I am Zhu Shi, a demon hunter of Luoshan.

  My older brother—Zhu Chang'an—might recently become a target for fallen demon hunters. Though I think the chances are slim, the truth is we have no solid leads to track them down.

  What I never saw coming was him showing up at the hospital to visit Mom. I’m genuinely happy he had the rare impulse to come, but what if a fallen hunter really attacks and endangers everyone nearby? It’s impossible to explain to him why even a military hospital isn’t safe, and I’m terrible at lying—I spent half the day scrambling for any believable excuse to get him to leave.

  Sharing the same room with him felt awkward anyway. Several agents were keeping watch around him, and I had to keep up the act of being an artsy female college student in his presence. Their stares were practically burning holes in me. So I made up an excuse to step outside for some fresh air, just to give my exhausted mind a brief break. It wasn’t only the surveillance; I’d already placed my spells around him, and my perception covered the entire inpatient ward. There was no real risk of anyone slipping through.

  As I was leaving, he asked why I was carrying my guitar case. It actually contains my spiritual gear, but I could only tell him it was so I could play a little in the courtyard. I have absolutely no intention of letting him know about my work in Luoshan.

  The moment I stepped out of the inpatient building, I spotted Agent Kong walking toward me from the opposite direction. He was probably coming to relieve the others on shift.

  In Luoshan, agents are officially called “probes.” Their primary job is to gather intelligence on anomalous incidents, report them to demon hunters for handling, and take care of whatever miscellaneous tasks come up.

  Agent Kong is one of the best among them. His understanding of anomalies runs deeper than mine. The university I’m attending falls within his patrol zone, and we’ve worked together a few times. I’ve heard from others that his superiors have recently dumped an unreasonable workload on him, forcing him to impersonate a police officer and run around nonstop.

  Plenty of demon hunters look down on probes, viewing them as defective leftovers who couldn’t make it as hunters. It’s as if failing to become a demon hunter automatically makes someone inferior—and yes, that’s precisely how they think. So they look down on ordinary people too. Agent Kong’s bosses probably share that attitude. I just can’t stand people like that.

  We still had about half an hour before the shift change, so we sat in the courtyard pavilion and talked. Agent Kong is a man in his thirties; casual small talk doesn’t really work between us, so we naturally drifted to work topics. It didn’t take long to reach the anomaly in the fifteenth-floor room he’d mentioned on the phone earlier.

  “The origin of the cave Zhu Chang’an described is still unknown. I was the one who first asked if you had time to deal with it, but are you really sure you’re okay handling this?” he asked, clearly worried.

  “Whether I’m okay or not, I won’t know until I try. Besides, we don’t even know if that cave is the kind of anomaly that can affect anyone who’s come into contact with it, no matter the distance. He’s my brother. I have to protect him.”

  “But combat is your specialty, right? If it’s too much, you could always ask another hunter who’s better suited for this kind of thing.”

  “I can’t just hand off an unknown anomaly to someone else when I don’t even have the full picture…”

  “Alright. If that’s how you feel, I won’t push anymore.” He let out a sigh, then changed tack. “Still, while you’re dealing with the cave, you could take the opportunity to sound out that Z guy.”

  “Z? You still think he’s connected to the cave appearing?”

  “That’s only a secondary suspicion, and the probability is low,” he explained. “What I’m really getting at is that he’s almost certainly already brushed against our world. Anomalous incidents have surged over the past two years. For someone who relentlessly chases after them to come out completely unscathed every time—doesn’t that strike you as strange? Maybe he’s acquired some kind of protective power.”

  He’d said something similar before, but this time I caught a different undertone. “You mean recruit him—bring Z into our circle as an ally?”

  “Even if he can’t become combat-ready, he’d make an outstanding probe. For him, it would probably fulfill a lifelong wish.” He gave a small smile. “Scouting promising talent from the civilian world is technically my job as a probe, but if you’re the one who brings him in, you could serve as his guide afterward. He’d assist you from the sidelines. Even without any magical ability, he’s exceptionally capable. He’d definitely be a valuable asset to you.”

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  “Thanks for the thought, but…”

  I do acknowledge that Z is talented, but the reality might not align with what Agent Kong imagines.

  I found myself thinking back to how I first came to know Z.

  It started around my first year of high school when my brother mentioned him to me.

  Unlike normal families, the Zhu family is a lineage of demon hunters. Legend has it one of our ancestors was even a Great Impermanent, though the family has fallen on hard times since. Originally, my brother was supposed to inherit the family artifacts and become the next hunter. But because of an accident, I became the heir instead. He lost his childhood memories, and the family sealed away every trace of the demon-hunter world from him.

