Environmental Adjustments?

"Use these, and you don't have to worry about aiming. It doesn't matter if your aim isn't great—the key is that they have a much larger kill radius!"

"...Wouldn't that make them more dangerous for your teammates?" Zheng Yichen looked at the two weapons in front of him. He had the long guns and the short guns covered now. There wasn't much to say about the shotgun; different shells had different effects. It wasn't just something that fired a spread of pellets.

The Hand Cannon was exactly what its name suggested. Instead of bullets, it fired Small Grenades. You didn't need to hit the target precisely; hitting the ground beside it was enough to inflict massive damage.

"Your teammates definitely won't stand in front of you." The Gun Store owner laughed. There was no way he'd be Zheng Yichen's teammate, anyway. Besides, hunters generally had decent combat awareness. Once they knew what Zheng Yichen was capable of, they definitely wouldn't ask him to cover them.

Besides, both the shotgun and the Small Grenade Hand Cannon had limited range. They were powerful within a few dozen meters, but beyond that, it depended on what kind of ammunition you used. In other words, when fighting alongside Zheng Yichen, as long as his teammates didn't stand in front of him, there was basically no risk of friendly fire.

Then the Gun Store owner brought out a regular pistol. "This one's standard issue."

"...How much for all of it?"

"Twelve thousand." The Gun Store owner named a price. Zheng Yichen hadn't dealt much with this line of business, so he didn't know whether that was expensive or cheap. But the guns seemed well-suited to a beginner like him. The shotgun was a semiautomatic model.

The Hand Cannon, naturally, needed to be reloaded after each shot. The pistol was so ordinary there was no need to explain it. The twelve thousand included enough ammunition, along with a trial membership card for the Roarer Club. If Zheng Yichen was interested, he could join the club later.

He could also come here to practice shooting in his spare time. The Gun Store owner said everyone at the club was strong and easy to get along with, and that Zheng Yichen, with his sturdy build, was welcome to come by and exchange knowledge in a friendly atmosphere.

With firearms on him, he couldn't take the subway. A bus was out of the question, and whether a taxi would take him depended on the driver. The driver Zheng Yichen found was more than willing—he'd paid extra.

Zheng Yichen didn't go straight back to his place. Instead, he headed for the Twilight Chapel. He didn't plan to take the guns home; leaving them at the chapel would do. The Night Banquet Bar was also in the Lower City, as was the Twilight Chapel.

Whenever he had a commission to complete, he could go to the Twilight Chapel to get his weapons. To Zheng Yichen, these guns were for situations where getting into close combat wasn't ideal. Otherwise, he'd definitely charge in and fight up close. How else was he supposed to get stronger?

"Oh, it's you." Hunter Arno spotted Zheng Yichen and greeted him. He glanced at the sturdy black travel bag in Zheng Yichen's hand but said nothing.

Zheng Yichen sat down beside him and set the rather heavy travel bag on the long table. "Do you come here often in the afternoon?"

"Yeah. When I have nothing going on, I come sit here for a while in the afternoon." Hunter Arno nodded. "If I come at other times, I always get the impression the day's about to end."

"True." Zheng Yichen agreed completely. He'd come here first thing in the morning, but as soon as he entered the Twilight Chapel, he'd felt as if it were already afternoon. The place's twilight theme was just that strong.

Zheng Yichen retrieved the snacks he'd prepared from the storage area with a key and shared some with Arno. Then they started chatting about hunters. Arno didn't hesitate to eat the snacks Zheng Yichen offered.

They weren't things like puffed snacks, but dried meat and the like.

"I ran into an anomaly last night."

"Oh?" Arno instinctively reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette, but when he saw a nun looking over, he put it away. "You can smoke here, but only in the smoking area." He paused. "Sounds like you had quite an experience?"

"Didn't you see the news?" Zheng Yichen asked in surprise.

Arno shook his head. "I haven't really been keeping up lately."

Zheng Yichen took out his phone and pulled up a story on Longcheng News for him to see. "Right here. A lot of things came out of the anomaly last night—skeletons and walking corpses, all kinds of stuff."

Zheng Yichen hadn't recorded anything this time. He hadn't had the chance, for one thing, and Roy had been watching, so it wouldn't have been appropriate. He regretted it a little; the Bone Dragon's breath had been a truly spectacular sight. But after that immense torrent of dragon breath surged out from the center of the anomaly, it turned into a sneeze.

