Illusion Report

Chapter 361: Chapter 312: Fu Tailan: The Unexpected Gutter

The scream that tore out of the study was something between human and wolf, between man and Resident — but whatever pain had tried to stretch itself open was choked back down before it could spread. Swallowed whole.

A thin skin of silence hung in the air, trembling, as if the whole house might crack open at any moment. Then the sound came again — a low, involuntary moan, the kind that slips out when a fever won’t break and the body stops fighting it.

...So Brianna had figured it out.

Fu Tailan sat back in his chair at the far end of the corridor, tucked behind the curve of the hallway and half-hidden by a large potted plant, and waited.

A figure stumbled out of the study — hollow-eyed, barely keeping upright. They stood in the corridor for a few seconds, throat working, making a wet sound somewhere between a sob and a swallow, and then slowly disappeared into the shadows at the other end of the hall.

It would have been better if Brianna weren’t very smart. If she’d gone her whole life and never put the pieces together.

At least, that was what he told himself he wished — even knowing full well it was impossible.

Fu Tailan sat there a while longer, staring at nothing.

If someone could just tell him a lie — a good, comfortable one, the kind that smoothed out all the creases — and if he could somehow never see through it, not once in his life...how nice that would be.

Oh well.

It wasn’t like he’d told that lie for Brianna’s sake in the first place. He’d gotten what he needed out of it. That was enough.

Fu Tailan felt his tongue slide along the inside of his cheek, pressing lightly against it.

He almost wanted to laugh.

Chaisi, once he got his hands on the so-called "rumor" — he’d be insufferably smug about it, wouldn’t he? Probably congratulating himself on his great luck all over again.

God, Fu Tailan could hardly wait to see the expression on his face when that same thing was taken away from him. He was almost too impatient for the future to arrive.

He rose without a sound, paused to listen, then made his way back to the study, one quiet step at a time.

Brianna probably thought he was using Westley’s face to slip out of the manor right now.

She wasn’t going to just let him walk out. Not a chance.

After all, if their positions were reversed, Fu Tailan wouldn’t let her walk out easily either.

He didn’t know how many guards were still posted around the manor, but sealing it off — keeping anyone from coming or going — that much she could certainly manage. And Westley had resources. Who knew what other tricks he’d had up his sleeve that could close the net around him even tighter.

If getting out was going to be that much trouble, then fine. He wouldn’t bother.

Let Brianna send people to hunt him down out there. The manor was enormous — finding somewhere to hide wouldn’t be hard.

He eased the study door shut behind him and locked it, then swept his gaze around the room. Westley’s body was still slumped over the desk — but it had lost that uncanny, disorienting quality it had carried before. Now it was just a corpse. Ordinary.

Fu Tailan’s eyes moved across it the same way they moved across the desk, the lamp, the bookcase, the laptop — and then snapped back.

...The laptop?

Would it open?

The safe in the study, the locked drawers — even with Westley’s face, he had no hope of getting into any of those. But the laptop was a different matter. Could the Illusion fool facial recognition software?

Fu Tailan decided to try.

Years of working as a Hunter had trained certain habits deep into him — so deep that, almost without thinking, he found himself considering a second question: when he was wearing someone else’s identity, did the fingerprints he left belong to himself, or to Westley?

Same idea as facial recognition — a new direction for testing the Illusion’s capabilities next time. Though, right. He wasn’t Hunter Chief for the Morgan Family anymore. That wasn’t his problem.

...Unsurprisingly, the laptop didn’t wake up when he put his face in front of the camera.

Really. Was it too much to ask for just one thing to go smoothly?

Anyone who had never handled a corpse themselves had absolutely no idea how tedious, awkward, and deeply unpleasant the whole process was.

And he was doing this alone, with no accomplice to help hold anything in place.

Fu Tailan had to manage it himself — grip Westley’s head, pry open his eyelids, and angle the whole thing toward the camera.

The first attempt failed. Afraid a password prompt would pop up and lock him out entirely, he quickly shut the lid. He studied Westley’s face for a moment, then — swallowing his revulsion — reached out and adjusted the eyeballs, rolling them back into position so the pupils were centered, so Westley looked like he was actually facing the camera.

All of this while keeping one ear trained on the hallway outside. Absolutely maddening.

When the laptop finally, grudgingly accepted the facial verification, Fu Tailan’s first instinct was to wipe his hands hard against his trousers. The slick, yielding sensation of those eyeballs seemed to have lodged itself in his fingertips and refused to leave.

Perhaps because the laptop wasn’t life-or-death sensitive, or perhaps because Westley was already surrounded by guards and bodyguards inside his own estate, the machine hadn’t been set up with anything like the layered verification system on the secure room. Which made sense — if you had to spend half an hour logging in every single time you opened the thing, you’d lose your mind.

Fu Tailan thought this idly as he clicked through every folder he could access.

Plenty of files were flagged as commercially sensitive and demanded passwords — he left those alone. The ones he could open held nothing worth reading closely.

He’d never been a billionaire, had no idea what habits a man like that would have on his personal machine, so he worked through it by ordinary logic. After a moment’s thought, he opened the email client.

Westley had several inboxes, most of them clearly corporate addresses linked to the conglomerate. But one stood out — a plain, personal Gmail account.

Fu Tailan opened it.

Only about a dozen emails inside. The subject line of the most recent one caught his eye immediately.

"Mr. Ouma, regarding the test you requested"

...Ouma?

Westley had been using an alias? Why?

November 13, 2026, 2:25 PM

Dear Mr. Ouma,

I have been unable to reach you by phone for some time, so I hope you’ll forgive me for writing to you directly.

