Chapter 1 Good Morning, Brother Chen!

"Good morning, Brother Chen!"

As soon as he entered, Su Zhou greeted the owner, surnamed Chen, with familiar ease.

At the counter, a man who seemed to be dozing off, propped up his face with one hand. Hearing the teenager's greeting, he suddenly jerked awake. He opened his bleary eyes, looked at Su Zhou, and cursed, "You brat, can't even let your brother Chen get a good nap!"

The man didn't look very old, about thirty years old. His appearance and dress were fairly ordinary. He sported a trendy slicked-back hairstyle, making him look more like a typical office worker than the owner of a flower and plant shop.

He wiped his face with a wet wipe, finally waking up a bit. "Speak up, A'Zhou. What does your mom want you to buy this time?"

"Not my mom, it's me. I want to buy a potted apple tree. Do you have any?"

Su Zhou didn't stand on ceremony. He was familiar with the owner here. This man, named Chen Zhicheng, was pushing forty at 31 years old. He was a neighbor, and when Su Zhou was young, he often liked to tease him.

However, six years ago, the 25-year-old Chen suffered a crushing defeat in an arm-wrestling match against an 11-year-old elementary school student, becoming the laughingstock of the neighborhood. He never teased Su Zhou again... Just kidding! He almost strained a muscle that time. Who would dare to compare strength with this reincarnation of an evil deity!

"Fruit tree bonsai...you'll probably have to wait a while. I have some at the greenhouse, but not at the store."

Chen thought for a moment and replied, "I'll deliver it to you later. Speaking of which, A'Zhou, why are you suddenly into bonsai like your mom?"

"No need, I'll move it back myself later. How much?"

Not answering the question, Su Zhou opened Alipay, and Chen sent him a code. "Alright, with your strength, you wouldn't care anyway. As for the price, the expensive ones are several hundred, the cheap ones are a few dozen. But I bet you wouldn't buy those fancy ones just for show, so I'm sending you the code for the excellent variety that costs 55 yuan. I'll round it down for you. Guaranteed to live, big and sweet."

"Really?" Su Zhou asked casually and paid directly. Chen smiled and said, "Would your brother Chen ever lie to you? Good luck with your senior year. Growing bonsai is a good way to relieve stress. Make sure you get into a good academy. Don't end up like your brother Chen, stuck here running a shop."

Clearly, he was treating Su Zhou's actions as one of the many strange stress-relief methods of a senior high school student. Su Zhou glanced at his attire and understood. "Brother Chen must have been on another blind date recently, right? Looks like it didn't work out."

Chen Zhicheng's family wasn't poor, and he was decent-looking, just a bit old-fashioned. But for some reason, probably because they looked down on him for running a small shop in the neighborhood, and because he worked hard, he couldn't find a girlfriend all these years, and his blind dates always failed.

He didn't seem to care himself, but his family was urging him anxiously. He usually just played mobile games, and like Su Zhou, he was an African player (meaning unlucky at gacha games). His virtual wives always required a lot of money to obtain, a miserable state of affairs.

After saying goodbye to the owner, Su Zhou left the store, looked at the direction, and prepared to ride his bicycle to Shao Qiming's house—about ten kilometers away. For him, riding slowly would take about thirty to forty minutes. Seriously, in Hong City, sometimes you encounter traffic jams and traffic lights, and taking a car might not be as fast as riding a bicycle.

However, as Su Zhou rode down a street of shops, he slowed down because he heard some rather intriguing words.

"Have you heard? There's another murder case in Chigutan next door!"

"I heard, my niece and her best friend live there. A girl died, right at the exit of the neighborhood. Such a good little girl, now you don't dare to go out without four or five people!"

"Oh, what a tragedy!"

This was the conversation of several middle-aged women in a fully automated grocery store.

"How about we go eat barbecue tonight, at that place by the river?"

"Let's not go to the riverside, okay? Haven't you heard that the riverside is under martial law recently? Police cars are everywhere, and they've even put up yellow tape. Someone died there."

"Eh~ We're just eating barbecue, we're not going in the water, it'll be fine."

This was the conversation of a group of young people about their activities for the evening.

