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

Vera was looking for a place similar to a storage room, and her first thought was to find something valuable.

Gordon, on the other hand, values ​​clues.

He needed to figure out where Harold wrote, where he drew, and where he gave orders.

After some investigation, he discovered Harold's office.

This room was originally the duty room for maintenance personnel. It was very narrow, with only a table that could be used to write.

Behind the door hung the servant uniforms of the Monford family, which he had still kept.

Harold used to wear this uniform when cleaning the Montfort family's collection room and talking to the silverfish box.

After some effort, Gordon found some useful information.

[Old notes. Who dreamed of becoming a monster when they were a child?]

[Purchase List. Buying things without reimbursement would be too costly.]

[Private email. Describes a bad idea.]

Gordon skimmed through the text without reading it carefully, but a few words already made him uncomfortable... such as "sacred artifact," "sluice gate area," and "fishing king"...

Now is not the time to sit down and appreciate the spiritual state of Tantric practitioners.

Harold's self-pity, the secrets of the Blackwater Hermitage, and all sorts of documents were all put away by him.

These things are important and are worth looking at slowly while making tea at home.

At that time, there will definitely be huge gains.

"Found what?" Vera's voice came from outside.

Paper. One of mankind's greatest inventions.

"Paper can't be sold. I have some unusual materials here." Vera was carrying a tattered cloth bag in her right hand.

It contains cartilage, glands, coral, and shells, with a faint, spiritual glow.

"Excellent. This bag of stuff is perfect for the market." Gordon's eyes lit up, and he didn't bother explaining the importance of paper to Vera anymore.

"What about the body?" Vera asked. "It's gone down there and won't come back up."

Both of them looked down at the bottom of the reservoir.

  

Harold crashed to the bottom of the dried-up pool, where the walls were steep, and they couldn't fly down.

Vera pressed the black spike against the railing, estimating the angle.

"I'll go down and cut him open; Harold's most valuable possessions won't crawl back up on their own," Gordon said.

"Danger," Vera said.

"It's valuable," Gordon said. "You stay up there and keep watch. If anything happens, just pull me up."

"..." Vera reluctantly agreed, "What if it's still alive?"

Gordon looked down.

[Harold's body. Rest in peace.]

That confirms it.

Now that Harold has become an item description, he's less likely to come back to life. Gordon's eyes don't trigger on living people.

Gordon went back to the small boat to get a rope, tied one end to the iron railing in the hall, and made a knot.

Next, Gordon wrapped the rope around his waist twice, tried tugging on it to make sure the knot was tight enough.

"If something pops up, just pull me up like a bag of food," he said.

"Quick move." Vera glanced at him, as if assessing whether his joke was worth a punch.

Then, Gordon took the sampling box and went downstairs.

Once underground, the sludge at the bottom of the pool was up to the soles of my shoes, and the black water residue clung to the ground, feeling like cooled grease.

He walked to the side.

Harold's body was horrible and hideous.

Gordon crouched down and first looked at Harold's chest.

[Colored scales. Belong to no creature you are familiar with.]

Admittedly, the scale looked quite beautiful, a striking contrast to Harold's hideous flesh.

Gordon opened the sampling box, used a hunting knife to remove the scales, put them into a thick-walled glass bottle, and then poured sealing wax on them.

After collecting the colored scales, Gordon re-examined the corpse.

Amidst the gray flesh and blood, the outline of a black fish slowly swam deep within the abdominal cavity.

It has no physical form, yet it crawls from the shadows of the intestines into the stomach sac and then swims towards the head.

It was as if Harold's corpse was merely its fish tank.

With his eyes locked on the target, Gordon forcefully cut it open, exposing it to the air.

He instantly felt a tightness in the back of his neck.

[The faint source of the heterogeneous element - "The Birth of Failure". The resentment of not being born correctly. It doesn't understand living, it only remembers the pain of birth. Failed, failed, failed, failed...]

The last few words are not static descriptions.

