Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 200: Useless Effort

"Yes, you are right." Tiebi nodded, "Even if you really created a corpse, it would not be able to survive in this place for more than five seconds."

"Now that the fight is over, can I go in and see the boss?" Sun Hang asked. "I'm actually quite curious. I wrote down everything that happened on the Nameless Island in great detail in the mission report. Even if you ask me personally, I can only tell you those things. I really don't know why he asked me to come here."

"You'll have to ask Master Pei yourself." Tiebi made way and pointed to a door at the other end of the hall, "Go in by yourself."

"Only myself?" Sun Hang turned to look at Yang Qi, then looked at the two accompanying personnel who had no intention of leaving, and finally looked at Tiebi, "Only myself?"

"Yes," Tiebi nodded, "This is also Pei Lao's request. He wants to meet with you alone. During the meeting, no matter what happens, no one is allowed to enter."

"No one is allowed to enter? Including you?" Sun Hang asked.

"I'll guard the door." said Tiebi.

Sun Hang suddenly felt that his initial joke was not wrong. This guy really changed his job from a bodyguard to a security guard.

"If I were an assassin, wouldn't something terrible happen?" Sun Hang rubbed his chin. "No matter what happens...if there were explosions, screams, or something like that, wouldn't you come in?"

"My job is just to guard this door. I have no right to care about other things." Tiebi replied.

"Sun Hang!" Yang Qi, who was standing by, couldn't bear it any longer and said, "You won't die if you say less!"

"I'm just pointing out the security loopholes inside the Tianshu Tower." Sun Hang said with a look of grievance.

Yang Qi: “…”

……

……

Two minutes later.

Looking at the humanoid holographic projection in front of him with a faint blue light, Sun Hang finally understood why Tianshu Tower was not worried that he might be an assassin...

The big boss known as "Mr. Pei" is not in this room. There is only a projection controlled by him remotely.

The misunderstanding was resolved. It seemed that the security measures of Tianshu Tower were still very strict.

"You are much younger than I thought." Sun Hang was the first to speak. "I thought I would see an old man with a white beard. At the very least, he would be a middle-aged or elderly person with high moral character and prestige."

The humanoid projection in front of him looked very young, probably in his early thirties at most. He wore a white coat that looked no different from that of an ordinary researcher, and had a 3:7 hairstyle that was popular decades ago.

"The aging of the body cannot be reversed, but since there is a chance to reshape my virtual image, I still prefer the way I looked when I was young." The humanoid projection motioned Sun Hang to sit on the sofa nearby, and then walked around the table. A mechanical arm reached down from the ceiling and placed a goblet in front of Sun Hang. "What would you like to drink?"

"Coke, icy cold." Sun Hang said, "I want Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi, and I want something with sugar instead of sugar-free."

Two ice cubes fell on the bottom of the cards with a crisp clash, and then a hose stretched out from the inside of the robotic arm and filled the goblet with bubbling brown liquid.

Sun Hang picked up the glass and took a sip, closing his eyes and enjoying the feeling of bubbles bursting in his mouth - if you didn't look at the fine bubbles on the wall of the glass, people who didn't know would think he was tasting some high-end red wine.

"Are you disappointed?" The humanoid projection smiled and looked at Sun Hang. "I can see what's happening outside. What you said does make some sense... But please don't misunderstand me. I'm not afraid of the assassin. It's because my physical condition has deteriorated to a very bad level. So I have to use the help of the holographic projection equipment to have this conversation."

"...Are you about to die?" Sun Hang asked bluntly.

"At my age, I should have died a long time ago." The other party was not angry. "But fortunately, I caught up with an era of rapid technological development. Since I can still be of some use to human civilization, the Xiazhou Federation has consumed a lot of resources to prolong my life to this day... But according to the current situation, unless the relevant technology makes a major breakthrough, this extension is about to reach its limit."

"Can you just talk about this kind of thing?" Sun Hang tilted his head. "For people of your level, your health status should be the top secret of the Federation, right?"

"Of course you can't just say it casually. If you tell these words to others, it may cause you a lot of trouble." The humanoid projection sat down opposite Sun Hang. "I need to ask you for one thing. Please don't spread any conversations that took place in this room."

"Okay." Sun Hang replied.

"You may have guessed why I want to see you." The humanoid projection said again.

"You can't be looking for a successor, right?" Sun Hang remembered the last conversation between him and Professor Li.

"Why not?" The humanoid projection asked with an interested smile on his face. "I am an infected person, let's put that aside for now." Sun Hang said, "As the number one person in Tianshu Tower, the reason why the Xiazhou Federation spent so much to extend your life is because you have made achievements in the study of strange things that ordinary people cannot achieve, not because of how good you are at fighting... Even if you want to find a successor, you should choose from those researchers in white coats, not someone like me who can't even recite the list of known strange things."

"Do you think that relying on researchers, we can really defeat those monsters that are becoming stronger and more bizarre?" The smile on the humanoid projection's face faded slightly, and he asked Sun Hang in a very serious tone.

"I don't know. I'm just a hunter. This kind of problem is not something I need to consider." Sun Hang threw away the burden in an instant.

"When I was young, I always believed that as long as our technology developed fast enough, those incomprehensible things would eventually be explained by science, and all difficult problems would be solved with the progress of civilization... I witnessed the emergence of generation after generation of geniuses. Each of them was extremely talented, and their research results would have won them a Nobel Prize in the past... Thanks to their efforts, we have learned more and more about weird things. We have classified various weird things into different categories, and we have also deciphered a large number of meme fragments... and even applied them... But what is the result?"

