Lantern Monster

Early the next morning, Yue Wen received word that the job was his.

Actually, the moment he gave his quote, everyone in the group knew it was settled. He was taking the job for a thousand yuan-what the hell was there left to compete over?

The work might take two or three nights, averaging three to five hundred yuan a night. Staying up all night for that little money? A guy might as well work as a male model at a bar.

Yue Wen merely smiled at his colleagues' outrage.

What could he do? He earned extra spirit-suppressing coins from fighting monsters. Compared with those, actual cash mattered less, so he would just have to undercut everyone.

Let my colleagues suffer a little. I'll take the blame.

Having arranged to visit the client that evening, Yue Wen could spend the day handling his own affairs at the office.

First, he put together a recruitment notice.

"Hiring one demon hunter's assistant. Must possess cultivation; no minimum realm required. All ages and genders welcome. Expected monthly salary: 3,000-100,000 yuan. Base salary of 3,000, plus a fifty-fifty split of mission earnings. No upper limit. Apply now if interested."

After writing it, Yue Wen looked it over and added another sentence.

"Limited openings. First come, first served."

With a base salary of only three thousand, even hiring a college intern would probably be difficult, let alone a cultivator. His only option was to offer a bigger cut-even partners at similar offices couldn't expect a fifty-fifty split.

"That ought to make it a little appealing, right?" Yue Wen muttered.

After all, he had absolutely no requirements regarding cultivation level.

Cultivators in Jiangcheng weren't so precious that he couldn't find one.

Five hundred years ago, Blue Star, which had previously possessed a purely technological civilization, experienced a sudden, massive increase in spiritual energy. Before long, all manner of things in the world began manifesting spiritual powers.

Heirs to ancient immortal sects emerged from seclusion, proclaiming that the world's spiritual energy was like a tide: rising for three thousand years, declining for three thousand years, and remaining depleted for three thousand years.

A single rise and fall spanned nearly ten thousand years.

Now that the period of spiritual depletion had fully passed, the human realm would enter three full millennia of rising spiritual energy, until it reached its peak.

At first, people were ecstatic and dubbed it the "spiritual resurgence."

But they soon discovered that this resurgence brought tremendous chaos to the world. Humans weren't the only ones capable of developing spiritual powers. The land awakened, mountains and rivers turned into primeval wilderness, and as all things gained spirits, sinister entities sprang up everywhere.

The greatest danger, however, came from the spatial barriers loosened by the surge in spiritual energy.

The many domains beyond the human realm stirred, and powerful otherworldly demons descended, nearly annihilating Blue Star while its cultivation civilization was still in its infancy.

For close to a century, the human world was all but destroyed. Even the survivors lived constantly in its shadow, never knowing a day's peace.

The spiritual resurgence came to be called the "spiritual catastrophe" instead.

Ultimately, human cultivators gradually accumulated strength, while a group of immortal sect heirs followed preserved maps to find the legendary Four Seas Dragon Palace, retrieving vast stores of immortal treasures left behind by the previous age of spiritual energy.

Only then did they turn the tide and restore order to the human world.

Even today, vast stretches of wilderness and forbidden zones remained outside the satellite cities, inhabited by demons and sinister entities of various levels. At least the humans within the cities could live and work in peace, and had reclaimed their former technology-based lifestyles.

Otherworldly demons could only descend through occasional spatial rifts, and there hadn't been a large-scale invasion from another realm for many years.

Over these centuries, cultivation civilization had flourished ever more vigorously. Although only one person in ten thousand possessed the spiritual aptitude to cultivate, on a planet with a population exceeding ten billion, that still meant millions. Add in the heretical cultivators who had modified themselves to acquire that ability, and the number grew even larger.

Naturally, the lower the realm, the more people there were. Of the nine cultivation realms, the bottom three accounted for over seventy percent of cultivators. As for cultivation "hobbyists" who spent their entire lives in the first realm, they were a dime a dozen.

Yue Wen's requirements were modest. He didn't really need his assistant to help with anything; he only wanted to satisfy the Supernatural Affairs Bureau's regulations.

Hiring a hobbyist would be enough.

The day soon passed. Yue Wen cultivated alone in the office all day, without a single visitor.

The Yue Family Cultivation Office was still far too obscure.

On one little utility pole, ads for "big money for fathering a child," "cheap exorcisms," "local home visits," and "lose weight without dieting" were all crammed together. It was hard to believe that one of them was actually legitimate.

