“Join Luoshan…”

  Zhu Shi paused for a moment, then let out a soft sigh.

  “Still not allowed?” I asked, a little put off.

  “It’s not that it’s impossible,” she replied. “If you truly possess that kind of extraordinary power, whether you want to join Luoshan or do something else entirely, I have neither the reason nor the authority to stop you.”

  “Then… you think I’m exaggerating about my abilities?” I could understand if that was her concern.

  But she shook her head. “I’m not doubting your account of the fight.”

  You could at least doubt it a little.

  I was already prepared to demonstrate right then and there.

  “Earlier, I opposed you joining because I thought you had flaws in your combat approach. Now the situation is the complete opposite: being too powerful comes with its own serious problems.” Zhu Shi seemed to be weighing something carefully. Her gaze drifted to the scattered remains on the ground, and a trace of sorrow colored her expression. “I’ll explain the details to you properly later. For now, let’s deal with the aftermath of the fallen demon hunter.”

  Agent Kong had clearly been someone Zhu Shi knew. Seeing an acquaintance turn into a villain and then die must have left her emotions in turmoil.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to kill him,” I said.

  “You don’t need to apologize to me. I know it wasn’t you who killed him—it was some other unknown cause. Even if it had been you, the fault would lie with Agent Kong, not with you.” Toward the end, a look of guilt appeared on her face. “Besides… I’m the demon hunter responsible for this region. The burden of that killing karma should have fallen on me in the first place.”

  I had felt a faint, irrational sense of guilt for causing the death of someone close to her. Now, unexpectedly, she was the one feeling guilty toward me. It reminded me of something Agent Kong had said while still pretending to be himself: one reason Zhu Shi didn’t want me to join Luoshan was that she didn’t want me to have to kill.

  That hadn’t been a casual remark. Zhu Shi really did have an almost naive side to her.

  Agent Kong hadn’t died directly at my hands, but my involvement was undeniably part of the reason. Unlike the previous fallen demon hunter, Agent Kong had always struck me as fundamentally human. Logically, I should have felt some guilt over taking a life. Yet my heart remained completely unmoved.

  What I felt instead was regret: with his death, so many truths I still didn’t understand had been buried in darkness forever.

  The fallen demon hunter incident was clearly full of unresolved mysteries. Where had Agent Kong gotten that kind of power? Why had he suddenly self-destructed at the end? Why had the previous fallen demon hunter recognized me? What exactly were the ritual array and the cavern on the fifteenth floor? It felt like I had speedrun a game only to realize I’d missed a ton of collectibles—and there was no New Game+ in reality. All I could do was throw myself into the next adventure.

  I also deeply regretted that I could no longer use Agent Kong to access the shadow world again.

  Describing the interior of the shadow realm in human language was impossible—even I couldn’t clearly articulate what it felt like to be inside it. If I had to force an analogy: imagine my existence as a piece of software. Entering the shadow world was like forcibly opening a video file in a text editor—it nearly turned me into incomprehensible garbled code.

  So I had gritted my teeth and endured, forcibly maintaining my sense of self and ability to think while I was there.

  When I told Zhu Shi about it earlier, she had looked at me like I was speaking an alien language, completely baffled. I didn’t fully understand it myself—I was just going on instinct.

  I had originally planned to stay longer and observe, but I worried Agent Kong might escape in the meantime. If I could capture him again, he could reopen the passage for me. So I hurried back—only to find…

  After parting with Zhu Shi, I searched the area again and recovered the remaining scattered fragments of Agent Kong’s body. Not large pieces—just a single finger that had flown off in the explosion and been charred black by flames. Out of a lingering sense of incompleteness, I picked it up and kept it. Since it had been burned before his death, it still retained the appearance of his fallen demon hunter form—almost like a morbid keepsake.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Calling it a “souvenir” might make me sound like a creep. In the future, I’ll surely encounter far stranger things. Compared to what’s coming, a charred finger is nothing. But for the me of right now, it still carries some meaning.

  —

  One day later—early this morning—I met Zhu Shi in a park near the university.

  Perhaps she had handled things on her end, because despite the enormous commotion of me slicing an unfinished building in half, no official personnel ever came to question me. Or maybe she herself was the official assigned to deal with me.

  She was dressed as usual: white blouse, black knee-length skirt, and a large black guitar case slung over her back—like a girl from a rock band.

  Compared to yesterday, her expression was much calmer. She seemed to have processed—or at least buried deep—the emotional turmoil of seeing someone she knew turn evil and die.

