Trying to Find Work

"Was that his 'Skillful Hands'?"

"I heard he was possessed by a demon..." another person whispered.

Someone voiced their concern. "Isn't it too dangerous to let a demon-possessed person into headquarters?"

"What's there to fear? Captain Huaisu is watching him herself. What, is he supposed to turn the sky upside down?"

Curious and worried gazes alike converged on Chu Hengkong's arm. The white tactical masks hid everyone's expressions, but they could not conceal the deep hostility in their eyes. Chu Hengkong turned a blind eye to it all. He carefully observed everything around him, focused like a tourist visiting a great city for the first time.

His battle with the fanatics had happened half an hour ago. After their encounter beneath the weapon Tide, the blonde Ji Huaishu had escorted him to the operational headquarters of the Resurrection Corps.

It was a brightly lit hall. The large bulletin board on the wall was covered in wanted posters with ferocious faces, each one bearing a hefty bounty beneath it. Masked members carrying weapons of every kind stood or sat around the room, staring at Chu Hengkong as if examining a criminal.

"Make way, injured coming through!"

An urgent shout suddenly rang out, and the crowd immediately cleared a path. Two masked members raced past carrying a stretcher. The wounded man on it groaned in agony. His injuries were horrifyingly severe; ruptured organs and shattered bones protruded from his wounds, as though the fangs of some beast had torn open his chest and abdomen.

Chu Hengkong noticed Ji Huaishu purse her lips at that moment. She hurried into a corridor at the side of the hall and pulled open the iron door to an interrogation room. The room contained only a long table and several chairs. Chu Hengkong obediently took a seat at one end of the table.

Neither of them spoke. They had already exchanged brief introductions on the way here. Chu Hengkong was an assassin, while the Resurrection Corps Ji Huaishu belonged to was the police force of this place. They silently studied one another, like swordsmen in a duel searching for the moment to land a killing blow.

Ji Huaishu found him strange. Dragon's Return City had no shortage of extraordinary people, but this was the first time she had encountered someone like him. The man wore a dark green hooded jacket and looked like an ordinary student one could find anywhere. His manner was calm to the point of seeming docile. Along the way, he had had countless opportunities to attack or escape, yet he had cooperated completely without showing the slightest resistance. It was hard to imagine that such a person had killed Alex and his followers barehanded, but the fanatics' gruesome wounds were proof enough of his brutality.

Similar thoughts ran through Chu Hengkong's mind. Compared to her fully armed subordinates, this girl's outfit was astonishingly casual. She had tied her long blonde hair into a ponytail. She wore a white athletic tank top beneath a brown vest, paired with breezy denim shorts. It was an outfit suited to any sporty college girl, flattering her tall and enviable figure, but it clearly had not the slightest thing to do with a special forces unit.

Yet he had not forgotten the gleaming golden shield in her hand. It was probably another form of supernatural power, like the Great Shaman's bizarre "summoning." For someone so unprofessional to be the leader, she had to be stronger than every one of her subordinates.

Chu Hengkong silently drafted his opening words. Negotiation was like a clash between masters: the first move often set the tone. The other side had ample intelligence while his side was at a disadvantage; the more he said, the more mistakes he could make. Better to first see what kind of moves they had. With that thought, Chu Hengkong gave a slight nod. The girl across from him received the signal as well and, without yielding the initiative, struck first.

"Do you eat roast goose lai fun?" Ji Huaishu asked.

"...Huh?"

Chu Hengkong began to doubt his own judgment. What the hell kind of bizarre opening was this? It was indeed long past mealtime, but shouldn't an officer's opening three questions be who are you, what do you do, where did you come from, and where are you going? And hadn't they just left the scene of some bizarre ritual? Shouldn't she be explaining demons to an outsider first?

How had this girl skipped the interrogation and gone straight to the traditional "Are you hungry? I'll make you a bowl of noodles" phase... How was he supposed to respond to that?

The iron door opened, and someone actually brought in a bowl of roast goose lai fun. A whole roast goose leg lay generously atop the noodles, its fat melting into the broth and releasing an enticing aroma. The guy delivering the noodles greeted them and left. Chu Hengkong's eye twitched. "No, thank you..."

"You really aren't eating?" Ji Huaishu beamed. "That's great, then it's mine! I haven't eaten all day, and I was just thinking of having a late-night snack."

She lifted the bowl in one sweep and genuinely began eating. The girl ate with tremendous relish, taking a bite of goose and a mouthful of lai fun at a time, not even sparing the soup. She was clearly truly hungry. Amid his astonishment, Chu Hengkong felt a rather subtle regret. It was like getting off work late at noon and just missing the cafeteria's braised ribs—nothing serious, yet all afternoon his mind kept circling back to that plate of bones he had failed to eat.

"I..." Chu Hengkong silently pressed a hand to his forehead. "Fine, you win. I admit, this is the first time I've seen someone interrogate a person like this..."

Ji Huaishu gnawed on the goose leg bone. "What's the rush? You didn't make any trouble all the way here, so you can't be stupid enough to start something at our headquarters, right? You were ruthless enough when dealing with those cultists, so why are you acting so proper with me?"

"Living alone in another world is challenging enough. I don't want to add 'wanted criminal' to my hell-mode starting conditions." Chu Hengkong took out his spoils and placed the transparent bead, tobacco, and watch on the table one by one, but he did not touch the Pendant or the Silver-Eyed Tome.

"Your subordinates have good discipline. They didn't lay hands on me or steal my things on the way here. They didn't even cuff me. I figured the leader of a group like that couldn't be unreasonable," Chu Hengkong said.

