Chapter 16: Strange Tale Investigation

Three days later, at noon, in Lin Yun's office.

Having finished the morning's work and with no other tasks, Lin Yun rarely had a quiet lunch break; he could sit before his desk and, with limited time, scan the information on his computer screen.

Five days had passed since the night Lin Xiaolu was in danger; during this time, besides work and teaching several novice magical girls, he had started searching the internet for various news over the past two days, focusing mainly on messages within Fang Ting City related to Remnant Beasts and magical girls.

It was not that he wanted to use such an inefficient method, but the investigation feedback from the Anomaly Strategy Bureau side was not going smoothly. To put it bluntly, even the Fang Ting City Anomaly Strategy Bureau itself seemed to know nothing about the reason why magical girls and Remnant Beasts had vanished in the past two years.

According to the archive documents provided by Hong Siyu: In the past two years, Fang Ting City experienced a total of 132 magic-side crimes and attacks, big and small. Of these, 129 were committed by magic users; 125 had been solved by the Anomaly Strategy Bureau, and suspects arrested; 3 were Remnant Beast attack cases, all occurring in the half-month since Lin Xiaolu became a magical girl.

In other words, in the previous two years, the number of Remnant Beast appearances was zero.

It was not that they appeared rarely, as Lin Yun originally thought, but that there were absolutely no sighting records.

Correspondingly, the Anomaly Strategy Bureau's archives showed: The Bureau had never had any employee come into contact with the Sower "Senior Nini"; they simply did not know whether this Sower had ever come to Fang Ting City.

Whether this "Senior Nini" deliberately did not come, or encountered some misfortune on the way, no one knew.

What was more troublesome was that without the Sower, the Anomaly Strategy Bureau had even lost the means to contact the Magic Realm.

The Magic Realm's attitude toward the material world had always been one of superiority. The Anomaly Strategy Bureau nominally possessed the right to contact magical girls and assist them in their work, but in reality, it had no qualification to constrain or manage magical girls.

Except for those large central cities, general small and medium-sized city governments simply lacked the capital to communicate and negotiate with the Magic Realm.

Ultimately, this resulted in the Anomaly Strategy Bureau being merely a logistics service organization that provided post-battle cleanup services for magical girls and appropriately protected their data privacy and security when facing them.

What they could actually do was mainly manage the various behaviors of ordinary mana cultivators—magic users—in the city, recruit suitable magic users, and arrest magic user criminals. As for magical girls, they had no right to interfere.

Whether a magical girl's actions achieved merit or violated rules, the power to reward, punish, and manage them lay solely with the Realm.

Under such unequal and oppressive rules, the Fang Ting City Anomaly Strategy Bureau could only try to contact the Anomaly Strategy Bureaus of other cities, attempting to reach the Realm through the Sowers of other cities to inquire when their city's new Sower would arrive.

The first three times, the answer received was "arriving soon"; after the third time, the Realm side no longer gave any response.

Thus, both sides fell into an eerie stalemate: the Realm side ignored Fang Ting City's questions about the new Sower, and the Fang Ting City Anomaly Strategy Bureau dared not ask more.

Fortunately, in these two years, for some unknown reason, Remnant Beasts disappeared, so this vast city managed to muddle through amidst anxiety and hesitation.

—Until Moke came to this city.

It sounded as if all new doubts pointed to Moke.

But in Lin Yun's own judgment, this possibility was very low.

This was not his blind faith, but because he knew a deeper secret: In the Magic Realm, fairies are absolutely loyal to the Wang Ting.

Of course, due suspicion could not be lacking, so these past few days he had often continued to pressure Moke in the identity of Senior Cuique, trying to trick some information out of it.

The conclusion was no gain; Moke could say nothing.

Helplessly, Lin Yun, retaining his last shred of suspicion, left a tracking spell on it to monitor its general movements, and stopped wasting effort on this matter.

In fact, he was more inclined to believe that Moke's arrival had broken some kind of balance in Fang Ting City.

It was just that this hidden balance lay completely submerged beneath the water's surface; to see the full picture, more investigation was needed.

