"A suspected Calamity Beast has appeared on Linping Road in Cloudscape District. Please head there to confirm as soon as possible!"
Hearing the announcement from the speaker on the wall, Shen Heng quickly packed up and headed outside.
He was First Tier now, and it was time to start officially carrying out missions.
Shen Heng had barely been in the reception hall for two seconds when Wei Leyang and Wu Cheng came running downstairs.
Han Ling was on day shift this week. As for the captain, he had gone to get the car, as usual.
To make deployments easier, the captain always parked on the road outside his office window. That way, whenever a mission came up, he could jump straight out the window and get behind the wheel as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, there was no one else beside the Supervision Bureau building, so parking there caused no problems.
While he was thinking, Wang Hai had already pulled up outside the Supervision Bureau.
Everyone quickly opened the doors and got in.
Glancing at the three who had climbed aboard, Wang Hai quickly stepped on the accelerator, and the black sedan sped off with a roar of its engine.
Wang Hai glanced at Shen Heng in the back seat through the rearview mirror and asked,
"Shen Heng, were you still tempering your torso bones just now?"
"Yes!" Shen Heng replied.
"How's the tempering going?" Wang Hai asked.
"I just finished!"
"Jeez... what a freak!" Wu Cheng drew a quiet, sharp breath from the front passenger seat.
Although he had already had an inkling after hearing that Shen Heng had broken through from Zero Tier to First Tier in a month, learning of his cultivation progress again still left him stunned.
Wang Hai nodded. He had already expected this, but that was not what he really wanted to ask.
"Do you still have Origin Power left to use your ability?" Wang Hai asked.
"Yes!" Shen Heng replied.
"Good. Remember, when you're on night shift from now on, once you've used up half your Origin Power, you need to stop and switch to breathing exercises to replenish it. Otherwise, if a Calamity Beast appears and you don't have any Origin Power to use your ability, things will get ugly!" Wang Hai reminded him.
"..."
My ability might not need to worry about that... Shen Heng said silently to himself, but he still nodded.
"Yes, I will!"
A little over ten minutes later.
The car stopped in front of a cluster of buildings.
To Shen Heng's surprise, aside from two police officers, Han Ling, who was on day shift, had also already arrived.
As though noticing Shen Heng's confusion, Han Ling explained,
"My place is pretty close to here!"
Oh, I see... Shen Heng nodded silently, then looked up and surveyed the buildings before him.
The development was unfinished... no, it would be more accurate to call it abandoned.
The buildings were clearly all unfinished, but there were no signs of ongoing construction anywhere around them. Only scattered scaffolding and green safety netting, already torn to shreds by the wind, remained outside.
The open ground in front of the buildings was uneven and pitted, with puddles of varying depths. The surrounding streetlights were nothing but bare poles without bulbs installed, and the whole area lay desolate.
"A few years back, Jincheng Land wanted to build an upscale residential complex here. It was bustling back then. Who knew Jincheng Land would suddenly blow up one day? Its funding chain snapped just like that, and construction here stopped too!"
Wu Cheng walked up beside Shen Heng and shook his head somewhat helplessly as he looked at the buildings before them.
"It doesn't really matter whether a company like that lives or dies. The poor ones are the people who already took out loans to buy homes. Plenty of them had saved their entire lives, just hoping to move into a new home. And now look-there's no sign of their homes, and all their money's gone down the drain. Some families can barely keep going because of this. Sigh..."
Shen Heng looked at the vast stretch of abandoned buildings before him and slowly shook his head.
"Calamity Beasts eat people, and unfinished developments eat money. At heart, they're both devouring humanity's hopes. The difference is that one can be killed with bullets, while the other..."
He lifted his foot and kicked aside a discarded can that had been lying there for who knew how long.
"...you don't even know where to aim."
The group gathered with the police officers in front of the buildings.
Wang Hai took out his credentials and handed them to the two officers. Once they had confirmed his identity, he asked,
"Where's the person who called it in?"
"There wasn't one. Or rather, we're the ones who called it in!" said the slightly older officer.
"What's the situation right now?" Wang Hai looked at him.
"We were driving through this neighborhood on night patrol just now when we saw something that looked a lot like a Calamity Beast running this way!" the officer replied.
"Did you get a rough look at it?" Wang Hai asked.
"All we saw was that it had two legs and a very long tail!" the officer said.
