Illusion Report

Chapter 161: Chapter 129: Han Liuyue: A Corpse Isn’t So Useful After All

After so many setbacks right from the start, Han Liuyue had expected bringing Vulture and the corpse into the Nest to be an even greater ordeal.

To her surprise, the next part of their journey went unexpectedly smoothly.

She took Vulture while Jin Xueli took the corpse. After dumping the collapsed, chaotic mess—a disaster no one knew how to begin cleaning up—on the rendezvous Hunter, the two of them split up and entered the Nest.

It wasn’t that they didn’t want to go together—Han Liuyue was actually uneasy about splitting up—but that they couldn’t.

She hadn’t asked Jin Xueli for the details and only knew the gist of it, but their Paths were apparently too far apart to converge, so they had no choice but to regroup inside the Nest.

She remained on high alert the entire way. No matter how reluctant Vulture was to return to the Nest, it never found an opening to exploit against Han Liuyue.

Ultimately, the human and the resident both arrived safely and on schedule at the entrance to the Nest’s Museum of Modern Art. Jin Xueli was there, pulling a suitcase and waving frantically at her.

"See? You were worried I couldn’t handle it on my own, but look, I even got here before you."

Jin Xueli still seemed a little indignant. Before they had set out, Han Liuyue, uneasy about her, had probed her indirectly in at least ten different ways.

"Yeah, you were really early. Nice work,"

The praise slipped from Han Liuyue’s lips without much thought. "Dragging such a heavy suitcase all by yourself is pretty impressive."

"...Are you trying to humor a kid?"

Jin Xueli grumbled, then shivered involuntarily as she glanced at the soft, shattered human form in Han Liuyue’s arms.

"We’re already inside the Nest, so why are you still carrying it? Why not just find an open space, untie the ropes, and kick it away? It’d be so much less trouble. Having it around is making me nervous."

It was true; carrying Vulture was a huge hassle.

The moment it sensed an opportunity to attack, even the environment would begin to create favorable conditions for it.

To keep it from getting any ideas, Han Liuyue had to meticulously re-break and shatter its body every few minutes, tightening the ropes and stuffing its mouth shut.

Coupled with the need to stay on guard against her surroundings, by the time she arrived, she felt more exhausted than she ever had before. The mental pressure was all-encompassing, soaking her body until she felt like a tired, wet towel.

Besides, she still hadn’t had a chance to change out of her rain-soaked clothes, making the "wet towel" feeling all the more literal.

"If I could get rid of it, I would have,"

Han Liuyue sighed. "I’m keeping it with us just in case. If the corpse doesn’t work, we might have to force it to turn back into Westley... I know, I know, it said it can’t transform anymore. But who knows if that’s true? Even a partial transformation would be better than nothing."

Jin Xueli shivered again.

"Then you better keep a close eye on it," she warned. "This is where I fought Vulture for my life last time. I’m seriously traumatized by it."

According to her, a giant candle had formed at some point on the basement level. It was taller than a person and dozens of meters long.

Given its size and length, there was no way to get it out of here without blowing up the building above ground.

’Not being able to take it back is a bit tricky...’

’Jin Xueli found it by accident, so there’s no guarantee another Hunter won’t find it too. How can we make it the Kai Family’s property instead of some public attraction anyone can visit?’

’Can’t exactly piss a circle around it to claim it.’

But people are strange. Even as Han Liuyue was fretting over how to move the candle, she was also secretly worried that she would get to the basement and not see it at all.

When she finally stopped before the enormous candle stretching across the exhibition hall, Han Liuyue stared at it blankly for a few seconds. Then she turned, slapped Jin Xueli on the back, and laughed. "You weren’t lying!"

"Ouch! Of course I wasn’t lying!"

"I was worried, you know? That this might be a trap and there was no candle. Then I’d have had to make a move on you."

Han Liuyue let out a long sigh of relief, patting her chest. "You may not be very strong, and you don’t seem to have much experience, but I really do enjoy going on missions with you. It’s relaxing. If I really had to kill you, I’d lose my appetite for at least three... well, one day."

"Why’d you knock it down from three days to one?" Jin Xueli was so incensed she didn’t know what to focus on. "Just get started already, seriously!"

She grumbled, dragging the suitcase to the center of the hall. She unzipped it, revealing the corpse inside.

Westley had been dead for several days, and after the embalming process, his body had long since gone rigid.

Before setting out, they’d had to shatter all the corpse’s joints. It took a tremendous amount of effort to fold his limbs, curl up his body, and stuff him into the suitcase.

After having gone through something as grotesque as folding a corpse, Jin Xueli didn’t seem as squeamish about moving the body out. Her face was a mask of resignation. Meanwhile, Han Liuyue hadn’t been idle.

First, she tied Vulture securely to a pillar.

Once she was sure it couldn’t break free, she took out her phone and photographed the candle and all the descriptive text on the surrounding walls.

Next, she pulled a folding tripod from her backpack, aimed it at the candle, and set up a video camera. She also held a smaller, handheld camcorder.

One was to record the entire process, the other to record the candle’s contents.

"I’m ready. We can start recording," Han Liuyue called out.

"How about we trade jobs? Why am I always the one touching the corpse?"