The Anomaly Strategy Bureau could provide only limited help, and the request for aid to the Magic Realm, relayed by Hong Siyu through other cities, had temporarily received no response. At present, only he could deal with all of this.

He had to plan for the worst possibility: the Magic Realm would not send anyone to support.

This was also the reason he agreed to recruit Xia Liang.

As for why he would make such a judgment, that was a reason unrelated to the current incident.

Ultimately, it had evolved into this: he sat alone before the computer, flipping through news, striving to search for every clue. For many news items that even the Anomaly Strategy Bureaus could not determine were related to the magic side, his rich experience could provide a judgment.

The good news was that he really had some leads.

At first, he tried to search for clues from the past two years, but the harvest was meager; he could only discover that the number of missing persons had increased. Reluctantly, he expanded the range to five years, ten years, even to the point where news report photos were so old they showed Anya's figure, but besides making his mood worse, he still found nothing.

After this dead end, Lin Yun chose a method he originally did not want to use: the urban legend search method.

This method was not created by him personally, but came from another magical girl companion of his from his youth in Fang Ting City—Su Shengzi.

Su Shengzi was keen on collecting urban legends and strange tales, and after some research, she integrated them, proposing a theory through extensive combat experience that sounded extremely absurd yet held a grain of sense: Over seventy percent of urban legends allegedly "witnessed firsthand" originated from Remnant Beasts.

The reason this theory was called absurd was that there was no rigorous statistics behind it; it was merely something Su Shengzi thought up one afternoon while sitting at home drinking afternoon tea.

The reason it held a grain of sense was actually because this theory implicitly aligned with the logic of Remnant Beast evolution: After a Remnant Beast evolved to the "pupa" stage, in order to store sufficient mana and nutrients to initiate the next stage of evolution, it needed to "build a nest."

After building a nest, a pupa-stage Remnant Beast would take a certain area as its base, distorting the space-time of the entire region to form its own nest, which was also its own "pupa." After that, it would hunt centered on its nest.

At the pupa stage, Remnant Beasts were no longer mindless like in the egg stage, acting solely on instinct, but possessed wisdom akin to wild beasts. They began to act more secretly, hiding from the tracking of magical girls and the Anomaly Strategy Bureau, to fulfill their feeding needs.

The strength of pupa-stage Remnant Beasts and the abundant food in their nests would also attract many lower-level Remnant Beasts to parasitize within them; however, these lower-level Remnant Beasts and the pupa-stage ones were often not in a subordinate relationship; if they were seen by a pupa-stage Remnant Beast, they would simply be swallowed whole as a snack.

The Remnant Beast's diet was all-encompassing, naturally including other Remnant Beasts.

Precisely because of this, the behavioral logic of pupa-stage Remnant Beasts was actually very likely to cause urban legends to arise in the city district where they were located.

If it were a city normally garrisoned by magical girls, relying on normal information exchange with the outside world and the long-term carpet patrols of numerous magical girls, it would be almost impossible for a pupa-stage Remnant Beast to hide within the city.

Their pupa was a shell protecting themselves, and at the same time a cage locking themselves in; once the nest was discovered, there was basically nowhere to escape, and they could only wait for a large group of magical girls to come and beat them up, or fight a life-or-death battle with elite magical girls summoned to the scene.

But Fang Ting City was different.

Lin Yun now suspected that there was likely a pupa-stage Remnant Beast hiding within Fang Ting City, and that it was related to the current series of strange phenomena.

The long-term vacancy of magical girls was enough to provide time for the birth of a pupa-stage Remnant Beast; the vast Fang Ting City also provided space for hiding; furthermore, the fact itself that "Remnant Beast attack incidents had vanished" could also be explained by the existence of a pupa-stage Remnant Beast, so this suspicion was not without reason.

He told this guess to Hong Siyu; Hong Siyu also expressed concern about it and promised to assist in the search. However, since it concerned Remnant Beasts, he did not want to just wait foolishly for news.

Now, the news could not provide information; he was afraid he really had to start with urban legends.

