Hunter of Mysterious Creature

Chapter 849 - 92: Golden Chip (Part 2)

The guy immediately dropped to his knees like a dog, picked the bills up off the floor with his mouth... and at some unknown point, a fluffy tail had actually grown out of Lei’s ass, wagging hard at the original owner.

...

Good dreams never last. When the shrill alarm yanked the original owner awake, there were less than thirty minutes left before assembly.

"Fuck!" He glanced at the alarm that was already ringing for the third time, then hurriedly pulled on his clothes and shoes, grabbed the backpack next to him, and shoved all the crap on the table into it.

He threw his gear together in a rush, didn’t bother to brush his teeth or wash his face, grabbed the backpack and bolted out of the room.

There was a drunk lying in the hallway of the cheap motel. The original owner just stepped over him, then two seconds later doubled back, rummaged around in the drunk’s pocket and fished out a few coins.

"Motherfucker, broke-ass mutt." he spat under his breath, then scampered downstairs, hopped on a shared bike by the curb and started tearing off toward the North Gate.

Luckily Dragon City’s traffic at four in the morning hadn’t started clogging up yet, so with two minutes left before the deadline, he finally barely made it to the rendezvous point.

Four Hunters and a fully armed mercenary squad were already waiting there. When they saw the original owner in his half-dressed state, their eyes instinctively flashed with a messy mix of contempt, confusion, and disgust. A heavily made-up female Hunter even said straight out, "Don’t tell me this piece of shit is on our team? Talk about bad fucking luck."

"What’s your problem? I’m not even late! Watch your damn mouth." The original owner glared at the woman, completely oblivious to the fact that his fly was still open, his shirt buttons were done up wrong, his greasy, filthy hair was matted with some kind of unknown white flecks, and his grimy jacket looked like it hadn’t been washed in ages. The whole person was so sloppy he might as well have just crawled out of a dumpster.

"Enough, quit wasting time. Get in the truck." A male Hunter nearly two meters tall spoke up. He was one of Lei’s men, and also the field leader for this operation—in fact, Lei had never once shown his face in front of the original owner; this Hunter, on the other hand, had already worked several jobs with him.

The hired guns all clambered into the back of a truck, while the team-lead Hunter got into another SUV... Smash cut, and the scene jumped to the mine in Nanhua Town—the place where Sun Hang and the others were right now.

Dozens of hours had passed in the memory, but in reality only two seconds had gone by. Sun Hang’s brain was already in a state where it could receive information to the greatest extent possible, yet even so, this Hunter’s memory data still showed signs of fading; some images were starting to twist and distort.

"Weird, he’s not dead yet..." Sun Hang glanced at the Hunter bound up in mycelium. The guy still had vital signs. By rights, as long as someone’s not dead, the memetic imprint doesn’t disappear, and the memory information embedded in it won’t be lost... And after Sun Hang devoured those memes, the memory data inside them would be "permanently" stored—to be clear, deep in Sun Hang’s mind there were a ton of memory fragments that didn’t belong to him. Whenever he had downtime, he’d rummage through that mountain of memory trash, delete the useless stuff, and categorize and file away any information that might come in handy.

"Could it be the effect of that anomalous thing?" Sun Hang muttered to himself. "Everything else is crystal clear, but as they got close to the mine, the memories start going fuzzy... looks like that freak is almost certainly behind it. That monk outside said the same thing—his memories are constantly deteriorating..."

Sun Hang took a deep breath, flashed Candle Dragon an OK sign, and kept browsing through the Hunter’s memories.

After arriving at the pit, they split into two teams. One stayed topside, the other took the same lift Sun Hang’s group had just ridden down into the pit.

Of course, the original owner in the memories got assigned by the lead Hunter to the team going into the pit—he didn’t really protest, just grumbled under his breath once and obediently squeezed into the lift car.

Besides him, the ones sent down into the pit were that heavily made-up female Hunter from before and three mercenaries. None of them looked thrilled about it, but they’d taken the money, so no one made a fuss. They all followed the team-lead Hunter’s orders.

"You’ve all seen the missing person’s photo and description on the way over. Remember, the primary objective of this op is to locate the target. Avoid fighting if at all possible. Even if there’s something down there at the bottom of the pit, as long as it doesn’t interfere with our mission, we leave it alone." the lead Hunter said. "You’ve got one hour of exploration time. After one hour, whether you find anything or not, you must return to the lift. Understood?"

"Understood—"

Cut again—now the memory’s original owner and his unlucky teammates had already made it to a deep, narrow tunnel. He and the female Hunter walked in front, while the three fully armed soldiers followed behind them with guns at the ready, using their helmet lamps and the tactical flashlights slung under their rifles to light the way.

It was clear this tunnel was different from the one Sun Hang was in now. Judging from the rock layers, this place should be deeper in the mine.

"Finally, something with some real value." Sun Hang let out a breath and pushed a small amount of diluted life force into the memory’s original owner’s body—until he finished watching this segment, the guy couldn’t die.

"You think we took a wrong turn?" The original owner looked around uneasily as he walked. "There aren’t even any footprints on the ground. Maybe the missing people didn’t come this way at all."

"What other way would there be?" the female Hunter snorted. "We’ve been walking this whole time and haven’t seen a single fork. What, you think they squeezed into those tiny gaps in the rock?"

"Who the hell knows." the original owner muttered. "Anything involving an anomalous, nothing would surprise me at this point."

Just then, the three mercenaries suddenly stopped. One of them said quietly, "Look at the wall."

On the right-hand wall of the tunnel, there was a blue streak of paint that had clearly been put on recently—a palm-sized circle, with a cross drawn overlapping it.

"That’s gotta be their marker." another mercenary said.

"But what’s this symbol supposed to mean?" the original owner muttered. "Dead end? They turned back here?"

"You know what it means?" The mercenaries exchanged looks.

"This symbol’s actually pretty common... Usually it’s something like ’forbidden’, ’not allowed’, ’stop’, that kind of thing." The female Hunter frowned as well. "But drawn here, I really can’t figure out what they were trying to say."

While the others were scratching their heads over the symbol on the wall, something at the edge of the original owner’s vision caught his eye—under the shadows cast by the lights, something seemed to be lying on the ground.

He drifted over casually and put his foot on it, then crouched down, pretending to tie his shoe, and in one quick motion scooped the thing into his hand.

"A coin? A gold chip?" Sun Hang froze for a second. From the original owner’s memory, he instantly realized what it was.

It was a chip from the casino he frequented—the biggest casino in Dragon City.

And this chip was the highest-denomination gold chip, worth ten thousand cash a piece.

The original owner’s breathing grew a little heavier.