The man stared at him for a few seconds, a length of ash building on the cigarette in his mouth before it dropped onto the counter. He didn't bother to flick it off.
"You're a guy who knows how to watch his mouth."
"Anyone who's lived this long knows how to watch his mouth."
The man let out a short laugh. "You're interesting. Fine, wait here."
He stood up from behind the counter and walked toward the back of the shop.
Chen Guan sat on the low stool without moving, his gaze casually sweeping across the interior of the shop.
The hardware items on the shelves were arranged haphazardly, some clearly gathering thick layers of dust, as if they were never meant to be bought. The whole place felt more like a front, its real purpose having nothing to do with selling goods.
Other than that, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
The leopard's ear twitched, angling toward the back of the shop.
From behind, the man exchanged a few words with someone, his voice lowered so much that the content was impossible to make out.
After about two or three minutes, he returned.
Someone followed behind him.
A young man, around twenty-five or twenty-six, wearing a black hoodie with the hood down, revealing a sharply defined face. His skin was dark-toned, and his left ear bore a silver stud.
He walked up to the counter, leaned against the shelves, crossed his arms, and looked Chen Guan over twice from above.
"He Chenguan?"
"Yeah."
"Came up from the southwest?"
"Yeah."
"Traveled this far to find work. No opportunities left back home?"
"Not many."
Chen Guan slowed his speech slightly, letting a note of weariness creep into his tone.
"Small place. The local teams have locked down all the exotic beast cleanup contracts—outsiders can't break in. Hauling jobs are getting rarer too. A man's got to eat."
The young man in the hoodie studied him, his gaze lingering on Chen Guan's face for two seconds before shifting to the leopard.
"This leopard yours?"
"Yeah."
"Mutated?"
"Yeah."
Listening to these standard questions, Chen Guan was already starting to feel drowsy.
Man, this is dragging.
The hoodie squatted down, extended a hand, and waved it in front of the leopard.
The leopard tilted its head, sniffed his fingers, then turned away, ignoring him.
"Got an attitude." The hoodie stood up, a faint smirk curling at the corner of his mouth.
"Been with me too long. Not friendly with strangers," Chen Guan said.
The hoodie's gaze returned to his face. "Take off the mask."
Chen Guan did as he was told.
Then, he felt an extremely faint wave of psychic energy, like something brushing lightly across his face—but the force dissipated quickly, as if it had been deflected by an invisible membrane.
The energy came fast and faded just as fast.
The hoodie's brow furrowed slightly. It was like biting into something and finding the taste off, but not being able to pinpoint why.
"Is there something on your face?"
"What kind of something?" Chen Guan's tone carried a hint of irritation, the natural reaction of someone being asked an odd question out of nowhere.
The hoodie stared at him for two more seconds, then looked away.
"Never mind."
He turned his head toward the middle-aged man behind the counter, and the two exchanged a glance. The middle-aged man gave a slight nod.
The hoodie refocused on Chen Guan, his arms still crossed, but his whole demeanor loosened a notch, settling into a matter-of-fact tone.
"Alright, He Chenguan, right? I'll go over the rules once. Only once."
"Go ahead."
Chen Guan snapped the mask back on. The thing worked well—aside from not being durable, shattering at the first hit, it had no flaws.
"First: don't ask what you shouldn't ask, don't see what you shouldn't see, don't remember what you shouldn't remember. All you need to know is that someone's paying you to do a job. You finish the job, you take the money, and you leave."
Chen Guan nodded.
"Second: once you take a job, you finish it. If you bail partway through, you face the consequences."
"What consequences?"
The hoodie grinned. "What do you think?"
Chen Guan didn't respond.
The hoodie didn't wait for an answer either, pressing on.
"Third: freelancers are not allowed to form private connections. No asking about each other's backgrounds. You don't know them, they don't know you. Everyone's here to make money. When it's over, everyone goes their separate ways."
"Last one." The hoodie raised a single finger, pointing it in the air. "Control your beast. If it bites someone it shouldn't, you can't afford the damage."
The leopard lay on the floor, its ear twitching, the tip of its tail lightly slapping the ground, looking utterly docile.
Chen Guan glanced down at it.
"He's better behaved than I am."
The hoodie snorted, then turned and walked toward the back of the shop.
"Follow me."
Chen Guan stood up, and the leopard rose with him.
