Unable to repay my student loans, I had no choice but to work part-time as a demon hunter.

Gordon was very serious.

If the test is successful today, in Winslow's eyes he will not only be a student who can hand out tweezers, but also an assistant who can bring new projects.

The river flowed as usual, its water as black as an old leather shoe that could never be properly cleaned.

"How much longer?" Winslow asked in a low voice, his pen tip hovering over the page, forming a single, stubborn ink droplet.

"It depends on how far away they live," Gordon said.

"they?"

"Look." Gordon stared at the river.

The water surface near the bridge piers began to ripple.

The shadows swam close to the water's surface. Straight, quiet, and without hesitation, they rushed towards where the precipitate had entered the water.

Winslow's pen stopped in mid-air, and a drop of ink fell onto the paper, spreading into a small black dot.

Then he began to take notes.

"From deployment to first response, forty seconds. Target quantity... three. Trending..." he murmured.

He was originally going to write "suspected trend response".

But when he saw the three figures converge on the same point without hesitation, Winslow paused, then crossed out "suspected".

A professor can doubt a student, but cannot doubt the facts that are happening.

Gray stared at the river.

They don't struggle; they dance around that tiny drop of water. If the inducement is precise enough, the Deepclaw demons will indeed send themselves to the slaughterhouse.

"...That's strange," Gray said. He was now completely convinced of the truth of the Montfort ancestral home incident; the Otherworldly demons wouldn't lie to humans.

"Conquering the 'strange' is part of the history of human science," Winslow said without looking up, his notes already filling a page. "...Some of the otherworldly beings in the Blackwater River exhibit a targeted response to specific spiritual remnants. This is a discovery worthy of being included in textbooks."

At that moment, a Deepclaw demon swam too close to Winslow, its gray fingers climbing up the wet stone.

boom!

Gray drew his gun and fired.

After the gunshot, the thing plunged back into the river, its gray fingers creating two short ripples on the surface before sinking.

Winslow didn't even look up, only adding a line to his record.

It's probably because this thing is allergic to metals traveling at 400 meters per second.

Gordon continued to stare at the river.

He is becoming increasingly certain that the Source Ability is not just a simple addition of a superpower; it's more like giving someone a new cognitive system.

As the droplet fell into the river, he could see the light extending in all directions from the point of entry, reaching every corner of the riverbed where the Deepclaw Demon lurked.

The line seemed to be saying "come back," and the thing at the bottom of the river understood.

  

The experiment lasted less than ten minutes.

This time, the dosage was strictly controlled. A few Deepclaws swam around underwater for a while, but found that it was just a cold soup that smelled like home. Their interest gradually faded, and they went back to their own homes.

Winslow wore a scholarly look of satisfaction.

Gordon breathed a sigh of relief.

This will give Gordon more confidence in his scholarship campaign.

In fact, the professor was in such a good mood that he didn't even have time to go fishing.

He took out a thermometer, flow meter, and sampling bottles from his toolbox and began measuring hydrological conditions and recording environmental status, ensuring that every piece of data could be presented conspicuously at academic conferences.

So the fishing rods and bait that the professor brought all ended up in the hands of Gordon and Gray.

Gray takes fishing more seriously than anyone else.

A professional hunter's dignity must be reclaimed somewhere. Since the demon-hunting business hasn't been going well lately, Fish had better be sensible.

Gordon also fishes.

He mixed the extract into the fish bait to test the effect, and the earthworms reacted as if they were drunk.

The professor's purple heartwood fishing rod was over 3 meters long. With a strong flick of his wrist, the horsehair fishing line cut through the damp, cold air, and the silver-gray hook sank into the black water.

He sat on the wet stone slab, holding his fishing rod, watching the float nod gently among the colorful oil film of the black water river, and felt that fishing was really interesting.

The fish swarmed toward the hook.

The float sank quickly, and Gao Deng lifted the rod.

Whoosh!

A fish was pulled out of the water and slammed onto the wet stone slab, its tail spraying out a string of water droplets.

Gray glanced at Gordon, who simply assumed he was lucky.

Soon, Gordon had caught quite a few.

But as I continued fishing, something just felt off.

The fish were being caught too quickly, and they didn't even look like fish.

The red pike has made a decision that goes against its ancestors.

Two-headed sea bass. Are we alright?

A trout without a tail. Swimming relies on belief and momentum.

Huh? What is all this stuff?

Gordon lifted the fish one by one and laid them out on the shore.

It has scales, fins, gills, and eyes—everything you could want.

But upon closer inspection, something always seems off: tiny fleshy buds grow in the crevices of the scales, and fluffy substances float in the eyeballs.

They look like fish, but not one of them is willing to be a fish honestly.

When a small fish was caught, its tail had split into two strands, which would likely cause it to diverge from its own path as it swam.

Gray's mood worsened as he watched the increasing number of fish at Gordon's feet. Seeing Gordon lining them up like that, he thought he was holding a military parade.