"Not that it had two legs-it only had two legs. That Calamity Beast didn't have arms, or maybe they were too small for us to see!" the other officer added.
"Only two legs and a very long tail? Isn't that a dinosaur?" Wu Cheng said with a laugh.
Shen Heng: "..."
Han Ling shot Wu Cheng a glare, silencing him.
"Did you see any light coming from its tail?" Wang Hai asked.
"No!"
"Then did it have..."
Wang Hai continued asking questions one by one.
Shen Heng lowered his head in thought, his mind automatically listing possible Calamity Beasts based on the bestiary he had been studying lately.
Dark Leap Beast: sleek and agile, its entire body covered in black scales. It moved by leaping on two powerful hind legs alone, traveling at extreme speed like a streak of black lightning. Its tail was slender and flexible, balancing its body during leaps. When attacking, it could lash its tail at enemies like a whip with astonishing force.
Sickle-Tailed Beast: relatively sleek and agile, with a layer of hard, metallic-sheened scales covering its body that could withstand attacks to a certain degree. Its most distinctive feature was its sickle-shaped tail, with an incredibly sharp edge. In combat, it primarily attacked enemies by swinging its tail.
Spring-Tailed Demon: a relatively small, rat-like Calamity Beast. Its tail could bend and contract into the shape of a spring. By springing toward enemies, it could attack swiftly; by springing against the ground, it could propel itself at high speed...
Shen Heng looked up at the two officers.
He had thought of four or five possible Calamity Beasts. Unfortunately, the officers had not seen it clearly, so he could not pinpoint the most likely one.
Still, it was just as well they had not seen it clearly. If they had, the Calamity Beast might have attacked them.
As for the captain's earlier question about whether its tail gave off light, that referred to a Calamity Beast called a Candle-Tailed Monster.
The tip of its tail could emit a candle-like glow, and it could leave the light lingering briefly in the air, using it to confuse or intimidate opponents during combat.
Meanwhile.
Wang Hai had also finished his questions. Clearly, he had not managed to identify the exact type of Calamity Beast either.
Still, knowing roughly what it might be was enough to help them prepare better for the upcoming fight.
"Did you see where that Calamity Beast went, then?" Wang Hai asked the two officers.
"We saw it run toward that building just now!" The officer raised a hand and pointed at a building ahead to their right.
"All right, we'll handle it. You two wait here. If you encounter a Calamity Beast, drive away immediately. If you can't get away, open fire!"
Wang Hai gave the two officers their instructions, then glanced back at Shen Heng and the others.
They hurried toward the building the officer had just pointed out.
On the way, Shen Heng slowed slightly and looked up at the looming giant not far away.
Even unfinished, the building already stood over thirty stories and nearly a hundred meters tall. Tattered green safety netting billowed freely in the breeze.
Shen Heng lowered his gaze to the others a few meters ahead and quickened his pace to catch up. At the same time, he released the restrictions on his hearing, sweeping his perception toward the nearby building.
Only a moment later, Shen Heng suddenly slowed slightly.
Silence...
Apart from the wind blowing through it, all that came from that building was silence!
Shen Heng's eyes widened slightly without his realizing it.
The Calamity Beast was not in that building. The two officers had seen wrong, or the beast had merely passed through and gone somewhere else!
In short, the Calamity Beast was not in that building!
Shen Heng stopped completely and began expanding the boundaries of his hearing.
One hundred meters, three hundred meters, five hundred meters, eight hundred meters...
Like a wild horse freed from its reins, the boundary kept charging outward, racing full tilt toward the one-kilometer limit he could reach after breaking through to First Tier.
In an instant, voices, wind, chirping insects, and all manner of sounds flooded madly into Shen Heng's mind like ten thousand arrows loosed at once, stirring his head into a buzzing mess.
Up ahead, Wu Cheng was the first to notice Shen Heng had fallen behind. He turned around, his face full of confusion.
"Hey! What are you spacing out for?"
But Shen Heng did not notice his voice. He remained wholly immersed in that chaotic, clamorous sea of sound.
Finally.
A faint, elusive breath drifted out from the depths of one of the buildings.
Shen Heng's eyes snapped open. Under the bewildered gazes of Wang Hai and the others ahead, he slowly raised his hand and pointed at another building in the distance.
"The Calamity Beast is over there!"