Behind the shop was a narrow passage flanked by warehouse walls, rust stains and unknown climbing plants crawling up the plaster. Overhead, power lines hung so low they almost brushed the hair as they passed.
After two turns, an iron door appeared ahead, unlocked and left slightly ajar.
The hoodie pushed it open. Inside was a modest room, about thirty square meters, with a concrete floor and a tin roof.
The room already had people in it.
Three of them.
A bald man sat on the bed farthest in, wiping a short-bladed knife with a few old notches in the blade, well-used.
A lanky, tall guy leaned against the wall with his eyes closed, hands in his pockets—either sleeping or pretending to.
A woman sat on the edge of the bed closest to the door, holding a chipped enamel mug, drinking water. She had short hair.
All three glanced at Chen Guan when he entered.
The bald man's gaze lingered on him for less than a second before returning to his knife.
The lanky guy barely lifted an eyelid before closing it again. Chen Guan caught a faint trace of Long Ao in his posture.
The short-haired woman took a longer look, her eyes staying on the leopard longer than on Chen Guan himself.
"New guy. He Chenguan. Freelancer. Summoner class."
The hoodie announced him from the doorway in a bored, listing tone, then turned to Chen Guan. "Pick an empty bed, stash your stuff. Someone'll come tonight to assign tasks. Don't wander off before that."
With that, he left. The iron door clicked shut behind him with a dull thud.
Chen Guan stood at the entrance, surveying the room.
Two empty beds remained: one next to the bald man, one across from the lanky guy.
He chose the one across from the lanky guy.
The leopard followed him over, lying down by the bed, its tail curled around its side, purple pupils half-lidded, looking perfectly calm.
Chen Guan sat on the bed, took off his jacket, and draped it over the footrail, his movements so natural they suggested he was long used to such crude lodgings.
The room fell quiet for a while.
"Your leopard—purple?"
It was the short-haired woman who had spoken, her voice lower than expected.
"Yeah."
"Mutated?"
"Yeah."
"What rank?"
"Three."
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
. As long as he maintains the villain image and follows the plot to the grand finale, he can obtain generous rewards and return to the real world. So Gu Chen'an entered the role and began to act as a scumbag villain, but who would have expected that the female leads could hear his inner thoughts. Miss Su from the Su family was shocked: "I originally thought Gu Chen'an was a scumbag, but I didn't expect he turned out to be a gentleman! What? You said I have to call off the engagement? I definitely won't, I'll piss you off!" Bai Yuan Tian was dumbfounded: "Young Master Gu is usually unreasonable and a complete brat, but he actually calls me little sweetie in his heart? What, Young Master Gu even said he likes me?" As the female leads' images collapsed more and more, the plot also collapsed with it. Gu Chen'an looked at all this chaos. "Ladies, don't aggro me, if you keep this up the male lead really will stab me, I still need to survive to the grand finale!"
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
transmigrates into the world as the sect master of the Heavenly Yan Sect, which is on the verge of being wiped out. He binds a system that grants him cultivation power based on the number of disciples he has: for each disciple, he automatically gains a year's worth of cultivation every single day! Take one disciple: every day he gains 1 year of cultivation power. While others struggle through a year of bitter training, he gets the same just by sleeping through a single night. Take ten disciples: every day he gains 10 years of cultivation power. Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul—he breezes through all bottlenecks without lifting a finger. Take one hundred disciples: every day he gains 100 years of cultivation power. Even a Soul Transformation Venerable before him can’t survive a single blow. Take ten thousand disciples: every day he gains 10,000 years of cultivation power! With a wave of his hand, he topples empires. With a single step, he crushes the sacred grounds of the universe. ... While others fight tooth and nail for secret techniques, Lin Yan casually hands out Nascent Soul-level cultivation manuals as beginner textbooks. While others strain to find talented recruits, Lin Yan opens his doors to anyone—so long as they’re human. In just three short years, the Heavenly Yan Sect went from a backwater sect made up of three crumbling huts to a sacred land that every cultivator under heaven would kill to enter. ... One day, otherworldly demon gods invade, with a million demon soldiers pressing down upon the realm. Lin Yan, yawning, rises from his lounge chair and glances at the system panel: [Current Disciples: 1.28 million] [Daily Cultivation Increase: 1.28 million years] He waves his hand casually, and the countless demon soldiers are reduced to ashes in an instant. “So noisy… interrupting my fishing.”
