Chapter 551: Why Am I Here?

1:30 a.m., Xingfu Community, Hua City Calamity Irresponsible Scare Company, a corner of the warehouse.

Du Sixian pursed her lips, lowered her voice, and asked Lu Yibei, “Hero, why did you suddenly call me out here? And you even had to avoid everyone else before you could tell me…”

“Shh–!” Lu Yibei made a silencing gesture, glanced around, and after making sure no one was nearby, whispered back, “I managed to get us some funds. There are too many people outside, too many eyes. We shouldn’t flaunt our wealth. I’m worried those guys might see it, spread the word, and attract unwanted attention.”

She had just gone to Fat Master to verify it–the golden substance produced by that rod was indeed gold, with high purity and an astonishing quantity. Even after buying up all the alchemy residue from Fat Master, she still had more than half left.

After thinking it over, she still felt it was more reliable to let Du Sixian handle it.

Speaking of which, Lu Yibei couldn’t help but complain about the familiars recommended by the PL girl.

What kind of weirdos were those!

She had already looked into it. The candidates recommended by the PL girl were either dead or missing.

Even if she could find them, could they manage things better than Du Sixian? Could they make Paper Cicada Immortal more efficiently than Meng? Could they be cuter than the jacket?

None of them! Lu Yibei grumbled inwardly.

Hearing this, Du Sixian paused, puzzled, and asked, “A bit of funds? How much is that?”

Honestly, maintaining the Calamity Irresponsible Scare Company took more time, energy, and money than she had imagined. Almost all the rent she collected each month was spent, and it still wasn’t enough.

If a large sum of money could come in… Du Sixian frowned, and many plans that had been put on hold due to lack of funds floated through her mind.

Lu Yibei didn’t answer Du Sixian’s question. Instead, she raised an eyebrow at her with a sly look, then waved her small hand, opening a passage behind her leading to the prototype of the Divine Land.

Then…

“Ta-da–ta-da–!”

A fist-sized lump of gold rolled out from the passage, bounced twice, and landed in the corner between the shelves.

Gold? Du Sixian looked at the shiny object on the ground, a trace of disappointment flashing in her eyes.

She estimated roughly that the gold weighed about 3KG.

Although it was already quite valuable, for the vast haunting community of Hua City, it was just a drop in the bucket.

Just then, a rumbling sound came from the passage to the prototype of the Divine Land, vaguely like a landslide.

“Boom–!”

With the rumble, gold poured out of the passage like a floodgate opening, thundering down and filling the aisle between the shelves behind her.

Du Sixian roughly estimated the total to be at least two or three tons.

Staring at the dazzling gold all over the floor, her eyes widened. After swallowing hard, she looked at Lu Yibei and said weakly, “He-hero, have you finally chosen this path?”

A hero is truly a hero–did she just empty out some bank’s vault?

Aren’t you afraid The Midnight Watchers Society will track you down?

But if The Midnight Watchers Society does investigate, as long as I team up with Senior Lu, we should be able to clear the hero’s name, right? Du Sixian thought.

“This path?” Lu Yibei frowned.

“Robbery.” Du Sixian said seriously, a ruthless glint in her eyes. “Hero, don’t worry. I’ll go pick a good brother in a bit, give them enough support money, and they should be happy to take the fall for you.”

Lu Yibei’s eye twitched and she interrupted, “Stop, stop, stop, are you running some kind of gang? Why does it sound like I’m about to go on the run? I didn’t steal this!”

I’m not that bold, and not just me–I haven’t heard of any haunting or psychic daring to rob a bank! Lu Yibei thought.

Among the guardians of The Midnight Watchers Society, there is one known as [God of Wealth]. He almost never participates in investigations or handles haunting incidents. His daily job is to ensure that the vast majority of people’s wealth isn’t harmed by illegal psychic forces.

Almost every bank vault has a mark left by [God of Wealth]. If any psychic or haunting tries to rob a bank, [God of Wealth] will appear before them within an hour.

Of course…

This kind of work takes a huge amount of energy, and [God of Wealth] can’t look after everyone.

That’s why there are still haunting incidents where someone’s wallet, bank card, or even Huabei and Weili Loan are all drained.

“Though I can’t really explain how I got it, rest assured, this stuff definitely wasn’t obtained through illegal means. You can use it without worry!” Lu Yibei explained.

