"We've been through a life-or-death situation together. I saved you, and you saved me."
The red-haired man was covered from head to toe by a white sheet, his voice muffled as he spoke.
In the room, which reeked of disinfectant, an old incandescent light hummed the moment it was turned on. When Mai Mingle opened her eyes, all she could see was the white cloth covering her face, her vision a hazy, dim white.
"For that reason, I won't try to take the Illusion on you for now. But if you run into any of my other Hunters and they decide to make a move, I definitely won't stop them. This is our mission, after all. My people risk their lives to enter the Nest, so I have no right to ask them to give up."
"...That's one thing,"
Mai Mingle spoke from under the white sheet, a puff of warm, moist breath trapped between the fabric. "Why are we in a morgue pretending to be corpses?"
A few minutes earlier, the two of them, feeling they had put enough distance between themselves and the resident below, had leaped from the hospital bed and bolted. They'd wanted to get as far away from the ward as possible and shake the resident completely.
But as Mai Mingle ran, she glanced back and saw a black shadow flash in the distant ward doorway. It seemed a resident was in pursuit. The red-haired man also sensed trouble and barked in a low voice, "Running won't work anymore. We have to hide. Follow me!"
The tall, thin patient was three to four meters long and could stretch its body. If that was what was chasing them, the two of them would never be able to outrun it.
Mai Mingle just never expected that after leading her into the stairwell and clattering down to level B1, the red-haired man would so familiarly push open a door with the word "Morgue" written on it.
Seeing her hesitate, he glared back at her. "Come on, what are you spacing out for? You want the resident to catch you?"
'Seriously?' she thought. 'Who would be eager to go in after seeing the word "Morgue"?'
But seeing her only living companion in this godforsaken place stride inside, it seemed Mai Mingle didn't have much of a choice but to follow.
The moment she stepped inside, she couldn't help but shiver violently. The temperature in the morgue was at least three or four degrees lower than outside.
"Find an empty gurney," the red-haired man said, flipping on the morgue's light. He lifted the white sheet on one of the gurneys and lay down. "Do what I do. Cover yourself from head to toe and don't move. Ignore the gurneys that are already occupied. It's fine."
Mai Mingle stared at a mortuary slab in the corner of the room. The white sheet on it rose and fell, forming the outline of a human body. The room's lights flickered intermittently, making it impossible for her to see if the figure was breathing, let alone whether it was a person, a corpse, or a resident.
'In any case, the fact that the corpse didn't spring up to greet them when they came in was probably a good thing.'
"That one..." she began, pointing at the mortuary slab, but the red-haired man had already nimbly lain down and covered himself. A voice from under the white sheet urged, "Hurry up."
In the blink of an eye, in the vast morgue, Mai Mingle was the only living person left standing amidst two bodies covered in white sheets.
As she climbed onto a gurney herself, she felt a little dazed. 'An eighty-six-year-old woman first enters a hospital ward, then the hospital morgue... It certainly follows the natural order of things.'
'Tonight's experience felt like a metaphor. A metaphor for what, her wisdom was not yet sufficient to figure out.'
The red-haired man sighed from under his white sheet.
"First-timers in the Nest are such a pain. They don't know anything," he said in a low voice. "One of my least favorite parts of the job is training new recruits for the group."
"It's not like I want to be lying in a morgue," Mai Mingle retorted. "You can't go through life without doing things you don't like."
'Including playing dead.'
"Don't be so unhappy about it. The morgue is this hospital's 'gate of life.' Sounds illogical, right? How can a place for the dead be a gate of life?"
Mai Mingle immediately grunted in agreement.
"The Nest contains countless locations, each with its own unique terrain, dangers, and opportunities. Saint Louis Hospital is a location our Family Faction is relatively familiar with. This is already my third time here. Inside Saint Louis Hospital—"
"Wait, this is Saint Louis Hospital?" Mai Mingle couldn't help but interrupt. "Didn't you say this was a Nest? Saint Louis Hospital isn't far from my home."
She had been to Saint Louis Hospital a few times before, but she'd never seen any of these demons and monsters.
"No, you're talking about the Saint Louis Hospital in Blackmoor City. The one we're in right now is the Saint Louis Hospital in the Nest."
"The Nest is not in the human world at all."
The red-haired man fell silent for a few seconds, as if to let that sentence truly sink into Mai Mingle's understanding.
"Perhaps the universe cracked, and the shadow that Blackmoor City cast into that crack became this strange and perilous Nest, an Otherworld that only a few can enter. You can find place names from Blackmoor City in the Nest, but they're basically all twisted, dark versions."
As if afraid she would interrupt again, the red-haired man continued, "In short, we discovered that when you encounter a danger you can't shake in Saint Louis Hospital—for example, if a resident has locked onto us—the morgue is a place to 'reset'."
"Reset?" Mai Mingle tried her best to digest his words. What she couldn't digest, she committed firmly to memory.
She didn't really understand the language of young people; it had taken her quite a while to figure out clever-phones—oh, no, smartphones.
"Right. To put it simply, you come to the morgue, cover your face, and lie down for a while. In the eyes of Saint Louis Hospital, you've 'died.' The person the residents were chasing is dead, so naturally, they stop chasing. When you walk out again, you're a brand-new living person with nothing after you. It sounds like child's play at first, but if you think about it, it's quite logical, isn't it? Someone who enters a hospital's morgue is, of course, quickly forgotten by the hospital."
"It's the same in life," Mai Mingle murmured. "It's not just the hospital that forgets you."
