"Oh dear, it’s already gone."
...Fu Tailan hadn’t seen many truly old people, but he thought, ’A human face, no matter how old, could never look like this.’
He didn’t even dare let his gaze fall directly on that ancient face. He suspected his eyes would get trapped in the folds of skin, unable to pull free, and eventually be ground to pieces.
Staring for a few more seconds would probably cause his own eyeballs to crawl with a dense web of blood vessels, mirroring the wrinkles.
"That’s right, I’ve always been the one in charge of the gate key. But since last week, I just can’t find it..."
Last week—the sa ti the Bronk brothers returned to Blackmoor City with the key.
"Sigh, when you get old, your mory just isn’t what it used to be. Can you do an old man a favor? If you find the key, bring it to ..."
The resident spoke, raising a hand to peel back the skin on his cheek, revealing the half of his mouth it had been covering.
Deep vertical fissures radiated out, all pointing toward a black hole of a mouth. From within that hole, a voice that seed to echo from a great distance erged: "Bring it to . Put it in my mouth. Hmm? You ask what I want it for? I need to replace the key I lost. If soone else loses their key, that’s no longer my responsibility. At least I’ll be able to lock my door. Find it for . You won’t regret it..."
’Can the gate keys from different places really be used interchangeably?’
If Fu Tailan could find a key and try it on another gate, he might get an answer—but that idea was a non-starter.
Because he hadn’t found a single key.
Getting tangled up with residents or falling into the Nest’s traps were things Fu Tailan was ntally prepared for. What he hadn’t expected was that, starting from May, every single trip into the Nest had ended with him coming back empty-handed.
The hotel receptionist hadn’t lied. The keys did seem to be very common; almost every place had one.
Unfortunately, at every single place he checked, the key had vanished for one reason or another. There was even one administrator who was said to have just been sealed inside a concrete house, key and all. In short, whenever he was looking for a key, there were none to be found.
It was as if after the Bronk brothers found a key and rushed back to Blackmoor City, the Nest had suddenly wisened up and, belatedly trying to lock the stable after the horse had bolted, buried all the remaining keys.
But... how was that possible?
The Nest was just a na for this space. It didn’t have a unified will, let alone self-awareness.
The only ones who could be deliberately making the keys disappear from the Nest were so of the sentient, intelligent residents.
But, setting aside the question of whether they could even cooperate, why would they do this?
Was their motive for hiding the keys the sa as Westley’s reason for wanting them?
Fu Tailan had no answer for now.
Such frequent entry into the Nest had already made his connection to the Human World increasingly thin and pale, like a scrap of paper soaked soft and washed out, leaving only a remnant of its fibers. By September, Longzhen took the initiative to demand that he rest in Blackmoor City for at least two or three weeks and temporarily stop entering the Nest.
"Just now, it took you about ten seconds to recognize who I am."
After closing the office door, Longzhen warned in a low voice, "I’ve been in HR for years. I know this is a symptom of ’Nest Dissociation Syndro.’ It ans your sense of reality is being impacted. The younger you are, the more susceptible you are, because your roots in the Human World aren’t as firmly planted as others’.
"When these symptoms appear, the Family Faction’s rules state that you can’t enter the Nest anymore, not even if you’re a supervisor. Besides, sumr vacation ended long ago. Shouldn’t you at least be going to school and attending classes?"
Fu Tailan stared blankly for a mont before he could pull the word ’school’ out of a vast, white fog and bring it into focus. He had to think a bit more before he understood its aning—not the schools he had seen in the Nest, but the one in the Human World, the place where you had to attend classes and talk to classmates.
Although he had always tried to act like an adult, he still had the temperant of a youth: once he had a goal, he found it difficult to sit still.
He hadn’t expected that a mont of carelessness—just a few too many trips to the Nest—would cause so much cumulative strain on his mind.
"So this is what’s called ’Nest Dissociation Syndro’?"
Fu Tailan murmured, "Ever since my first trip to the Nest, I’ve felt it from ti to ti... Sotis it’s severe, other tis it’s fine."
"Yes. Didn’t Mr. Fu tell you? Or did he not know either? This is exactly why I require Household Hunters to stay in the Nest for a maximum of fourteen days a month—anything beyond that doesn’t count toward performance." Longzhen glanced at him and said, "You haven’t read the mos and emails I sent you, have you? All that is experience the Morgan Family paid for with blood and tears."
"...Because they’re really boring," Fu Tailan admitted honestly.
A Family Faction like the Morgan Family, with its fully developed system of regulations and operations similar to a large corporation, had a real talent for turning the most exciting thing in the world into the most sleep-inducing employee handbook.
"That won’t do," Longzhen insisted. "We’ll have to stress this in a eting this afternoon—where do you think you’re going? Get up. You have to attend, too."
She paused, then said, "Besides, you should start processing the Ti Illusion that Remy Squad brought back."
...’A Ti Illusion?’
It was an arrangent Fu Tailan himself had made, yet he had to think for a few seconds before it clicked—this Illusion wasn’t *that* Illusion.
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