From the end of the world

Chapter 41: Fallen Demon Hunter vs. Super Power 4 (rd update)

According to the information I read in Luoshan, some strange phenomena can indeed allow the parties involved to travel back and forth between the past and the future, but they are all extraordinary phenomena that can never be replicated by human power, and they are also rare experiences that can only be encountered by chance.

To what extent Luo Shan is determined to maintain this "cannot be replicated" and "can only be encountered by chance", you can see it by looking at their public data repository. The ritual knowledge related to time travel is openly displayed for anyone to read. The content can be summarized as "I successfully traveled to the past and the future by following the following steps, but I don't know why I always fail. Anyway, I write it here, you can believe it or not."

Although Luo Shan's attitude towards it is not as contemptuous as that of a serious scientist towards "a folk science enthusiast who gained enlightenment overnight and invented a perpetual motion machine", he really doesn't take it seriously at all.

If the monster maker is not lying, he may have traveled to the past or future through a method that cannot be replicated. Considering the innovativeness of the monster technology, it is more likely to be the future. Of course, he may have obtained technology that will not be available until a long time later through the method of "predicting the future", but from his tone, it does not seem to be the case. And if I want to make the Seed of Heart become my own forever, starting from the "future" seems to be a direction.

I don't know how to "predict the future", and I'm even less sure I can "travel into the future", but without any other clues, I can't sit idle, so I have to practice the ritual knowledge I found in the public data repository. It's meaningless to repeatedly describe and emphasize the various difficulties in my mind, and everything starts with practice.

Then I went to kill people first.

The prey this time was of course still the people with special abilities in the folks, and people with special abilities, or "mana", could often replace many ritual materials. Killing them on the spot and using their blood as the material for the ritual array was enough to make many ritual arrays perform beyond expectations.

As a Luoshan agent, if I rashly use my connections to collect a lot of ritual materials, I might be suspected by someone with ulterior motives, and killing people is the most convenient way; at the same time, due to the nature of my work, I am good at discovering people with magical powers among the people. Soon, I found a tenant in a community close to Xianshui University.

On the surface, he was just an ordinary employee of a company, renting a room on the 15th floor of a residential building in the community, but in fact he was a dormant superpower. As soon as I saw him, I could smell the fragrance of a high-quality soul coming from him.

With my official identity as Agent Luo Shan and my years of experience, I quickly gained his trust to a certain extent. After some investigation, I learned that his ability was "penetration", which turned himself into a shadow and could penetrate any object.

In other words, while the ability is activated, no one can harm him. Even if a nuclear bomb falls on him or an asteroid hits him, as long as he is still activating the ability, he is invincible. This is a very valuable ability that emphasizes defensive performance.

He probably didn't expose himself because he still had awe for the country and society, and was not interested in new and exciting life. But it can be seen that he had arrogance towards ordinary people, and he no longer regarded himself as an ordinary person. Even if he lived among people, he probably compared himself to a wolf lurking among the sheep, and was complacent and happy with it.

Unfortunately, most of these "superpowers" with only one particularly long board can be dealt with by sneak attacks from behind. They are invincible during the activation of their abilities - in other words, as long as they don't have time to activate their abilities, they are just ordinary people.

I sent out my substitute, and with a little trick I easily killed him in his rented house. He didn't have the chance to activate his "invincible" superpower until the moment of his death.

As for the ritual array arranged with his blood, there are one or two array symbols that serve as retrieval target time and space. Since I cannot determine exactly how many years in the future the source of the monster technology will be, I cannot write them in; as a substitute, I added my own blood as a monster into the array, which theoretically can serve as an alternative retrieval condition.

And sure enough, theory aside, I still failed.

Not only that, the fluctuations of magic power that leaked out at the time of failure also attracted Luo Shan Wu Chang who was patrolling the area at the time.

The impermanence in charge of patrolling this place at that time was Zhu Shi. She was not as easy to deal with as the superpowered person, and I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, so I had to order the stand-in to retreat for the time being.

Then it’s now, eight months later.

After repeated hunting, the strength of my Heart Seed has reached a bottleneck.

The monster maker told me that if I want to break through to the next stage, I must either overcome my inner demons and allow my soul to naturally sublimate, or devour a sufficient number of souls and forcibly sublimate my own soul.

I chose the latter path.

And a lot of other things happened in those eight months.

First, the Monster Maker has added another monster to Saltwater City.

