Artifact Report

Chapter 384 Unknowable - Residents and the Cloakroom
"This is not the Kai family mansion,"

Tianxi glanced at Jin Xueli, knowing she was confused, and explained first.

"Huh?" She was indeed taken aback. "Didn't you say you were going to take me back to the Kai family mansion? Why are we here?"

Tianxi adjusted the rearview mirror; the road in the mirror was still empty, with no headlights in sight, only a thick curtain of rain covering the world.

“We’re being followed. Of course, I can’t possibly lead the guys who’re following us all the way back to the Kai family mansion.”

"Who?" Kim Seol-ri turned around abruptly, squinting as she peered behind the car. "I didn't see anything... Are they hiding now?"

"No, it never appeared along the way."

Upon hearing this, Jin Xueli paused for a moment, then gave him a look that seemed to say, "What if you suddenly go crazy and I lose my life?"

Tianxi sighed again. He had sighed quite a bit ever since she got on the bus—since he couldn't get a word in edgewise, all he could do was sigh.

“Even though you were driving slowly, you were still hovering around 50 miles per hour. If the other person wasn’t driving, how could you follow them? If they were driving, how could you not see them?” Jin Xueli spoke very quickly. “Besides, in this kind of weather, there aren’t many cars on the road.”

“Not human.” Tianxi unbuckled his seatbelt, pulled a gun from under his seat, and asked, “What weapons do you have on you?”

Kim Seol-ri held out both hands to him. "Here."

...I don't know where Brother Chai found such a person.

Fortunately, he had plenty of weapons in his car; it's just unknown how useful they would be against non-humans.

“What else could it be but a human?” Jin Xueli took the gun he gave her, frowned, and said, “This is Blackmore City… Ah, I know! Today the Knight family released a kind of nest-like creature to track me. Those human-head balloons can’t just be floating on the roof of the car right now, can they?”

Tianxi couldn't help but glance at the roof of the car—unfortunately, this car didn't have a sunroof.

“I haven’t seen the human head balloon you mentioned, so I can’t be sure,” he said in a low voice. “Back when I was in the lair, I was once forced to eat a meal from the residents.”

Kim Seol-ri honestly showed a look of disgust. "Residents' food? Aren't residents supposed to eat people? You ate people?"

“No,” Tianxi himself didn’t want to recall that day, but he had to say it now. “I didn’t eat ‘residents’ food,’ I ate ‘residents’ food.’ When you hear ‘seafood rice,’ do you think it’s rice for seafood?”

Jin Xueli's face turned pale instantly. "You...you've eaten...the residents?"

“I told you, I was forced.” Tianxi wiped his face hard, the gun still gripping tightly in his other hand. “Do you think I wanted to? I was unintentionally dragged into a fight between two residents. I heard that some people go dozens of times and still might not encounter a conflict between the two residents, but I just happened to run into one… The one who had the upper hand couldn’t kill the one who was defeated, so he made it into a table full of dishes and forced me to eat it.”

It's a vegetable, but it's still alive.

It takes more than a dozen chews to barely break down the throbbing nerves in your mouth; with each chew, a hoarse scream comes from the soup pot on the table.

Just thinking about the feeling of the resident's tentacles pressing against his mouth, unwilling to fall into his throat, swimming back in his saliva, and the feeling of having to forcefully swallow them—even many years later, Tianxi still breaks out in a cold sweat.

He managed to escape by any means necessary, and as soon as he gained his freedom, he immediately vomited everything out of his stomach; he didn't even need to gag himself, because the inhabitants of his stomach were also trying to crawl out of his throat.

Kim Seol-ri covered her mouth, looking as if she was on the verge of vomiting.

"Although I vomited, I still suspect that I didn't vomit completely, and that I may have digested and absorbed some of it."

He "feasted" on his residents, repeating the phrase "you're what you eat" at the dinner table at least fifty times—perhaps forcing him to eat the residents was a way to turn Tianxi into a resident.

“Since that day, I’ve become very sensitive to the inhabitants. I can vaguely sense their presence… but not precisely. How should I put it? It’s like walking into a very humid room; you can immediately detect the difference, but you still can’t pinpoint where the water molecules are distributed.”

Jin Xueli started to get a little restless. "When did you start feeling this way?"

“It was intermittent, sometimes there and sometimes it didn’t,” Tianxi recalled. “It was difficult to pinpoint a precise time.”

"Anything else? I mean, that meal..."

Tianxi understood what she meant. "Actually, the seasoning is quite good."

Jin Xueli glared at him, and he shrugged. "Because there's nothing else to say."

He didn't acquire the remarkable ability to "detect the presence of inhabitants," which had previously been completely useless—the nest was full of inhabitants, so this feeling never stopped and served no warning purpose whatsoever; it only prevented him from sleeping well when he was resting.

He also doesn't know how effective it will be.

"So we've driven to this place..." Jin Xueli glanced helplessly out of the car a few times, "What's the next step?"

