Early that morning, Sanshan was enjoying a rare spell of good weather.
The forecast said it would rain again in the afternoon, but for now, sunlight streamed through the window and brought a little life to the cramped rental apartment.
Without the days of nonstop rain, Sanshan’s temperature at this time of year was actually the most comfortable—not too cold and not too hot.
Chen Qinyao’s eyes flew open, and she sat up in bed.
Through the window, she could hear car horns outside and the women downstairs arguing.
On the other side, she could also hear the elevator doors opening just outside her apartment.
It was still just as noisy out there.
Everything seemed as usual.
‘I thought… Why am I in bed?’
Chen Qinyao instinctively patted herself down, making sure she still had all her limbs.
Hadn’t she gone out in the middle of the night?
Could it have all just been a nightmare?
‘Was it really a dream?’
She tugged at the hem of her shirt and realized she’d changed clothes.
Looking up, she saw the outerwear she’d soaked in the rain yesterday hanging from the line.
What happened yesterday hadn’t been a dream.
As she stared at the clothes that had been washed and hung up, Chen Qinyao suddenly realized there was a problem.
‘Who brought me back? Who changed my clothes? Where’s Sister?!’
The girl started to climb out of bed, but then she noticed a Red Gemstone sitting beside her pillow.
Her expression darkened.
Everything that had happened last night was real.
That thing that looked neither like a cat nor a rabbit, and the Hunchback Man who’d knocked on her window.
At the thought, the girl scrambled out of bed.
She didn’t even manage to put on her slippers before running barefoot toward the door, pattering across the floor.
She had to make sure Sister was safe.
That severed hand from yesterday had left her terribly anxious.
But just as she reached for the doorknob, the door suddenly opened from the other side.
Gu Tong, coming in, collided with Chen Qinyao, who was rushing out.
“Ah!”
Looking at her living, breathing sister, the girl opened her mouth.
She had so much to say, so many questions to ask.
But now that she was actually face-to-face with her sister, staring at that poker face that never seemed to change, she couldn’t find a way to start.
She struggled to get one sentence after another out, her face turning red, until her sister spoke.
“If you’re up, hurry and eat breakfast.”
Gu Tong walked around Chen Qinyao and picked up the briefcase hanging from the line.
As she checked its contents, she said, “Remember to go to school after you eat.”
“Oh… Okay.”
After a long pause, the girl nodded and swallowed all the words she’d been holding back.
Maybe it was because she’d just woken up, but her mind was muddled with a jumble of thoughts.
Then she saw the sunny-side-up egg on her plate, and that hazy, unreal feeling shattered completely.
The egg and the scent of meat stirred her long-dormant appetite, and she swallowed instinctively.
Gu Tong didn’t know how conflicted the girl felt—or rather, even if she did know, she probably wouldn’t care.
She had something much more troublesome to worry about.
Money.
She was running out.
The concept of money had once been foreign to Monsters.
Monsters were tough, energy-based life-forms.
Places where humans could barely survive were child’s play to them, and their society was brutally cutthroat: survive if you could, die if you couldn’t.
The strong preyed on the weak, the strong grew stronger, and the weak grew weaker.
But after coming to human society, Gu Tong had realized that surviving in this godforsaken place required money.
Everything required money.
In theory, Ba Hui could survive on magic power alone.
Hunting once a month would be enough to meet her basic needs, but that Mad Dog couldn’t.
She really didn’t understand how a species like humans had managed to develop this kind of civilization.
And after two days of experience, Ba Hui had realized that getting by in human society without money was truly impossible.
If she didn’t want to be discovered by the Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau, an organization dedicated to dealing with abnormalities, and wanted to stay in human society long-term, she needed money.
And to get money, she had to work.
Following the memories left in this body, Gu Tong squeezed onto a tram and made her way to the spot in the Inner Ring closest to the Core Zone.
The commercial district was packed with people.
“Gu Tong” worked for a customer service company under Fantasy Entertainment.
Fantasy Entertainment was a game company owned by Tide Financial Holdings.
