Artifact Report

Chapter 74 Mai Minghe: Harvest of the First Hour
...Xiao Wei just said clearly that what it envied most was "Robi's blue eyes."

The Robbie that Xiaowei mentioned should be the same person as the "Robbie Margaret" in the photo, right?
The woman in the photo on the wall was talking to someone with her face turned sideways, revealing only one eye - an unmistakable brown eye.

If those eyes were the face she was looking for...

But the eyes in the photo should be two-dimensional. How can you use a three-dimensional eye to imitate them?

Even at Mai Minghe's 5.72 meters, she had to stand on tiptoe and stretch her arms to reach the photo at the top. She traced the smooth surface of the photo with her fingertips, and even though she was mentally prepared, she still couldn't help but take a deep breath.

It's the eyelashes—

She actually touched her eyelashes in the photo.

Under the eyelashes is a moist and smooth eyeball; when touched by a finger, the eyeball seems to shrink in fear and spins around.

Although now is not the time to admire the nest, Mai Minghe still couldn't help but sigh.

"Eh? How did they do this? How did they hide it so perfectly?" She looked around, hoping a resident would come over and explain it to her. Unfortunately, the waiter just stood there behind the bar, pointing at her with the four fleshy buds in his eye sockets, motionless. "One is a photo, and the other is a living eye. How did they fit together?"

But it is indeed pieced together.

She took the photo down, but the eye part of the photo was empty. It turned out that a hole was dug along the shape of a real eye; the human eye was still on the wall - when Mai Minghe looked up at it, the eyeball was also looking down, and its gaze met hers.

How to take it down?
With this question in mind, Mai Minghe reached out and fiddled with it a few times. Unexpectedly, it was as if he was pulling something out of mud, and his eyes gradually came out of the wall.

It was indeed a three-dimensional human eye, but most of it was melted into the wall, leaving only a surface outside; when it was framed at the right angle and in the middle of the photo, it looked naturally like the eye of the person in the photo.

Finally found……

Mai Minghe breathed a sigh of relief, carefully holding the occasionally blinking human eye, shrouded by its upper and lower eyelids, in her palm. For a moment, she couldn't tell whether she felt a sense of wonder or a touch of fear. Undeterred, she immediately ran to the restroom, holding her eyes. Along the way, every other diner stopped talking and stared at her as she ran, their faces expressionless.

The woman putting on makeup seemed to have had a premonition.

It was still standing in the corner of the bathroom, but one arm stretched out from behind its back, and the hand without the lipstick flipped into the air, spreading out a flat palm towards Mai Minghe.

"These are my eyes," it said in a pointed, thin voice, seemingly delighted. "Well done...Okay, now go find the next one, the next one, the next one, the next one!"

This thing seemed quite unstable, so Mai Minghe quickly left the bathroom.

She was greatly encouraged by the victory.

"Maybe I have potential as a hunter," she muttered to herself as she walked into the dining area, avoiding the three women at the table. "I've been in here twice, and I'm still alive..."

Her second life had just begun, and she didn't even know what to do with it to be worthy of this opportunity.

She wanted to live a completely different life from her previous one, so maybe she should try being a hunter.

Even from a practical point of view, she should find out the ins and outs of the nest and the hunters as soon as possible - after all, there is a hunter family that is hunting down the false image in her body.

"Don't even think about winning the jackpot on your anniversary," the wife at table number 3 said impatiently, "Even if you can drag the body into the lair, the chance that the body will have a way out is only one percent..."

The restaurant was now buzzing with conversation again. Mai Minghe walked between the tables, recalling what hints each table might have given. Even though she didn't need to listen to the diners' current conversations, and she didn't want to, it was inevitable that some words would pass by her ears.

"This nest has been experiencing this phenomenon for so many years, and no one knows why. What can we do?" The man with earrings was holding a taco and was still discussing something that Mai Minghe couldn't understand.

"Ah, so that woman actually stuffed her face into..."

The last sentence was like a hook, which immediately made Mai Minghe stop and turn her neck involuntarily in the direction where the words came from. When she realized that the speaker was the dark brown-skinned man at the table with three female guests, Mai Minghe had already met his eyes.

It seemed as if it was waiting for Mai Minghe's attention to be drawn to it.

"You don't seem to have a place to sit?" The dark brown man immediately greeted her with a smile, "Come, sit here! Let's chat!"

It patted the empty chair beside it vigorously. The fish on the table, which had been picked to pieces, trembled with fear.

How could this happen? Mai Minghe immediately glanced at the clock on the wall—the first hour hadn't even passed yet, with only ten minutes left. The diners could only talk nonsense, lie, or set verbal traps for her; they couldn't take any action against her.