  We call it amnesia, but it wasn’t total—he retained fragments and hazy impressions. That’s why, even as a child, he firmly believed in the existence of anomalous entities and told people around him that he had seen and touched them.

  Naturally, the family never confirmed his stories, and outsiders believed him even less. In middle school he was mocked and bullied by classmates; teachers frequently pulled him aside for serious talks. People are heavily shaped by their surroundings, especially during adolescence when personality is still forming—external validation or rejection carries enormous weight at that age.

  On top of that, after losing his memories, he genuinely never encountered any anomalies again. Over time, he probably came to accept that those scattered fragments were nothing more than childish delusions, and he eventually stopped mentioning them.

  Still, deep in some corner of his heart, there must remain a stubborn refusal to let go and a quiet hope for a chance to finally release it all.

  I felt deep sympathy for my brother—and at the same time, intense envy.

  I once believed I would never become a demon hunter.

  One day, out of the blue during dinner, he told me about someone at his high school—a weird kid obsessed with investigating urban legends. His name was Z.

  This person reminded me a little of the old version of my brother. Though he didn’t openly proclaim the existence of anomalies to others, he pursued proof of them with fierce determination—perhaps even more aggressively than my brother once had.

  I thought my brother was about to rekindle his old interest in the supernatural. For reasons I could never explain to outsiders, neither I nor the rest of the family wanted him anywhere near that world. So I responded from the perspective of an ordinary person, dismissing it as “a complete waste of time.” After a moment of silence, he agreed with me.

  Later, I looked into Z myself. His obsession didn’t start in high school; it went back at least to middle school, where he already showed an unusual level of passion. Classmates remembered him vividly, but almost no one was actually friends with him. One of my high-school seniors had been in the same middle-school class as him and visibly shuddered when his name came up.

  “That guy used to bring candles to school all the time.”

  “Candles?”

  “Yeah, candles. Whenever he felt like it, he’d pull one out of his desk drawer and stare at it with this creepy, intense look—like he was possessed or something. He was obsessed with ghost stories and kept going to haunted places to explore. He must’ve been possessed by something unclean…”

  Beyond that, I heard from others that he used to be fixated on feng shui, occult rituals, and similar concepts—always carrying a compass and divination tools to test things out. After a while he’d lose interest and move on to another field, but it was always something mystical. Most people thought he was either mentally ill or hopelessly immature. The gossip and finger-pointing around him were even worse than what my brother had endured in middle school.

  Yet Z acted as if none of it touched him. The voices around him might as well have been background noise; he did exactly what he wanted, completely unbothered.

  In high school, a girl in my class was into supernatural romance novels and started having weird fantasies. She tried to style herself as a “mysterious girl” who could “see things.” Z somehow sniffed it out, tracked her down, and dismantled her entire act on the spot—zero mercy.

  There was even an incident where a so-called overseas feng shui master was conning a local tycoon. Z, still just a high-schooler, caught wind of it from who-knows-where, showed up, and exposed the fraud right then and there.

  Years passed. He must have encountered countless fake supernatural claims, yet he remained just as “crazy” and “childish” in everyone’s eyes.

  This is only my guess, but maybe that’s exactly what drew my brother to him.

  So later, when I criticized Z in front of him, he no longer gave the half-hearted agreement he used to. Instead, he took Z’s side.

  Only afterward did I realize that ever since the first time he mentioned Z, he had been secretly following the guy’s activities—collecting updates like a fan.

  The way he talked about Z grew more and more animated, as if he saw in him an alternate version of himself that could have been.

  “You know, right before senior year graduation he went to another province to investigate a string of child disappearances. They say it was tied to local folklore—something like Japan’s ‘spirited away’ stories. Apparently it involved some seriously dangerous force operating behind the scenes there…”

  The more stories like that I heard, the more I had to admit: the guy really was legendary in his own way.

  But it was dangerous. Far too dangerous.

  One day, Z would inevitably push too far, end up in a hopeless situation, and die full of regret chasing the very thing he’d pursued so relentlessly.

  Roughly two or three years ago, organizations around the world that deal with anomalies began to notice something: entities that had long lurked in the shadows were suddenly becoming far more active. Rare spacetime distortions, once almost unheard of, were appearing with increasing frequency. The scale kept growing year by year. Reports of ordinary people dying because of anomalous phenomena were piling up like mountains.

  In Luoshan, some even made heretical prophecies: this was the omen of a great calamity approaching.

  If we define all of human history up to now as the “Age of Humanity,” then counting from today, within ten years that long, prosperous era would come to an end.

  After that, not only all humans but every living creature and every anomalous entity would be annihilated in the catastrophe.

  In the end, all matter would dissolve into nothingness.

  And the next age… there probably wouldn’t be a next age.

  If forced to give it a name, it would be the Age of the End.