Artifact Report

Chapter 431 Fu Tailan·Chiyu’s Disaster

"Please,"

Carter Morgan's once round and well-proportioned face now looked like a balloon that had been half-deflated; although the skin, flesh, and bones were still there, they looked dull and withered.

He slumped in the passenger seat, his head tilted against the seat, his light-colored eyelashes framing his bright, watery eyes. He looked at Fu Tailan with the gaze of a child looking up at his father.

"Please... let me treat my foot injury first... I'm losing too much blood, it hurts so much..."

Fu Tailan found him utterly incomprehensible. "Don't be unreasonable, you're an adult."

"How am I being unreasonable!" Carter exclaimed hastily, then quickly lowered his voice and pleaded, "I'm about to faint... Let me heal your wounds before I can take you to your father..."

"You have no right not to tell me your address."

Fu Tailan calmly said, "Either die, or tell me the exact address. With the address, I can go directly there; I won't need you. If I don't need you, why should I treat your injuries? You have no right to make demands, yet you're making demands of me—isn't that unreasonable?"

Carter's pale, skinny mouth was half-open, but he couldn't speak.

He squeezed his eyes shut, as if fighting off the dizziness; after a few seconds, he said, “No—you need me. Because I’ve stationed a lot of bodyguards and hunters there…”

“Then let’s have a fight,” Fu Tailan said realistically. “Even Chess Monroe couldn’t kill me, so the person you’re paying to hire should be more capable and more willing to risk his life than him.”

Besides, what's there to be afraid of if Carter goes first?

Carter Morgan paused for a moment.

He eventually gave the address. Carter silently took off his shirt, revealing a middle-aged man's belly that even exercise couldn't reduce, and used the shirt as a bandage to tightly wrap another layer around his foot—the first layer of the jacket used as a bandage was already soaked with blood.

“Fu Han deserves to die…” he mumbled, “It’s no wonder he raised such a devil as you.”

A few seconds later, Fu Tailan laughed so hard that tears almost came out—Carter was stunned and even mustered up the courage to ask, "Are you crazy?"

"Maybe it really isn't unfair. Let's wait and see."

Fu Tailan finally managed to stop laughing, raised his pistol, and wiped away his tears with the black muzzle. He turned to look at the building in the night and asked, "Is this the place?"

It's just an ordinary apartment building; it doesn't look like a place where high-risk individuals are detained.

Compared to the last time when they threw Fu Han into the state prison, this was really a bit unoriginal.

“As the saying goes, the greatest hermit lives in the city,” Carter said with a sullen face. “You probably didn’t expect that Fu Han would be locked up in such a busy place with so many people and so many eyes on him.”

"You underestimated my lesson? Haven't you learned your lesson yet?" Fu Tailan gestured with her chin at him. "Get out of the car."

Perhaps it was because Fu Tailan was covered in injuries and her mind was beginning to blur?
But he was still certain—well, he was only 80% sure—that when he got off the bus, the sky over Blackmore City was still the sky.

He forgot how he realized it, and he forgot who realized it first; when Fu Tailan raised his head and looked up at the night sky, he did not see clouds and rain.

It is a nest.

The streets, buildings, roads, and alleys of the lair... have become a new dome, inverted above Blackmore City.

Blackmore City seemed to be a reflection of its lair, swaying and trembling in the slowing drizzle.

No...that's not right.

It's not Blackmore City that's swaying...

Fu Tailan grabbed onto a lamppost by the roadside and caught her breath.

"What's going on?" Carter asked, his mouth slightly agape as he stared at the night sky. "W-why is there a reflection of the city in the sky? Is it a reflection? Does it have anything to do with you?"

He soon realized that it wasn't a reflection.

High in the sky, countless buildings stretched downwards and into the human world; several small shadows peeked out from the buildings, pointing and gesturing towards the human world below.

After a while, one of the shadows peeked out of the window.

It began to descend little by little.

Even Carter, who had never seen any residents before, gasped in shock, his voice changing – “What, what is that? It’s coming down! Hey, Fu Tai Lan, it’s coming down!”

"I'm not blind. This place is huge, and it's not going to fall into our hands, so what's there to be afraid of?"

Two people who were clearly locked in a life-or-death struggle stood side by side, as if they were both looking up at the moon, watching the sky and the dark shadows gradually descending in the sky for a while.

If you insist on calling it humanoid, that wouldn't be wrong—it does have a head, shoulders, and a torso; it has all the physiological structures and shapes that a human should have.

But it definitely doesn't look like a human.

Every segment of this "human figure" would be suddenly pinched shut, forming a narrow connecting point; to put it another way, it was like a long string of sausages connected together but not yet cut. The two watched as the "person," resembling a long string of sausages, hung longer and longer from the window, getting closer and closer to the human world, until finally, with a "whoosh," it seemed to be completely squeezed out of the window, falling straight down two or three streets away, landing among a cluster of buildings.