Since our call in early November, I have put in considerable effort searching for ordinary individuals who might carry a Path, to serve as test subjects, and I now feel reasonably confident on that front. However, before I proceed with any actual testing, I must bring a newly uncovered piece of information to your attention and ask for your guidance on how to proceed.

This Illusion has a usage limit — a maximum of three times. If the first test goes smoothly, two uses will remain. However, given the potential for complications and unforeseen risks, there is a possibility that, by the time of delivery, only one Path transfer may realistically be possible.

Of course, we are professional Hunters, and we will do everything in our power to prevent the worst-case scenario.

Do you still wish for us to proceed with testing?

My daughter’s condition cannot afford delays. I sincerely hope you will be able to reply at your earliest convenience.

Yours faithfully,

Havier

The email was marked as read. But when Fu Tailan opened the sent folder, there was no reply from Westley to Havier anywhere.

...It didn’t look like the kind of situation where someone sends a reply and then deletes it afterward.

This particular inbox seemed to be the one Westley used to contact Hunters directly, under the alias "Ouma" — his correspondence with other Hunters over time was all still there, untouched.

Beyond that, Havier’s very first line mentioned that he couldn’t reach Westley by phone. It looked less like an oversight and more like Westley had been deliberately avoiding him. Most likely, he simply never wrote back.

"Transfer a Path"...?

Fu Tailan was afraid he’d misread it, or misunderstood — he forced himself to read through the email a second time, word by word.

No. He’d read it correctly. Westley had been secretly working through Havier to find an Illusion capable of transferring a Path. And from the look of things, this Hunter called Havier had actually found one.

Transfer a Path...

Absolutely not.

Fu Tailan realized he had been biting down hard on his lower lip — hard enough to almost draw blood. He made himself let go.

He didn’t like this. Not one bit.

And it wasn’t just the thought of Chaisi getting a Path that bothered him — no, the true significance of this Illusion wasn’t about who might gain something. It was about who would lose something.

If someone used this Illusion on him. If someone reached in and took that Path — the one that marked him as chosen, touched by something beyond ordinary fortune—

What would he have left?

In this world, where would he stand? What place would there be for him?

If he couldn’t be a Hunter. If he couldn’t go back to the Nest. Then who was he?

What would Fu Han say?

Fu Han, finding out his son was no longer worth anything — Fu Tailan never wanted to find out, not in this lifetime, what a Fu Han like that would do to him.

Some things were better left unknown.

Fu Tailan had imagined it countless times — what his life would look like if he’d been born without a Path. But now that the possibility was actually sitting in front of him, what he needed to do became perfectly, brutally clear.

He had to cut off the possibility of a Path transfer at the root.

He could never lose his Path. Chaisi could never be allowed to get one.

Fu Tailan memorized Havier’s email address.

This Havier was sitting on an Illusion that could turn the entire Hunter world upside down — and he’d managed to keep it completely quiet, not a whisper reaching anyone. That kind of silence clearly wasn’t driven by loyalty to Westley.

Going by the email, it seemed to have something to do with his daughter’s illness. Had Westley promised some kind of treatment?

Fu Tailan didn’t fully understand it — but it seemed there were parents in this world willing to do absolutely anything for their children.

He’d probably need to convince Havier first that Ouma and Westley were the same person, and then that Westley was dead, before there was any chance of getting him to sell the Illusion.

But Fu Tailan had no proof.

If he couldn’t persuade him — then it would just have to come down to letting Havier’s daughter die. Once that happened, Havier would have no reason left to hold onto the Illusion.

Fu Tailan would rather not go that far. But having a backup plan was better than having none.

Either way, he couldn’t stay in Westley Manor much longer. The sooner he got his hands on Havier’s Illusion, the better. Once he was out, the first priority was tracking down who Havier was — which Family Faction, what his background looked like — and then figuring out how to approach him.

Two sharp knocks on the door yanked him out of his thoughts.

He caught himself just in time before he answered — after handling Westley’s body a moment ago, he’d already shifted back to his own appearance. If he spoke now, whoever was on the other side of that door would instantly know the voice didn’t belong to Westley.

"Mr. Westley?" came a deferential voice from the other side. "Are you in there, sir?"

The door was locked. The man couldn’t get in. Should he just pretend no one was home?

"Mr. Westley, it’s Ivan." A beat of silence. "I’m one of your bodyguards, sir."

Fu Tailan vaguely remembered the name.

The door handle turned — just slightly — then stopped. "Mr. Westley? Are you not in?"

Fu Tailan frowned. If he thought no one was inside, why wasn’t he leaving? And if he thought someone was inside, why was he trying the handle?

"There was a small incident during the lockdown of the manor — Dylan told me to come and brief you in person..." Ivan let the sentence die there, half-finished, dangling it like bait on a hook.

Fu Tailan was loath to admit it, but he’d taken the bait.

An incident during the lockdown? He actually did want to know.

If he wanted answers, there was only one way to get them.

He crept back toward the desk, lifted Westley’s head again, and silently offered another apology to Brianna in his head — however he looked at it, manhandling her father’s corpse like this, back and forth, was a deeply disrespectful thing to do.

"Also, I wanted to beg you one more time to reconsider my position here, sir."

So Westley had dismissed him. Looking at the man’s general conduct, that wasn’t hard to believe.

"You really aren’t in, are you, sir?"

The identity replacement wasn’t done yet. If Ivan walked away now, things were going to get complicated—

"In that case, I’m going to let myself in. Just for a security check — a patrol round. No disrespect intended, sir."

What? Wait — how was he planning to get in? Did he have a—

Click. A key turned in the lock.

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