"So tragic! Old Man Li said that A'hao's stomach was completely emptied! His mother saw the body and couldn't even catch her breath from crying. His father almost had a heart attack. A white-haired person sending off a black-haired person, and he even has a younger brother who just entered the academy..."

"I heard that the country has subsidies, so there's no need to worry. But old man, you should also tell your two sons to be careful."

"I know, I know..."

This was the conversation of an elderly couple taking a walk.

Su Zhou's ears were filled with almost all the conversations on the entire street. The enhanced hearing brought by his perfect body allowed him to easily hear what he wanted to hear.

"So there are more than just three victims? Did several more people die just yesterday?"

Su Zhou frowned. When he came back a few days ago, he had heard about this serial murder case from his father. He didn't expect that today, just by going out, he would hear four or five different versions of the murder from the mouths of the crowd... Some of it might be exaggerated rumors, but some of it was described vividly, and it was very likely to be true.

Moreover, every murder case had an extremely obvious and identical characteristic: the victim's body was utterly ravaged, with a large portion of flesh and internal organs missing, making it difficult to even bury them in peace.

"So rampant...and spiritual energy is really gradually reviving."

Su Zhou frowned deeply as he pedaled. Whether it was due to his family education or his personal character, he hated criminals... Although in a sense, he himself was one (illegally possessing heavy firearms, taking out a secret organization's base, and blowing up dozens of secret organization members), this didn't affect his views.

Moreover, besides this case, he also vaguely heard many interesting pieces of news from various corners of the streets... For example, someone saw very large insects and snakes in the suburbs, someone said they heard footsteps in their house in the middle of the night, and someone said they saw a phantom in the hospital... Not just one hospital, even Hong City Academy's First Affiliated Hospital, where his mother Ning Shiyu worked, was said to have strange shadows appearing.

This couldn't help but make Su Zhou anxious to make the warding-off evil jewelry sooner.

"But the most important thing is that murderer."

Recalling his father's tired appearance, Su Zhou had a vague guess in his heart: "To be honest, Hong City's surveillance network is already very good. To make a group of experienced old policemen so busy, it's enough to prove the extraordinary nature of the murderer... or the unexpected."

"Yala, you also think it's a demon, so you reminded me to ask last time, right?"

"Indeed." Hiding in Su Zhou's temples, the snake spirit cautiously poked its head out, greedily observing this long-separated ordinary world. It said in a cheerful tone, "Your father has a very faint demonic smell on him. He must have been in a place where demons appeared for a long time to have picked it up."

"Then what do you think that demon is?" Su Zhou was thinking to himself, and also asked Yala casually.

"Anything is possible." Yala replied, "Some demons are good at lurking in people's hearts, and can instantly turn an ordinary person into a perverted murderer. Of course, it could also be in the form of a demon beast. For example, this situation of missing flesh and internal organs is very likely to have been eaten on the spot."

"The good thing is that whether it's a human or a demon, based on the amount of flesh I heard about, this demon shouldn't be very strong yet—Su Zhou, if you want to track it, I can teach you a secret tracking method."

"What secret method!"

Hearing the words "secret method," Su Zhou's spirits immediately lifted. His father was pursuing a monster that might be a demon, which was something he was very worried about. The police in Zheng Country, unlike the Federation across the sea, couldn't be equipped with various weapons. If they encountered enemies similar to the Lian Dao Hui (Cult of the Covenant) High Priest, there would definitely be casualties. Being able to detect the other party's true form sooner would prevent danger sooner.

Moreover, Yala's secret methods, whether it was a simple and easy-to-understand warding-off-evil ritual, or an extremely popular sanctification ceremony, could all demonstrate its lofty supernatural knowledge. It deserved the title of 'King of Mysteries,' and the tracking secret method it could teach would definitely be the best of the best!

But Yala's answer was full of flaws.

"Close your eyes, randomly make a mudra, hypnotize yourself, and then suggest to yourself 'spiritual substance is also an objective existence, there's no reason why I can't see it', and then open your eyes."

Generally speaking, ordinary people might think this was a joke.

But Su Zhou was not an ordinary person.

