Outer Path Wuchang 1

"Join Luoshan..."

Zhu Shi stood stunned for a moment, then sighed.

"Does that mean it's still not possible?" I asked, feeling indignant.

"It's not that it's impossible. If you really possess such extraordinary power, whether you want to join Luoshan or do something else, I have neither the reason nor the right to stop you."

"Then do you think I'm faking my power?" I felt that her reaction was completely understandable.

Yet she shook her head. "I haven't doubted your account of what happened during the battle."

You should doubt me a little.

I had already been planning to demonstrate it on the spot.

"Before, I thought you had serious deficiencies in combat, which was why I opposed you joining Luoshan. But now it's the exact opposite. Being powerful has its own drawbacks." Zhu Shi seemed to be worrying about something. She looked again at the remains scattered across the ground, her face filled with sorrow. "I'll explain the details to you properly later. For now, we should deal with the Fallen Demon Hunter's aftermath."

Agent Kong seemed to have been an acquaintance of Zhu Shi's. Seeing an acquaintance become evil and die must have left her with extremely complicated emotions.

"Sorry. I didn't intend to kill her earlier," I said.

"You don't need to apologize to me. I know it wasn't you who killed her, but some other unknown cause. Even if you really had killed her, the fault would have been Agent Kong's, not yours." By the end, an ashamed expression had appeared on her face. "Besides... I'm the Demon Hunter responsible for this area. This was originally a sin of killing that I should have borne."

I had initially felt a slight, rather unreasonable sense of guilt over causing Zhu Shi's acquaintance to die. Now, however, she was the one feeling guilty toward me. Only then did I remember that when Agent Kong was still disguised, she had told me one of the reasons Zhu Shi didn't want me to join Luoshan was that she didn't want me to kill anyone.

That probably hadn't been something Agent Kong had said casually. Zhu Shi really did have an incredibly naïve side.

Agent Kong hadn't been killed directly by me, but my actions had certainly contributed to her death. Moreover, unlike the previous Fallen Demon Hunter, my impression of Agent Kong had always been that of a human being. Perhaps I should have felt guilty about killing someone, yet my heart was completely unmoved.

Instead, I felt more regret that after Agent Kong's death, many truths I didn't understand had been buried in the darkness with her.

The Fallen Demon Hunter incident clearly still held many mysteries. Where had Agent Kong obtained that power? Why had she suddenly self-destructed and died at the end? Why had the previous Fallen Demon Hunter known me? What was the ritual formation and cave in the room on the Fifteenth Floor about? I felt as if I had speedrun a game only to discover that I still hadn't collected many of its items. Reality couldn't be restarted, so it seemed I could only throw myself into the next adventure.

I also deeply regretted that I could no longer enter the Shadow World through Agent Kong.

I couldn't describe the inside of the Shadow World in human language. I couldn't even figure out what it actually felt like to be there myself. If I had to force an analogy, if my existence were compared to a software program, then entering the Shadow World would be like forcibly opening a video program with a text editor. It had nearly turned me into a string of meaningless garbled code.

So I had to endure it with all my strength before I could maintain my proper existence and thoughts there.

When Zhu Shi had heard me describe this before, the look in her eyes had grown even stranger, as if she had no idea what I was talking about. I didn't understand it either. I had simply followed my instincts.

I had originally planned to observe the place for a while longer, but I thought it would be bad if Agent Kong took the opportunity to escape. Besides, as long as I captured her, I could have her open the passage again. That was why I hurried back. I hadn't expected...

After saying goodbye to Zhu Shi, I found more of Agent Kong's shattered remains scattered nearby. Naturally, they weren't large pieces of her body—just a finger that had been blown away by the explosion. It had also been burned into charcoal by the flames. Driven by a sense of incompleteness, I picked it up and took it with me. Perhaps because it had been burned into charcoal before her death, it still retained the appearance of her Fallen Demon Hunter form, making it quite valuable as a keepsake.

Calling it a "souvenir" might make me seem somewhat deranged. I might encounter many more bizarre incidents in the future. Compared to those, a charred finger certainly wouldn't count for much. Still, at least to me right now, this thing held some meaning.

-

One day later, this morning, Zhu Shi and I met in a park near the university.

Perhaps she had done something on her end. Although I had made quite a commotion by cleaving the unfinished building in half, no government personnel had come to question me. Or perhaps she was the government representative responsible for speaking with me.

She was still wearing a white women's shirt and a black skirt, with a large black guitar case on her back. She looked like a woman in a band.

Compared to yesterday, her complexion was much calmer. She seemed to have processed the emotions brought on by watching an acquaintance become evil and die—or perhaps she had merely hidden them all away in a cabinet inside her heart.

