at a laptop, the patrons at every other table were chatting. A buzzing din of conversation rose and fell all around her.

Choosing to listen to one table meant she would miss the conversations at the other four—what if she had already missed a critical clue?

Suppressing a faint anxiety, Mai Mingle stood in the center of the restaurant, her gaze sweeping slowly around the room.

Plates of food on the tables, the sound of conversations, the diners’ faces, her own reflection in the mirror, the expressionless waiter at the bar... She suddenly felt like she was trapped at the bottom of a well, surrounded by incomprehensibly high walls.

"I met a Hunter last time. He was so handsome," said the female diner with dark brown skin, smiling. "It would be such a shame if he didn’t die in the Nest..."

"...When we go out to sea later, I plan to go fishing. Maybe I’ll catch something good," the husband was suggesting. "Didn’t a man fall into Blackmoor City Center Bay recently? If we could drag that corpse into the Nest, we’d hit the jackpot."

"Are you guys following the entertainment news in Blackmoor City?" a young man at the party table asked. "I’ve been really interested in human celebrities lately... I heard a singer had an accident. She almost opened a Path, but it didn’t happen in the end. A lot of residents were waiting for her to arrive..."

"What a shame for her fans in the Nest!" Xiaowei said with a laugh.

Mai Mingle turned around. The clock on the wall pointed to exactly one twenty-nine.

Her head was already spinning from listening. The conversation at the gay couple’s table almost passed right by her ears.

"...I despise risk," the female guest at the gay couple’s table was saying. "The more people who know about this, the greater the risk, right? Why insist on getting more Hunters to compete? It should have been nipped in the bud with the first person."

"If there are no competitors, then the first person to know might very well gather all seven items," the man with the earring stud said dismissively. "Think about it. What if that person doesn’t enter the Nest themselves, but just uses other Hunters to find the items? We can’t kill every Hunter who enters the Nest. If we let them keep searching like that, they’ll gather everything sooner or later."

"Then we could just send a resident who can go to the human world to Blackmoor City and kill the person. Anyway, I hate anything with risk..."

Just as the female guest said this, she suddenly stopped. At the same instant, every sound in the restaurant came to an abrupt halt.

The dizzying fragments of buzzing conversation from all directions fell into a dead silence.

Mai Mingle looked at the clock.

...It was one-thirty.

The second thirty-minute period had begun.

A breath later, the clatter of cutlery and the murmur of conversation and laughter flowed back into the restaurant—as if they had never stopped.

There was no longer any need to listen to them, but just as Mai Mingle was about to walk toward the central round table, a thought struck her. She remained where she was and listened intently for a moment.

The party table was still talking about the singer who almost entered the Nest; the couple continued to discuss sea fishing; the gay couple’s table had begun analyzing "necessary risks"; and the table with the three female guests was still on the topic of the handsome Hunter who needed to die in the Nest...

After one-thirty, the conversation at every table was still continuing along the same theme.

In other words... there were no clues in the final few minutes of conversation before one-thirty.

It was a simple matter of logical deduction: in the first thirty minutes, the diners would only speak "nonsense" and "clues." Once the second thirty-minute period began, the "clues" would disappear.

So, since they were still on the same topics, it meant those topics were not "clues."

Mai Mingle couldn’t help but sigh.

’If those topics weren’t clues, then what was?’

When she picked up the newspaper clipping, she was full of hope that it would give her some clues about the faces. However, after reading a few lines, she was so surprised she temporarily forgot all about the clues.

She hadn’t expected that the dead celebrity—the owner of the sweet, smiling face in the photograph—was actually a human.

"...Her last visit to the Nest was when she was eight years old. Although plenty of children fall into the Nest by accident, and we’ve all grown tired of killing them, Xia Tian, with her unique personality and endearing appearance, quickly won the adoration and welcome of the Nest’s residents. Overnight, she became the well-known ’Nest’s Daughter.’ It’s a great pity that after returning to Blackmoor City, Xia Tian never came back to the Nest again for the next twenty years..."

"Twenty years later, Xia Tian’s second visit to the Nest caused an unimaginable sensation; it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the streets were empty. Ah, she was just an ordinary person from Blackmoor City, yet she had completely captured the hearts of the Nest’s residents and even received a special lunch invitation from the ’Black Heart Restaurant’..."

’Wait, Black Heart Restaurant?’

Mai Mingle glanced at the menu on the empty table number one. Wasn’t that the very restaurant she was in?

"Xia Tian’s task was to successfully finish a lunch at the Black Heart Restaurant—simple, right? Unexpectedly, it was this simple task that killed our ’Nest’s Daughter.’ She didn’t find all the clues and hints in time, and thus never discovered the hidden rule that ultimately killed her..."

Mai Mingle’s gaze froze on that line of text.

"Any human who touches a product from the ’Cowboy Sanches’ company will die on the spot."

’The third rule... so I can’t touch any products from the "Cowboy Sanches" company.’

No wonder that male customer had said, "We’re not afraid of that," when he asked the waiter to serve the food. If Cowboy Sanches products only killed humans, then as residents of the Nest, they naturally had nothing to fear.

Mai Mingle finished reading the clipping and placed it back where she found it.

When that little girl named Xia Tian entered this restaurant, this rule must have been hidden extremely well, which is why it ultimately killed her.

After her death, the Nest’s restaurant turned right around and brazenly wrote this hidden rule on a newspaper clipping, making it the most obvious rule in the next task...

It was as if they were mocking Xia Tian, implying her death was worthless.

At this moment, Mai Mingle didn’t want to go near any of the residents to look for clues.

The Nest deliberately schemed to kill everyone who entered, even its own "Nest’s Daughter."

’And what about me?’

’In this task of finding seven faces, is there some kind of trap lying in wait to kill me, too?’

’That’s right... The woman applying makeup only said that starting from the third half-hour, the diners could set up "bombs," "dead ends," and agents.’

’But she never said what would happen in the restaurant from the fourth half-hour onward if I still haven’t found all seven faces.’

’By then, will the diners be able to attack me directly?’