He really closed his eyes, holding the handlebars with his left hand, and randomly made a mudra in his pocket with his right hand. Then, he suggested to himself, 'spiritual substance is also an objective existence, there's no reason why I can't see it'—

At this time, the snake spirit was still saying, "It might not work at first, try it for a few more days, maybe..."

But at this moment, Su Zhou opened his eyes.

And then he really saw it—ghosts all over the street.

"Awesome, Yala! I really saw it!" Su Zhou immediately cheered in his heart, "Wow, it's a hundred times clearer than what I used to see!"

"...No, no, no, you're the awesome one."

After being stunned for a while, even Yala, who had seen many big scenes, subconsciously slapped the ground with its tail in the mental space, clapping hard twice: "Your talent in the supernatural is really shockingly good..."

"After all, you gave me a taste of 'Dragon's Perspective' last time." Su Zhou was still looking around, surprised at the rather significant number of ghosts around him. He could see that inside the houses, under the shade of the trees, and in the shadows cast by various buildings, there were a large number of white spirits moving unconsciously. Most of them were physically incomplete and lacked intelligence... It wasn't disgusting either, because even the incomplete bodies only had white mist at the wound.

To give an example, the white spirits were like snow, piled up in the shadows that sunlight couldn't directly reach, and many ordinary people were taking a cool breeze within the embrace of these spirits.

Then, Su Zhou continued, "I closed my eyes and imitated the feeling of gazing at the Gate of Seals last time... Although it's not nearly as powerful, it seems like the direction I'm looking in is right."

"Correct." Regaining its composure, Yala nodded, confirming Su Zhou's guess: "Actually, this is using your subconscious mind to communicate with your supernatural spirituality gathered in your eyes. However, even if this is the most common and most useful 'spiritual vision', even a talented supernaturalist would need one or two weeks of cultivation to learn it. I had already overestimated your talent, but I didn't expect..."

—I didn't expect that you would learn it in two seconds.

"After all, it's me. I've been vaguely looking at it for ten years, so I already have a little trick to it... In the end, I don't need any suggestion or imagination, because I've always 'believed' that the supernatural has always existed, and I can 'really' see what they look like!"

At this time, Su Zhou was excitedly observing this rather novel world. He could even observe that there was a layer of light blue mist in the air. The color was very faint, only showing a faint hint of cyan, and those places with cyan mist had extra white ghosts.

That should be the so-called spiritual energy—but according to Yala, this spiritual energy was very thin. When spiritual energy revived, the entire world would be filled with cyan mist.

Su Zhou didn't deliberately avoid these ghosts. He rode his bike through them without feeling any discomfort. How to put it? Like clouds, they seemed to exist, but in reality, they were just like that, almost nonexistent.

But Su Zhou discovered that not far away, there were several ghosts with faint blue light emanating from their eyes. Their actions clearly still retained some intelligence, and when those roaming souls made eye contact with him and realized that he could see them, they all exclaimed in surprise and turned into mist, disappearing.

"Why is that? I seem to have seen similar ghosts before. They all run away as soon as they see me, only saying a word at most."

Su Zhou was quite puzzled by this, and the snake spirit patiently replied, "Being able to observe means being able to influence. You can see them, which also means you can harm them—and with the power of your perfect body, unintelligent ghosts are fine, but intelligent roaming souls approaching you are likely to have the intelligence maintained by their fragile structures washed away by your supernatural radiation."

At this moment, Su Zhou withdrew his 'spiritual vision'. In just that little bit of time, he already felt a bit tired.

"Yes, spiritual vision can only be used for a long time after awakening. You can only use it five or six times a day at most now, and you have to stop after a few minutes each time, otherwise, your spirituality will be excessively consumed, and you will be very tired."

Yala noticed Su Zhou's condition. It thought for a while and then said, "But Su Zhou, your talent is really good. I think we can skip a lot of training and testing time and directly let you start preparing to hunt demons."

Not even having time to think about the interesting special life form of ghosts, Su Zhou was first delighted, and then frowned slightly: "Hunting demons? I don't mind—but is my strength sufficient?"

"Of course, it's sufficient. Don't underestimate yourself. Not to mention your physical fitness, now that you can see ghosts, you can already see the traces left by the demons and track them."

Yala smiled confidently: "However, before that."

"You need a weapon."