  There was no one else around. We could speak freely. Right now, she stood before me as a representative of Luoshan, ready to formally discuss my future.

  First, she asked me to demonstrate turning my body into flame. I complied. She circled me slowly, observing, her eyes widening like someone who had just seen a ghost.

  “…Even though I never doubted your words and had mentally prepared myself… are my eyes working properly? Am I really not dreaming?”

  “Is this ability really that impressive?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “It’s beyond impressive. This is a divine technique.” Her assessment was blunt. “Freely transforming your body into a natural element is, in the world of demon hunters, known as the power of ‘Divine Manifestation’—or more commonly, ‘elementalization.’ It’s considered a hallmark of gods or immortals. While there are other ways to forcibly imitate this divine art, they almost always come with conditions, costs, or severe limitations. No one can wield it as naturally and effortlessly as you do.”

  I responded with a sense of unreality: “So… I’m a god or an immortal?”

  “…That depends on how you achieved elementalization,” she said, clearly finding the idea a bit absurd herself.

  I thought back on my own experiences and explained it to her.

  Learning elementalization—or what I called my “second form”—hadn’t been complicated.

  Both Zhu Shi and Agent Kong seemed to view flame users more as “ordinary people wielding powerful weapons” than as truly transcendent beings. In my normal state, I often felt the same way.

  In the past, I had always sensed an invisible barrier between myself and my flames. When I commanded them, it was like giving orders to a subordinate—there was always a perceptible delay between “I issue the command” and “the flames obey.” No matter how much I practiced, it felt like I was merely improving coordination rather than achieving true unity.

  Logically, since my flames were my spirit, there shouldn’t have been any lag. So I made an assumption: there was a difference between “my human spirit” and “the spirit that had become flame.”

  From that, a simple idea formed: I couldn’t command the flames perfectly because I was still human, not flame itself. So what if I became flame?

  To make it happen, I chose a very direct, brutal method.

  I set myself on fire.

  As long as I willed it, the flames wouldn’t harm my body. I filled every crevice inside myself with fire, experiencing the sensation of merging completely with it.

  Until one day, the separation vanished.

  I had become flame.

  Even I barely understood how it happened.

  After hearing my explanation, Zhu Shi stared at me in stunned silence.

  “Your method…” It took her a long moment to find words. “I can only say that true gods and immortals, when they achieve elementalization, may not be able to describe the process to others in words—but they themselves are absolutely clear on how it occurred. For the former, it’s an innate state. For the latter, it’s the fruit of profound enlightenment.

  “As for you—just randomly grabbing some vague hunch, messing around with it, and suddenly mastering it… In all my experience, there’s no precedent for what you did.”

  “I see…”

  So I really had nothing to do with gods or immortals. Still, as an esper, I was clearly an extreme outlier.

  I wasn’t sure whether to feel happy about being “special.” This uniqueness seemed to mean there were no reference points—no one else to learn from—which only made it harder to figure out the root cause of my ability’s awakening.

  “I think I finally understand why you never encountered anomalies before,” she said, sounding relieved. “Anomalies attract each other, but when something reaches an extreme, the opposite happens. Your power is so overwhelming that anomalies instinctively avoid you. Not just those with instinct or intelligence—even purely phenomenal anomalies somehow fail to intersect with you for reasons no one can explain.

  “That phenomenon normally only occurs with the vast majority of Great Unpredictables, and a tiny handful of exceptionally powerful demon hunters.”

  I caught a new term and couldn’t help asking, “What are ‘Great Unpredictables’?”

  “The Great Unpredictables are the strongest demon hunters who stand at the pinnacle of Luoshan,” she explained. “Their power is immense, and they are few. Right now, there are fewer than ten Great Unpredictables stationed at Luoshan.”

  “You say they’re powerful… just how powerful are we talking?”

  As I asked, I tried to guess in my own mind. Considering that an organization like Luoshan had never become the ruler of this country and had left no historical records of its own, the Great Unpredictables’ strength probably didn’t exceed that of ancient armies—at most, modern militaries.

  But… even I was confident I could defeat an ancient army. Could the strongest demon hunters really not do the same?

  Or was I underestimating armies? Had militaries throughout history always possessed secret trump cards capable of suppressing espers like me?

  Then Zhu Shi said something utterly outrageous:

  “Excluding perhaps a few exceptional cases in history that I’m aware of, the Great Unpredictables generally possess the power to destroy an entire nation single-handedly.”