After Lu Qi left, Lu Li didn't sprawl out on the sofa staring blankly like she had the day before.
She stood in the center of the living room, rolled her wrists, and drew a slow breath.
"Alright. Let's begin."
Rather than continuing to wait for disaster to find her, she might as well take the initiative and figure out exactly what she had beco. She'd spent the whole of yesterday passively adjusting to all the defects of this body—today, it was ti to test whether it had any advantages.
Yesterday's string of dostic blunders—failing to twist open a bottle cap, unable to lift a kettle, stumbling when she walked—had been humiliating, but none of it explained what had happened that night. In that rain-soaked alley, this body had displayed a terrifying strength: it had caught a blade bare-handed.
Lu Li replayed the mory of that sensation and tried to concentrate.
"Hmm..."
She stared at her right hand and imagined so kind of power surging up from inside her body.
1 second. 2 seconds. 10 seconds.
Nothing happened.
She tried clenching her fist and forcing strength into it, picturing herself punching clean through the wall.
All she got was a mild ache in her wrist.
"..."
Different approach.
Lu Li closed her eyes and tried to sense whether there was anything unusual lurking inside her body. That little black mass—that thing from her dreams that wouldn't stop crying out that it was hungry—it had to be sowhere in there.
Concentrate. Deeper. Push further inward...
3 minutes later, Lu Li opened her eyes.
"That's strange—why is there nothing?"
She slumped onto the sofa, deflated. So the abilities only triggered during a crisis? Ordinarily, she was just a frail girl who couldn't hurt a fly?
Possibly worse than that.
Which ant if sothing dangerous ca along that wasn't quite crisis-level... she'd be finished, wouldn't she?
Wait—there was one other ability she could verify.
Lu Li thought back to the arm the blade had sliced that night, healed completely within re seconds, not even a scar left behind.
Regeneration.
Lu Li turned and walked into the kitchen. She stood at the counter, her gaze settling on the sharp fruit knife in the knife block, its silver blade catching the cold light.
"...Am I out of my mind?"
Should she really try this? This was self-harm.
She hesitated for a full minute. In the end, that craving to understand the unknown overwheld everything else.
She steeled herself and pressed the tip of the knife against the index finger of her left hand.
Just a tiny cut. It'll be fine. Let's see...
"Sss—" Just the lightest nick, yet pain shot through her entire body with razor-sharp clarity—sharper than anything she'd felt before. A bead of bright red blood welled up instantly, rolling off her fingertip and dripping onto the counter.
"That hurts..."
Lu Li stared at the wound, her heart fluttering with unease.
‘Don't tell the regeneration from that night was a one-ti thing. Surely not.’
Just as she was about to go find a bandage, the edges of the wound began to move.
The sensation was unsettling—as if her skin were alive, drawing itself inward from both sides.
The bleeding stopped quickly. The wound healed at a visible pace, and 3 seconds later, all that remained on her index finger was a faint pink trace.
2 more seconds, and even that had vanished.
Good as new.
"...Sure enough."
Lu Li looked at her perfectly restored fingertip and exhaled a sigh of complex feelings. She didn't want to admit it, but this one experint had confird a fact: she was no longer a purely human being.
Good news: the regeneration ability was real, and it worked flawlessly.
Bad news: apart from that, she hadn't discovered any other abilities—at least not yet.
"As long as I don't die, I recover infinitely? That does save quite a bit on dical bills." She offered herself a wry quip and rinsed the blood from her finger.
So it seed the combat-related abilities really did only activate automatically in monts of crisis. In ordinary circumstances, she was nothing more than sothing weaker than a normal person—an ambulatory mascot with auto-regen.
The ability test was, for the ti being, concluded. Since the secrets of her body weren't going to unravel anyti soon, she would approach it through information instead.
****
Lu Li returned to the living room and dug out the old hand--down tablet Lu Qi had retired. Laggy, but still functional.
Lu Li opened the browser and typed her first search term.
