"Changqing? Hmm... Your experience isn't great." At the Night Banquet Bar in Longcheng Lower City, the bartender looked at the résumé in front of him, then at the young man standing across the counter. He seemed a little hesitant.
"It's not great, but it meets the requirements."
That only made the bartender look more conflicted. The bar wasn't hiring—no, that wasn't quite right. They were hiring, just not for employees. They were looking for people to take on a much bigger task.
The résumé on the counter looked like it belonged to a complete slacker. There was nothing impressive about it. But it wasn't entirely useless, either. Ordinarily, once someone got into this line of work, they couldn't find teammates. Slackers didn't team up with other slackers.
"There just wasn't much time. Otherwise, I could've made my résumé look better."
"Would you like a drink?" The bartender silently clicked his tongue. The kid wasn't even bothering to pretend. Young people these days...
Zheng Yichen nodded. "Then I'll take the one with the least alcohol."
The bartender served the young man a glass of fruit wine, then finished reading the rest of the résumé. "Since you found your way here, you know this is just an agency. Anything that happens outside the Night Banquet Bar has nothing to do with us."
"Of course." Zheng Yichen took a sip of the fruit wine, and his eyes lit up. There was a faint taste of alcohol, but the fruity flavor was much stronger. It was better than some soft drinks.
Seeing Zheng Yichen's reaction, the bartender took out a form. "Just fill this out. But I still need to remind you: adults have to take responsibility for their choices. You can use this identity to show off to your classmates and relatives later, but once you have it, even if you go out of your way to avoid anomalies, they might still come near you when you're not paying attention!"
The young man standing before him might be young, but he wasn't a child anymore. If he was just after the "Hunter" title because it sounded cool, he'd be the one regretting it later.
"Hunter" was just a common term that included people like Demon Hunters and Anomaly Exterminators. In general, they were hired to get things done, and their line of work wasn't all that different from that of ordinary mercenaries. The difference was that these people could deal with powerful anomalies that ordinary mercenaries couldn't handle.
Demon Hunters weren't the sort who often got stiffed on payment and ended up being killed with pitchforks...
"I don't get along with my classmates, and I don't have any relatives." Zheng Yichen quickly filled out the form in his hands.
The bartender looked at Zheng Yichen with some sympathy. "Then you should focus on living a good life even more, instead of deliberately getting involved with anomalies."
At the bartender's advice, Zheng Yichen looked up and smiled, then handed over the completed form. "I'm deliberately getting involved with anomalies because I realized I'm better suited to it."
The bartender took the completed form and pulled out a camera to snap a photo of Zheng Yichen. The background didn't need to be anything special; all they needed was a clear shot of the young man's face. People often wanted to look cool, so later they'd come back for another photo with some kind of monster in the background.
"Within the next week, you'll need to bring in proof." As he spoke, the bartender placed the form alongside the résumé Zheng Yichen had brought. He glanced over some of the details on the résumé, his tone turning a little teasing. "Even if it's just a Mutated Chicken."
Was he going to ask the chicken to play ball, too? Zheng Yichen nodded and downed the rest of his fruit wine. He'd paid for it, so he wasn't going to waste it. As for the bartender's joke, he had no intention of arguing. He knew full well how much of his résumé was exaggerated.
He left the bustling Night Banquet Bar. The city was hazy with fog that night.
Longcheng got its name from that very thing. The Upper City didn't have it too bad, but once night fell, the fog became especially thick in the Lower City. The streetlights were specially designed fog lamps. Even so, people at a distance still looked like indistinct shadows, hard to make out.
Back home, Zheng Yichen took off his jacket and went into the bathroom. He lifted his undershirt in front of the mirror and examined the faint marks on his chest, then nodded in satisfaction.
This world had anomalies, and he had one, too: a condition called "Withering Syndrome" that wasn't a normal medical illness. Growing up all over again had been difficult enough that, if he hadn't been one of the many people who'd crossed into another world, he probably wouldn't have made it past childhood.
