Illusion Report

Chapter 175: Chapter 143: Fu Tailan: Brief Ten Minutes

When he came to his senses, he was standing in the dark, narrow hallway of the apartment building.

One more step and he would be past the door to Room 209. If he reached out, he could touch the TV screen.

Sweat, gasps, a daze, the dull ache on his face, and tears... His limbs felt weak. He dazedly lifted his head and glanced at the screen.

His mother had just been dragged inside. The car door slammed shut with a BANG.

The woman who had acted as bait hurriedly got into the car. Soon, it was speeding away.

On the silent, endless highway stretching between heaven and earth, only his mother’s car remained, parked by the roadside. Its door was ajar, and it was empty. Fu Tailan was not inside.

He had clearly rushed over just now.

He hadn’t listened. He had made his choice. But just as Fu Tailan charged forward, something tripped him. He stumbled, and by the time he regained his balance, he was once again looking at the apartment hallway.

Fu Tailan covered his mouth and looked down. At his feet was a backpack.

The backpack that had been slung over one shoulder had slipped off at some point and fallen to the floor, tripping him and snapping him out of it.

’No... It’s probably not that simple.’

The illusion on the second floor of the apartment building was as vivid and intense as reality. He hadn’t even noticed the backpack fall to the ground in his daze. Just being tripped by it shouldn’t have been enough to break the illusion the building had created.

’Could the real reason be what Mom said?’

Fu Tailan suddenly looked up.

If he rushed into the screen now, drove after them, and called the police immediately, it wouldn’t be too late. He could still save her—

’...Are you kidding me?’

In the TV’s reality, he didn’t even know if the woman driving the car was really his mother. Fu Tailan had never met his mother.

Even the only photograph he had of her was blurry and washed out, the image obscured. Besides, a photograph was too flimsy to build the image of a real, complete person.

He didn’t even know if it was a genuine parallel reality at all.

As he bent down to pick up the backpack, his fingers trembled. It took him several tries to get a firm grip on the strap.

Staring at the screen—at the highway, the summer sky, and the grandmother’s house at the end of the road that he would never reach—Fu Tailan backed away from the door of Room 209, step by step. As he moved away from the screen, a sharp cry for help suddenly came from inside Room 209: "Xiaotai!"

It was her calling him. It was his mother—

The urge to rush in and the reason pulling him back were two forces he couldn’t balance. He became like a helpless boat caught between two raging torrents. His legs could no longer support him, and he collapsed heavily onto the floor.

Fu Tailan buried his head between his knees, hugged his legs, and began to cry softly.

Some distant part of his rational mind was still analyzing the situation. One by one, thoughts cut through the fog of his tears and entered his mind. freewёbnoνel.com

The first possibility was that he had misunderstood.

She had said what she did only to get Fu Tailan back in the car. The others had a gun; if he got shot, the situation would become irreversible.

That would still mean his mother wanted to save him.

The second possibility was... the parallel reality created by the apartment, and the mother within it, shouldn’t have actively warned him not to enter.

What she said might have just been another form of a Venus flytrap.

The mother in the parallel reality wanted him to know how much she loved him, how much she wanted him to be safe. To that end, she would even pretend to want him to escape the parallel reality. Only then would Fu Tailan willingly choose—

He refused to think about it any further.

In the reality on this side of the TV, he didn’t know if his mother really looked like the woman on the screen, nor had he ever spent seventeen years with her.

In the reality on the other side of the TV, he didn’t know if that was his mother.

If the parallel reality was fake and his mother was an illusion, it might be better from a logical standpoint. But for some reason, Fu Tailan couldn’t even bear to entertain the thought.

If the parallel reality was real, not just something the apartment used to harm people, then that meant...

Fu Tailan had let his own mother get kidnapped and had done nothing.

Either way, it felt designed to torture him.

’Wait...’

Fu Tailan lifted his head in a daze, staring at the blurry, shifting light and shadows on the opposite wall. His entire mind was seized by a sudden thought.

There was a way—only one way—to find out the truth.

’Just go in.’

’Is the parallel reality a lie? Is there really a mother waiting for me? As long as I enter the TV in Room 209, I’ll know, won’t I?’

Of course, if the parallel reality didn’t exist, going in would mean the end of "Fu Tailan."

It wasn’t that Fu Tailan was particularly attached to his life, but he couldn’t just throw it away without a second thought either.