「Calamity」
She hit enter. Everything that ca up was ga advertisents, end-of-the-world novel recomndations, and natural disaster news from various localities. Not a single result looked like it had anything to do with the monster from that night.
Try another.
「Night Wanderer Society」
The results were even more scattered—nightclub nas, night market promotions from so city, an obscure gaming guild. Clearly, these terms had been suppressed or diluted on the regular internet.
"As expected."
Lu Li wasn't surprised. If monsters roaming the streets were sothing you could just search up on Baidu, society would have collapsed long ago. She had to think differently. Official channels had certainly locked down the information—but what about civilian ones? The witnesses, the poor souls who'd been dragged into it, they'd speak up sowhere.
She thought for a mont, then typed new search terms:
「Strange tales of Foggy Ford City」「Foggy Ford City road closures」「Black-clad individuals」
This ti, the results were different.
After filtering out a heap of clickbait accounts and dull ghost stories, Lu Li found a highly active thread on a local paranormal forum called "Foggy Ford Night Talk."
The title read: [Compilation] Complete Collection of Foggy Ford City Urban Legends (Continuously Updated).
The post was long. The original poster seed to be a local enthusiast of strange tales who had compiled all manner of paranormal rumors about Foggy Ford City—things like "the weeping woman in XX Park" and "getting turned around at XX overpass." Most of it looked like ordinary urban legends, truth indeterminate.
But a few entries caught Lu Li's attention.
「#47 The Linjiang Alley Incident: So say that night Linjiang Alley was sealed off, with black-clad individuals moving around the periter. By the next morning the alley was back to normal, but reportedly there are marks on the ground that won't wash away. The official explanation: municipal construction work.」
Linjiang Alley.
Wasn't that right near the alley where it happened to her?
She kept scrolling.
「#52 Black-Clad Individual Sightings: Quite a few people in recent years claim to have seen black-clad figures moving through the streets late at night, sotis carrying strange equipnt. So guess it's a special governnt departnt; others say it's a civilian organization. There's a term for it—"Night Wandering"—but no one knows exactly what it ans.」
Night Wandering.
That was the one.
Lu Li opened the comnts section and scrolled through one by one. Most were just people chatting idly in replies, but one comnt stood out.
「Anyone who wants to know more can check out the Foggy Ford City Folk Culture Research Society forum. There's a pinned post there—those who know, know.」
She noted down the forum na and opened a new tab to search for it.
Found it.
It was a very niche forum, with only a few hundred followers and not many posts. But the title of the pinned thread made her pulse spike—
[Required Reading for Newcors] So Basic Common Sense About This World
"If you can see this website, it ans you have already made contact with the other side of the world."
"We call those things Calamities. They are not ghosts. They are not extraterrestrials. They are products of distorted reality."
"So people call us madn. So people call us hunters."
"In Foggy Ford City, if you find yourself in trouble, you may try to contact us—"
At the end of the article, an email address had been left.
But beneath the email, there was one more line—written in bold red text, conspicuous as a warning sign.
"Contact with Calamities is often accompanied by irreversible ntal contamination and physical mutation. We cannot guarantee the ability to cure all survivors. If you find that your body is undergoing non-human changes and you cannot control them... please, before you lose control entirely, distance yourself from others."
"A hunter will see you off."
"..."
Lu Li stared at those 2 words—"see you off"—and the phantom pain of a blade across the back of her neck ca rushing back.
"So that's how it is." Lu Li closed the browser, thodically cleared every trace of her browsing history, then tossed the tablet back in the drawer.
She had found a lead. But she had also confird her own situation—
The black-clad woman hadn't killed her. Perhaps it was only because the circumstances at the ti had been urgent, or perhaps... sothing else.
"Even so, I have to make contact."
Lu Li walked to the entryway mirror and looked at the silver-haired, crimson-eyed girl gazing back at her. As long as she still wanted to go on living in human society, she couldn't afford to avoid the people who specialized in handling non-human beings.
"But before making formal contact..." She raised her hand, fingertip lightly grazing the pair of scarlet eyes on the mirror's surface.
"I need to give myself a disguise first."
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