I'm a Serious Student; I Only Eat Nine Kinds of Potions Every Day

He rubbed his chin.

"Detective's assistant."

He weighed the significance of those four words in his mind.

He could legally gather information, come into contact with cases involving every social class, and move freely through all kinds of places without arousing suspicion.

For a newly awakened Beyonder trying to gain a foothold in this city's undercurrents,

"it seemed like a rather convenient side job."

After seeing McRae off, nothing else happened.

Evan spent seventeen cents on dinner at Lucky Bee.

Roasted pork liver, potato-and-cabbage stew, and a large chunk of rye bread. The portions were solid, though the food was so greasy it left his throat feeling cloying.

After returning home and checking the place over, making sure there were no additional "guests," he changed into his father's work clothes and headed straight for the docks.

It was still casual piecework.

He started at seven and finished at eleven.

Eighty cents went into his pocket.

When work ended, Evan clenched the sweat-scented coins in his palm, walked over to the foreman Parker, and lowered his voice.

"Uncle Parker, I saw Carey at the clinic a couple of days ago. He went there to test medicine."

Parker was stuffing tobacco into his pipe when his fingers paused.

"Ah."

He sighed, the breath as heavy as though a stone weighed on his chest.

"Who knew he'd get that kind of disease? He'd only just married a beautiful wife, and now his life's probably ruined."

He muttered the words, but his tone paused subtly on "beautiful wife," and there was a strange note in the trailing end that Evan could not pinpoint.

"What a beautiful woman..."

Parker said nothing more. He turned and headed into the warehouse, the red glow of his pipe flickering in the night.

Evan stood where he was, staring at Parker's back for several seconds.

"Beautiful woman. Syphilis."

A few days ago, those two words would not have made Evan think much of anything.

Syphilis was not a rare disease on Gooding Street. Marrying a prostitute or sleeping with someone else's wife could both lead to infection.

But everything he had seen these past few days had made it impossible for him to look at anything around him with "normal" eyes.

"Make a note of it. It might come in handy."

He opened a separate drawer in his mind and stuffed the clues—"Carey, beautiful wife, syphilis, Parker's reaction"—inside, then locked it.

By the time he reached his front door, exhaustion began to wash over him.

He instinctively touched the pocket of his jacket, intending to take two Phenobarbital pills to help himself sleep, only to find the bottle empty.

He sighed and pulled out the bottle of Mercury Pills.

Two were left.

He swallowed them both.

[You reversed the side effects of the Mercury Pill.]

[Your mouth has been enhanced. Constitution permanently +0.001.]

"Hmm?"

Evan frowned.

Under normal circumstances, reversing the Mercury Pill should have alleviated digestive tract ulcers and cranial nerve damage.

The digestive tract ulcers had already dropped to zero, so it was understandable that there was no effect.

But his cranial nerve damage was still at thirteen percent. Why was there no reaction to that either?

"Did I develop a drug resistance?"

He thought about it, but did not dwell on it.

"Whatever. I wasn't planning to take any more anyway. I'll try new medicine in the future."

Mercury Pills cost three cents each, which was not cheap, but their attribute boost was simply too limited.

Now that the rash had completely faded, there was no need to keep throwing money at them.

He tossed the empty bottle into the trash, washed up, and climbed onto the iron-framed bed.

A healthy body brought healthy sleep.

Less than five minutes after his head hit the pillow, his consciousness sank away.

"Did you know? There are no books in the Beyonder world."

Deep within his dream, Evan felt as though someone had forcibly stuffed something new into his mind.

It was a kind of whisper.

A voice that sounded directly inside his skull.

"Young Demon Hunter, let me pave the road ahead for you."

The aged, weary voice sounded again.

Evan raised his head in the void of the dream and saw a bright campfire.

The flames danced, their orange-red light illuminating a small patch of space around them.

He instinctively walked over and sat on a stone beside the fire.

All kinds of smells rushed at him.

The stench of rotting animal hides, the rusty smell of old bloodstains, the scorched fragrance of dry grass mixed with pine resin, and an indescribable moldy odor resembling damp leather.

