Normally, three to five tall, burly, and hostile strangers bursting through the door should be the most alarming threat, right?
No matter how you looked at it, they should have been more dangerous than a patient lying in a hospital bed.
But for some reason, Mai Mingle couldn't help but stare fixedly at the pair of pale feet peeking out from behind the curtain. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, her palms were damp and cold, and yet she couldn't spare the strange men so much as a glance.
She was currently wedged between the patient in bed 03 and bed 02, with the nightstand and the wall behind her. The men blocked her path forward, leaving no way out.
She glanced at the patient in the next bed again.
They looked a little different from when she'd first seen them, though she couldn't say exactly how—but looking at them now triggered an instinctual, biological repulsion. It was as if she desperately wanted to open her mouth and vomit out the sight, the very air she'd breathed that had touched those feet, and all her internal organs along with them.
When she looked up again, she saw the strangers probably felt the same way. Despite having burst in so menacingly, their eyes were now all aimed at the ceiling, none of them willing to look down at the feet on the bed. At a glance, they looked like a group of blind men who had just taken off their sunglasses.
Mai Mingle wiped her nose.
Perhaps her fear and tension had become so overwhelming that her nervous system needed a release. Perhaps it was the intoxicating, surging magic of her restored youth, a power that not even fear could extinguish. Or perhaps it was simply because the men across from her looked so ridiculous—she suddenly couldn't hold it in anymore and burst out laughing.
"How do you do that?"
She stopped laughing, not wanting the men to think she belonged in a psychiatric hospital. She said to the patient in the next bed, "I don't know how, but just one look at you makes my stomach churn. You'd be great for a part-time job here in the hospital—pumping stomachs."
The red-haired man, who seemed to be the leader, didn't say a word, but the look on his face expressed his opinion of Mai Mingle perfectly—she wasn't all there.
"Young lady,"
The male voice from behind the curtain sounded like a bag of rocks coated in thick phlegm, a sound that was indescribably unpleasant to the ear. "This is your first time in a Nest, isn't it?"
Just now, Mai Mingle had heard a string of incomprehensible terms: someone disguised as a nurse, Hunter, Illusion... and now, Nest.
"This isn't a hospital?" Mai Mingle asked.
Though it was a question, the answer was already crystal clear in her mind: of course this wasn't a hospital.
Somehow, she had come to this place called a "Nest," and that "somehow" seemed to have a great deal to do with her falling on the television.
"It is a hospital. Why wouldn't it be?" the patient behind the curtain replied with almost-friendly reassurance. "A hospital in a Nest is still a hospital."
Mai Mingle stalled for time, thinking as she spoke. "You say this is a Nest, but you don't look like a chicken to me."
The red-haired man let out a snort he'd tried to suppress, then covered it with a cough.
"Doesn't even know what a Nest is," one of the men at the door muttered to his companion. "Must be her first fucking time in one. No wonder she's still in her pajamas."
"But if it's her first time, how could she have captured an Illusion?" another one murmured.
"Watch and wait," the red-haired man instructed. "Be ready. If she can't handle it, we'll have to snatch it from the resident."
As they spoke, they acted as if Mai Mingle didn't exist, or rather, as if she were something that was about to cease to exist.
In just a minute or two, too many incomprehensible things had happened. Mai Mingle could only cling to two facts.
One, she had regained her youth after entering the Nest. Two, the thing that had restored her youth seemed to be the target both sides were after.
Even knowing nothing else, she knew she was like a child carrying a fortune through a crowded market—or more accurately, a ghost market. And that was not good at all.
A dead silence fell from behind the curtain. Two bare, deathly pale feet, tinged with blue, rested on the metal rail at the foot of the bed, toes hooked over it.
"What is it you want?" Mai Mingle asked, staring at the feet behind the curtain, though she already knew the answer. "How about this: you tell me what's going on, and I'll give you what you want. We can all be civil about this. Wouldn't that be nice?"
The patient behind the curtain considered this for two seconds.
"Feel around on your body," he said. His voice was calmer now, not as grating as before, but he still refused to explain further. "You should be able to feel something, right? Take it off and give it to me."
Mai Mingle reached a hand inside her pajamas and felt her back and stomach. The moment her fingers made contact, she jumped in fright.
A slightly raised, ice-cold, belt-like object was wrapped in strips around her torso. To the touch, it felt exactly as if a large snake were coiled around her body.
'That's right,' she thought. 'The arm of that black shadow from before... it felt like it wrapped around me just like this, coil by coil.'
"You've found it, haven't you," the patient in the next bed said with a sudden hiss, the phlegm churning in his throat. "Give it to me."
Mai Mingle felt along the edge of the Snake Belt. It seemed reluctant to separate from her skin; she had to use some force just to wedge her fingertips between the Snake Belt and her flesh.
"Okay, okay, I get it. I'll give it to you." It really could be removed. With a lift of her hand, she had already peeled up a small section of the Snake Belt.
She thought of another question.
"I was having a heart attack just now, and it only stopped when this thing appeared. If I take it off, will the heart attack come back?"
"You might be old, but your mind is quick. I don't think so. It reverses aging, not disease. The disease's disappearance was merely a side effect; it won't necessarily return when the aging does."