I have secretly contacted this strange man. He never hides his traces of committing crimes, and has a hatred of the powerful that comes from nowhere. In fact, he is also a rich man, but he is jealous of those who are richer and more powerful than him. In the past two or three months, he has killed five local dignitaries. I hate him very much. He even carelessly leaves his biological clues at the crime scene. I deliberately let the stand-in leave some hair with hair follicles in the room on the 15th floor to make it easier to distance himself from me. Why did he do this? Fortunately, the Luoshan forces in Xianshui City lack modern criminal investigation experience and have temporarily confused me with him. But perhaps he will expose himself sooner or later and implicate my existence.

It is not so easy to deal with him secretly. We monsters all have the ability to summon our own mirror clones through the power of shadows. Although this mirror clone is much weaker than our original body, it also has an inherent ability called "Shadow Changing", which ignores the spatial distance and allows us to instantly exchange positions with the distant clone.

This ability also has a tricky function, which is that it can be triggered passively. If he encounters a fatal blow that he cannot react to, the ability will be activated automatically out of a mysterious judgment mechanism to protect his life. It is simply the worst of the worst.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why he is so reckless. I can't do anything about him anyway. Now Zhu Shi is handling his related matters. I just hope he dies under Zhu Shi's sword as soon as possible.

Then, I met a mysterious person with super powers the day before yesterday.

This happened during the day. I was resting at the Luoshan Office opposite the Public Security Department when an unprecedented commotion broke out. I rushed over and found out that someone had sneaked into the Public Security Department to steal guns and ammunition. This was a big deal for them. I also smelled the scent of souls there.

Just like a carnivore can smell wounded and bleeding prey from the air, if there is a prey with a wounded soul near me, I can find it more easily. And at that time, I smelled such a smell. I ordered the stand to move in that direction, and then found the source of the smell behind a fried chicken shop.

It turned out to be a pale and tired girl of about 13 or 14 years old. She was holding a real gun in her hand, which showed that she was the criminal who had sneaked into the public security department to steal guns and ammunition.

Based on my judgment of the soul's smell, she should have been a very powerful superpower. When she was in good condition, I'm afraid that characters like me and the stand-in would not be taken seriously at all. But her current condition is so bad that she is even inferior to the stand-in.

As long as I devour her soul, my Heart Seed will surely break through to the next stage, and there will even be more surplus!
I immediately ordered my double to attack her, but the result was disappointing.

She actually possessed the power of spatial transfer. Although she was at a disadvantage and suffered severe injuries at first, she was able to quickly move to a place far away that was beyond the reach of my soul's sense of smell.

Soon after, there was another unexpected change. My superior gave me the information of a certain person and asked me to find him by any means necessary. The target was the girl who had escaped from me earlier.

It's not just me and my superiors who want to find out the whereabouts of this girl, but also my superiors' superiors and other mountain leaders in Luoshan. They all know that the girl has the power of space transfer, so they even plan to expand the search to the whole country, and they must get it in their hands no matter what.

The storm beyond imagination has swept my mind into a turbulent sea.

——Who is that girl?
-
Since the incident has become so serious, I dare not touch the girl anymore and can only focus on another matter.

This matter itself is something I cannot ignore. It is Zhu Shi’s brother Zhu Chang’an. He rented the room on the 15th floor eight months ago, which is where the person with the ability to penetrate the body lived, and found the ritual array I left behind. And the ritual array actually activated itself without my noticing.

I don't know if it was a successful activation. I heard that a mysterious cave appeared in the center of the ritual array. I can only understand it as the effect of the ritual array. After Zhu Shi told me about this and asked me to go and investigate, I set off without hesitation.

This time, I was disappointed again. I did not see the cave in the room on the fifteenth floor, but I saw Zhuang Cheng instead.

Zhuang Cheng is a well-known figure in the local Luoshan forces. In this increasingly chaotic world, it is incredible that someone like him who tracks strange things would return empty-handed repeatedly. I and a few familiar Luoshan agents occasionally get together to talk about him as a topic of idle chat. Even my superiors and several local Wuchang remember him.

After I got his information, I did have doubts about him. I wondered if he had really encountered strange events, but he just hid his experiences and pretended to know nothing about our world. So what was his motive for deliberately hiding his experiences? I naturally had doubts - he had benefited from the strange events in the past, or even gained strange powers.

Or maybe it was because he had acquired strange powers that he was able to escape from strange events. He chose not to tell others about his experiences because he could not conceal his own powers.

And this kind of person with special abilities is exactly my prey.

But maybe it was just a coincidence. In the past, whenever I wanted to spy on and hunt Zhuang Cheng, I would always give up my original plan for one reason or another, and it would end up in vain.

(End of this chapter)