"But what's the result?" Sun Hang asked after taking a sip of Coke.

"The scope of human activities is still shrinking... I have personally witnessed the fall of the Yunnan-Yunnan region, and hundreds of thousands of refugees have flowed into Shuzhou. On the east side of the federal territory, the border line that symbolizes the safe sea area is shrinking towards the mainland every year. And now, Shuzhou has completely fallen into darkness and cold... Sometimes, I wonder, is everything we have done over the years really meaningful?"

"If nothing had been done, human civilization would have perished long ago, right?" Sun Hang glanced at the humanoid projection. "It takes effort to survive. Moreover, if we look away from the border areas, people seem to be living quite well... at least much better than during the great battles back then."

"The public can indeed look away from the border area, but we cannot." The humanoid projection sighed, "Under the room we are in now, there is buried the most powerful supercomputer in human history. The Tianshu Tower once spent four years using this supercomputer to build a mathematical model. If we want to maintain the status quo, we must increase the speed of technological development by more than twenty times."

"Twenty times? To be honest, I can understand if you said that the volume of beverages can be increased twenty times, but the idea of ​​increasing the speed of technological development by twenty times... this statement is really a bit abstract." Sun Hang said, "If it could really be done, humans would have probably abandoned this earth and gone to outer space for interstellar colonization, right? Why would they stay on the ground and fight those weird creatures to the death?"

"There is one thing you may not know... Of course, most people don't know it either." The humanoid shadow said, "After so many years of observation and calculation, we found that strange things do not only exist on Earth."

“Are there weird things in the universe?”

"Yes." The other party nodded, "So, running away is not a solution."

"Then according to what you just said, the speed of technological development will be increased twenty times... can it be done?" Sun Hang asked again.

"I can't do it." The humanoid shadow shook his head with some regret. "Since the end of the last century, when human civilization and technology exploded, our development speed has reached a bottleneck until now... We tried to use the study of strange objects as a new breakthrough, but the progress was extremely slow. Moreover, the biggest problem is... many of these research results cannot be directly put into actual combat."

Sun Hang couldn't help but think of the "meme bullets" that "Professor Deng" had boasted about at the press conference.

"In the fight against monsters, the main force, apart from the army and weapons of the old era, is only monster hunters like you... In comparison, the research results of Tianshu Tower and the research institutes of various city-states have not provided any substantial help in this war between humans and monsters."

"It seems... that's really the case." Sun Hang nodded thoughtfully, "Those research institutes... rather than being a research institution, I think they are more like a management institution."

"So, what we need now is not research talents, but..." The humanoid shadow paused, and then said, "sufficiently strong combat power."

"Does this count as the start?" Sun Hang couldn't help but secretly complained.

If you can't figure it out during the research, just stop researching. As long as you can use the power of the monster for your own benefit, you won't have to consider anything else... Sun Hang really couldn't understand how such a simple and crude idea could appear in the mind of the number one person in Tianshu Tower?

After much thought, I can only attribute it to the fact that this group of researchers have spent so much of their lives researching that they have broken down their defenses and shattered their faith... Just like the dangerous knowledge in the Cthulhu mythology, the more you study, the easier it is to fall into madness. Sometimes, it is the kind of character who kicks the door open and starts shooting who can survive to the end.

"Do you think I'm the kind of 'decisive force' that can turn the tide of the battle?" Sun Hang spat out the half-melted ice cube into the empty cup, and the mechanical arm beside him immediately filled his cup with another one. "Not really, right? I can't even beat the big guy standing guard outside. Besides, he's ranked eleventh, and there are ten people stronger than him... No matter how you count it, it won't be my turn, right?"

"But you're growing very fast." The humanoid shadow said seriously, "From the time you were infected to the time you passed the test and registered as a hunter, it was only a little over a month, but you're already able to fight Iron Arm back and forth. This already explains a lot."

"Maybe I'm just lucky."

In the report that Sun Hang submitted, he did not mention that he had any memories related to the Nameless Island Research Institute in his head. The fisherman and Yano who were rescued by the search and rescue team afterwards seemed to have lost their memory and had completely forgotten anything about "Anna"... After reading the reports submitted by the two of them, Sun Hang discovered that his "heavily deleted" version of the report had become the most detailed one among the reports of the only three survivors.

He didn't know whether it was "Anna" who erased their memories or the three apes who took action... But what puzzled Sun Hang the most was that the nameplate engraved with the name "Anna Dimoshchina" that he brought out from the research institute disappeared without a trace at some point.

Sun Hang checked his pocket several times. This was a sealed pocket with a waterproof zipper, specially for hunters to store important items. There was no tear inside or outside the pocket, and the waterproof zipper was intact, but the nameplate in the pocket disappeared without a trace.

Sun Hang remembered very clearly that when he returned to the beach of the Nameless Island on the landing craft sent by the Yamata no Orochi, he specifically pressed the pocket with his hand to make sure that the nameplate was inside and had not been lost in the sea.

But when he was taken back to the warship, the pocket became empty...

Not only that, he also asked the officers on the warship, and the officers said that they did receive several drones carrying distress messages, but the content of the information only mentioned that the trial participants who landed on the island were attacked by strange monsters... The name Yamata no Orochi was also "erased" from the distress message.

The only thing that is certain is that the "curse" on the nameless island has really been lifted. A large number of people have landed on the island and started excavating the ruins of the research institute... But in Sun Hang's opinion, what these people did was undoubtedly in vain.

Even if there is any important information in the ruins, it will probably be erased by the invisible force like Anna's nameplate.

(End of this chapter)