Early the next morning, Yue Wen received word that the job was his.
In truth, the moment he’d quoted his price, everyone in the group knew there was no suspense left. He was willing to take the job for a thousand yuan—what was there even to fight over?
This job might take two or three nights. Averaged out, that was three to five hundred a night, and you still had to stay up late for that bit of money. A guy might as well go work as a male model at a bar.
As for the indignation of his peers, Yue Wen merely smiled it off.
Who told them that when he fought monsters, he could earn extra evil-suppression money on the side? Compared to that, real cash was actually less important. He could only force everyone else into the grind a little.
Let my peers suffer; I’ll bear the bad name.
After arranging with the employer to head over in the evening, Yue Wen had the daytime to busy himself with his own affairs at the office.
First, he made a recruitment notice.
“Now hiring one demon-exorcist assistant. Must possess cultivation; realm does not matter. Men, women, old, or young are all welcome. Expected monthly salary: 3,000 to 100,000 yuan. (Base salary 3,000; fifty-fifty split for participating in missions.) No upper limit. Interested parties, apply quickly.”
After Yue Wen finished writing it, he looked it over, then added another line.
“Limited positions. First come, first served.”
If it were just the three-thousand-yuan base salary, it would probably be hard to recruit even an intern college student, let alone a cultivator. So he could only offer a higher commission—even at other similar agencies, not even partners would get a fifty-fifty split.
“This should have some appeal, right?” Yue Wen murmured.
After all, he had absolutely no cultivation requirement.
The cultivators in Jiangcheng City weren’t so precious as all that.
Five hundred years ago, Blue Star, which had originally been a purely technological civilization, suddenly saw a dramatic rise in spiritual energy concentration. Before long, all things in the world began to manifest spirituality.
Descendants of ancient immortal sects emerged from seclusion, saying that the spiritual energy of the world was like the tides: three thousand years of rising, three thousand years of decline, and three thousand years of exhaustion.
One rise and one fall, spanning ten thousand years.
Now that the period of spiritual energy exhaustion had completely passed, the human realm would enter a full three-thousand-year period of rising spiritual energy, until it reached its peak.
At first, people were ecstatic and called it the “Spiritual Energy Revival.”
But they soon discovered that this revival had brought tremendous chaos to the world. It was not only humans who could give birth to spirituality; the living beings of the earth, the mountains, and the rivers all transformed as if into a primordial wilderness. All things gained spirit, and evil spirits sprang up everywhere.
The greatest danger was still the spatial barriers that had loosened with the surge of spiritual energy.
Many realms beyond the human realm stirred as a result. Powerful otherworldly demons descended, nearly bringing annihilation to Blue Star, whose cultivation civilization had only just begun.
For nearly a hundred years, the human world was all but destroyed, and the survivors lived constantly in shadow, anxious and fearful day after day.
The Spiritual Energy Revival came to be called the “Spiritual Energy Calamity.”
In the end, it was only after human cultivators gradually accumulated strength and grew powerful, and after a group of immortal-sect descendants followed ancient records to locate the legendary Dragon Palaces of the Four Seas and retrieved vast troves of immortal treasures left behind from the previous spiritual-energy era, that the tide was finally turned and order restored to the mortal world.
To this day, although large stretches of wasteland and forbidden zones still lie outside the satellite cities, and demons and evil spirits of various ranks still exist, at the very least, humans within the cities can live and work in peace, once again taking up the technological lifestyle of the past.
As for otherworldly demons, they can only descend when spatial rifts appear by chance. Large-scale realm invasions have not occurred for many years.
Over these past few centuries, cultivation civilization has flourished more and more. Although those born with spirituality and able to cultivate are still one in ten thousand, on a planet with a population of over ten billion, one in ten thousand still amounts to several million. Add in some evil cultivators created through acquired modification, and the number becomes even larger.
Naturally, the lower the realm, the more people there are. Among the nine realms of cultivators, the lower three realms account for over seventy percent. As for “hobbyist” cultivators who remain in the first realm their entire lives, they are everywhere.
Yue Wen’s requirements were not high. He did not actually need an assistant to help much; it was only to deal with the regulations of the Supernatural Administration Bureau.
Recruiting a hobbyist would be enough.
……
The day passed quickly. Yue Wen cultivated alone in the office for the entire day, and not a single person came through the door.
The reputation of “Yue’s Cultivation Agency” was still too small.
On one little utility pole, “Huge Reward for Surrogacy,” “Cheap Exorcisms,” “Same-City House Calls,” “Lose Weight Without Dieting”... with so many things crammed together, it was very hard to believe that one of them was actually real.
Even so, Yue Wen remained optimistic. As long as he recruited an assistant and obtained an official business license, he could openly and properly use some advanced advertising methods—for example, handing out flyers on the street.