Du Sixian was a girl born with a silver spoon in her mouth, accustomed to grand scenes. After a brief moment of shock, she quickly regained her composure.

She looked at the gold on the ground, was silent for a few seconds, propped her chin with one hand, nodded, and said, “I have indeed thought of a few projects that would require a large amount of funding, but…”

Pausing, she looked at Lu Yibei and continued, “But with this much money, if I manage and operate it for you, doubling or tripling it shouldn’t be a problem. But don’t you have any other plans?”

“Of course! First, buy tens of thousands of graphics cards, then sell them off cheaply under the name of ‘cursed graphics cards,’ ruin the profiteers’ business, and throw in a one-month scare package. If the profiteers or mining bosses try to fish in troubled waters, the scare package will automatically upgrade to a real haunting incident.”

“What do you think?” Lu Yibei asked.

As a gaming enthusiast, she knew all too well the pain of her fellow gamers not being able to buy cheap graphics cards.

What’s a little scare? Aren’t the ugly faces of profiteers more terrifying than hauntings?

Besides, when the guys are playing certain unspeakable games, if a haunting suddenly crawls out of the screen, it could even help them quit their addictions! It’s good for their health.

Du Sixian, “……” A hero is indeed a hero, too proud to use underhanded tricks–the methods are as simple and direct as ever.

Seeing Du Sixian remain silent, Lu Yibei didn’t know what she was thinking and felt a bit awkward, hurriedly changing the subject, “Just kidding, the graphics card thing can wait. If possible, I’d like to use these funds to develop some new equipment…”

She paused, then added, “Something like the Paper Cicada Immortal, but the blueprints for making the equipment are stored elsewhere for now. I’ll have to retrieve them before I can start developing.”

“Elsewhere?” Du Sixian tilted her head.

Besides Hua City and that mysterious space, did the hero have other secret bases?

No wonder she’s a hero–always likes to keep a card up her sleeve!

“Oh, the Great Pure Palace,” Lu Yibei said offhandedly.

Anyway, she was going there to look for fragments of the Pure Lotus Sword and the Visualized Diagram, and while she was at it, she might as well grab some methods for making psychic artifacts. That shouldn’t be a problem.

If you’re going to fleece a sheep, you have to pick one and fleece it to the end. If you don’t believe it, just ask the other “sheep” if that’s not what they think, Lu Yibei thought.

Du Sixian, “???”

Isn’t that place…

Why does the hero talk about it like it’s her own home, just going in and out as she pleases?

No wonder she’s a hero–she can come and go from the Great Pure Palace as if it’s an unguarded land! Du Sixian thought.

————

2:30 a.m., Yan City, in a small town twenty kilometers outside the Plague Taisui quarantine zone.

Even though it was late at night and pouring rain, it was livelier here than daytime in some places.

After the haunting incident caused by Plague Taisui, most of the former residents here were dead or injured, nine out of ten houses empty, the place nearly a ghost town.

However, as The Midnight Watchers Society successfully suppressed Plague Taisui and the threat was eliminated, a group of garbage pickers with psychic energy levels so low they didn’t even register began to gather here.

These fearless garbage pickers came from all over the world, often appearing in areas abandoned due to haunting incidents.

Whether it was an abandoned oil factory on the Siberian plains, a remote city somewhere in Northern Europe, or an obscure street in Southeast Asia, their active figures could be seen.

They swarmed in like locusts, carrying away wealth that no longer had an owner, leaving behind only empty shells.

Although, compared to the total number of human settlements, the areas abandoned due to haunting incidents were very few, and these garbage pickers were insignificant compared to the more than seven billion humans.

But just as there are people living in landfills, spending their days with mosquitoes and disease in corners unknown to most, so too do these garbage pickers exist, though unknown to the public. Yet, worldwide, their numbers reach tens of thousands, and they are highly mobile. Even The Midnight Watchers Society and similar organizations in various countries, even if they wanted to intervene, could not completely stop their actions.

Where there is light, there is darkness; there will always be those willing to seek gold in the shadows.

Some countries even simply let them be, thinking that if these garbage pickers want to die, it’s their own fault.

At this moment, in the small town shrouded by night and rain, lights flashed from time to time, orange-yellow glows outlining the silhouettes of people in raincoats.

Faint sounds of arguing came from unseen places–one side speaking Kansai-accented Japanese, the other with a South American Spanish accent, neither understanding the other, and judging by the tone, a fight was about to break out.