Since it was backed by the biggest financial conglomerate, people always got the impression that Fantasy Entertainment “wasn’t short on money.”
But even if the company had plenty of money, there was no way the grunts’ working conditions would improve.
These days, most customer service departments had already been eliminated.
Intelligent AI was more patient than human customer service reps, never got irritated, and never argued with idiots.
Even when furious customers cursed it out, AI didn’t react emotionally at all.
So after intelligent AI had taken over almost all of the city’s logistics and online services, companies had eliminated many low-level customer service jobs.
Even scores of programmers had lost their jobs as a result.
But later, many large companies brought their customer service departments back, even if only on a small scale.
The bosses had realized that AI was great, but if they didn’t pay it, service stopped immediately.
If it ran out of points, it would announce a strike and stop working.
There was no negotiating.
Human employees, on the other hand, could go unpaid for months without a problem.
“Hey, Sister Gu, did you come back to work after your stock investments went bust?”
Following the original owner’s memories, Gu Tong sat down at her workstation.
The young woman beside her immediately came over and asked with a teasing grin.
Gu Tong glanced at her.
The girl was called Ding Ling.
She and Gu Tong had joined the company at the same time, and she was the only person the real Gu Tong knew at work.
Customer service had a high turnover rate, with terrible pressure and lousy pay.
It was normal for an entire company to be replaced by a fresh batch of faces every so often.
If she were the real Gu Tong, she would’ve snapped back at that comment.
She didn’t care if people made fun of her low salary, but if they mocked her stock-picking skills, she’d definitely lose it.
But Ba Hui had taken over the driver’s seat now, and she didn’t care about that sort of thing.
She just answered casually.
“Yeah.”
Ding Ling was stunned by the one-word reply.
“Oh my god, Sister Gu, have you changed?”
In the past, if someone teased Gu Tong like that, she’d turn bright red, the veins on her forehead bulging as she stubbornly argued, “It was a technical adjustment. How can you call short-term trading a failure?”
Then she’d go on with incomprehensible talk about “frequent trading” and “going all in.”
That was always enough to put people in a good mood for the rest of the day.
But what was going on with Gu Tong today?
Not only was she much colder, she seemed to have a completely different air about her.
Ding Ling hurriedly reached out and felt Gu Tong’s forehead.
Gu Tong looked at her in confusion.
“Are you possessed or something? Why are you so different today?”
Ding Ling hadn’t meant anything by it, but Gu Tong took the words to heart.
She stared hard at Ding Ling until the other girl started to squirm, then looked away.
She’d just used a little magic power to check, and the girl didn’t seem to have any ability to detect it.
She was just an ordinary person.
“You’re overthinking it.”
If she weren’t wary of being on human territory, she would’ve killed her to keep her quiet with a single magic bullet.
“I-Is that so?”
Ding Ling thought Gu Tong’s expression just now had been a little frightening, but the first phone call came in and put an end to their conversation.
Customer service was a busy job.
Anyone calling in had a complaint about their game experience or the company’s products.
It was a fairly marginal department, and artificial intelligence had taken over most of the customer service work, but they still needed actual people to answer the phones.
To cut costs and improve efficiency, the unscrupulous boss also required employees to keep a bunch of accounts open at once.
They had to take calls while messaging another customer on the computer.
As for the customers’ needs, the company definitely wasn’t going to accommodate them.
The boss simply demanded that employees get positive reviews out of customers who were already furious, without spending a single cent.
And negative reviews meant a cut to their performance bonuses.
They worked from morning until evening.
For many people at their desks, lunch could stretch from noon until the end of the workday.
There was nothing they could do.
Customers didn’t care whether the customer service reps were on their lunch break.
As a Monster, this level of work was still within her limits.
She could take a Magical Girl’s beam cannon, let alone phone calls.
But everyone in the other positions was human.
They couldn’t finish their meals or go to the bathroom, and the calls just kept coming one after another.
That these people could endure it all day was astonishing.
Humans had incredible mental fortitude.