He looked around.

Including himself, seven people sat around the campfire.

The other five sat in silence, like statues forgotten by time.

Their clothing varied greatly.

The person farthest to the left wore medieval knight-style chainmail, with a long-faded family crest carved into his breastplate.

The person beside him wore a Nordic-style wolfskin cloak, with a string of beast fangs hanging from his waist.

Farther over sat a figure in a bird-beaked mask, reminiscent of a seventeenth-century plague doctor.

The attire of the others extended all the way into the Industrial Age—leather jackets, brass buttons, flintlock holsters.

Their forms differed as well.

One was massive, like a mountain of flesh crouched beside the fire, a whole bearskin draped over his broad shoulders.

One was thin and silent, with long fingers and every knuckle protruding half an inch farther than a normal person's.

Another was grotesquely deformed, leaning on a cane topped with a carved wolf's head. Half his face was hidden in the shadow of his hood, revealing only skin with a texture that did not seem quite right.

Yet they all had one thing in common.

A pair of golden pupils.

Their pupils were vertical slits, their irises burning amber-gold.

Sharp, resolute, and incomparably familiar to Evan.

Hill's pupils.

The eyes of a Demon Hunter.

"Young hunter, what do you wish to know?"

The aged voice sounded again.

Evan turned his head.

A slightly plump middle-aged man sat at his right.

He wore a wide-brimmed tricorne hat, his lower face covered by a black cloth mask, and an old-fashioned black coat draped over his body.

Compared to the other companions, who resembled statues, this man seemed impossibly alive.

He sat cross-legged, a silver longsword laid across his knees. Holding a soft cloth in one hand, he wiped the blade over and over.

Firelight flowed across the sword's edge, reflecting warm light in his golden vertical pupils.

Evan understood at once.

These were memory fragments passed on during the digestion of the Demon Hunter Beyonder Characteristic.

Those "forebears" seated around the campfire were merely symbolic representations.

The one truly speaking to him was this middle-aged Demon Hunter—Hill's master.

"You just said that there are no books in the Beyonder world," Evan said.

"What did you mean by that?"

The Demon Hunter's hand paused as he polished the sword.

"What people call Beyonder powers are, in essence, mystery and impossibility."

"How could something so mysterious and impossible be written down properly in books like ordinary knowledge?"

Evan considered it.

"Then how is knowledge passed down?"

The Demon Hunter smiled. The black cloth concealed his smile, leaving only the faint wrinkles at the corners of his eyes to curve.

He pointed the tip of his sword at the dancing fire beneath them.

"There are currently five symbols of the Beyonder world, each governing three professions."

"All knowledge is passed down from generation to generation through Beyonder Characteristics."

"That is also why it has hidden itself so well in the Industrial Age."

"There are no records, no evidence. It flows only through oral teachings, inheritance, and mystery."

He paused, lowering his voice by half a note.

"That is also why the inheritance of factions is so important."

"The foundations accumulated by an unbroken lineage are beyond what outsiders can imagine."

Evan fell silent for several seconds.

This was the first time he had heard such an unintuitive yet irrefutable description of the Beyonder system.

"Then wouldn't the Beyonder system be unable to expand? After all, there are only so many Beyonder Characteristics that can be passed down."

The Demon Hunter shook his head.

"Beyonder Characteristics can be obtained by hunting Beyonder creatures and artificially made into potions, opening new branches of inheritance."

"That brings us to the profession system of the Beyonder world."

His voice became slow and heavy.

"Human instinct contains only spirituality, not characteristics."

"All the Beyonder Characteristics possessed by humanity today came from monsters that appeared in the human world at some unknown time."

He paused and slowly drew a line on the ground with the tip of his sword.

"It was precisely because humans used spirituality to accept the characteristics of monsters that bestiality took root within them."

His golden vertical pupils stared directly into Evan's eyes.

"Remember this. Never forget your identity as a human."

"Otherwise, you will not be far from completely losing control and becoming a beast."