I studied the man in front of me—Lu Chan, the Luoshan Wandering Inspector—with careful attention.

  He was strikingly handsome, not at all inferior to Chang’an in looks. His stride carried a confident energy, his posture straight and composed. Even though he had saved Agent Kong from an anomalous incident twenty years ago, he didn’t look nearly as aged as I’d imagined. Judging by his face alone, he could only be a few years older than me—young enough to disguise himself as a university student and blend into Xianshui University without anyone batting an eye.

  He was a demon hunter, after all. Having the soul of a forty- or fifty-year-old inside a twenty-something body wasn’t strange in the slightest. In the real world there were plenty of so-called “eternal beauties” who achieved youthful appearances through makeup and health regimens. Compared to actual supernatural abilities, this was just unusually good preservation of looks.

  “Hello. I’m Z.” I shook the hand he offered.

  His gaze shifted between Zhu Shi and me. Smiling, he asked, “You two seem close. Are you dating?”

  I answered with perfect seriousness, “She’s my guide.”

  “I see—a mentor-student relationship.” Lu Chan appeared to take it at face value.

  “No! That’s not it!” Zhu Shi’s face flushed red as she hurried to correct him. “I’m nowhere near qualified to teach anyone!”

  “The one who has attained the way becomes the teacher,” I said.

  “Fine, enough joking for now.” Lu Chan withdrew his hand and turned to me. “Z, I hope you won’t misunderstand me because of what Zhu Shi said earlier. I have no intention of deliberately making things difficult for you. Kong Da fell to become a fallen demon hunter and was ultimately defeated by you… that can only be called karmic retribution. I deeply regret his fall, but I would never hold it against you.”

  “Who knows what you’re really thinking?” Zhu Shi shot him a cold look. “If you truly have no issue with Z, why interfere in his application to become a Luoshan Wuchang?”

  “Isn’t that your problem?” Lu Chan turned the accusation back on her.

  Zhu Shi blinked. “Me?”

  “In your report about Z, there are clearly many parts left vague and incomplete. As a Wandering Inspector, I can’t simply ignore that.” He pointed this out first, then addressed me directly. “Rest assured—regardless of how this evaluation turns out, I will approve your promotion to a new Outer Path Wuchang. The ‘traces’ left by your power are still sitting in that abandoned construction site. But I have a duty to monitor civilian demon hunters. I need to understand your true capabilities.”

  He paused, then added, “Besides, I’m personally quite interested in you.”

  “What kind of interest?” I asked.

  “An ordinary flame-user, no matter how wide their area of attack, would find it extremely difficult to defeat a fallen demon hunter with no obvious weaknesses in a one-on-one fight.” His tone carried deeper meaning. “At least in other cities, no such case has ever been recorded.”

  “You said ‘other cities’…” A new connection formed in my mind. “So fallen demon hunters like Agent Kong have appeared elsewhere too?”

  He nodded, then dropped a bombshell.

  “Luoshan now refers to this particular type of fallen demon hunter as ‘Monsters.’”

  For a moment I thought I’d misheard. “Monsters?”

  “Monster” was another name for Karma Demons—the survivors of the apocalypse who, driven mad by karmic corruption, transformed into monstrous beings.

  Weren’t those supposed to be products exclusive to the end-times? Or was this just a coincidental name overlap, and the “Monsters” he meant were something entirely different?

  No—I shouldn’t treat it as pure coincidence. Just as in the misty dream, I had suspected Number Two was Alice’s friend even before she revealed her identity, I should now connect this clue to Alice. If for no other reason than the fact that I was still caught in the vortex centered around her.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Looking back on my battle with Agent Kong—he had indeed transformed into a monstrous form. He hadn’t “forgotten his name and past” the way Alice described Karma Demons doing, but it was reasonable to hypothesize a link to “omens of the apocalypse.”

  From that angle, Alice taking Kong’s charred finger became deeply significant.

  To her, it might not have been an ordinary charred finger at all—it could have been “the remains of a Karma Demon that somehow appeared in this era.” Combined with what I’d told her about recently fighting “a human who turned into a monster,” she likely concluded that she needed to search Xianshui City for signs that the apocalypse was approaching.

  No wonder she was still active in this city. Honestly, after two days of searching with no trace, I’d started worrying she might have slipped back to the end-times. She had already been accidentally displaced here once through spatial transfer—who could guarantee the same thing wouldn’t happen again when she left me? At least now one of the stones weighing on my heart had finally lifted.

  “Let’s not keep talking on the roadside. We should find somewhere to sit,” Lu Chan suggested.

