Artifact Report

Chapter 143: Chase · The 18th Dead Person

The urge to twist and crush the world with these hands is as dark as the roaring waves during a typhoon, capable of drowning everything between heaven and earth.

Is it destined that in this life, whatever he wants will disappear before his eyes?
When the dark waves of emotion finally receded, Chase found himself still standing in the center of the room.

His hands trembled slightly for a few times before returning to calm.

Apart from this, the room and the people in it were still intact.

There was no corpse lying at his feet, and the furniture was not broken into pieces... Compared with the impulse just now that even his vision went dark, even Chai Si was a little surprised.

Although he controlled himself from getting angry, the dark, stormy emotions that came over him at that moment were obviously too vivid, so vivid that they even impacted the hunter opposite him.

Chai Si pulled out a chair, sat down in it, and crossed one leg.

He then raised his eyes and said, "Put the gun away. You won't need it."

The middle-aged man took a deep breath, opened his mouth, and wanted to say something, but he seemed unable to find the words.

The gun in his hand dropped down and froze in mid-air. When he tried to raise it again with trembling hands, it was finally smashed onto the table almost in dejection.

"It's not our fault," the middle-aged man wiped his face and said with a wry smile, "We just made a deal and sold an illusion. Isn't that what hunters do?"

"Tell me from the beginning," Shibashi said, looking at him. "Start from when I received the commission."

The man named Javier seemed afraid to take his eyes off Chase. He felt behind his back a few times before finding his chair, pulling it over and sitting down.

Across the table, he hesitated for a moment, then unexpectedly asked, "...Could it be that the client is you, Mr. Monroe?"

Chai Si slashed him right under his nose.

"Could it be... that I sold your things to Fu Tailan?"

"You don't know who the client is?"

Chai Si had already anticipated that Vesile would not use his real name; but he also thought that Vesile would use someone else to send out the commission, but he didn't expect that Javier didn't even know who the client was.

Javier was stunned and took a deep breath.

"It's not you after all... Well, everything I tell you next is the truth. There's no need for me to lie anymore."

He lowered his head, looking at the table. "I've never met the client. In early March of this year, I received a call from a man who called himself 'Ouma.' He gave me some information and asked us to search for a false image in the lair. He also readily wired us a down payment."

By this point, Chai Si already had a lot of questions, but he still listened quietly.

"Information about the lair is extremely valuable. The fact that he was able to obtain the fake image information shows that he is not a simple person. The down payment is also three times the usual amount. At first, I didn't understand why he would come to a small family like ours with only six or seven people."

Javier paused, his fingers unconsciously stroking the phone he had placed on the table.

The front of the phone is facing down, and there is a pink, round cartoon character printed on the back cover, which seems to be called Gerbo.

"We were too few in number to take turns entering the nest. Each entry was very tiring and demanding, so it wasn't until the end of October that we finally found the artifact.

"It's strange. At the beginning, Omar was very pushy, calling every few days to ask about our progress. But after September, he stopped calling for a month."

Javier frowned and said, "When I called him and told him we found the artifact, Omar's reaction was very cold... No, to say cold might not be the right word, um..."

After thinking for a moment, Chai Si interjected, "Afraid? On guard?"

"Yep!"

Javier was stunned and said, "How do you know? That's the feeling. He clearly asked us to find this fake image, and we were so anxious at first, but when we finally found it and called him—"

"It's like your phone call is a death warrant for him, right?"

"Did you hear that phone call?" Javier looked incredulous.

……it is as expected.

Ouma is most likely Vesile himself.

It was not unexpected that he had such a reaction to the good news brought by Javier.

In the "False Image Report," there was a clear statement: "Please be careful and take care. On the road to becoming a ruler, the closer you get to the end, the more dangerous and difficult it becomes."

Wesile probably understood the meaning of this sentence in September when he discovered that there was an extra power strip in the swimming pool for some reason - and now, Chai Si also understood it.

The more they collect and the closer they get to completion, the more serious the life-threatening situation the participants will face.

The artifact of the transfer pathway wasn't one of the seven goals for dominating the game, but its arrival had a 95% chance of bringing an "artifact report" containing intelligence on the target artifact...

In times of panic and fear, it is indeed normal for Vesile to react coldly to Javier's call.

"The last time I spoke to Omar was in early November. He said that since we already had the artifact, we also knew its function. He couldn't just trust that we had found what he wanted. He wanted us to take the artifact and test it out first... Once we actually got access from someone else, he would fulfill his promise to me."

He didn't say "pay the bill," he said "fulfill the promise."

"I went to great lengths to hand over the artifact to Ouma as quickly as possible... We couldn't take the passage from existing hunters, so we had to start with ordinary people who didn't know the nest existed. You have no idea how much effort I put into finally finding an old lady in the hospital records who I thought might have the passage."

That old lady also became the clue that led Chai Si here.

