Chapter 94: Chapter 67: Mai Mingle: The First Hour’s Harvest

...But Xiaowei just said that the thing it envied most was "Robbie’s blue eyes."

’The Robbie that Xiaowei mentioned and the "Robbie Margaret" in the photograph should be the same person, right?’

The woman in the photo on the wall was turned sideways, talking to someone. Only one of her eyes was visible—and it was, without a doubt, brown.

’What if that eye is one of the face parts I’m looking for...’

’But the eye in the photo should be two-dimensional. How could a three-dimensional eye be disguised as one?’

Even at her height of five-foot-eight, Mai Mingle had to stand on her toes and stretch her arm to reach the photograph posted at the very top. Her fingertips fumbled over the glossy surface for a moment, and despite having braced herself, she couldn’t help but gasp.

It was eyelashes—

She could actually feel eyelashes on the photograph.

Beneath them was a slick, moist eyeball. The moment her finger touched it, the eyeball darted away as if startled.

Although now was not the time to be admiring the Nest, Mai Mingle couldn’t suppress a sigh of wonder.

"Huh? How did they do this? How did they hide it so perfectly?" She glanced around, half-wishing a resident would come over and explain it to her. But alas, the waiter only stood motionlessly far behind the bar, the four flesh-buds in its eye sockets pointed at her. "One’s a photo, the other is a living eye. How did they put them together?"

But they were indeed put together.

She peeled the photograph off, but the spot where the eye should have been was empty. A hole had been cut out, tracing the shape of a real eye. And that human eye remained on the wall. When Mai Mingle looked up at it, the eyeball was looking down, meeting her gaze.

’How do I get it down?’

With this question in mind, Mai Mingle reached out and prodded it a few times. To her surprise, it was like pulling something out of mud; the eye gradually worked its way out of the wall.

It was indeed a three-dimensional human eye, but more than half of it had been fused into the wall, leaving only the front surface exposed. When positioned at the right angle and framed by the photograph, it naturally looked like it belonged to the person in the picture.

’Finally found it...’

Mai Mingle let out a soft breath. Carefully cupping the human eye—which was nestled between its lids and occasionally blinked—she couldn’t tell if she felt amazed or terrified. Not daring to delay, she carried the eye and immediately ran to the restroom. Along the way, every diner fell silent, watching her pass with blank expressions.

The woman touching up her makeup seemed to have been expecting her.

It was still standing in the corner of the restroom, but one arm reached out from behind its back. The hand not holding the lipstick turned palm-up in mid-air, presenting a flat palm to Mai Mingle.

"That’s my eye," it said, sounding pleased, its voice a high, thin, rapid patter. "Good job... Okay, now hurry and find the next piece the next piece the next piece the next piece!"

The thing seemed rather unstable. Mai Mingle quickly backed out of the restroom.

Getting off to a flying start was a huge encouragement.

"Maybe I have the potential to be a Hunter after all," she muttered to herself as she walked into the dining area, making sure to keep a wide berth around the table with the three female diners. "I’ve come in here twice now, and I’m not dead yet..."

The second Chapter of her life had just begun, and she didn’t even know what to do with it to make this chance worthwhile.

She wanted to live a life completely different from her last one. Perhaps she should really try being a Hunter.

Even from a practical standpoint, she needed to figure out the ways of the Nests and Hunters as soon as possible. After all, there was a Hunter Family Faction hunting the Illusion on her.

"Stop dreaming about hitting the jackpot on our wedding anniversary," the wife at table number three said, sounding impatient. "Even if you manage to drag a body into a Nest, the chance of that body having a Path is only one percent..."

The buzz of conversation had returned to the restaurant. Mai Mingle weaved between the tables, trying to recall what clues each table might have given. She had no need or desire to listen to the diners’ current conversations, but snippets of their talk inevitably drifted past her ears.

"The Nests have been around for so many years, and these phenomena just keep happening. No one knows why. What can you do?" the man with the ear stud said, holding a taco, still discussing things Mai Mingle didn’t understand.

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

That last sentence was like a hook that stopped Mai Mingle in her tracks. She involuntarily craned her neck in the direction of the voice. By the time she realized the speaker was the dark-brown-skinned diner from the table of three women, their eyes had already met.

It was as if it had been waiting for its words to snag Mai Mingle’s attention.

"You don’t seem to have a place to sit, do you?" the dark-brown-skinned diner immediately called out with a smile. "Come on, sit here! Let’s have a chat!"

It vigorously patted the empty chair beside it. The fish on the table, which had been picked clean to skin and bone, shuddered in fright.