So he asked for the "soaked bait".

"This river is full of strange fish," Gordon warned.

"I've seen plenty of weird things. What's a few more fish?" Gray said dismissively.

"That costs money," Gordon said. "One silver pound for a single earthworm."

"robbery?"

"The college's earthworms are a high-value-added product."

Gray laughed angrily.

"I'll give you this in exchange; I haven't used it much." Gray took out a hunting knife.

Gordon's eyes lit up, and he picked it up to play with.

This knife is very beautiful and suitable for cutting and slicing. It has been hand-forged and quenched, and the brass handguard has turned dark gold due to oxidation. I liked it as soon as I held it.

"Deal." Gordon pushed a whole box of earthworms soaked in the extract over.

Gray switched to earthworms that had been soaked in the extract, and he caught something as soon as he cast his line.

"Hey!" Gray lifted the rod.

The water broke open, and he fished out an octopus that clearly shouldn't have been in the river.

The octopus's eight tentacles curled up into a ball, and suddenly it opened its mouth:

"Sir, I would like to introduce you to our Heavenly Father and Savior..."

boom!

Gray shot it dead without batting an eye and then kicked it back into the river.

"It was those wet people again," Gray complained.

"A wet person?" Gordon asked.

"You'll run into a wet-footed person sooner or later if you stay by the river too long," Gray said.

Gao Deng seemed to be deep in thought.

Gray wanted to see if there was anything that couldn't talk.

He caught another fish with three eyes and stared at it with a frown.

The fish's three eyes stared at him, and it struggled for a while before finally dying.

"This used to be a whitebait." Winslow finally noticed the strange fish.

He took the three-eyed whitebait, held it up to the light, and his expression suddenly became somewhat distant.

"When I was young," he said, "the fish in the Blackwater River were edible. Fishermen would set out in the morning and return in the evening, their boats filled with real fish. When my wife was still alive, she loved the silverfish from the Blackwater River the most..."

He misses the days when the river produced fish, not accident reports.

"This river had its good times." Winslow finished his lyrical remark and went back to writing his footnotes.

No wonder the old fish market used to be a fish market, but now it's a distribution center for alien materials...

Gordon continued to observe the fish.

Whether he caught them or Gray caught them, each of these so-called "mutant fish" had tiny lights inside its body.

It's as if someone has crushed tiny stardust and mixed it into flesh, gills, spine, and internal organs.

One at a time is insignificant. But there are already more than a dozen in the bucket.

Spots of light, one after another, and another.

When combined, it's a different story.

Then he suddenly thought of a problem in the opposite direction.

Using this bait, they only caught strange fish; not a single normal one.

The strange fish was attracted by the bait, and the Deepclaw Demon was attracted by the Silver Fish Box.

With two things on my mind side by side, the line between them suddenly brightened.

Essentially, there is an attraction between people of the same spiritual origin.

They fished until evening.

Gray was clearly having a great time fishing. He used to sit for half a day and only catch one fish, but now he was getting hooked one after another.

"Mr. Gray, are you taking these fish with you? You seem to be enjoying them," Gordon asked.

"No need for that." Gray stretched. "I'm a great Source Hunter. What would people on the street think of me if I came back to the office carrying a bucket of strange fish?"

"You live in the office?"

"If your consultation fee is 20 gold pounds, you don't want to miss any late-night requests."

That makes perfect sense.

"Then I'll accept it for you." Gordon readily accepted it; the fish, which contained traces of spiritual energy, was extremely useful.

"You study this?" Winslow looked up.

"I suppose so," Gordon said. "The mutation of the fish is a topic for further discussion."

"Mark it carefully so Peter doesn't accidentally eat it." Winslow didn't ask any more questions; a bucket of river fish wasn't worthy of his notebook.

……

When I returned to the dissection room, it was already dark.

Gordon carried the bucket of fish onto the dissection table.

The fishy smell spread immediately.

He used a hunting knife to cut the fish open one by one.

I must say, the hunting knife Gray gave me was really useful.

Scald, cut meat, split the spine, spread the internal organs on a plate, and then use sediment salt to separate the spiritual imprints and attachments.

A glimmer of light. And another glimmer of light.

After staying up all night, all that remained on the dissection table was a small mountain of fish bones, their secrets now lost.

Finally, at the bottom of the glass dish, Gordon left a clump of something almost invisible, like damp salt, no bigger than a fingernail.

Gordon stared intently at it, and the faint light finally coalesced.

Of course, it was still incredibly small, but it had a clear purpose.

[Spiritual powder. Adaptation, settling, residue—it comes from something greater.]

His fingers had been soaked in foul water all night; the fingertips were wrinkled and stiff with cold.

This job is troublesome, disgusting, and time-consuming; no normal person would do it.

Therefore, that tiny glimmer on the glass dish belonged only to him.