In the end, I still turned down Lu Youxun’s recruitment pitch.

  He clearly hadn’t expected to win me over in one conversation—my refusal probably came as no surprise. When he saw I wasn’t biting, he kept his composure, left me his contact information, and we finished the skewers together before heading our separate ways.

  As for whether everything he said was true—whether transcendentalism truly had no intention of enslaving ordinary people—I still couldn’t be sure.

  The Black Rope Heart-Locking Ring told me he was speaking honestly. But the ring itself was an item he’d handed over willingly. It was entirely possible he’d planned from the start to let me use it, precisely to lend his words extra credibility. Who’s to say there wasn’t some countermeasure built in?

  Even if everything he said was factual, that didn’t mean he’d told me the whole truth. He could easily have omitted anything inconvenient, selectively presented only the parts that served his case, and polished them to look better.

  That lingering uncertainty reminded me of something Zhu Shi once told me: once I revealed my true power, people with all kinds of agendas would approach me, carefully dressing up their true positions.

  It wasn’t just Lu Youxun. Maybe—even unintentionally—Zhu Shi had done the same.

  Wherever there are people, there are factions, alliances, and power plays. I understood that rationally. But actually witnessing the intricate calculations, maneuvering, and backstabbing even within an extraordinary organization like Mount Luo still left me disappointed.

  Fortunately, Zhu Shi had already given me a reliable way to handle exactly this kind of disillusionment. From the very beginning, she’d advised: stay calm, stay patient, observe carefully. There was no need to rush to judgment. Wait until their real faces revealed themselves—then decide.

  At the very least, one thing was crystal clear: Lu Youxun was genuinely loyal to transcendentalism. Voluntarily letting someone grip your still-beating heart just to prove your sincerity—that wasn’t something a normal person would even consider, let alone actually do. His boldness left an indelible impression.

  Putting that together with everything else, his claim that he wouldn’t report my elementalization to his superiors or colleagues was probably also true.

  Both his and Zhu Shi’s reactions made it obvious that “a cultivator capable of elementalization” carried extraordinary significance within Mount Luo. Concealing such a thing wasn’t a trivial matter. If he were simply carrying out faction business out of duty, he wouldn’t risk covering for me. Only someone truly devoted to transcendentalism—someone sincerely trying to extend goodwill on its behalf—would take that kind of personal risk and act on his own initiative.

  Even if all of it was just masterful acting to win me over, I had to admit: the performance was highly effective. My view of his position had genuinely shifted, if only a little.

  Shifted or not, once I got home, most of my attention turned to the Black Rope Heart-Locking Ring.

  Aside from the functionally useless Divine Seal fragment, this was the first proper “spellcasting item” I’d ever obtained. “Can’t put it down” barely described how I felt. I spent ages phasing my right hand through walls and furniture, even pressing it against my own beating chest—more thrilling than the first time I ever held a real gun.

  Only after playing with it for a long while did a belated sense of caution finally surface.

  Was this ring really safe? I didn’t think Lu Youxun would tamper with a gift he gave me, but what if there was a GPS tracker inside—or some kind of magical backdoor?

  Normally, no one puts GPS in a gift. Normally, no one even thinks to check whether a gift has GPS. But I’m not exactly normal in either respect.

  I decided I needed to find a way to inspect it properly.

  The opportunity came the very next evening.

  —

  The following afternoon, Zhu Shi, Lu Youxun, and I met again.

  Just as Lu Youxun had mentioned the night before, his divination work on the monster’s head had run into obstacles.

  The other monster we were now hunting likely possessed genuine anti-divination abilities—Lu Youxun couldn’t extract any direct information about him. Fortunately, everything else could still be divined. Using those secondary clues, we could at least infer the other monster’s approximate active hours and range of movement.

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

  Among the information were also faint traces pointing toward the Monster Maker himself.

  If the Monster Maker truly belonged to the Humanity Division, then the very existence of monsters raised some puzzling questions.

  The Humanity Division’s stated goal was to create superhuman soldiers who were completely obedient to secular authority and answered solely to ordinary human leadership—tools to counter Mount Luo’s demon hunters. Yet the monsters we’d encountered were arrogant to the extreme, treating ordinary humans as prey and proclaiming themselves apex predators. Their attitude was even more radical than what I’d heard from transcendentalists. How did that possibly align with the Humanity Division’s vision of obedient super-soldiers?

  According to the information inside the monster’s head, the Monster Maker periodically met with his creations for full-body examinations and comprehensive data collection. Combined with his attempt to force Agent Kong into the labyrinth against his will—pushing him to overcome his inner demons and elevate his soul—it was impossible not to see the researcher-subject dynamic at play.

