Chapter 433 - 377: Undetectable: The Resident and the Walk-in Closet

"This isn't the Kai Family Mansion,"

Tian Xi glanced at Jin Xueli. Seeing her confusion, he explained before she could ask.

"Huh?" As he expected, she was taken aback. "Didn't you say you were taking me back to the Kai Family Mansion? Why are we here?"

Tian Xi adjusted his rearview mirror. The road behind them was still empty, with no sign of headlights—only the thick curtain of rain enshrouding the world.

"We were being followed. I certainly wasn't going to lead whoever was tailing us all the way back to the Kai Family Mansion."

"Who?" Jin Xueli whipped around, squinting at the road behind them. "I don't see anything... Are they hiding now?"

"No, they never showed themselves the entire way."

Jin Xueli paused at his words, then shot him a look that clearly said, 'If you've suddenly gone mad, how am I supposed to guarantee my personal safety?'

Tian Xi sighed again. He'd been doing a lot of that since she got in the car. 'He couldn't get a word in edgewise anyway, so all he could do was sigh.'

"Even though you drive like a snail, you were still hovering around fifty miles per hour. If they weren't in a car, how could they keep up? And if they were in a car, how could we not see them?" Jin Xueli's words came out in a rapid-fire burst. "Besides, in this weather, there are barely any other cars on the road."

"It's not human." Tian Xi unbuckled his seatbelt, pulled a gun out from under his seat, and asked, "What weapons do you have on you?"

Jin Xueli held out both her hands to him. "Voilà."

'I have no idea where Brother Chaisi found someone like her.'

Luckily, he had no shortage of weapons in his car, though he had no idea how useful they would be against something non-human.

"What do you mean, not human?" Jin Xueli took the gun he offered, her brow furrowed. "This is Blackmoor City... Oh, I know! The Knight Family released some kind of Nest half-creature to track me today. Those human-head balloons can't be floating above the car right now, can they?"

Tian Xi couldn't help but glance up at the roof. Unfortunately, this particular car didn't have a sunroof.

"I've never seen the human-head balloons you're talking about, so I can't say for sure," he said in a low voice. "Once, when I was in a Nest, I was forced to eat a 'resident meal.'"

Jin Xueli's face twisted in honest disgust. "A 'resident meal'? Don't residents eat people? Did you eat a person?"

"No." Tian Xi didn't want to relive that day, but he had no choice but to explain. "I didn't eat 'a meal for residents,' I ate a 'resident meal.' When you hear 'seafood paella,' do you think it's a meal for seafood to eat?"

Jin Xueli's face turned green. "You... you ate... a resident?"

"I told you, I was forced." Tian Xi scrubbed a hand over his face, the gun still clutched tightly in his other. "You think I wanted to? I was accidentally dragged into a fight between two residents. I've heard people can go dozens of times and never see two residents in conflict, but of course, it had to happen to me... The one that had the upper hand couldn't kill the one it had defeated, so it... it made it into a whole feast and forced me to eat it."

It was a dish, but it was still alive.

He had to chew more than a dozen times to work through the twitching, trembling nerves in his mouth. With every bite, a hoarse, miserable cry would echo from the soup pot on the table.

Just the memory of a resident's tentacle resisting in his mouth, refusing to go down his throat, swimming back against his saliva as he had to forcefully swallow it down—even today, years later, it was enough to make Tian Xi break out in a cold sweat.

He used every trick he knew to get away. The moment he was free, he violently vomited up everything in his stomach. He didn't even need to stick a finger down his throat, because the pieces of resident inside him were trying to crawl their way out.

Jin Xueli covered her mouth, looking like she was on the verge of vomiting herself.

"Even though I threw it all up, I've always suspected I didn't get it all out. That maybe I... digested and absorbed some of it."

The resident who had "hosted" him repeated the phrase "you're what you eat" at least fifty times at the table. Perhaps forcing him to eat a resident was a way to turn him into one.

"Ever since that day, I've become very sensitive to residents. I can vaguely feel their presence... but it's not precise. How should I put it... It's like when you walk into a very humid room. You can immediately feel the difference, but you can't point out exactly where the water molecules are distributed."

Jin Xueli started to fidget. "When did you first get this feeling?"

"It's been intermittent, on and off," Tian Xi recalled. "It's hard to pinpoint an exact time."

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

Tian Xi understood what she was asking. "The seasoning was actually quite good."

Jin Xueli stared at him. He shrugged. "Because there's nothing else to say."

He hadn't gained some incredible power. This "ability to sense residents" had always been completely useless—Nests were crawling with residents, so the feeling was constant. It served no purpose as a warning and only made it impossible for him to get a good night's sleep.

And now, he still didn't know how useful it could be.

"So we drove all the way out here..." Jin Xueli glanced helplessly out the window. "What's the next step?"

***

"The feeling of a resident's presence vanished a little while ago. I don't know if it'll come back," Tian Xi explained. "Let's go inside first. Sitting in the car isn't a long-term solution."

