Chapter 1 A New Director at the Abnormal Strategy Bureau
Tian Sheng felt as though he had been dreaming. In the dream, he seemed to transform into an agile moth, flying freely in the sky and resting peacefully on a wall.
The worries of being human had nothing to do with him anymore, the attachments of humanity no longer formed bonds. The form of his life had changed, and yet his will dissipated amidst these changes.
He began to forget that he was Tian Sheng, he began to believe he was a moth. Was it Tian Sheng dreaming about being a moth, or was it a moth dreaming about being Tian Sheng?
Lost in such hazy contemplation, he was brought back to reality by a deep blue light.
Click, click, the crisp sound reminiscent of scissors echoed in his heart. Accompanied by such a sound, he felt his consciousness becoming clear again, his body lighter, as if something had been stripped from him, and whatever had been binding him had been erased.
Then, Tian Sheng woke up from his sleep.
Upon awakening, he found himself amidst ruins, seeing a thread glowing with fluorescent blue light extending from his chest, reaching endlessly into the high sky. Experience tales at empire
He looked up, following the thread into the sky, only to see a petite figure standing against the night sky, a tangle of fine threads spreading from her back like wings, connecting to countless others just like himself.
For some reason, a thought arose in his heart: He was saved.
That figure, akin to an angel amongst men, was firmly imprinted in his mind before he fell unconscious once again.
...
...
—"Hey Tian, hey, Tian! I'm talking to you, what's the matter with you?"
The calling voice pulled Tian Sheng back to reality, and as he looked ahead, he saw a young man in an Abnormal Strategy Bureau uniform looking at him quizzically: "I asked what you're having for lunch, why are you acting like you've lost your soul? Spaced out again?"
"Ah... sorry."
Still reminiscing about his somewhat hazy dream, Tian Sheng blinked and awkwardly wiped his face, standing up from his workstation: "I spaced out again."
It was early November, deep into autumn, the afternoon, two weeks since the large-scale Remnant Beasts attack during the Full Moon Festival.
As the front line of the city in dealing with magical incidents, the Abnormal Strategy Bureau suffered huge losses this time – not only was the main building destroyed, losing nearly a dozen employees, but even the director of the Abnormal Strategy Bureau, Mosi, went missing after the event.
Even more bizarre, as the first site of the attack, no one in the Abnormal Strategy Bureau knew what had happened. The surviving employees only felt like they had had a dream, and when they woke up, they were lying in the Abnormal Strategy Bureau's ruins, while the Remnant Beasts had been eliminated and dawn was breaking.
Tian Sheng was also one of those who had fallen unconscious, and his experience was even more absurd – he passed the recruitment exam of the Abnormal Strategy Bureau by a narrow margin, and on the day he was to report for duty at headquarters, he lost consciousness. According to his estimate of the date, he had probably been in a deep coma for over three days.
In the end, the incident was defined and concluded as a "coordinated attack by Remnant Beasts with hypnotic and hallucinogenic abilities, and suspected Molt Rank Remnant Beasts, plotted by Black Ash Dawn."
The mastermind behind the incident was rumored to have been killed by a Magical Girl, but a large number of Black Ash Dawn remnants remained at large, still in hiding.
Faced with the task of hunting down these remnant criminals and participating in disaster recovery and repair work, the freshly revived Abnormal Strategy Bureau urgently needed to start a new round of work.
With the efforts of Magicians and various parties, the main building of the Abnormal Strategy Bureau was rebuilt in about a week. However, replenishing the workforce took time, not to mention the compensation and resettlement of injured and deceased employees. Thus, newly recruited employees like Tian Sheng were also deployed to the front lines, having been involved in intense magical armed conflicts several times recently.
If it were according to Tian Sheng's original Magic Power and Spell Technique level, he surely would not have had the chance to participate in such fierce battles, but now, not only was he constantly on the front line, he had also become a fairly effective combatant.
Yes, Tian Sheng's Magic Power had grown stronger.
Unbeknownst to him, his Magic Power had been greatly enhanced, skipping the stages of peering and touching altogether, reaching the highest control level among Magicians, and it even seemed to be on an upward trend.
This was, by far, the most incredible thing about him during this time.
He vaguely felt that this was related to the moth dream he had before, the dream of becoming a moth might not have been entirely illusory.
He wasn't the only Abnormal Strategy Bureau employee to fall unconscious in the attack, but upon inquiry, he found that no one else had had a dream quite like his.
"Dreaming of becoming a moth" seemed to be a unique experience to him.
Therefore, he always subconsciously revisited that peculiar and vivid dream, trying to grasp something from those memories on the verge of fading.
Standing up from his workstation and following the young man out of the office, Tian Sheng walked through the corridors of the Abnormal Strategy Bureau building, feeling an inexplicable surrealness in the life before him.
A month ago, he was a simple welfare institute caretaker, engaging in mediocre Spell Technique research, dreaming every day of getting into the Abnormal Strategy Bureau through an exam. Because he spent his meager savings on research, he lived frugally, nearly thirty and yet without a girlfriend.