***
“The sense of the residents’ presence disappeared for a while just now, and I don’t know if it will come back,” Tianxi explained. “Let’s go inside first, otherwise sitting in the car indefinitely isn’t a solution.”

indeed.

The furious wind and rain, like a torrent, pounded against the car roof, turning the outside of the windows into a dark, vast expanse of water. Sitting inside, even with the doors and windows tightly closed, there was always a sense of unease, as if a gust of wind might tear the car apart at any moment, leaving it exposed like clam meat.

Jin Xueli walked in the cold rain, following Tianxi step by step towards the main building of the manor, her whole body trembling; perhaps she shouldn't be thinking about this when she was being chased, but she just couldn't control herself—she raised her head and barely managed to take in the main building in the dark rainy night, and suddenly realized that nine million was nothing at all.

"You can change your wet clothes once you go inside; you must be feeling really uncomfortable."

Tianxi clearly didn't have a key, but somehow managed to open the front door lock in just a few moments, surprisingly easily—the lock offered no resistance to such a luxurious and massive building. "This is a house our partner abandoned. There are no security guards now, and it seems like nothing inside has been moved."

The poor people in the world would probably be just as excited as Jin Xueli at this moment if they heard that they could wander in the mansions of the rich, glimpse their daily lives, and enjoy a level of abundance and prosperity beyond their imagination—even if she knew that she still had to leave and that it was not safe for her to leave now.

That's almost terrifying... isn't it?

She walked into the foyer with an almost awe-inspiring air, watching the soft lights gradually illuminate the way ahead, like a country girl entering the Sagrada Familia for the first time.

Humanity's pursuit of beauty, its greed for material possessions, and its wanton squandering of other human beings; humanity's command and taming of the world, demanding that it cater to its arrogance and hubris...

It is both terrifying and captivating, making it impossible to escape.

She gently touched the corridor, the side table, the vase, and the door frame.

"Door frame," "handle," "light"—these were just individual words, the same words used in the trailer she lived in as a child. But seeing them with the naked eye, she realized that so many distant, unconnected galaxies existed on the same Earth.

“It’s so good to be rich,” she murmured. “We’re only born with seventy or eighty years of life. But with money, other people’s time indirectly becomes your time…”

Tianxi looked around, shrugged, and seemed uninterested. "Is it really that amazing? How much can one person enjoy? Such a big house, isn't it unnecessary? The master bedroom is upstairs, do you want to go find some dry clothes?"

Of course she would, but Kim Seol-ri had something more important to do than change her clothes.

"I need to take a picture!" She quickly searched her pockets and rummaged through her backpack, only to find her phone wasn't there. "Huh, my phone—oh, I forgot it charging in your car! Can you come with me to get it?"

“It’s not safe to go out,” Tianxi glanced at her sideways. “Are you really willing to risk being attacked by residents just for taking photos?”

Jin Xueli isn't so willful as to be unable to distinguish between what's important and what's urgent.

For modern people, being without their phones is torture, but right now, besides suffering, she seems to have no other choice—the car is still quite a distance from the main building, and who knows what might happen on the way there.

"You brought your phone, right?"

She was still persistent, especially after seeing a walk-in closet filled with all kinds of women's clothing. "Take a picture for me and send it to me later. Anyway, this house is abandoned, so it doesn't matter. This walk-in closet is bigger than my living room!"

"You don't care about the residents at all?" Tianxi seemed to be both amused and exasperated.

"Live in the moment, live in the moment," Kim Seol-ri stretched out a hand and waved it several times. "If I kept worrying about things I couldn't change, I would have died long ago."

Unable to resist her persistence, Tianxi finally hesitated and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket—Jin Xueli was stunned when she saw it.

“Are you an eighty-year-old?” she immediately withdrew her hand. “Who still uses a folding machine? Is the Kai family not well-treated? I bet your phone is worth no more than a hundred dollars.”

The phone, which she felt she could throw away after one use, stubbornly had a camera still attached; she tried it out and found that it turned her mansion into a haunted house.

“Forget it,” Jin Xueli said dejectedly. “Luckily, I’m not a blogger, I don’t make a living from this.”

She sent Tianxi away, locked the bedroom door, and then remembered that he knew how to pick locks, so she moved a single sofa to block the doorknob so that it couldn't turn.

It wasn't that she didn't trust Tianxi; it was just a habit she had developed since childhood.

In the trailer that she and her mother called home, whenever a man appeared, she would make sure to lock the door tightly when she washed up or went to the toilet; she would also make sure to keep her distance from men.

Once everything was settled, Kim Seol-ri turned and walked towards the dressing room.

It connected to such a luxurious and beautiful bathroom, even having a separate area for grooming; the walk-in closet was incomprehensibly large. Countless clothes, clothes whose prices I can't even imagine, shimmered softly under the spotlights.

One by one, row upon row, so many... the walk-in closet is so big...

The walk-in closet is so big... so spacious...

Such a deep walk-in closet... so many beautiful clothes...

Jin Xueli kept walking and walking, and kept walking.

Keep watching, keep watching, keep watching.

(End of this chapter)