True.

The furious, torrential rain hammered against the roof, smearing the world outside the windows into a dark, murky ocean.

Sitting in the car, even with the doors and windows shut tight, gave them a precarious sense of unease, as if some random gust of wind could peel the car open like a shell, leaving them exposed like the flesh of a clam.

Walking through the cold rain, Jin Xueli followed Tian Xi step by step toward the manor's main building, shivering uncontrollably. 'Maybe I shouldn't be thinking about this while being hunted,' she thought, 'but I can't help it.' She looked up, trying to make out the main building in the dark, rainy night, and suddenly realized that nine million was nothing.

"Once we're inside, we can change out of these wet clothes. You must be miserable."

Tian Xi obviously didn't have a key, but using some unknown method, he picked the front door lock in just a few moments with surprising ease. For such a luxurious, massive building, the lock offered no resistance at all. "This is an abandoned mansion that belonged to one of our partners. There's no security anymore, and it looks like they didn't even move their stuff out."

Any poor person in the world who heard they could wander through a rich person's mansion—peeking into their daily lives, enjoying an opulence beyond their wildest imagination—would probably be as thrilled as Jin Xueli was at that moment. Even knowing they had to leave, knowing they weren't safe.

'It's almost scary... isn't it?'

She stepped into the foyer with something akin to reverence, watching as soft lights switched on one by one, illuminating the path ahead. She felt like a country girl stepping into the Sagrada Familia Cathedral for the first time.

Humanity's pursuit of beauty, its greed for material things, its wanton extravagance at the expense of other humans; humanity's arrogance and conceit in commanding and taming the world, demanding it cater to its every whim...

It was both terrifying and mesmerizing, impossible to look away from.

She lightly touched the hallway walls, the console table, a vase, a doorframe.

"Doorframe," "handle," "light"—they were just words, the same words used for the things in the trailer she grew up in. But seeing them with her own eyes, she realized that so many distant, separate galaxies could exist on the same planet.

"It's so good to be rich," she murmured. "People are only born with seventy or eighty years to live. But with money, other people's time indirectly becomes your time..."

Tian Xi glanced around and shrugged, seemingly unimpressed. "Is it really that amazing? How much can one person enjoy? A house this big is unnecessary, isn't it? The master bedroom is upstairs. Want to go find some dry clothes?"

She definitely did, but Jin Xueli had something even more important to do than changing her clothes.

"I have to take pictures!" She quickly patted herself down, then rummaged through her backpack, only to find her phone wasn't there. "Huh, my phone—oh, I left it charging in your car! Can you come with me to get it?"

"It's not safe outside," Tian Xi said, giving her a sidelong glance. "You're going to risk a resident attack just to take some pictures?"

Jin Xueli wasn't so willful that she couldn't tell what was important.

For a modern person, being without a phone was a form of torture, but besides suffering through it, there really wasn't anything she could do. The car was still a good distance from the main building, and who knew what might happen on the way there.

"You have your phone, right?"

She hadn't given up, especially after seeing a walk-in closet filled with all sorts of women's clothing. "You can take them for me and send them to me later. The mansion's abandoned anyway, so it doesn't matter. This walk-in closet is bigger than my living room!"

"You really don't care about the resident at all, do you?" Tian Xi sounded as if he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"Live in the moment, live in the moment," Jin Xueli said, waving her hand dismissively. "If I constantly worried about things I can't change, I'd have been dead long ago."

Worn down by her pestering, Tian Xi finally, reluctantly, pulled a phone out of his pocket. The moment Jin Xueli saw it, she was dumbfounded.

"Are you an eighty-year-old man?" She immediately pulled her hand back. "Who still uses a flip phone? Does the Kai Family not pay you well? I bet that phone cost you a hundred bucks, tops."

The phone, which looked like you could throw it away after one use without feeling bad, still stubbornly had a camera. She reluctantly gave it a try and found it made the luxurious mansion look like a haunted house.

"Forget it," Jin Xueli said, deflated. "Good thing I'm not an internet influencer. I don't rely on this to make a living."

She shooed Tian Xi away, locked the bedroom door, then remembered he could pick locks. So, she dragged a single-seater sofa over to block the handle and keep it from turning.

It wasn't that she didn't trust Tian Xi; it was just a habit she'd developed since childhood.

In the trailer she and her mother called home, whenever a man was around, she would make sure the door was securely locked when she washed up or used the bathroom. She made sure to keep her distance from men.

Once everything was secure, Jin Xueli finally turned and walked toward the closet.

It was connected to a bathroom so luxurious and beautiful it even had a separate vanity area. The walk-in closet itself was incomprehensibly large. Countless clothes, clothes whose price tags she couldn't even imagine, shimmered softly under the spotlights.

Piece after piece, row after row, so many... The closet was so big...

The closet was so big... so vast...

Such a deep closet... so many beautiful clothes...

Jin Xueli walked on, and on, and on,

Looking on, and on, and on.