Ji Huaishu took out a pair of handcuffs and held them up, comparing their size with the tentacle from a distance. The tentacle's tip was only slightly thicker than an ordinary person's index finger. No matter how tightly it was cuffed, a gentle tug would let it slip right out.

"Unless you voluntarily tie your tentacle into a dead knot, would this thing be any use against you?" Ji Huaishu said. "It's much easier if you still have your reason. Tell me your plans from here on out. First, you'll undergo an amputation. Then you'll stay in an observation room for three months. Once we confirm everything is normal, you sign a confidentiality agreement and can return to normal life. Isn't that pretty lenient?"

Chu Hengkong remained expressionless. "Cutting off someone's arm based on mere suspicion is rather overbearing."

"Which Dust Island did you come from, anyway? How can you not understand your own situation?" The blonde girl ground her teeth. "You've been possessed by the Imaginary Demon! If we don't deal with it quickly, even your personality will be gone!"

"Maybe you got it wrong?" Chu Hengkong gave the tentacle a shake. "I heard them call this the 'hand of the All-Knowing God'..."

"That is a common misunderstanding among believers. An omnipotent creator, one who knows all, a great existence... They enjoy using such words. But that has nothing to do with the demon's true nature. It is merely because people see on demons the illusory image of what they desire." A third person spoke.

The interrogation room door opened soundlessly, and a man in a casual sweater walked in. Holding a paper folding fan that looked remarkably like a dog-headed military strategist, he smiled as he walked to the center of the room.

"Imaginary Demons are purely spiritual creatures. Their forms are twisted and their temperaments strange. They find it difficult to exist independently in the material world, so they often possess the bodies of intelligent lifeforms to act through." The man with the folding fan turned to Chu Hengkong. "Did your hometown have hard candy?"

Chu Hengkong did not understand why he was asking. "It did."

The man with the paper fan pulled out a pink hard candy from his pocket and tossed it into Ji Huaishu's bowl of noodles.

"Father! I'm not done eating!" Ji Huaishu protested loudly.

"Be careful not to gain weight from eating too much at night." Huaisu's Father smiled. He snapped his paper fan shut and pointed it at the bowl. The hard candy slowly melted in the hot broth, turning the soup pink and cloudy like vomit.

"This candy is the Imaginary Demon, and your body is that bowl of soup. The candy has only just fallen in, so there is still time to scoop it out. But if you wait until it completely dissolves, this bowl of soup will be ruined." Huaisu's Father gave Chu Hengkong a deep look. "Don't let that knowledge and those abilities blind you. Amputation is the best course of action right now. The demon's corrosion will worsen with time. You don't want to turn into some octopus-headed or noodle-monster thing, do you?"

A chill ran down Chu Hengkong's back. There were no strange patterns in Huaisu's Father's eyes, nor did they glow, but a spear-like sharpness lurked deep in his gaze. Standing before him made one feel like a transparent person. Those black pupils seemed able to pierce flesh and bore through bone marrow, seeing the most secret thoughts at the bottom of one's heart.

But in the next instant, that sharp sensation vanished without a trace. Huaisu's Father still stood in the distance with a smile, like a harmless convenience store owner. Chu Hengkong slowly loosened his tightly clenched right fist, rose to his feet, and said, "Mr. Ji, impressive skills."

"Your skills aren't bad either, little brother." Huaisu's Father took out a badly deformed stone and placed it on the table. It was a fragment of the stone staff Chu Hengkong had kicked apart earlier. "What kind of knowledge did that tentacle give you, for you to possess such skill?"

Chu Hengkong was taken aback, then smiled. Since the battle ended, unexpected events had come one after another. These people who never played by the book had kept his calculations from finding solid ground. But Huaisu's Father's implication now made his eyes light up. At last, he had been given an opportunity—an opportunity to seize the initiative.

Chu Hengkong tucked the tentacle on his left arm behind his back and lightly tapped the table with his right hand. At the very instant the tap rang out, a stone beyond half the table's surface suddenly jumped up on its own.

Ji Huaishu rose warily. "Telekinesis? The corrosion is progressing that quickly?"

Huaisu's Father held his folding fan sideways and stopped her.

"Don't be nervous, Huaisu," he said. "It is Force Transmission. He used the tabletop as a medium to complete the strike. It is the same principle as striking the cow across the mountain."

Chu Hengkong slowly stretched out his right hand, demonstrating through his actions that it was unquestionably a human arm, with no connection whatsoever to supernatural power.

"You two seem to have misunderstood. This tentacle arm did not give me 'knowledge' or 'abilities.' I trained my skills myself; they have nothing to do with demons." Chu Hengkong said, "For that matter, this might not even be a demon's arm. Maybe it came from a squid that stumbled in here like I did? Cutting off someone's arm is a serious matter. Please think it over carefully."

"What do you know?" Ji Huaishu pointed the goose leg bone at him. "Do you know how many demon-possessed people I've put down? Yours is definitely—"

Huaisu's Father flicked open his folding fan with a swish, looking thoughtful. "That does make sense..."

"Hey, how does that excuse make any sense? With Imaginary Demons, we'd rather kill the wrong one than let one go!" Ji Huaishu was greatly alarmed.

Chu Hengkong sat back down and assessed the current situation. He had finally regained a little initiative. His next words would be a crucial moment. What was the situation now? What did they need, and what were they wary of? Most importantly, what did he himself need most?

He had already made all his plans before setting out, so when Chu Hengkong spoke, he was completely confident.

"Since everyone needs a solution that benefits both sides..." Chu Hengkong said, "would you consider hiring me?"

(The cheerful adventure story of the Tentacle Assassin updates daily at 8 p.m. Welcome to read and comment!)