"That's why I brought you here," the red-haired man concluded. "You should be grateful. If you were a Hunter from another Family Faction, I would never have brought you here so easily."
"Why?"
"Competitors are enemies."
Mai Mingle was starting to understand. These people called themselves Hunters, and it seemed the Hunters were divided into many Family Factions. They didn't know if other Family Factions were aware that the morgue was a reset point. If not, they were naturally unwilling to reveal this valuable information.
"But, why do you come to the Nest...?"
"Ma'am," the red-haired man chuckled. "Touch the Illusion on your stomach. Think about it. The effects Illusions can achieve are countless. From raising your IQ by five points to defying fate and changing your destiny, there's nothing they can't do. They can even realize humanity's most impossible fantasies. But Illusions only exist in the Nest. In Blackmoor City, there are plenty of powerful politicians and celebrities willing to pay a high price for them. Where there's demand, there's supply. We were all led into the Nest by the principles of economics."
He paused, then said, "That's why we're called Illusion Hunters."
'Illusion Hunters...'
'To think that in Blackmoor City, where she had lived her whole life, there was a group of people chasing and trading such fantastical, dream-like things...'
'And now, she herself had accidentally stumbled into a world beyond her own and obtained a second life.'
Mai Mingle lay on the mortuary slab, her heart thumping.
She was surprised that she wasn't scared right now, nor did she want to run home. Instead, she felt like a child who had accidentally wandered into an amusement park at midnight. The night was another realm, and the amusement park's silhouette in the darkness was unfamiliar and terrifying, yet it was also an irresistibly vast and wondrous place.
'The Nest... in the deep, shadowy, pitch-black night, it was a paradise where she could ride a bloody carousel horse and gallop toward a wonderland.'
"I never thought... I would fall into a place like this," she said in a low voice.
Compared to tonight, her entire life before seemed to have suddenly shriveled and faded.
"It's understandable that you didn't know the Nest existed. It's rare to see someone enter the Nest by accidentally opening a Path through sheer luck, without a senior to guide them—"
"Path?" Mai Mingle seized on the word, nearly jolting upright from the gurney like a reanimated corpse. "I fell into the ward after I hit the TV screen. Could that be my 'Path'?"
The red-haired man pondered for a moment before humming in affirmation.
"So that's how you got in... You've never run into a TV screen before, have you?"
'Of course not. Who would run into a TV for no reason?'
"Every Hunter's Path is different." The red-haired man chuckled. "Only 1% of all humanity is born with a Path that allows them to enter the Nest. The conditions for these Paths vary, and most are quite strange and particular. So, within that 1%, who knows how many people live their entire lives without ever opening their Path, completely unaware that the Nest even exists..."
'Wasn't that her? For eighty-six years, until the burglar broke into her home—'
A jolt went through Mai Mingle.
'...That's right, the burglar was an Illusion Hunter too.'
"Some people's Paths are relatively normal," the red-haired man continued. "I heard of someone who can enter the Nest just by sitting down in a full bathtub. Of course, his luck wasn't great. Imagine, the first time you take a bath, you're probably young, naked, and haven't brought anything with you—what hope would you have of getting back from the Nest alive?"
"Other people's Paths are trickier, like standing in a toilet and flushing it, or opening a door in an abandoned building... things like that, the list goes on. Just opening the Path, with such specific conditions, already filters out a huge number of people. Not to mention, there's another important condition for entering the Nest."
"What condition?"
"You can only open a Path in a large city with a population of over ten million. We're not sure of the specific reason, but..."
The red-haired man said in a low voice, "It's a common belief among Hunters that the Nest is a byproduct born from human society developing to a certain scale. Therefore, the most densely populated places are the ones that connect to the Nest."
Mai Mingle lay quietly for a while.
Every word he had just said was like a puzzle piece, gradually assembling in her mind the image of a deep world she had never imagined. She wanted to reach up and touch the corner of her forehead, the spot swollen from hitting the TV screen, to confirm she wasn't just dreaming.
"Alright,"
There was a RUSTLE of fabric nearby, as if the red-haired man had thrown back his sheet and sat up. "Time's about up. The reset should be complete. If you want to hold onto your Illusion, it's best you aren't seen by my companions."
'This young man is surprisingly decent.'
"The Illusion on me, you were planning to give it to Westley?" Mai Mingle asked.
"Yes, he's the one who hired us," the red-haired man said, startled. He turned his head. "You even know that?"
"He's already dead. He won't be able to buy this Illusion anymore." Mai Mingle recalled the endless news reports on TV from the past couple of days and asked, "Haven't you heard? When did you enter the Nest?"
The red-haired man gave her a suspicious look, then looked away again.
Clearly, he didn't believe her.
The Illusion Westley wanted had fallen right into her hands, and now she was immediately claiming Westley was dead and couldn't take it... It was too much of a convenient coincidence. No wonder he didn't believe her.
"Ha, he's not going to die. The few Illusions he has are so powerful—" The red-haired man stopped mid-sentence, rubbed his nose, and cut himself off. "Dead or alive, whatever. Like I said, I won't try to rob you. I advise you to hurry back to Blackmoor City."
"How do I get back?"
Although the Nest was both terrifying and fascinating, Mai Mingle knew that to protect her Illusion, her best bet right now was to leave.
"Sigh, honestly..." The red-haired man's shoulders slumped, seeming a bit deflated. "In for a penny, in for a pound. I'll take you to an exit. But let's be clear beforehand: if a Household Hunter sees us, I'll have no choice but to join them and take the Illusion from you."