Though there was no video, Arno understood the gist of what had happened from Zheng Yichen's account. He picked up a fragment of a skull, took a look, then put it back. The skull was useless now, not even worth using as material. It was just trash.

To avoid spoiling their appetites, Arno suggested that Zheng Yichen throw the "souvenir" in the trash.

"I was wondering: since things inside an anomaly can come out, could we... enter one?"

"Since you've already experienced something like that, there's no harm in telling you about it. We can enter anomalies, but most people can't. As for what happened last night, that was unusual."

Normal living beings felt pressure as they approached an anomaly's center, but the creatures that came out of that one weren't normal. That sort of situation was rare. Most of the time, only a few beings came through from the other side, or nothing came through at all.

Longcheng's Countermeasures Bureau didn't even need to get involved. The regular police were enough to take the unlucky people who'd passed out—or the Mist Walkers—and bring them to the hospital. It didn't matter if local residents were accidentally caught up in it, but Mist Walkers would definitely have to pay a fine.

"Since anomalies don't last for a set amount of time, it's generally best not to enter their centers, even if... you can withstand the pressure nearby."

"You might not run into danger inside an anomaly, but if you don't make it back before it disappears, then under normal circumstances, you won't be coming back."

That sounded a little obvious, but Zheng Yichen caught the emphasis in Arno's words: under normal circumstances, he wouldn't be coming back. Zheng Yichen had learned a little from George, so what about circumstances that weren't normal?

"For example, you might get lucky. You're forced to remain in a place connected to the anomaly, and not long after, an anomaly forms there. If that anomaly happens to connect to the place where we live, then you can come back."

"What are the odds of that?"

"Maybe a little higher than winning the lottery jackpot." Arno made a joke that wasn't particularly funny, then continued, "Living conditions in the places connected to anomalies might be better than in Longcheng. If you enter an anomaly and get stuck there, you might even think it's not so bad. At that point, the only thing you'd have to worry about is your identity."

Zheng Yichen mulled over what Arno had said. It made sense. If the world connected to an anomaly had an incredibly high standard of living for everyone, staying there might not be so bad. Of course, that was assuming the place he ended up wasn't like the world where he'd encountered the Bone Dragon.

A place full of Undead Creatures—that kind of godforsaken place probably wasn't somewhere any normal person would want to stay for long, let alone be stuck in.

Arno continued, "Still, even if the living conditions in those places are excellent, some people might not want to stay."

"Why?" Zheng Yichen asked, since he didn't know. He'd been a hunter for less than a month, after all. He knew next to nothing, so naturally he had a lot of questions. Every piece of information he got now helped fill in the puzzle. Once he'd put enough of it together, he'd really be able to cut loose within reason.

He fished a bottle of liquor out of the snack bag. Arno raised his eyebrows at Zheng Yichen, who'd come prepared, and smiled before continuing. "This would've been a bit complicated to explain, but since you encountered an anomaly intrusion last night, you should have some thoughts about it. For example, that Bone Dragon's breath you mentioned."

It looked terrifying thanks to the special effects, but when it hit, it had been all thunder and no rain.

As a transmigrator who'd entered an anomaly before, he immediately came up with a plausible explanation. The environment weakens them both?

How else could he explain why the Bone Dragon's breath had been so underwhelming?

"You've got the idea, but there's something to add." Arno praised Zheng Yichen's understanding, then elaborated. "To be precise, the environments adjust each other."

Zheng Yichen was very curious about this, so he asked a few more questions. That was how he learned what this adjustment actually meant.

Anomalies formed when different worlds temporarily connected for some reason. They could see the anomaly on their side, and the other side could see it too. It worked both ways: as long as there was a witness, both sides could detect the anomaly. Whether anything could cross over was another matter.

Then there were the "adjustments" caused by differences in the environments of the two worlds.

Zheng Yichen immediately thought of what he'd felt after that first "transmigration." When he'd gone to the world where George lived, his body had felt unusually energetic. But when he tried to return and ended up in the world that seemed to belong to the "merfolk," his body's level of energy changed, and he also felt "Water Vapor" in the air—something he couldn't normally sense.

Once he returned to Longcheng, everything went back to normal. He'd wondered about it, but without enough information, he couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Now that Arno had told him all this, Zheng Yichen could make sense of what had happened.

Put simply, it was probably something like different worlds having different "suppressive forces." Some worlds had stronger suppressive forces, making everything in them seem ordinary. Others had weaker suppressive forces, making the natives seem much more powerful...