To avoid touching the corpse directly, Jin Xueli had put on a pair of work gloves. She dragged Westley over to the candle, took one of his hands, found a random spot, and pressed it against the surface.

"Go check the head of the candle. Has his birthday appeared?"

Han Liuyue’s camera panned across Westley.

Westley’s ashy-pale face lolled limply beside the candle.

His stiff corpse—joints shattered, body folded and then unfolded—was twisted into an elongated Z-shape, his legs dragging on the ground while his torso was held half-suspended in the air by one hand.

’So this was the billionaire who, in life, had been the center of the universe, whose word was law... Now he was nothing more than a repulsive tool.’

’In fact, the more money he had in life, the more ironic this posthumous state seemed.’ freewebnoveℓ.com

’Hah. As if I have any reason to feel sympathy for his plight.’

As Han Liuyue’s camera panned away from Westley and focused on the candle, her heart skipped a beat.

"It actually appeared! Great, the corpse works."

She laughed. "So a dead man’s hand works just as well. I wonder if a severed hand would also be effective... Hmm, I’ll have to try that next time. Could try a living hand and a dead hand, too. So much potential, so much potential."

"Hunters might be a nasty lot, but you’re something else entirely," Jin Xueli muttered. "When’s his birthday?"

The numbers "1967.5.22" materialized on the head of the candle, matching the information they had found before entering the Nest.

"How far back from his death does Chaisi want information from?" Jin Xueli asked. freёweɓnovel.com

"Ah, he didn’t actually give me a timeframe. How about... a year?" Han Liuyue frowned. "But if we have to watch it day by day, is it going to take us a year?"

"To be honest, I’m not sure. I didn’t get a chance to use it thoroughly last time..."

Jin Xueli thought for a moment before suggesting, "I think we should start from the day he died, don’t you? We can see what happened on the day he passed away. Maybe there’s a clue."

"Fine by me. Whether we start from the beginning or the end, we have to watch it all anyway."

As she spoke, Han Liuyue strode toward the tail end of the candle. The end of the candle represented the last day of Westley’s life—it couldn’t foretell the future.

Jin Xueli set the corpse down, knelt on the floor, and opened the groove corresponding to November 16.

A moment later, the candle seen through the camcorder lens softened, melted, and drooped, hanging a transparent, shimmering sheet of Candle Tears in midair, smooth as the surface of a lake.

Han Liuyue held her breath.

Even though she had known, intellectually, what she was about to see, she couldn’t suppress her astonishment when she saw a tiny, living Westley shuffle into a study.

’...So this was what he experienced, what he saw, on the last day of his life?’

No matter how long you were a Hunter, Illusions and the Nest never ceased to amaze.

The miniature Westley seemed to be working, sitting alone at his desk without moving for quite some time.

’He’s been alone this whole time. Could it really have been a heart problem...?’

Jin Xueli reached out and gently nudged the Candle Tears, fast-forwarding time as if it were a movie. But then the image in the Candle Tears suddenly went blank. The study and the tiny figure were gone.

Han Liuyue looked up and met Jin Xueli’s equally shocked expression.

"What happened?"

Jin Xueli fiddled with it, moving it back and forth, but couldn’t figure it out. She grabbed the corpse’s hand and slapped it against the candle a few times, as if it were a broken television.

"Did I go too far? Is he already dead at this point?"

Looking at the spot the corpse had touched, Han Liuyue asked, "When the person themselves touches the candle, does the corresponding date appear?"

"Yeah," Jin Xueli answered.

"Look," Han Liuyue said, moving her camera closer. "Right here. It should be showing November 15th, right? The part we melted was the very end. You must have accidentally touched the spot for the day before."

Jin Xueli looked.

After a few seconds, she asked, "...Where’s the date? Why isn’t anything showing up?"

"Drag the corpse and let’s move toward the middle," Han Liuyue instructed. "Let’s see if the earlier dates are consecutive."

Half an hour later, they had their answer.

The candle that should have displayed the entire history of Westley’s life was now shrouded in a thick fog that gathered and dissipated intermittently.

Wherever the fog concealed the surface, either entire days were missing, or the scenes themselves were gone.

Within a timeframe of roughly one year, they touched the candle with the corpse’s hand twenty-five times. A date appeared only twelve of those times. And of those twelve days, only three showed complete experiences with clear scenes.

The two of them exchanged a look. From Jin Xueli’s expression, Han Liuyue knew they had both arrived at the same conclusion.

"It’s because he’s dead, isn’t it?" Jin Xueli surmised. "If we’d come any later, maybe nothing would have shown up on the candle at all."

"So, the ’change the past’ function isn’t as great as it sounds."

Han Liuyue fought the urge to sigh. "I was thinking on the way here, if a dead person’s experiences could be made to appear and then altered, wouldn’t that mean you could reverse death itself? Turns out there’s this limitation."

"So what do we do now?" Jin Xueli asked.

Han Liuyue looked at her.

"What are you looking at me for?" Jin Xueli grew wary.

"Nothing... Since the experiences are incomplete, we’ll just have to record what’s here. Testing it bit by bit is going to be grunt work. Think you can handle it?"

For some reason, Jin Xueli was always susceptible to her provocations.

"Get back with your camera," she said, suddenly fired up. "Corpse coming through!"