Hunter of Mysterious Creature

"So what do you think—Pangu who split the heavens and earth, Gonggong who rammed into Buzhou Mountain, and Xingtian who danced with Gan Qi..." the Candle Dragon continued, "are they gods, or humans?"

"I'm an atheist," Sun Hang replied.

"Then in your eyes, can those unimaginably powerful primordial anomalies be considered gods?"

"Why not?"

"Aren't you an atheist?"

"'God' is just a label, like 'Sun Hang' or 'Candle Dragon', it doesn't hold any special meaning for me," Sun Hang said with a sly smile. "I just don't believe in those man-made religious idols."

...

...

Tianfu City, Anomaly Investigation Bureau.

Although the Dragon Rock Fortress incident was over, the newly confirmed investigator Yin Xiang had no time to slack off—for while the overtime pay for an official investigator was indeed enticing, the workload was definitely deserving of the amount.

Yin Xiang hadn't slept for nearly two days and nights. He glanced at the cup containing coffee as bitter as traditional Chinese medicine and couldn't help but sigh... relying on coffee for alertness was no longer effective. He felt like his eyelids were as heavy as lead weights, constantly being dragged down by an irresistible force.

Yin Xiang couldn't help but recall a meme he'd seen online: a group of "cattle and horses" working themselves to exhaustion, so much so they didn't even have time to drink coffee. An IV pole stood next to each one, and the concentrated coffee in the IV bags was directly injected into their veins.

Yin Xiang thought he might as well grab a syringe and inject concentrated coffee directly into his bloodstream—if he dropped dead, at least he'd be relieved.

"Team leader... do we still have to sort through this pile of documents tonight?" Yin Xiang made a hand gesture to indicate the stacks of files towering over his computer screen, asking weakly.

"Of course! The Disaster Response Committee needs them urgently!" replied a middle-aged man also sporting heavy dark circles. The ashtray in front of him was overflowing with cigarette butts, and the office was filled with a choking smoke that lingered stubbornly.

Yin Xiang had initially thought that being an official investigator would mean tracking the traces of anomalies in the streets or open fields, at worst, interviewing among the crowds to uncover clues... He never expected that his first task after confirmation would be organizing this massive amount of document archives.

Is this job any different from the lowest-level office clerks in the city's Management Committee?

Did it?

Perhaps... it did?

Yin Xiang consoled himself, at least those office clerks wouldn't have access to these "classified documents."

These files were preserved from decades ago before computers were prevalent, documenting all sightings and encounters with anomalies or suspected anomalies in Shuzhou and surrounding areas.

The Investigation Bureau had spent considerable manpower collecting these from archives in various cities, counties, and towns across Shuzhou, piling them all here.

Some of these archives were even older than Yin Xiang's great-grandfather, with brittle, worm-eaten, yellowed paper that could crumble to dust with the slightest mishandling—for which Yin Xiang had been reprimanded by his team leader several times.

"An anomaly capable of flight or temporary levitation, moves extremely fast, weighs between eight to ten tons, and emits a pale glow at night..." Yin Xiang mumbled the target he was seeking, carefully organizing the stack of old files he'd just reviewed and placing them into a designated archive box.

These files contained invaluable information. As the bureau chief had noted, it was the perfect opportunity to digitize all paper archives accumulated over a century in Shuzhou—next to Yin Xiang's desk, similar archive boxes had already been stacked up waiting to be delivered to the basement archive room.

The leader had spoken easily, but the implementation was horrendously labor-intensive—like a group of children building sandcastles in a sandbox with plastic buckets and toy shovels, only to have someone come along and demand they reconstruct the Great Wall.

Optimistically called ambitious; pessimistically, it was pure insanity.

"Sigh... seems I'm not the most unfortunate one," Yin Xiang yawned. "Those guys responsible for encoding the archives have a workload much larger than mine..."

Yin Xiang figured, if he didn't drop dead, he could probably finish reviewing this batch of archives in about a week... but for those in the archive room aiming to digitize everything, they might be staring at computer screens typing like madmen for the next few months.

For those documents printed in recent years, a scanner might assist the process, but the majority being handwritten required painfully manual input into the computer system word by word...

The mere thought made Yin Xiang's scalp numb.

"Everyone hang in there a little longer," the team leader clapped and addressed the dozen or so investigators hard at work in the office, "it's half an hour to midnight, then you'll have four hours of rest to grab a bite and sleep well—don't worry, no matter how late we work, the cafeteria will have hot meals waiting for us."

"Hot meals? More like hot meal packs..." Yin Xiang couldn't help but gripe internally.

Four hours of sleep—what a joke... This group of investigators was merely human, not infected like the Hunter. If continued, someone would surely drop dead from exhaustion.

Yin Xiang regretted... had he known, he would have pushed Sun Hang to make him infected...

Thinking of Sun Hang, his teeth clenched—this guy was enjoying himself in Chunming City, leaving the mess for them to clean up, and they had to clean this mess night after day...

"Sun Hang, oh Sun Hang, why did you have to spot that white shadow... if you had been a few seconds late, it would've been better..."

While working and complaining, Yin Xiang seemed to glimpse something flicker past the window.

He shivered instantly, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

"Lea... leader?" Yin Xiang hollered with a wavering voice.