’How can this be?’ Mai Mingle shot a glance at the clock on the wall. The first hour wasn’t over yet; there were still ten minutes left. The diners should only be able to speak nonsense, lie, or set verbal traps for her. They couldn’t take action against her yet.

’So, are they asking me to sit with them now to make it easier to attack me later?’

Mai Mingle was afraid that speaking with the female diner would lead to unexpected complications. She lowered her eyes, shook her head without a word, and turned to leave.

The female diner clicked her tongue behind her, as if in regret.

’There are still six parts of the face left. No matter how I think about it, there’s no way I can find them all in ten minutes...’

Mai Mingle walked past the table of the lone male diner, then paused. She backtracked and took a closer look at his table. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

The soup and salad were untouched. He was still staring at his computer, deep in thought. The only difference from before was that one of his phones was missing.

’Right, he did just say one of his phones was dead... It seems perfectly normal to put away a phone that’s out of battery.’

’But from another perspective, a phone that was on the table during the thirty minutes when clues were available, but vanished from the table during the thirty minutes when clues were gone—doesn’t that suggest the phone itself might be the clue?’

’The phone itself probably isn’t the clue, because there’s another identical one on the table. The clue must lie in the difference between the two phones.’

’The one that disappeared was the one that wouldn’t charge...’

Before Mai Mingle even realized what she was doing, she had already strode over to the bar. Ignoring the waiter’s flesh-buds, which were still aimed at her, she leaned over the counter to look. Sure enough, she saw the "shoddy" outlet the lone male diner had complained about.

The Nest seemed to follow the template and standards of Blackmoor City, even maintaining consistency in small details like electrical outlets. In Blackmoor City, a standard outlet should look like this:

｜｜

｜｜

The top half of the bar’s outlet already had a coffee machine plugged into it. The plug was a normal shape, meaning the top sockets were correct. But the outlet as a whole looked like this:

｜｜

/-\

The holes in the second row looked strangely familiar, no matter how she looked at them... Although the plastic faceplate of the outlet was snow-white, didn’t those two long, narrow, slanted openings look just like human nostrils?

"Hey, get out of the way,"

In her excitement, Mai Mingle didn’t even hesitate to touch the waiter. She pushed aside its face, which had been bobbing in front of her—the rules only said she couldn’t touch the diners’ faces, not the waiter’s. She reached in and felt around the holes. As she suspected, it didn’t feel like plastic, but more like skin.

’It’s fused in. The entire nose was fused into the wall behind the outlet, leaving only the nostrils to act as sockets. Even the ring of skin around the nostrils was painted white—this is basically fraud and cheating.’

Mai Mingle tried grabbing the outlet’s faceplate and found it wasn’t sealed to the wall. With a hard pull, the plate came off. Then, just like with the eye from before, she slowly worked the nose out of the wall.

Finding two pieces of the face in quick succession, she was practically happier than the makeup woman herself. Pinching the bridge of the nose, she placed it on the makeup woman’s upturned palm, which was stretched out straight behind its back.

"Very nice," the makeup woman encouraged. "But these two were the ones that weren’t life-threatening to find, and also the easiest. You’ll have to keep up the good work."

"Isn’t this cheating?" Mai Mingle asked, pointing at the nose. "The bridge of the nose is flesh-colored, but the part that was showing, the ring around the nostrils, was painted white just like the plastic. That’s not fair, is it?"

"Of course it’s not cheating." The makeup woman pulled her hand back. Mai Mingle couldn’t see what it did, but when its hand dropped back down, the nose was gone, perhaps having returned to its original place. "It’s not like there’s nothing in this restaurant that could have painted my nose white. Besides, giving you clues while also doing everything possible to hide them is what makes it fair, isn’t it?"

Come to think of it, the Nest itself had set all the rules for this restaurant. Mai Mingle had no say in what was fair or not.

Even if the Nest was just toying with her and the remaining five pieces of the face didn’t even exist, there was nothing she could do about it. She could only suppress this unsettling thought and try not to dwell on it.

’Isn’t there some way for a person to gain some measure of control over a Nest?’

Mai Mingle sighed. She felt she was being a little too optimistic.

’From what the makeup woman said, the next few pieces of the face will be hard to find, and dangerous too...’

As she turned from the short hallway back into the dining area, she was still pondering where the next piece might be hidden. It took her a second or two to realize that every face at the tables had lifted.

Every face was watching her, motionless, their cheeks puffed high in a smile.

The restaurant was dead silent.

Mai Mingle froze, then slowly lifted her head to look at the clock.

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