So, are you asking her to sit over there now so that it will be easier for you to take action later?
Mai Minghe was afraid that talking to the woman would lead to something unexpected; she lowered her eyes, shook her head without saying a word, and turned away. The woman seemed to feel regretful and clicked her tongue behind her back.

There are still six faces left. No matter how I think about it, it seems impossible to find them all in ten minutes...

Mai Minghe walked past the table of a single male guest, was suddenly stunned, and then stepped back and took a closer look at his table.

The soup and salad were untouched as it continued to ponder over the computer; the only difference from before was that it lacked a mobile phone.

Yes, it just said that a mobile phone was out of battery... When the mobile phone is out of battery, it is put away, which seems normal.

But from another perspective, the mobile phone that appeared on the table within the "thirty minutes when the clue existed" disappeared from the table within the "thirty minutes when the clue disappeared" - doesn't this just prove that the mobile phone might be the "clue"?

The phone itself shouldn't be the clue, as there's another identical phone on the table. The clue should be in the differences between the two phones.

The phone disappeared because it couldn't be charged...

By the time Mai Minghe reacted, she had already strode to the bar; regardless of the waiter who kept pointing his finger at her flesh bud, she leaned over the bar and looked inside, and sure enough, she saw the socket that the single male customer had complained about as "broken".

The nest seemed to follow the template and style of Blackmore City, and even kept the same details as the sockets. In Blackmore City, a standard socket should look like this:

｜｜
｜｜
The socket above the bar counter was already plugged into the coffee machine. The plug was normal, indicating the socket above was correct, but the socket as a whole was:
｜｜
/-\
The second row of holes looks so familiar no matter how you look at it... Although the plastic plate of the socket is snow-white, don't those two narrow holes that are tilted in an "eight" shape look very similar to human nostrils?

"Hey, get out of the way,"

In her excitement, Mai Minghe didn't even hesitate to touch the waiter, and pushed away its face that was poking around in front of her - after all, the rules only said that diners' faces could not be touched, and waiters were not included - she reached in and felt around the hole a few times. Sure enough, it didn't feel like plastic, but more like skin.

It was melted in. It turned out that the entire nose was melted into the wall behind the socket, leaving only a pair of nostrils as the socket; even the skin around the nostrils was painted white - this was simply a fraud and a foul.

Mai Minghe tried to grab the socket panel, but found it wasn't sealed to the wall. With a firm pull, the panel fell off. Then, just like when she had taken out her glasses, she slowly pried her nose out of the wall.

Having found two faces at once, she was even happier than the woman who was putting on makeup. She pinched the bridge of her nose and placed it on the palm of the woman's hand that was stretched straight back.

"That's great," the makeup woman encouraged. "But these two pieces are the easiest to find without putting your life in danger. You need to keep working on it."

"Isn't this a violation?" Mai Minghe pointed at the nose and said, "The bridge of the nose is flesh-colored, but the area around the nostrils that's exposed is painted a plastic-like white. Doesn't that make sense?"

"Of course it's not a foul." The woman, applying makeup, withdrew her hand. She didn't know what she was doing, but when she lowered it again, the nose had vanished, perhaps returning to its original position. "It's not like there's nothing in this restaurant that can paint my nose white. Besides, giving you a clue and then trying to hide it is only fair, isn't it?"

In fact, the operating rules of the entire restaurant were set by the Nest; Mai Minghe had no say in whether it was fair or what fairness meant.

Even if the nest was just torturing her for fun, and there weren't five faces left out there, there was nothing she could do—she could only suppress the disturbing thought and try not to think about it.

Couldn't humans somehow gain some control over the nest?

Mai Minghe sighed, thinking that she was dreaming too much.

The next few faces, according to the makeup woman, seemed difficult to find, and also very dangerous...

As she turned into the dining area from the short hallway, she kept wondering where the next face might be hiding; after a second or two, she suddenly realized that every face had been raised from the table.

Every face was looking at her, motionless, with a smile puffed up high.

There was dead silence in the restaurant.

Mai Minghe stood there in a daze, and finally slowly looked up at the clock.

The first hour, also the safest hour, just ended.

　There shouldn't be a short horizontal line in the middle of the nostrils/-\, but there is no space allowed at the starting point, so in order to indicate that they are not close together and there is space in the middle, I added a short horizontal line.

　　Actually, I am quite proud of the hiding place of the 7 faces (.

　　This chapter was finally finished because time was very tight. I guess there are typos. I will correct them later.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)