They overlapped repeatedly in Gordon's vision, as if someone were writing on the inside of his eyeballs with a baby's finger dipped in blood.

Gordon gritted his teeth and dug it out of Harold's body.

Normal source matter usually merges with a person, but this unformed, terrifying source matter seems to be merely occupying Harold's flesh.

But that's still quite remarkable.

Harold made a mistake, and Gordon sabotaged it, yet a strange source material was still produced. This shows that the ritual is indeed very unique, and Gordon must learn its secrets.

He struggled to pour it into the bottle, then quickly capped it.

Just then, Gordon heard singing.

Initially, he thought it was a resonance in the pump station's pipeline.

But the voice quickly became coherent and soft.

Listen carefully.

Like someone singing a lullaby that shouldn't exist on land, with a wet throat.

There were no lyrics I could understand; it had the texture of something from the deep sea—cold, soft, and so beautiful it sent chills down my spine.

Then, a sudden downpour began, pounding on the top of the pumping station.

He sensed something strange approaching.

It has a human-like outline, but that's all.

"Vera!" Gordon shouted.

Vera didn't ask why, she just pulled hard with her right arm.

Gordon immediately arched his back. The tightness around his waist almost made him swallow his lunch.

As he was pulled into the air, Gordon saw a hand sticking out of the drainpipe.

The hand was so white it was almost transparent, and something with a silhouette resembling a woman crawled out of the pipe.

Her wet hair clung to her shoulders and back, with a dark green sheen like seaweed.

Its lower body is covered by a tail with fine, dense scales. The rest of its body is pure white.

So beautiful...

Gordon's mind honestly paused for a moment.

But she held a dagger in her hand, with a narrow blade and a white handle.

[Whalebone dagger. Be careful, it holds a grudge.]

[The pipe leads to a place where curiosity is not warranted.]

Seashell hair accessory. Don't mistake the sea for a river.

Vera saw the mermaid but was not amazed.

She simply wrapped the rope around her wrist one more time with her right hand and then pulled Gordon up.

The mermaid crawled to Harold's corpse.

puff.

The dagger plunged into Harold's chest.

puff.

Another one.

Puff, puff, puff.

The movements became faster and more ruthless.

She sang while poking.

Her singing voice was as gentle as a lullaby, but her actions were as ruthless as revenge.

Gordon was somewhat lost in thought.

After the explosion, the distorted Harold, and the emergency flood discharge, he saw a mermaid in the sewers.

In his eyes, the mermaid was covered with a strong spirituality, like wet paint moving on her skin and scales.

She sang as she mutilated Harold's corpse.

She even cut open the remaining fleshy buds and bit them off in one go.

He chewed it a couple of times, his expression like he'd eaten a stale piece of candy.

She suddenly looked up at Gordon and Vera. Their eyes were neither fish-like nor human-like.

"Let's go," Vera said.

"I completely agree." All of Gordon's beautiful fantasies vanished without a trace.

Mermaids. Fairy tales don't tell you what they eat.

……

By the time they returned to the boat, the rain had intensified.

Gordon rowed the boat, and it glided quietly outwards.

He couldn't help but drift off while performing repetitive mechanical movements.

This world is so big.

Unbelievable, like a dream!

From the water monkey and the silver fish box, to the octopus-faced cultists, to Harold the clam-man who failed to be born, now even mermaids have crawled out of the sewers and are eating corpses.

Gordon doesn't have many trump cards left. He still has a brand new source of energy to empower, and he also has to figure out how to pay off his student loans...

How do I turn what we dug up tonight into gold pounds?

But Gordon suddenly felt like laughing.

Because he finally realized that even these seemingly terrifying things could die.

How many things in this world are still deliberately mysterious?

Once this thought came to him, he felt there was nothing to be afraid of.

The boat returned to the Blackwater River. Previously, they had gone upstream, but now they were going downstream, and the small boat swam towards the city on its own.

Gordon pulled himself together and finally focused his attention back on Vera.

