"Spring Breeze" Stronghold, Central Monitoring Room.
"This is a curse..." Nagano Souya tapped the tabletop with his metal fingers. "I saw it once before..."
"When?" Candle Dragon asked.
"Seven years... no, it should have been eight years ago." Nagano Souya recalled, "I remember that team clearly. They had four Anomaly Hunters and thirteen seasoned mercenaries. One of the Hunters had only been free from Tianshu Tower's control and become a freelance Hunter for less than three months. Before that, he had ranked within the top three hundred on the Hunter leaderboard."
Nagano Souya operated the wheelchair beneath him, moving over to a cabinet and taking out a small flask of sake.
"Boss... given your current condition, you can't drink alcohol..." The suited man who called himself the accountant immediately tried to dissuade him.
"I'm not drinking. Just tasting it." Nagano Souya glared at his subordinate, then poured himself a small cup.
He lifted the cup and lightly moistened his lips with the liquor before continuing. "They had been hired by a wealthy man living in Shencheng. He wanted them to venture deep into the uninhabited zone, find his family's old ancestral hall, and bring back the ancestral tablets left there when the entire family migrated away years ago."
"Looks like they failed the mission," Sun Hang muttered. "If you don't mind me asking, how much did it pay?"
"Six million," Nagano Souya said. "That was already higher than the reward for many missions involving the collection of anomalous samples."
"They ran into the same thing?" Candle Dragon asked.
"That's right... They lost their bearings in the uninhabited zone. Not only did they fail to reach their intended destination, they instead stumbled into a massive fog bank stretching nearly a hundred kilometers."
"A fog bank stretching nearly a hundred kilometers?"
"They