Using keywords such as "Fang Ting City," "urban legends," and "strange tales," he extracted information from major forums and media, and had already found many strange rumors that seemed plausible but were dubious.

For instance, "the song from the sewers," "the abandoned construction site with reversed mirrors," "the flickering streetlights," and so on; these half-true, half-false supernatural anecdotes made Lin Yun feel chills even in the middle of the day.

But these messages lacked concrete evidence; to truly find clues, he would probably have to verify them one by one in person next to know which one was actually credible.

Thinking of this, he was just about to move the mouse to switch web pages when he suddenly felt a vibration coming from his pocket.

It was a mobile phone, and it was "Senior Cuique's mobile phone." He judged this from the position of the pocket.

Looks like I have to use the magical girl form again, he thought.

Three days ago, he and Lin Xiaolu had found Xia Liang in the electronics district, smoothly made her a magical girl, briefly confirmed Xia Liang's condition, exchanged contact information, and then disbanded on the spot.

Since then, every other night, Lin Yun would gather the two of them at the old place to conduct lessons on magical girl-related knowledge.

This included how to train and enhance magic power, as well as common knowledge a Magical Girl should know, but most importantly, it was the combat awareness needed when fighting Remnant Beasts.

What are the instinctive behaviors of common Remnant Beasts, where do their general openings usually appear, and which techniques require caution, and so on.

Much of this was wisdom left by predecessors, and there was also quite a bit of experience summarized by Senior Cuique herself; in terms of rationality, there should be no problems. But according to her thinking, after a few days of theoretical instruction, it might still be necessary to wait for an opportunity for combat and practice.

He took out his phone and glanced at the screen, discovering it was indeed a call from Lin Xiaolu. Lin Yun thought for a moment, then sighed slightly, transformed into Senior Cuique, and only then answered the call:

"Hello? What is it?"

"Ah, Senior Cuique?"

Unlike the last time when Moko snatched the phone, this time what Senior Cuique heard was indeed Lin Xiaolu's voice: "Sorry to disturb you, but Moko just discovered a Remnant Beast!"

As expected.

Senior Cuique did not find it surprising; this was about what she had expected. Several days had passed since the last Remnant Beast attack, and she figured it was time for the next one to appear.

So she did not say much, roughly learned the location and current situation of the Remnant Beast's appearance from Lin Xiaolu, and prepared to set out.

However, just as she was about to hang up the phone, she heard a voice from outside the door that made her breath catch.

— "Director, are you in?"

Someone had arrived.

She could distinguish who this voice came from; without a doubt, it was her subordinate from the same department.

What to do? Is it too late to undo the transformation now? It seems it is too late!

A string of thoughts flashed through Senior Cuique's mind, and as the saying goes, while she was thinking these things, she saw the office door handle already being pressed down.

A young man pushed the door open while counting the documents in his hand, then raised his head and looked into the room—

He saw only an empty room.

"Huh? When did the Director go out?"

He felt a bit strange because, if he remembered correctly, he had previously seen the director of his own department walk into the office.

Poking his head out and looking to the left and right again, he confirmed that the office was truly empty of people, then scratched his head and turned around to leave with a strange expression.

What he did not expect was that right behind that empty desk, in the space under the table, a petite girl was curled up there with an displeased expression, staring at her phone screen, her thumb pressing on the spot where she had just hung up the call.

Only after the footsteps at the office door disappeared in the distance did she let out a long sigh of relief: Fortunately, her reaction was fast enough; not only did she hang up the call in time, but she also smoothly hid under the table.

Otherwise, whether it was the conversation heard by Lin Xiaolu afterward, or the sight of Senior Cuique sitting in the office seen by the person entering the office, both would be quite tricky situations.

It seems next time before answering a phone call, I must lock the door first.

Thinking this, her gaze passed through the gap under the table to confirm no one was at the office door before undoing the transformation, and she crawled out from under the table somewhat clumsily.

Adjusting his clothes on the way, he put on an air of nonchalance and walked out of the office; once out of others' sight, he immediately quickened his pace and rushed toward the location of the Remnant Beast's appearance as previously mentioned.