He couldn't figure out why he'd become a child again after crossing over. Back then, what concerned him most was the strange "illness" that had appeared on his body. Only later did he learn that it was an anomaly, too.
Being young had helped him fit into this world. In a modern society, a child could blend in easily, even one with no traceable background. He'd also managed to get along fairly well at the orphanage.
He'd been an adult on the inside from the start, so he hadn't developed some new, awkward personality just because of his problems. He was still himself. Things had been difficult, but in the end, he'd grown up in this world and left the orphanage.
Growing up all over again hadn't been too difficult. The hard part had always been the anomaly inside him.
It hadn't been too serious when he was young. At worst, his skin was wrinkled. But as he got older, it grew more and more severe. Even though he exercised hard, it didn't help much. Still, exercise worked better than medicine.
Medicine wasn't worth it when he could just eat a couple more steamed buns.
The anomaly didn't make Zheng Yichen feel weak, nor did it affect his ability to exercise. It only made his skin develop worse wrinkles. Touching them felt like touching the bark of a dead tree. At first, the wrinkles were only on his torso, so he could cover them up by dressing warmly.
As the symptoms worsened, they gradually spread to his limbs. That was too much.
The turning point came when he got caught up in an anomalous incident. He'd found a new job in Longcheng. It wasn't anything fancy—he was just feeding chickens.
There were a lot of anomalies in this world, and chicken farms could encounter them, too. While he was feeding the chickens there, one of them suddenly exploded at the head. A dozen tendrils like blood vessels burst out and began devouring its fellows, even the eggs they'd just laid!
He'd been at a safe distance at the time. When faced with the Mutated Hen, Zheng Yichen felt an urge well up inside him, as if a starving man had just spotted a roast chicken.
Driven by that urge, he charged in with his strong physique.
It was just a chicken. Even with tentacles, it was still a chicken. He won, but the owner of the chicken farm was extremely unhappy about it. They could've solved the problem with a gun, so why had he rushed in to fight it up close?
The chicken had mutated, but it was still trapped in its cage. The cage was sturdy enough that a Mutated Chicken couldn't break free right away. That gave the staff plenty of time to grab a weapon and shoot it.
But Zheng Yichen had chosen the most reckless approach.
The chicken farm owner's words had struck Zheng Yichen as perfectly reasonable. Come to think of it, this wasn't ancient times. If you ran into something that had mutated, of course you should deal with it as safely as possible. A person might get hurt if they went in, but if they shot it from a distance, they'd be fine. At the very least, they could grab a crossbow.
Crossbows were much easier to obtain than guns. The chicken farm owner had a gun, and among the farm's safety equipment, they had a crossbow in addition to fire extinguishers. But the crossbow was locked up and connected to the local police station's network. In an emergency, staff could contact the owner for authorization. In an even more urgent situation, they could bypass authorization, but they had to scan their face and record a photo.
Either way, they could get a weapon right away and deal with unexpected situations.
He hadn't lost his job over it. He'd been the first one to rush in, and while it had been reckless, a person wouldn't usually get killed by a Mutated Chicken unless they were terribly unlucky.
Besides, Zheng Yichen was strong and brave. The chicken farm owner simply emphasized that if something like that happened again, he should prioritize using a ranged weapon. Hitting the other chickens by mistake didn't matter; hitting a person did. As for the chickens the Mutated Chicken had eaten?
They weren't important. A Mutated Chicken fetched a higher price on the market. One was worth a hundred ordinary chickens!
Plenty of schools were eager to buy them for their teachers and students to use. Others planned to buy them to eat. Mutated creatures were still living things; they'd only undergone certain changes. It wasn't as if they turned from meat into stone after mutating. If prepared properly, they could still be a kind of "delicacy."
As long as they could take down the Mutated Chicken, the dead ordinary chickens didn't matter.
After Zheng Yichen made the first kill of a mutated creature in his life, he also noticed a change in himself. When the Mutated Hen's blood got on him, he hadn't felt anything at first. He hadn't even noticed that the blood was fading and disappearing. It was only after he got home and took a shower that he noticed it, along with the fact that his "Withering Disease" had eased a little.