There was no one else around, so we could speak freely. Today, she was meeting with me formally as a Demon Hunter of Luoshan to discuss what I would do in the future.

First, she asked me to demonstrate my skill of transforming my body into flames. After I complied, she circled around me to observe, her eyes taking on an expression as if she had seen a ghost.

"...Although I never doubted what you said, and I had already prepared myself mentally, still... Are my eyes all right? Am I really not dreaming?"

"Is this skill really that impressive?" I asked curiously.

"It's no longer a question of whether it's impressive. This is a divine skill." She gave her assessment. "To freely transform your own body into a natural element—in the world of Demon Hunters, this is considered the power of 'divine manifestation.' In ordinary terms, it's Elementalization. Demon Hunters regard this skill as a characteristic of gods or immortals. Although there are other ways to forcibly imitate this divine skill, they basically all involve certain conditions, costs, or limitations. It's impossible to use it as naturally as you do."

I responded in a tone devoid of any sense of reality. "So, does that mean I'm a god or an immortal?"

"...That depends on how you mastered Elementalization." She seemed to find the idea absurd as well.

At her words, I recalled my past experiences and explained them to her.

The process by which I learned Elementalization—or the "Second Form"—wasn't complicated.

Zhu Shi and Agent Kong both seemed to believe that a Flame ability user was more like "an ordinary person carrying a powerful weapon" than a "supernatural being." In my normal form, I did indeed feel that way.

In the past, I had always felt an invisible barrier between myself and flames. When I manipulated flames, it was as if I were issuing orders to a subordinate. There was always an interval between "me giving the command" and "the flames receiving the command." No matter how much I practiced, it felt as if I were only cultivating a rapport between myself and the flames, rather than truly controlling them as naturally as my own limbs.

In theory, my flames were my spirit, so there shouldn't have been any inexplicable delay. Thus, I could only form one hypothesis: my own spirit and the spirit that had transformed into flames were different.

From there, I came up with an idea—if I couldn't control flames as naturally as my own limbs because I was still human rather than flames themselves, then couldn't I simply become flames?

To put that idea into practice, I chose an extremely simple and crude method.

I used flames to set myself on fire.

Unless I intended it, the flames wouldn't harm my body. I could directly fill every gap inside my body with flames, feeling the sensation of becoming one with them.

Until one day, I discovered that the boundary between myself and the flames had finally disappeared.

I had become flames.

The process had actually left me confused as well.

After hearing my account, Zhu Shi stood there dumbfounded.

"Your method..." After a long while, she finally spoke with difficulty. "All I can say is that true gods and immortals may be unable to describe the process of achieving Elementalization to others in words, but they themselves would certainly understand it perfectly. For the former, it's an innate state. For the latter, it's the result of attaining enlightenment.

"As for your situation—randomly grabbing hold of some incomprehensible idea and suddenly mastering it while practicing... In all my experience, there are no other examples of anyone doing it your way."

"I see..."

It seemed I really had nothing to do with gods or immortals. However, as a superpowered individual, I was clearly quite unusual.

I didn't know whether I should feel happy about being "different." This uniqueness seemed to mean that it would be difficult for me to find any examples to reference, making it even harder to uncover the reason behind my superpower awakening.

"I think I understand now why you almost never encountered anomalies in the past." She sounded relieved. "Anomalies attract one another, but when something reaches an extreme, the opposite occurs. Your power is too immense, so anomalies will instead retreat from you of their own accord. It isn't just anomalous beings with instincts and intelligence that retreat. Even anomalies that exist as phenomena somehow cannot form a connection with you.

"And this is a special phenomenon that normally occurs among the vast majority of the Great Wuchang, as well as a very small number of Demon Hunters whose power is excessively strong."

I heard a new term and couldn't help growing curious. "'Great Wuchang'? What does that mean?"

"Great Wuchang are the strongest Demon Hunters who stand at the pinnacle of Luoshan." She explained, "They possess immense power and are few in number. At present, fewer than ten Great Wuchang are stationed at Luoshan."

"You said they're powerful... Just how powerful are they?"

As I asked, I began speculating inwardly. Considering that an organization like Luoshan hadn't become the ruler of this country and hadn't left any records of its own in history, the power of the Great Wuchang shouldn't exceed that of ancient armies. At most, it shouldn't surpass modern armies.

But still... even I was confident I could defeat an ancient army. Could the strongest Demon Hunters really not do the same?

Or was I underestimating armies? Had armies throughout history possessed some trump card capable of suppressing superpowered individuals like me?

Then Zhu Shi said something utterly absurd:

"Setting aside certain special cases that may have existed throughout history, as far as I know, the Great Wuchang generally possess enough power to single-handedly destroy an entire country."