Chapter 409 - 357: Fu Tailan · Complete Trust · Illusion Exchange · Need to Flee Immediately

The Vulture had never once considered that it was Fu Tailan's next meal.

After Fu Tailan convinced it that he, too, was a Vulture, the trust it extended him was almost startling — as if knowing they were the same kind was all it took.

Fu Tailan helped it track down a Hunter inside the Nest, then walked alongside it — freshly shifted into human form — into the world of the living, and led it straight into the Black Abyss Belt. The whole thing went off without a hitch. No complications, no surprises. When it came down to it, the whole thing was just legwork.

"This is the place?"

The Vulture stood beside him on the lawn of Westley Manor, craning its neck into the thick black fog. "And after, we just use the Path to get back to the Nest?"

The word "yes" caught in Fu Tailan's throat.

Something unfamiliar had wedged itself in there alongside the lie.

He had to pause, swallow that strange thing back down, and only then could he make room for the lie. "That's right," he said. "Didn't I use Fu Tailan's Path to get back to the Nest myself?"

The Vulture nodded without a trace of suspicion. "Then let's go," it said, and stepped one foot into the black fog.

Fu Tailan swallowed a "wait."

Why had he wanted to call it back? Everything he'd put himself through in the Black Abyss Belt — wasn't it all for exactly this moment?

Using the Black Abyss Belt to alter cognition could only go so far — at most, it could make residents doubt or misread his identity. He couldn't add truly human qualities to himself through theory and logic alone. No matter how deeply he believed himself to be a resident, if someone shot him, he'd still die.

But if he could take a fragment of Han Liuyue, he could take a fragment of a resident.

"Wow, this is incredible,"

The Vulture's voice drifted back through the fog, tinged with something almost like excitement. "Everything's black… We're probably the first residents to ever come in here…"

That unfamiliar thing rose again, lodging in his throat. Fu Tailan swallowed it back down.

It was just a resident. Just a Vulture. Its true form was grotesque enough that you'd rather not look at it twice.

He watched the Vulture fade into the Black Abyss Belt, then forced his feet to move and followed it in.

He had never told the Vulture what happened inside the Black Abyss Belt.

And he certainly wasn't going to tell it how to resist dissolution.

Fu Tailan stood motionless in the dark and felt every stage of the Vulture's slow unraveling.

Just as he himself had been once, it became an egg yolk suspended in water, softening and losing its shape. And just as he'd expected, it had a brief, frantic moment of confusion before it lost the capacity to think at all.

"What's happening? My body feels wrong…" it pleaded. "Help me… please…"

Even that plea drifted away.

Fu Tailan watched it dissolve at last into a drifting cloud of scattered fragments, free for him to sift through and take what he needed.

Strange.

He wondered, briefly, if he was crying. But inside the Black Abyss Belt, he couldn't feel tears.

"…Not necessarily,"

Chaisi's voice came from somewhere distant: "He can't trust anyone, and no one can trust him. He can only go it alone. But just to be safe…"

Fu Tailan was lying on the hospital room floor, his mind slowly reassembling itself, when that sentence reached him.

He hadn't taken many of the Vulture's fragments.

If he'd absorbed a large volume of fragments fundamentally unlike himself, it would have become an open question whether "Fu Tailan" could still persist — or whether the person who remained at the end would still be "Fu Tailan" at all.

Beyond that, perhaps because of some essential barrier between human and resident, many of the fragments inside the Vulture resisted him no matter how he reached for them, no matter how he tried to absorb them — they simply refused to merge.

In the end, the Vulture fragments Fu Tailan managed to keep amounted to no more than two fistfuls.

Just enough to fill one hand.

They couldn't give him the ability to shapeshift, and they wouldn't turn him from human into resident. They preserved only what the Vulture had always been: no matter how thoroughly it was beaten, shattered, or ground into pulp, it could still cling to its core and gradually reconstitute itself.

Chaisi had held a gun to his head long enough that even an idiot would have known to shift that portion of the Vulture's fragment to wherever the bullet would pass through. What belonged to Fu Tailan had never been pierced by a bullet. What got pierced was only that small part — a fragment of a Vulture that had trusted too easily.

Everyone who had ever fallen for Fu Tailan's tricks had been deceived by his traps and lies. They'd convinced themselves they were making sound judgments and smart decisions. But not one of them had ever actually trusted Fu Tailan the person. The Vulture, clearly, hadn't understood that distinction — and so it had been erased from the world.

By the time Chaisi threw him onto the hospital bed, most of Fu Tailan's faculties had returned. He simply lay still, watching for an opening.

That was how he noticed it: because of that one sentence, he had begun to feel a new kind of hatred for Chaisi.

…A shame, really — if only Chaisi's guard had slipped in that moment of surprise.

Han Liuyue had left the door open when she walked out — probably so someone could keep an eye on the sign by the door, to make sure no one took it. After he fired twice more, the commotion and voices from down the corridor grew louder, rolling in like waves, crashing into the room one after another.

"You can't kill a resident," Fu Tailan raised his voice to cut through the noise, "and you can't kill me."

He kept his grip tight on the gun — tight enough that his tendons and bones ached with a dull, persistent throb — but he still hadn't found the right moment to take a shot at Chaisi.

Chaisi had stayed crouched at the foot of the bed the whole time, sitting squarely in Fu Tailan's blind spot, effectively cutting off every route he had off the bed.