What the heck! Can dogs get obsessed too?

A moment later.

Brian opened his eyes, his expression strange.

The owner of this obsession was actually Andreas, whom he had killed.

Working out the timing...

It must have been when the little inn was cleaning rooms in the afternoon and discovered his body, then called the police.

Brian rubbed his chin, where a little stubble still remained.

This guy's drop rate was pretty high.

When he was alive, Brian had killed him as task material.

After he died, he had even changed classes into a quest NPC and issued a new task.

This beast's obsession was bizarre too: dance and piss on Carolina Ellis's grave.

Carolina Ellis was Andreas's wife.

The color of Andreas's obsession, in terms of vividness, was only a tiny bit worse than that single mother's obsession from before.

It was obvious.

Andreas had a very intense resentment toward this wife of his, who was not exactly a good person either.

That resentment even surpassed his hatred of Brian for killing him.

"Dancing and pissing on a dead person's grave is too inhumane!

But...

Then again, dancing compacts the soil on the grave.

Pissing helps fertilize the grass growing on it.

That's an act of kindness and righteousness!"

After this bout of self-justifying hypocrisy, Brian still decided he would complete this obsession sometime later.

Over the next few workdays, Brian behaved very diligently.

Every time he finished his own work, he ran off to the morgue.

When someone asked out of curiosity, Brian used the new department at the end of the month as an excuse, saying he wanted to get ahead.

The establishment of the new department was already no secret.

It was not just Brian.

Many people in the Medical Examiner's Office wanted to use this opportunity to obtain better treatment.

So no one suspected anything about Brian's unusual behavior.

After several days, Brian felt very frustrated.

He had come into contact with roughly over a hundred and seventy corpses.

In the end, he had only collected three new obsessions.

For the first new obsession, the deceased was an old lady.

Her obsession was to find her first love, from whom she had been separated for many years, and tell him about all her longing and love over the years.

This was a hopeless romantic who had preserved her chastity for an entire lifetime because of a promise made in her youth.

Brian swore.

He truly wanted to help this respectable old lady complete her obsession.

As a result, after investigating, Brian discovered that the old lady's first love had kicked the bucket more than ten years ago.

The cause of death was also ridiculously sloppy: he had hired a prostitute and refused to pay, so a gang carried out a private punishment on him, cutting him to make their point, then dumping him by the roadside as a warning. In the end, he died from excessive blood loss.

The key point was that, after more than ten years, with no one taking care of it, no one even knew where the old lady's first love's urn had ended up.

Brian could not complete this obsession either.

The two obsessions he gained afterward

were about the same.

Either Brian had difficulty completing them, Or the obsession was just too bizarre.

Brian couldn't bring himself to do it.

Over the past few days, his only gain had been confirming that obsessions were not easily born.

It made sense, when he thought about it.

Everyone

had plenty of regrets in their life.

But most people's regrets were not especially intense.

The corpses most likely to yield obsessions were probably those of people who had carried powerful emotions and regrets while alive, or who had suffered something extremely painful before death—only then could an obsession strong enough be nurtured.

Unfortunately, Brian discovered that recently, very few victims of homicide had been sent to the Medical Examiner's Office.

After asking his colleagues in the field, Brian learned

that after the Blood Moon anomaly, the remains of those who were clearly suspected homicide victims had all been sent directly to the morgue at the detective bureau's major crimes unit.

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office had been stripped of part of its authority.

Brian guessed

that this was preparation for the establishment of the "Criminal Experiment Team" later on.

About that, there was nothing he could do. He could only quietly wait for recruitment into the new department to begin.

On his day off, Brian left a private medical facility in the suburbs with a smile on his face.

Today, he had made a special trip to visit his adoptive parents.

To keep them from noticing the pressure he was under, every time he came to visit, Brian smiled like an idiot.

Back in the car, Brian rubbed his face, which was starting to cramp from smiling, took out a pile of little slips of paper from his pocket, threw away the contact information the female caregivers and doctors had shoved at him, kept the payment bill, and let out a long sigh.

In order to collect new obsessions, and also to smoothly join the new department at the end of the month, Brian had recently put all his energy into work.

As a result, his part-time income had dropped sharply.

Next month's medical expenses still had no source.

"Two people, tens of thousands of dollars a month. Medical care really is a mountain pressing down on ordinary people's heads."

Brian crumpled the payment bill in his hand into a ball, tossed it under the passenger seat cushion, started the car, and prepared to head to his next destination.

He was pretty busy today.

Nearly an hour later, Brian looked at the old, run-down children's home in front of him and knocked on the door.

A moment later, a white old woman who looked to be in her fifties opened the door in some confusion, holding a child's sweater she had not finished knitting.

Brian looked at the old woman and smiled gently. "Mrs. Brown, I'm Brian. It's been a long time."

"You are?"

The old woman looked at the handsome, tall Brian before her, somewhat puzzled. "I'm sorry, but I don't think I know you."

Brian was not surprised by this.

Because the last time he had been here, he had only been eight.

At the time, Mrs. Brown had not yet been the head of this children's home.

Brian only knew her so well because, in recent years, when he had been better off, he had donated several times through the children's home's official website and had seen Mrs. Brown's photo there.

Just as Brian was about to explain, Mrs. Brown seemed to think of something. Her pupils shrank, and she backed away again and again. Looking at Brian, it was as if she had seen a demon descend before her, and the hands holding the yarn trembled nonstop.

"Brian!"

"I remember now!"

"Child of Calamity!"

"You're that Child of Calamity from more than ten years ago!"

Amid Mrs. Brown's terrified cries, a one-eyed Black man with a head full of white hair rushed out of the kitchen clutching a kitchen knife, his gaze fierce. "Mrs. Brown, what happened!"

Brian:

A dozen minutes later.

Brian looked at the one-eyed Black man, whose gaze was still wary, and left the children's home speechlessly.

He hadn't expected that after so many years, there were still people who remembered him being called the Child of Calamity back then.

Brian had come this time

because he had actually wanted to visit the three-year-old girl from his first obsession—Ellie.

Unfortunately, all he got was an address.

And that was only after Brian produced records of his many donations to the children's home that Mrs. Brown agreed to give him little Ellie's new home address.

Because of the Z government's welfare policies, adopting a child came with a decent monthly subsidy.

So adopting children was fairly popular here in Los Angeles. Sometimes there was even a waiting list, to the point that families who genuinely wanted to adopt children were affected.

This had also led, in recent years, to quite a few families who didn't want to wait choosing to adopt children from certain foreign countries with more relaxed vetting processes.

Three-year-old Ellie

had been adopted by a couple who met the requirements on the third day after she was sent here.

"I hope this little girl met someone who loves her as much as her mother did."

Brian felt a little melancholy.

Just as Brian was about to get in the car and leave, "Woo, woo~"

right then, a little stray dog, so thin only its ribs were left and black all over with grime, suddenly charged out of a side alley, bit onto Brian's pant leg, and seemed to want to drag him into the alley off the street.

Looking at the filthy little dog, Brian frowned slightly and was about to kick it away, but the moment he raised his leg, he couldn't help thinking of that little girl, Ellie.

He sighed, shut the car door again, and followed the little dog's tugging into the alley.

It was a very narrow alley, not very long. At the end was a large dumpster, connected to the garbage chute pipes of the apartment building beside it.

Beside the dumpster lay an equally filthy, scrawny big dog.

The instant he saw the big dog, Brian's pupils shrank.

Holy shit!

Dogs could develop obsessions too???

Good night, brothers.