Deep in a narrow alley, the stench of rot filled the air, and several corpses lay in the dark corners.

At the alley entrance, a garbage picker pushed his cart with a rain canopy, holding up a pebble solidified with a red flame flash spell formation for light, slowly approaching. Raindrops tapped against the canopy, producing a crisp sound that lulled one to sleep.

He was here to look for corpses.

Where there are people, there is conflict. In this small town, conflict happened every day, and deaths were common.

The dead were wealth.

For a lone garbage picker like him, he often couldn’t compete with those who acted in gangs when scavenging unclaimed riches, so he could only try his luck in corners where corpses piled up.

Human organs that hadn’t yet rotted could be sold to the Black Sun Brotherhood. The dead’s phones and wallets often yielded some loose change, and if he managed to find a psychic artifact or two, the haul might even surpass sweeping through an entire apartment building.

The garbage picker used his rusty iron hook to flip over a corpse lying face down, saw the empty abdominal cavity, and spat viciously, “Pah! Even the shit’s been scooped out, damn stray dogs!”

“This world’s gone to hell, about to hit catastrophe-class haunting and destroy everything!”

He cursed as he pushed his cart forward, stopping from time to time to use his iron hook to turn over corpses that had already been scavenged several times, followed by another round of venomous swearing.

Finally, at the deepest part of the alley, he found a corpse that hadn’t yet been touched by other garbage pickers…

“Wait, this person’s still alive? Damn! How is that even possible?” the garbage picker exclaimed in surprise.

By the light of his pebble, he saw that the woman in the black raincoat had no color in her face, her body riddled with bloody holes. He seemed to hear the wailing of torn organs, and the wounds had already begun to rot, showing a moldy dark green.

But she was indeed still alive, her chest rising and falling at an extremely slow rate.

“Heh, so what if you’re alive? Bad luck running into me. The bosses at Black Sun Brotherhood are pushing hard, they’ll definitely love your still-beating heart.”

“Heh heh, looks like a young girl too. It’s been ages since I’ve touched a woman!”

Muttering, the garbage picker squatted down, using the faint firelight to reach into the girl’s raincoat and grope around. Suddenly, his smile froze.

He touched some indescribable rod-shaped organ.

“……” After a few seconds of silence, his grin grew wider. “A boy? Isn’t that even better? Heh heh heh!”

He continued searching, soon pulling out a wallet pierced by some sharp weapon.

“fang ji, male, Kyrgyz…” The garbage picker glanced at the ID in the wallet, curled his lip, took the only eighty-seven yuan and fifty cents inside, and reached again into the boy’s raincoat.

Suddenly, his body stiffened, trembling as he withdrew his hand and looked at the cold object in his palm, his pupils contracting violently.

It was a Death Owl Emblem covered in cracks.

“He’s… he’s with The Midnight Watchers Society? This, this…” The garbage picker muttered, lips trembling, looking at the unconscious boy on the ground, hesitating whether to help him, go find the big shots of The Midnight Watchers Society for a reward, or just finish him off so The Midnight Watchers Society wouldn’t come after him later.

Just then, the boy suddenly woke up, opened his eyes, and a sun-like brilliance flashed in his gaze.

Staring into those eyes, the garbage picker’s body trembled. He vaguely felt something inside him being drawn away by those eyes–maybe his soul, maybe something else.

The next moment, a group of R-country people and South Americans started fighting in the distance, gunshots echoing through the empty streets.

In the chaos, an Alchemy bullet flew from the crowd, entered the alley, struck the wall, its trajectory suddenly changing, landing right on the garbage picker’s temple. With a “pop!” it blasted a bloody hole, and before he could react, he was dead.

Beside him, the severely wounded boy stared blankly at the scene before him, only after a long while raising his hand to wipe the blood from his face, murmuring, “Who am I?”

As soon as he spoke, a gust of wind blew by, lifting the fallen ID card from the ground and carrying it to his side.

He glanced at the ID out of the corner of his eye, and when he saw his own photo printed on it, he frowned slightly.

“I am fang ji… What is this place?”

“Damn you, fighting every day! R-country bastards and South Americans, get out of Qianqiu Town!” A furious shout echoed from the distant, empty town.

“Qianqiu Town…” the boy muttered, “Why am I here?”

This time, he didn’t get an answer by coincidence…