  Perhaps, in the eyes of the Humanity Division and the Monster Maker, monsters were merely transitional prototypes. They were lab rats—nothing more. No need for loyalty, no need for principles; they only needed to serve their experimental value.

  Even so, the fact that the Monster Maker allowed his creations to slaughter indiscriminately hinted at the rotten nature of the Humanity Division itself.

  Were they truly trying to protect secular society—or were they using these “super-soldiers” to position themselves as its new overlords?

  On a side note, after Lu Youxun officially approved my status as an unorthodox Impermanent, Zhu Shi felt there was no longer any need to keep dragging me into the investigation and suggested handling the monster case on her own.

  I’d almost forgotten that, nominally, my only reason for getting involved was to earn that unorthodox status. Naturally, I wasn’t about to bail halfway. Lu Youxun once again told her something along the lines of “I can’t feel at ease letting a lone woman handle this,” and I still wasn’t sure whether he meant it or was deliberately playing along with me.

  Of course, that argument didn’t convince her. So I told her, “I can’t just sit back and watch monsters tear apart the city I live in.” That reason seemed to hit exactly the image she had of me—she immediately brightened and agreed.

  At 8:30 p.m., Zhu Shi and I rendezvoused again—this time inside an old residential compound in the New District.

  Though it was called the “New District,” the area had some age to it; the name just hadn’t changed. This aging complex was a fair distance from the bustling main streets. By night, it was eerily quiet, with hardly any pedestrians around. That our target monster—who preferred hunting local dignitaries—would be active in a place like this was genuinely unexpected.

  “Old doesn’t necessarily mean poor,” Zhu Shi told me, then shifted the topic to the Divine Seal. She said she’d gone home last night and looked up what information she could find on it. The details largely matched what Lu Youxun had told me.

  “The Divine Seal is mentioned in a few very ancient texts, but those references are sparse—just a handful of books and only a few passing lines each. If it truly had the power to grant any wish, how could there be so little written about it?” she said. “If someone in Mount Luo hadn’t dragged it up while speculating about the origin of the ‘Heaven-Turning Event,’ most people probably wouldn’t even know the name.”

  The force that had once prevented Mount Luo from influencing the mortal world had now vanished. Mount Luo called that vanishing the “Heaven-Turning Event,” she explained.

  The character “fan” (番) carried the meaning of change or turnover. “Heaven-Turning” was essentially “regime change.”

  “But how did you even hear about the Divine Seal?” she asked.

  I answered with perfect seriousness: “I can’t quite remember. It must have been Agent Kong who told me.”

  I was gradually turning Agent Kong into the image of someone who’d gossip about anything and everything to anyone who’d listen.

  “How would Agent Kong know something like that?” She frowned at first, then seemed to realize something. “Right—he always wanted to become a demon hunter. He kept going back to Mount Luo for training, but he could never make it. When it comes to rituals and formations, I actually know less than he did. An artifact that grants any wish… it makes sense he’d be curious about something like that. Maybe that’s even why he became a monster…”

  She shook her head at the end, cutting the topic short, and seemed about to start a new one.

  Seizing the moment, I asked the question that had been nagging at me since last night: what exactly was her ability?

  I added, “If it’s inconvenient to say, you don’t have to force yourself.”

  “It’s fine, Z. You’re my partner now—we’re fighting side by side. For the sake of working well together, I should have explained my ability to you earlier anyway. I was the one who overlooked it.” She actually sounded a little apologetic before continuing. “My ability is actually very simple: I can spot an opponent’s flaws.”

  “Spot flaws…” I struggled for a moment to grasp what that meant in practice. “For example?”

  “For example, if my opponent is highly skilled with a sword, I can spot the weaknesses in their technique and catch them off guard. And if my opponent has an indestructible body, I can still find the weak points in their physique and land a devastating blow.”

  “I see—so it massively boosts your insight…” I thought back to her performance last night. “When we were first trapped in the labyrinth space, were you planning to use this ability to find a flaw in the labyrinth itself and break it open?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “But my ability is far less effective against inanimate objects than against living beings, so finding a weak point in the labyrinth right away was very difficult.”

  “Against living beings, it’s not just about spotting technical mistakes or physical vulnerabilities, is it?” I recalled what she’d done to that monster last night.

  The monster had possessed the ability to transfer damage to his clones—yet he couldn’t regenerate the limbs she’d severed.

  “Correct. Beyond technical and physical flaws, I can also detect flaws in other areas—for instance, flaws in speech.” Zhu Shi suddenly said something impossible to ignore.

  “Wait—what do you mean by ‘flaws in speech’?” I immediately felt a very bad premonition.

  She replied lightly, “It means if Senior Brother Zhuang ever lies to me, I can see it at a glance.”