It helped far more than his daily exercise. Unfortunately, the Mutated Hen had been taken away, and he hadn't gotten the chance to test that strange, hard-to-explain urge.
That Mutated Hen became the first entry on his résumé. He'd killed an Abnormal Creature with his own two hands. Why shouldn't he put it down?
Other people hadn't even killed a chicken like that with their own hands. After that, he kept his job while looking for other anomalies. He hadn't found many big ones, and he couldn't afford to mess with them.
As for the smaller ones, most could be taken down by ordinary people with enough courage, a certain level of physical ability, and a bit of luck.
Even the more troublesome ones were about as dangerous as an alligator on land fighting a human with a knife. It wasn't that they couldn't be fought. The key was that not many people had the courage to do it. Facing one in person was nothing like watching a video. A lion or tiger might look cute in a video, but facing one for real was another matter.
Before, he'd had to take off his clothes to reveal a body like the bark of a withered tree. Now, aside from a few faint marks, he looked pretty much as he had a few years ago. You could hardly tell there was anything wrong.
The price he'd paid for this was the deaths of countless mutated little animals at his hands.
He was sure his "illness" wasn't a real disease. It was more like a Golden Finger. Although it had caused him plenty of trouble when he first arrived in this world, he'd also trained hard to fight it, so he'd always been in great shape.
A Golden Finger, combined with the self-discipline that pressure had forced him to develop—that was twice the fun, wasn't it?
His one regret was that this Golden Finger wasn't something like a "system." It was just a special ability. This world had special powers, and anything involving them fell under the category of anomalies—in other words, anything "abnormal."
This world resembled Earth, but it wasn't Earth. Special powers weren't a secret, and having something unusual about you didn't mean you'd be sent to some research institute and vivisected. That approach was long outdated, unless they sent over a corpse. In any case, none of that had much to do with him.
That had nothing to do with him. He'd found a way to ease, or even completely cure, his "Withering Disease," and it had something to do with Abnormal Creatures. So, once he'd built up enough "experience," he'd eagerly gone to the Night Banquet Bar to register.
After he brought in the proof, he'd officially receive his "Hunter" credential. Then he'd have free access to all kinds of information, instead of having to run all over the place searching for mutated creatures that were hard to find in the city.
Chicken farms? Mutated chickens were still the chicken farm owner's property. If he encountered one and took it down in time, he might get a bonus, but the creature still belonged to the owner. Other farms had the same rules.
Zheng Yichen had encountered those creatures three times at the chicken farm, but each time, all he got was a little blood on him. In the end, he quit and began officially hunting anomalies in his spare time.
It was only through that amateur hunting that he gained a clearer understanding of his "illness."
By now, mutated little animals no longer met his needs, but his "Withering Disease" still hadn't been cured completely. He couldn't become the Ten Mile Slope Sword God by picking on little animals. That was clearly unrealistic. Just like leveling up by fighting monsters, sooner or later, you had to leave the beginner's village.
So he might as well head out into the world.
He patted his chest. He had to admit, working out was addictive. He used to do it to survive, but now that he was used to it, he felt uncomfortable if he didn't work his muscles every day.
He casually lifted and moved around the heavy barbells at home for over half an hour. After finishing his pre-bedtime workout, Zheng Yichen hummed to himself as he took a cold shower, then leaned against the bed and read a book on "combat techniques" he'd bought at a street stall.
He wanted to find someone skilled to teach him a few things, but without connections to those circles, he couldn't find anyone. As for the ordinary martial arts schools, they'd be suitable if he wanted to get in shape, but he'd already passed the stage where he needed that.
The schools should have real techniques, but those were even harder to come by than cabbages at a market. What Zheng Yichen wanted was something "quick to learn." If his anomaly wasn't so serious, he could settle down and train for a few years, but he didn't have that kind of time.
He might as well learn through actual combat in the Hunter circles.
For that reason, he planned to go out bright and early the next morning and kill a chicken...
Before you continue