Her breathing was heavy.

She stood ramrod straight the whole night, like a block of iron, moving freely with Gordon, making it easy to forget that she was also human, capable of being hurt, feeling pain, and dying.

She was clearly not as at ease now; blood soaked through the left side of her coat and dripped from the bottom edge.

Vera took a small silver tube out of her coat and used her thumb to pry open the cap.

Inside was a pale gray liquid, which gleamed with a heavy, cold light against the inner glass wall.

[Suppressive Agent. Rapidly reduces source substance pollution. Also affects the nervous system and suppresses humanity.]

"So serious that we need this?" Gordon was surprised.

"It's very important." Vera stammered as she downed the drink.

A few seconds later, she froze, her whole body trembling.

Then, Vera slumped down in the rain. Blood mingled with the rainwater and flowed down.

"...You're injured." Gordon sat down next to him.

"It's alright," Vera said, looking at him.

"Are you planning to let the wound figure out its own healing process?"

"It's always been like this."

"Not now, not later, not with me around."

"You know how to treat it?"

"I promise you won't die an unexplained death from a wound," Gordon promised.

After all, he studied biology and medicine.

Vera looked at him for a while.

"This is already... a very heavy promise," Vera said.

Gordon took off his black coat.

The white shirt on the left shoulder was stuck together with blood.

Gordon cut open the fabric and discovered a large, horrifying purplish-black bruise on Vera's left shoulder, its outline resembling a dent from a hammer blow.

There was a tear nearly a palm's length long under his ribs, with the skin and flesh turned outwards and the wound edges a terrible dark red.

There were several minor injuries on his waist and right forearm, and his back was a complete mess.

Clearly, her original plan was to let her body handle it on its own, and if it couldn't, she would deal with it in the next life.

"They don't value themselves enough," Gordon said.

"As long as I can still move, that's fine," Vera said.

"Being able to blink after a decapitation doesn't mean you're in good condition," Gordon said.

"Aww," Vera responded softly.

Gordon examined her various remedies and found a narrow-necked glass bottle. Inside, a pale red liquid swayed and shimmered against the bottle's walls.

[Regeneration Elixir. Standard Hunter Recovery Potion.]

"I drank this too," Gordon said.

"No," Vera stopped her, "It's expensive."

She's already used up the suppressant tonight, so drinking the regeneration potion now would be too much of a luxury for her.

"Listen to me, I'll buy it for you when we get back to the city." Gordon opened the medicine and held it to her lips.

She tilted her head back and drank it.

A few seconds after swallowing the medicine, Vera tensed up, her breathing became deeper, and her brows gradually relaxed.

"Say it if it hurts." Gordon prepared the pain relief tincture.

"It doesn't hurt."

"I haven't touched the wound yet."

"Let me know in advance."

Gordon walked toward the windproof boat light, burned the instruments over the fire, and then treated the wound.

He used tweezers to remove the identifiable fragments, sprinkled hemostatic powder on them, and then used a suture needle to treat the long gash under his ribs.

The ship rocked incessantly.

The torrential rain pounded against the boat's awning, the river lapped against the deck, and the Blackwater River lifted the bottom of the boat again and again before suddenly slamming it down.

An ordinary person wouldn't even be able to sit still in such a storm.

Gordon's movements, however, were steady and precise.

He could even predict in advance which side the ship would tilt to when the needle pierced his skin.

And so, he performed surgery on the swaying water, closing up wounds inch by inch in his hands.

Vera quietly savored the sensation; it was so strange… unlike anything she had ever experienced before…

As she finished sewing, Vera suddenly rested her forehead gently on Gordon's shoulder.

The movement was very gentle; it was just to make sure there was a place where I could temporarily find leverage.

Gordon paused, his fingers pausing.

"Don't move," Gordon said.

"Nothing was moved."

"You're completely on top of me right now."

"Excuse me," Vera said, her eyes closed, her right hand gently circling his side. After a few seconds, she pressed her forehead closer to his.