  —

  We headed to a nearby teahouse.

  On the way, I checked on the “firefly” I’d sent toward the Zhu residence. Whether I should call it “as expected” or not, the firefly had gone completely silent. Zhu Shi had said the Zhu estate was protected by a dedicated warding barrier against outsiders. My firefly was, at the end of the day, just a tiny spark—probably snuffed out the moment it touched the barrier, like a mosquito hitting an electric grid.

  Conveniently, I’d also been worried that leaving a firefly near Chang’an might bring him misfortune. This way, the issue resolved itself neatly.

  At the same time, Lu Chan gave me a brief overview of Luoshan’s progress on the fallen demon hunter investigation.

  Whatever his true feelings toward me, on the surface he was polite, professional, and thorough—hard to dislike.

  First, regarding the fallen demon hunters (now uniformly called “Monsters”), Agent Kong had concealed a great deal from Zhu Shi.

  The biggest secret was that Monster incidents weren’t limited to Xianshui City—they had occurred across the country. Not frequent enough to become common knowledge, but when tallied, there were dozens or even hundreds of cases, the earliest dating back eighteen months. Anyone who bothered to connect the dots could have linked them.

  Kong’s original mission had been to supply Zhu Shi with the relevant files. Instead, he deliberately withheld that portion—presumably to keep her from realizing there were “more Monsters out there.” Such concealment couldn’t last forever. He had probably already planned to abandon his agent identity and leave Xianshui.

  Only after Lu Chan took over did the complete dossier finally reach Zhu Shi.

  On a side note, it was also Lu Chan who had used divination to produce those photo clues. Investigative skills like that seemed to be his specialty.

  Yet Zhu Shi clearly harbored no fondness for him—apparently not just because he’d interfered in my Wuchang application.

  Lu Chan walked ahead. I lagged behind, pulled out my phone, and—much like passing notes in class behind the teacher’s back—quietly texted Zhu Shi:

  “Do you dislike Lu Chan?”

  She checked her phone, glanced at Lu Chan’s back, typed for a long moment, then replied:

  “Within the organization, Lu Chan belongs to the faction that believes ‘demon hunters should become living gods and turn all ordinary people into slaves.’ We don’t get along.”

  Reading that, I couldn’t help glancing at Lu Chan’s back again.

  You really can’t judge a book by its cover.

  It made sense, though. Agent Kong had said his own faction was “the extremist wing.” Lu Chan, as his superior, wasn’t likely to be some moderate, balanced thinker.

  Even so, right now I needed Lu Chan’s help.

  The photo of Alice had come from his divination ability. After two days of fruitless searching, I had accepted that I couldn’t find her on my own. Even if I borrowed his power and eventually located her, she would almost certainly end up exposed in his sight—but this was no time to worry about that.

  We settled into a private room at the teahouse. Lu Chan took the photos from his pocket and spread them across the table like playing cards—the same set Zhu Shi had shown me earlier.

  “Right now, two demon hunters are handling the Monster incidents in Xianshui City: Zhu Shi for combat, and me for investigation.” He looked at me. “Now we’re adding a third—you, Z. So from here on, please join us in analyzing the case.”

  “Fine,” I said, nodding.

  “In the past five days, two more local dignitaries in Xianshui City have been killed by Monsters. Or, more precisely… four people.” Lu Chan picked up two of the photos, each showing a different crime scene.

  One was outdoors: the victim had clearly been a portly elderly man in life, but now his body was torn apart as if mauled by a beast—mutilated beyond recognition, sprawled grotesquely in the grass.

  The other was indoors: a sturdy middle-aged man, likewise ripped open, the violence carrying a sense of frenzied hysteria. Nearby lay two more bodies—a middle-aged woman and a young boy, apparently mother and son.

  Unlike the other two victims, the mother and child had been killed instantly—heads caved in by heavy blows, skulls visibly deformed. They had likely been the man’s family, killed in passing by the perpetrator.

  The indoor scene was also marked by many chaotic, bloody footprints—not human, but those of a large animal. I mentally compared them to Agent Kong’s transformed state. Yes—definitely Monster tracks.

  Lu Chan briefly summarized what he had uncovered. Just as the photos suggested: on what had seemed an ordinary day to the victims, the Monster suddenly burst in, slaughtered them with extreme brutality, then left. Both scenes had formed in exactly that straightforward way.

  Then he placed the third photo on the table—the one of Alice walking down a deserted midnight street.

  “Z, do you know who she is?”

  “I know a little,” I said.

  “Zhu Shi must have told you.” He continued, “So—what’s your opinion on this amnesiac girl?”