Reflections!

Xu Feng thought over his [Skill] and found there was no doubt about it.

He touched the [Protective Talisman] around his neck again. It was real.

Xu Feng decided to rest first.

He had been in the game for one minute, and the books he had queued up still had not finished downloading.

After setting an alarm,

Xu Feng fell asleep in a rather undignified but effective position.

In the afternoon, his Forest Ranger's Courtyard was hardly peaceful.

"Guests" were always dropping by.

The mountain monkeys were crafty little devils. They could open doors and windows, and even smash the glass with stones.

So Xu Feng kept every window and the front door shut.

He had also fitted every window with fine-mesh security bars.

Ordinarily, Xu Feng found the monkeys noisy.

Now, though, he welcomed them. At least they brought a little life to the mountain.

When the alarm woke him, Xu Feng got up, washed his face out of habit, then ate and clocked in.

The clock-in routine had become second nature.

Afterward, Xu Feng took a deliberate look at the landline beside him.

It was there for emergency calls. Xu Feng glanced up at the wall, where a sheet of A4 paper hung.

Printed on it were the "Forest Ranger Rules."

Xu Feng lingered over two of them.

The first read, "When the mountain experiences moderate rain or worse weather, forest rangers may temporarily descend the mountain."

Another rule was interesting, too.

"When orders conflict, the instructions given over the landline take precedence."

Xu Feng locked the door.

Before, he had thought nothing of it.

But looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, those two rules were unsettling.

Each came with an explanation. Take the one about rain.

According to the notice, Yunjia Mountain's soil and terrain were unusual. Moderate rain or heavier could easily trigger mudslides, landslides, and other natural disasters.

So, in the spirit of putting people first, rangers were allowed to descend the mountain early.

As for the phone, it was a dedicated line. Instructions delivered through it were final; in an emergency, the highest authority took precedence.

Taken separately,

neither rule seemed unreasonable.

But now, after locking the door, Xu Feng looked toward the evening sun.

By mountain standards, Yunjia Mountain's weather was not especially changeable.

Since he had begun patrolling, the most he had encountered along his route was drizzle.

"Rain is a warning sign of some kind of danger."

Xu Feng checked the forecast. For the next week, not a cloud was expected in the sky—not even an overcast day.

While his mind was clear, Xu Feng began turning everything over.

One thing he was certain of:

Everywhere on the mountain had problems.

The village below was not reliable, either.

Yet for now, those kept in the dark seemed safe enough.

Xu Feng took out three sticks of incense and planted them outside the Forest Ranger's Courtyard. Fortunately, nothing happened this time.

Xu Feng voiced a question.

No one answered.

"The courtyard seems fine."

Xu Feng found the convenience-store owner's number and called him. They chatted first; then Xu Feng asked to borrow his motorcycle.

When the call ended, Xu Feng muttered to himself again. "After the Land God down the mountain was replaced, there haven't been any major problems there, either."

By "major problems,"

he meant an obvious death toll, or certain things no one could quite explain.

Those were things people could see with their own eyes, and no one could resist gossiping about them.

So where was the problem?

It was precisely because nowhere seemed to have a problem that Xu Feng felt there was one everywhere.

To Xu Feng, the stillness felt like extinction itself. It bore the crushing weight of storm clouds pressing down on a city, with the wind already filling the tower before the rain.

"The Land God that was hit."

"The new Land God Temple."

Xu Feng leaned against the wall, frowning as he watched the monkeys in a nearby tree head home.

To him, the Land God was one of the most familiar and endearing household deities in folk tradition.

In a sense, among deities whose authority bridged two realms, he was also one of the closest to ordinary people.

He reported upward, served as a link, and carried out duties at the local level.

But the Land God shrine that had undergone the ritual of enshrinement had been struck and carried away by a vehicle. Before the collision, had there been a spirit within it?

With that thought, Xu Feng searched online for his agency's announcements from previous years, pulled up a map, and began checking them one by one.

"Yunjia Mountain."

"White Wave Mountain."

"Cloud-Storage Cave."

"Longevity Grotto."

He compared the recruitment announcements year by year against the locations of the agency's ranger courtyards and the records of staff turnover. To his shock, there were plenty of courtyards like the one on Yunjia Mountain.

Perhaps too many.

Xu Feng returned to his bedroom, picked up a pen, and marked the places on the map one after another. When he finished, he breathed a sigh of relief.

The marks formed no recognizable shape.

No ghostly face appeared, nor any other monster-like figure.

Judging by the place names, each was as distinctive as the next, rivaling Ancient People's Tomb and Dragon-Locking Temple.

"If all these places have problems, those are only the ones out in the open."

"What about the ones hidden away?"

At that thought, Xu Feng suddenly felt as though he were sitting squarely atop an active volcano.

It was dormant.

But no one knew when it might erupt again.

"What does that make me? Unlucky, or just in time for it?"

Xu Feng had spotted the problem.

He began considering what to do.

Then he realized the answer was right in front of him, hidden in the question itself.

"The game."

Whether or not the volcano beneath him erupted, Xu Feng could still learn a few skills to protect himself.

That way, even if he could not escape, he might at least run faster than the others.

"That's the plan, then!"

He would study today.

Tomorrow, he would go into the city and have a look.

That was what the motorcycle was for.

His main destinations in the city were places connected to local folk traditions.

There were three kinds of such places.

First, the Confucius Temple, also called Kui Xing Shrine. The street outside it was a tourist attraction.

Second, the City God Temple. The area outside it was a tourist attraction too, but that was beside the point.

Third, the local Daoist temples and Buddhist temples.

Xu Feng intended to visit them all.

By the time he had settled on that plan, it was nearly dark. He secured the door, returned to his bedroom, drew the curtains, and began studying.

First on his mind, naturally, was the Stitching Calamity method from the previous night.

And then there was the technique he had used at the end.

Both seemed derived from the Filling Method and the Needle Method among the Four Corpse-Sewing Methods.

Only the material used to fill the gap had changed, from ordinary incense ash, wood, and sawdust to a "plaque."

"Now that's interesting."

Xu Feng turned on the light and sorted the downloaded books into categories.

Then he began reading.

As everyone knew, truly reading a book—especially a specialist text—took considerable time, even if one only skimmed it.

Xu Feng was no exception.

He had his own approach to studying, of course.

But as he studied, Xu Feng discovered an advantage. It was not just his newly acquired Skill, but the chance to combine theory with practice.

The books contained distilled theory.

And theory existed to serve practice.

Xu Feng had just been through a brutal practical lesson, one he could hardly forget. As he studied the muscles in the anatomy texts and the material in the forensic medicine books,

things he had not understood began to click into place.

The better you got at learning, the better you got at learning! It sounded like saying the same thing twice—unless, like Xu Feng, you had a [Skill Bar].

Then it might mean something after all.

Because his Skill Bar could actually display his Proficiency!