’After all, if I go in... what about Fu Han? What will he do?’

Just as he was lost in a daze, a pair of cold hands touched his neck.

The next second, the hands clamped around his throat like an iron lock.

Fu Tailan jolted. As he instinctively reached for the hands, a force yanked him backward, and the back of his head hit the floor tiles with a THUD. The impact was so hard that his vision went black.

In a flash, Fu Tailan remembered the blurry light and shadows on the wall in front of him and understood everything.

When he had stumbled away from the door of Room 209, when he had collapsed to the ground, sobbing with blurry vision, he hadn’t noticed that he had fallen right in front of the door to Room 210.

The TV in Room 210 had been aimed at his back the whole time. Unlike the other TVs, it hadn’t made a single sound, as if it knew that waiting quietly was the best strategy.

In his dazed state, Fu Tailan had indeed unknowingly sat there for a full thirty seconds. Those hands were here to "receive" him into the parallel reality of Room 210.

As he was being dragged by the neck into Room 210, Fu Tailan wanted to laugh out loud.

’Could this be any more absurd?’

He had just abandoned the reality where his mother was, and now the apartment wanted him to enter another one, God knows where? Did it think he would just meekly resign himself to his fate and go in?

As he was dragged past the doorway, he struggled, stretched out his arm, and grabbed the doorknob. The pressure on his neck instantly multiplied several times over, squeezing so hard that blood buzzed in his head and his vision blurred.

Gritting his teeth, Fu Tailan fought against the waves of dizziness from the lack of oxygen. With one hand, he steadied himself; with the other, he managed to reach behind his back and find his gun.

In the narrow space, a series of explosive gunshots rang out, leaving his ears numb.

He couldn’t see if he had hit the TV, but he felt the hands on his neck loosen slightly. He seized the opportunity, flipped over, scrambled to his feet, and bolted out of Room 210.

Clutching his throat with one hand, Fu Tailan bent over, GASPING for breath.

After he took a few steps away from the direct line of sight of the television, making sure he wouldn’t be pulled in again, he finally raised his eyes to glance at the screen in Room 210.

...How ridiculous. He was playing the part of the father in a family portrait.

Fu Tailan hung his head and started to laugh intermittently. The laughter went from weak and hollow to hard and brittle, punctuated by heavy gasps.

"...A little too eager," he said to the hallway. "Couldn’t even wait past thirty seconds to come and drag me in?"

The apartment was silent. There was no reply.

On the TV in Room 210, there was still just a family portrait.

"If you had just waited a little longer, I would have gotten up myself and walked back into Room 209." freёwebnovel.com

He gasped, wiping his face and smearing the sweat, tears, and seeping blood all over his sleeve.

"You play with people’s minds to this extent, but it never occurred to you that someone might go back on their own?"

But thanks to its impatience, Fu Tailan was now wide awake.

"I never had a mother to begin with. All these years, it’s just been me and Fu Han," he said, almost calmly. "The woman you showed on that TV has nothing to do with me."

After a pause, Fu Tailan gave a mocking smile.

"I don’t know how many times I fantasized about a more ideal mother than her when I was a kid," he said. "In any case, it doesn’t change this reality, does it?"

’I’m this old and I still almost fell for the image of a mother. I can’t let the other Hunters in the Family Faction hear about this. It’s too embarrassing.’

Fu Tailan took out his phone and looked at it.

The last photo in his album was of the residents’ mailboxes he had taken earlier.

Putting his phone away, he looked up toward the end of the hallway and said, "Are you done playing? I’m going upstairs now."

The second floor of the apartment building seemed to be just a hallway full of various parallel realities, but it concealed a great number of ways to harm people.

But strangely, Fu Tailan wasn’t angry.

He had fallen into the illusion like a fool, bickered with his mother, worried for her, been afraid for her, and wept in a grief-stricken daze...

After being played with like that, Fu Tailan thought he should be so furious he’d want to burn this building down. But he didn’t feel a trace of anger in his heart.

He turned around in the hallway. Instead of walking toward the stairs at the end, he silently walked back to the door of Room 208.

He looked at the TV screen, hitched his backpack up on his shoulder, and took a soft breath.

’Time to go. Time to head upstairs.’

As he charged headfirst toward the TV, Fu Tailan squeezed his eyes shut.

...In any case, for ten brief, genuine minutes, he had been loved by his mother.