"But the plan failed at the last moment... The old lady fell into her own passage and is probably dead now." Javier's face trembled, as if he wanted to laugh at himself, but he couldn't.

"I haven't been able to contact Ouma since the beginning of November. Now his promises have come to nothing, and we've also implicated an ordinary old lady, leaving me with only a fake image that I don't even want to look at anymore... So when Fu Tailan came to me, I gave him the fake image as soon as I heard the price was right."

Chase forced himself to let go of the armrest of the chair to avoid cracking it.

Before asking Fu Tailan, he had a few more questions that he needed answers to first.

"You should know what the significance of an artifact that can divert the pathway is, right?" Chai Si asked in a flat voice.

"certainly,"

Javier seemed to have anticipated his question and understood what he meant by not saying it out loud.

"It was when I realized that what I was looking for was an artifact that could divert the pathway that I understood why Ouma came to me."

"Oh?"

"If this mission were assigned to another hunter family, the down payment would be like throwing meat buns at a dog, and it would never come back... Even if they found the fake image, not many people would honestly give it to an unknown Ouma."

Javier smiled bitterly and raised his hand to gesture towards Chase.

"Besides anything else, Mr. Monroe, if I gave it to you right away, how much would you pay for it? I'm afraid it would be far more than what Ouma can afford."

He didn't know that Ouma was Vesile, so it was not surprising that he had this misunderstanding.

"The appearance of this thing in the hunter community has caused a huge stir. I can imagine how much benefit it can bring, as well as how much danger it can bring.

"So, entrusting it to any hunter in this world besides me cannot guarantee that Ouma will be able to obtain it. Only I...only I will keep the secret for him with my life."

When he said this, he couldn't help but touch the phone case again.

Chai Si waited for him to continue.

"I have a four-year-old daughter. She was diagnosed with congenital nephrotic syndrome last year," Javier said, his head bowed. "There's no other treatment except a kidney transplant."

Chai Si understood.

"The promise Omarsh made to me was 'a kidney'."

He spoke slowly, "He has the ability to fulfill his promise, and he has proven this to me. So, no matter who it is, whether they offer a high price or threaten my life, I will never hand over the channel transfer artifact to anyone else. I have guarded the secret and not leaked a single word. The person who took the old lady's channel was also a child I trust the most."

The room was quiet for a while.

Chase finally spoke. "Is she still alive?"

Javier said almost numbly, "It suddenly got worse... It's gone on the 18th."

Shiji whispered, "...I'm sorry."

Javier shook his head.

After several seconds, he said, "I don't want to go home, and my wife doesn't want to see me. So I came to the office... and planned to sleep here for two days. To be honest, when Fu Tailan came to my house, I couldn't figure out where he got the news from."

Fu Tailan had never obtained Vesile's memories of his life, so it was impossible for him to find this place by following Chase's tracking route - and Javier would never joke with his daughter's life and leak the false information.

So how did he find out?
"Are you sure he is Fu Tailan?" Chai Si asked.

"That should be it," Javier said, his attention shifting from the phone case. "Although I've never met him in person, I've heard a lot about him. He's a very young boy, about seventeen or eighteen, right? So handsome that I was dazed for a moment."

His subsequent description of the visitor's appearance should indeed belong only to Fu Tailan - even if Chai Si hated Fu Tailan, he had to admit that there were not many people in the entire Blackmore City who deserved that description.

"What's more, he has the Morgan family's backing, so his financial resources shouldn't be underestimated. He transferred such a large sum of money instantly," Javier said. "It must be Fu Tailan, no doubt about it."

The only one who could get ahead of him and ruin his plans was probably Fu Tailan.

"What time exactly did he arrive?" Chai Si asked.

"I had a lot to drink and was getting ready for bed... I just remember it was early in the morning." Javier frowned, thought for a moment, then suddenly picked up his phone. "I had the wine delivered from a nearby liquor store. Let me check the call time."

The liquor store delivered the wine about thirty minutes after the call, which was 19: pm on the th.

"I drank all the wine and was about to go to bed when I heard the doorbell... At least two hours had passed since I got the wine."

Javier touched his chin, and his stubble rustled.

He looked at his phone and said, "That is to say, when Fu Tailan visits, it should be between 20: and : in the morning on the th."

"He didn't tell you and wanted to keep it a secret?" Chai Si already knew the answer when he asked this question.

"Oh, no." Javier was stunned. "Instead, he told me that if anyone came to me, they could just say he had the fake image. It didn't matter."

　I wish you all a happy Mid-Autumn Festival!
　　Seeing that I wrote the update regardless of the weather, I wish you all a happy new year (?
　　I was particularly depressed on Saturday and was lying there all the time, so I forgot to write a thank-you chapter... I will definitely continue this Saturday, I'm sorry everyone.

　　It was only when I was writing this chapter that I realized that the correct way to write it was "syndrome" rather than "syndrome", which is a bit counterintuitive.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)