Still, Yue Wen remained optimistic. Once he hired an assistant and obtained an official business license, he could openly employ more sophisticated advertising methods-like handing out flyers on the street.

Seeing that it was about time, he locked up the storefront and set off on his little electric scooter again.

He headed east until he reached the edge of Satellite City No. 7. Even from a distance, he could see a hazy curtain of light ahead, stretching from earth to sky without end.

Satellite cities surrounded the main urban area, and a formation protected their outer perimeter. Beyond the light curtain of this city-protecting formation lay the boundless wilderness.

The great formation couldn't keep out every demon and sinister entity. Some individual entities could still slip through its gaps. But once the aura of invading demons or sinister entities reached a certain strength, the formation would activate, preventing large-scale demonic tides and protecting the city as a whole.

The East City Public Cemetery was located in these distant outskirts.

The evening sky was dim. At a glance, the sections divided by trees halfway up the hillside were filled with jutting gravestones. Many were blank or bore only a date of death, left ready in case relatives ever came to identify the deceased.

In this era, living conditions for ordinary people had actually worsened, and accidental deaths were extremely numerous every year.

At the beginning of the spiritual resurgence, some ordinary people had feared cultivators and their enormous power, worrying that its proliferation would throw society into chaos. Back then, some experts had even advocated, "Let everyone cultivate, and there won't be any chaos."

It was laughable in retrospect.

A small cottage stood on the slope beside the cemetery, serving as the caretaker's home. Yue Wen puttered up to it on his electric scooter, parked, and locked it.

A somewhat scruffy, balding old man came out of the cottage and greeted him with a smile. "Young man, you're here to clear out the sinister entities, right?"

"That's right, sir," Yue Wen replied.

"My surname's Huang. I'm the cemetery caretaker. I'll be leaving these next few nights to you. If you get tired, you can come inside and rest." The old man led Yue Wen on a brief tour of the cottage.

"Mr. Huang, leave it to me. You can rest easy," Yue Wen said with a smile.

The cottage was simply furnished, with a few everyday household appliances and a small, yellowed bed.

"Only ordinary people are buried in our cemetery, so nothing particularly powerful will turn up. You should have no trouble." Old Huang pointed. "There are a few stacks of yellow

paper in the drawer. Help yourself whenever you need it."

"Sure." Yue Wen nodded.

The preparations were quite thorough, but he had never learned talisman arts, so he had no use for the stuff.

"There are a few cucumbers in the fridge. Help yourself whenever you're hungry," Old Huang said, pointing again.

"Got it." Yue Wen nodded again, thinking the old man was rather considerate.

"There are a few dirty books on the shelf. Help yourself whenever you need..." Old Huang pointed toward the bookshelf.

"I won't be needing those." Yue Wen hastily shook his head.

Good grief.

Does everything in this room have to match your surname-yellow?

I'm a respectable man, sir.

"True enough. The internet's thriving again these days." Old Huang sighed and smiled, seemingly lamenting that the new era had left him behind.

Dusk was nearly over. After leaving Yue Wen the key with its little yellow duck attached, Old Huang puttered off on a small yellow electric scooter of his own.

Left alone in the cottage, Yue Wen flipped through the books on the shelf-purely out of curiosity.

Sure enough, they were titles like "There's No Way I'm a Goddess," "Wife, Please Slay the Demons," and "The Fairy Has Spoken"-works whose titles alone made them sound distinctly disreputable.

He idled away a little time until darkness had fully fallen and the creatures of the night were about to stir.

Then Yue Wen left the cottage and entered the cemetery.

Compared with demons possessing physical bodies, nightmare wraiths-sinister entities formed from the residual mental energy of living beings-were far more intangible. They left no trace in daylight, yet could regenerate in the darkness.

Yue Wen had barely taken a few steps when he saw a ghostly green flame drifting toward him from the distant trees. Though this wasn't his first encounter, he put on the Demon-Detecting Mirror out of caution, concentrated, and channeled his true qi to identify it.

Besides revealing the auras of sinister entities, the Demon-Detecting Mirror could determine their origins and analyze their combat strength, providing plenty of crucial information. The weaker an entity's spiritual power, the more information the mirror revealed.

An impression immediately surfaced in Yue Wen's mind.

[Lantern Monster: A nightmare wraith formed when a trace of lingering resentment from a corpse attaches itself to worn paper. Unquestionably the weakest sinister entity in the world. An adult specimen has approximately one-quarter the combat strength of a healthy human grandmother.]