“Ah, I’m exhausted. The only good thing about working is that it makes death seem like it might not be so bad.”
When it was time to clock out, Ding Ling slumped in her computer chair and looked listlessly at Gu Tong, who was getting ready to leave.
“Sister Gu, want to get barbecue later? I found a new place nearby recently, and it’s pretty good.”
Hearing that, Gu Tong hadn’t wanted to spend more time with someone who knew this body so well.
But according to the original owner’s memories, the two of them often went out to eat after work.
Acting too out of character would expose her.
She couldn’t just kill the girl to settle things, and she couldn’t act too differently either.
So Gu Tong could only nod in agreement.
The place they went to eat was really just a street stall near the company.
Ding Ling munched on skewers and drank a little, then rode the alcohol into a long, rambling discussion of the latest gossip.
She controlled most of the conversation between them, while Gu Tong, following the principle of doing less to make fewer mistakes, became her quietest listener.
Ding Ling was a Magical Girl enthusiast and a fan of the popular Magical Girl Heavy Cannon Cat.
Even the back of her phone case had a picture of Heavy Cannon Cat on it.
Espers weren’t exactly a mysterious presence in human society.
In the ten years since the war between humans and monsters had ended, Espers had become an open topic of conversation.
The Espers active in public mostly belonged to the Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau.
That was only the public face of things, of course.
There were plenty of Espers engaging in illegal activities behind the scenes, including anti-social Espers.
Heavy Cannon Cat, whom Ding Ling liked so much, was one example.
It was just a nickname for an illegal Magical Girl who liked to act as a violent vigilante.
She often left a simple drawing of a cat holding a cannon on the lawbreakers she tied to lampposts, and little by little, netizens started calling her Heavy Cannon Cat.
Although Heavy Cannon Cat was on the government’s wanted list, the Public Security Bureau was short-staffed and could only handle the Core Zone and the commercial districts of the Inner Ring.
The Bureau couldn’t reach the edge of the Inner Ring, where Gu Tong lived.
Security there relied entirely on local gangs or vigilantes like Heavy Cannon Cat.
But among the many violent vigilantes, Heavy Cannon Cat was the most extreme.
Her style was to handle whatever the heavens refused to, and deliver the justice the officials wouldn’t.
She believed that anyone guilty of a crime deserved the death penalty.
Her methods were so brutal that she often left the scene looking as if it had been run over by a steamroller, with no useful evidence left behind.
As a result, the Public Security Bureau still had no idea who Heavy Cannon Cat was.
They’d spent over half a month investigating without finding a single clue, so all they could do was leave the bounty posted online.
“So that thing last night was definitely Heavy Cannon Cat’s work.”
“Last night?”
“Yeah, Sister Gu, you didn’t hear? It was near your place.”
As she spoke, Ding Ling held her phone screen out in front of Gu Tong.
It showed a news photo from that morning.
The photographer had snapped the moment a public security officer reached out to block the camera.
Behind the officer, a police cordon had been set up, with an ambulance in the distance.
From where the photo had been taken, Gu Tong recognized the place at once.
It was where she’d killed that Monster yesterday.
“The Public Security Bureau didn’t used to bother with that area, but it seems they detected a magic power fluctuation, so they sent the cops over.”
“I’m telling you, it was definitely Heavy Cannon Cat cracking down on crime. Her territory has always been around there.”
“Those cops never do their jobs, and then they turn around and put her on the wanted list. So unreasonable.”
The girl complained drunkenly, completely missing the pensive look on Gu Tong’s face across the table.
She hadn’t expected the place she lived to be within Heavy Cannon Cat’s territory.
If she needed to feed after that, wouldn’t she be likely to run into her?
What a hassle.
“But I heard vigilantes get paid for fighting crime. Must be nice. I wish I could make some extra money like that.”
Ding Ling mumbled casually, carried along by the alcohol.
“Get paid?”
At the mention of money, Gu Tong—who was thinking about how the fridge was empty, her paycheck wasn’t due until the end of the month, and where she could quietly get food in the meantime—reacted immediately.