Could this also be an effect of the original solution?

The way their nests invade humans is quite interesting.

"Let's hurry, it'll be safe once we're inside the building." Carter wiped his face vigorously, suddenly much more enthusiastic than before. "What if something else falls around here..."

Fu Tailan raised an eyebrow slightly.

"It's only safe once you're inside the building?"
If this building is just an ordinary residential building, and the Fu Han is being kept here to avoid suspicion, and the security measures are just some hunters, bodyguards, and decoys—what makes Carter so confident that it can resist residents and the lair?
Was Carter too naive, or did he inadvertently reveal a bit of the truth?
Fu Tailan is a genius at lying; he has an almost abnormal sensitivity to all deception and fraud.

He watched as Carter limped and hurried toward the apartment building, his hand already gripping the gun tightly.

Perhaps it was because Fu Tailan was so focused on observing Carter and pondering the hidden dangers in the apartment building that he was a step too late.

When that rule, enveloped in raindrops, gently fell into Carter's soaked, sparse curly hair, Fu Tailan didn't even realize what she was seeing.

……what?
Why do words appear in my mind when it looks like rain?

"The first human to receive this rule within any 24-hour period will be protected under the 1998 Nest Humanitarian Act (hereinafter referred to as this Act). This Act aims to liberate humanity and make it aware of the absurdity and error of the human world. To this end, this Act will provide the following protections and guarantees to eligible humans:"
"First, the peace that comes from faith. You will turn to the nest, believe in the nest, and let the light of the nest spread across the earth."

"Second, material abundance. Each person can request one illusion and one human weapon, the types of which are randomly distributed."

"Third, freedom from fear, from threats, from physical or mental harm."

"Fourth, you can freely use your power to instill fear in others, threaten others, and inflict physical or psychological harm on others."

"5. This protection lasts for one hour."

Fu Tailan was completely dumbfounded.

What kind of luck is this? No way!
He stared blankly at Carter—Carter had clearly noticed something was wrong, stopped at the gate, and touched the top of his head.

"Huh?" Carter was still not quite understanding. "What? What humanitarian bill?"

He didn't look up at the "raindrops"; only his scalp came into contact with the rules.

Carter clearly didn't see it, yet he seemed to know the rules as well—could it be that these rules would still be effective after they were implemented in the human world?
Fu Tailan was jolted awake by this thought.

He had less than a few seconds to react—more precisely, whether he would have any chance to fight back depended entirely on that brief moment before Carter understood the situation and turned to him.

Before Carter could turn around, Fu Tailan took off running, lunging at the car parked by the roadside; he crouched down behind the car and, without stopping for a moment, stealthily made his way to a nearby alley.

"The mansion—wait, the mansion is too blue?"

At the apartment building entrance, Carter's surprised voice rang out. "Ah, my foot..."

Cursing under his breath, Fu Tailan quickly looked up at the sky.

...Yes, it's raining in the nest; but what's wrapped in the rain and shimmering with silver light in the night are all rules.

A variety of rules, from different sources and numbering in the hundreds, formed a new rain, which drifted down into the world.

Fu Tailan watched helplessly as a rule fell upon him; he hurriedly dodged to the side, took a few steps back, and crouched down behind another car—the alley next to the apartment building was only a dozen steps away from him.

"Strange, twisted, swaying, and wobbly, bestowing upon admirers a strange, twisted, and swaying posture."

……what?
The rules before and after have all been scattered and drifted away to who knows where, yet they can still take effect on their own; if you happen to encounter this, you might not even know how to follow the rules.

Fu Tailan quietly stood up slightly and peeked into the front of the apartment building.

Carter was still standing at the building entrance—he was there so that Fu Tailan couldn't go onto the sidewalk, because he would spot her immediately.

Carter Morgan had turned around at some point and was now facing Fu Tailan.

His face was flushed, and it was hard to tell whether it was excitement, madness, or the exhilaration of having his faith finally confirmed.

"You're too quick to react!" Carter laughed repeatedly, clapping his hands vigorously. "You're too quick to react! No wonder you're a genius young hunter... I just realized what was going on, and when I turned around, you were already gone! No wonder you've been to the lair so many times at such a young age, and the lair couldn't keep you alive."

He lifted his foot, ripped off the clothes he was using as a bandage, and threw them aside.

"What... that really startled me. A lowly person who crawled out of who knows which backwater village, almost made me think the world was about to change."

He softened his voice, scanning the night streets in circles, and said softly, "Didn't I say it before? This world exists for people like me... This world is a giant brotherhood."

(End of this chapter)