Seeing that it was about time, he locked up the storefront and rode off again on his little electric scooter.
All the way east, he arrived at the edge of Satellite City No. 7. From afar, he could already see a vast, hazy curtain of chaotic light ahead, standing between heaven and earth, boundless and endless.
The satellite cities encircled the main urban district, and outside the satellite cities were protected by formations. Beyond the light curtain of this city-protecting grand formation lay the vast wasteland.
This grand formation could not block out all demons and evil spirits. Some lone evil spirits could still find gaps and slip inside. But once the aura of invading demons or evil spirits reached a certain level of strength, the formation would be triggered, preventing large-scale demon tides and protecting the overall safety of the city.
The East City Public Cemetery was located in this distant suburban area.
The evening sky was dim. At a glance, the several sections separated by the trees on the mountainside were filled with protruding stone tablets. Many of them were blank, or recorded only the time of death, prepared in case family members came to claim them one day.
In this era, the living space for ordinary people had, in truth, grown harsher. Every year, the number of accidental deaths was quite high.
At the beginning of the spiritual energy revival, there had been a group of ordinary people who felt terrified of cultivators who controlled great power, worrying that the spread of such power would cause social chaos. Back then, there had even been experts loudly advocating, “If everyone cultivates, then it won’t be chaotic.”
Thinking about it was enough to make one laugh.
On the slope beside the public cemetery stood a small hut, the place where the gravekeeper lived. Yue Wen rode his little electric scooter putt-putt-putting up outside the hut, parked it, and locked it.
A somewhat sloppy-looking balding old man walked out from inside. He greeted him with a cheerful smile and said, “Young man, you’re the one here to clear out the evil spirits, right?”
“That’s right, sir,” Yue Wen replied.
“My surname is Huang. I’m the cemetery administrator. I’ll be leaving these next few nights to you. If you get tired while working, you can come in and rest.” Old Huang led Yue Wen into the hut and showed him around.
“Uncle Huang, you can rest assured leaving it to me,” Yue Wen said with a smile.
The furnishings inside the hut were simple, nothing more than some everyday household appliances and a small yellowed bed.
“The people buried in our cemetery are all ordinary folk. There won’t be any major evil spirits, so there definitely won’t be a problem.” Old Huang pointed and said, “There are several stacks of yellow paper in the drawer. Use them whenever you need.”
“Got it.” Yue Wen nodded.
They were rather well prepared, but he had never studied talisman arts, so he had no use for that stuff yet.
“There are a few cucumbers in the fridge. Eat them whenever you need,” Old Huang said, pointing again.
“Understood.” Yue Wen nodded again, thinking that the old man was rather considerate.
“There are a few yellow books on the shelf. Whenever you need, you can...” Old Huang pointed toward the bookshelf.
“I don’t have that need.” Yue Wen hurriedly shook his head.
Good grief.
Did everything in this hut have to share your surname?
I’m a proper person, sir.
“True enough. The internet’s developed again now.” Old Huang sighed and smiled, seeming to lament that the new era no longer had a flight willing to carry him.
As dusk was about to pass, after leaving Yue Wen the key with a little yellow duck attached to it, Old Huang also rode off on a yellow little electric scooter, putt-putt-putting away.
Left alone in the hut, Yue Wen flipped through the few books on the shelf—purely out of curiosity.
Sure enough, they were all things like I Can’t Possibly Be a Goddess, Madam, Please Slay the Demons, The Fairy Has an Order... works of that sort. Just from the titles, one could tell they weren’t exactly proper.
He casually passed some time. Once the sky had completely darkened, the yin creatures were about to become active.
Yue Wen walked out of the hut and into the cemetery area.
Compared with demons that possessed physical bodies, a “nightmare,” an evil spirit transformed from the residual mental energy of living beings, was even more illusory and intangible. Under sunlight, it left no trace at all, but in the night, it could regenerate.
Yue Wen had not taken many steps before he saw a ball of eerie green ghostfire drifting over from the distant woods. Although it was not his first time seeing one, out of caution, he still put on the Demon-Revealing Mirror, focused his mind, circulated his true qi, and identified the other party’s information.
Aside from seeing the aura of evil spirits, the Demon-Revealing Mirror could also distinguish their origins and analyze their combat strength, providing a great deal of key information. The weaker the evil spirit’s spiritual power, the more information it revealed.
A perception immediately surfaced in Yue Wen’s mind.
【Lantern Monster: A nightmare creature formed when a trace of lingering resentment from a corpse attached itself to worn-out paper. It is, without question, the weakest evil spirit in the world. An adult specimen’s combat strength is approximately equal to one-fourth of a healthy human grandmother.】