The Bizarre Detective Agency

Chapter 722: More Questions

Lu Li closed Sean's diary.

He silently processed the information he had just read.

There was, of course, a small chance that this was all just a pre-death hallucination, something that had begun the moment he fell into the abyss, or perhaps when the praying mantis killed him.

But it was far more likely that he was alive, and that twenty-four years had truly passed.

After his first awakening, Friday had told him that six months or a year had passed, and that he had slept a total of twenty-three times.

"Does this tunnel lead outside?" Lu Li asked, slipping the diary into his pocket as he turned and sat on the edge of the wooden chair.

"Of course. It was intact when I got here..." the woman replied, looking at Lu Li with suspicion, puzzled by his question.

"And what's outside?"

"...The surface?" the woman answered uncertainly.

"The Allen Peninsula, the Main Continent, or the Wastelands?""The Gloom Plains of the Wastelands."

Lu Li searched his memories but found no such place. Either the woman was lying, or the name had come into use more recently.

"Do you know where the shelter's residents went?"

"The city-dwellers took them."

"City-dwellers?"

"Well, the people... who live... in the city," the woman articulated, speaking as if she were afraid Lu Li wouldn't understand.

Lu Li understood perfectly. Judging by her earlier sarcastic remark about the "upper class from the city," her perception of city-dwellers was quite different from his own.

He decided to set the question aside for now, realizing that further inquiries would only lead to more mysteries.

First, he needed to resolve his own doubts before trying to make sense of the outside world.

The woman, who had initially been impatient and mocking, now answered every question obediently, as if she were trying to figure something out herself.

Lu Li wasn't bothered by it.

"What kind of creature broke through the Deep Sea Stone?"

"A praying mantis. Some people call them mantis-men."

"Why was it able to get through the Deep Sea Stone?"

"The sealing stone? It stopped working," the woman said, seemingly unaware of how shocking her casual reply was. "Ever since that leviathan crawled out of the sea, these stones that used to protect us from monsters have been useless."

"Otherwise, the cowards from the shelter would never have dared to leave their homes," she added with a sneer, watching Lu Li's expression closely, as if trying to confirm he wasn't one of them.

But on Lu Li's exhausted, stubble-covered face, all she saw was composure.

"What's your name?" the woman suddenly asked.

"Lu Li."

"Lu Li? A strange name. You can call me Katerina," the woman said, trying to connect his name to the shelter residents.

But as far as she knew, none of the shelter dwellers had such an odd name. Neither did the outsiders—their names were long, unpronounceable, and bizarre, composed of either all vowels or all consonants.

Lu Li looked at her calmly. "You're very interested in who I am."

"A little. Shelter residents are in high demand right now," Katerina didn't bother hiding her intentions, her gaze burning into Lu Li as she awaited the answer she wanted.

"I'm not from the shelter," Lu Li said, shaking his head slightly.

"Really?" Katerina expressed her doubt. "If you dare say you've lost your memory, you'll lose the trust of Katerina 'The Sting'."

She emphasized, "Trust is very important on the surface. If you hadn't saved me, I wouldn't have told you this much."

"It's true. But I'm not from this time, either."

"'Not from this time'?"

Lu Li calmly told her the truth. "For certain reasons, I've spent a very long time underground."

"How long?"

"Twenty-four years."

After getting his answer, Katerina fell silent for a long time, just as Lu Li had shortly before when he learned that twenty-four years had passed. She made a hissing sound, as if sucking in a sharp breath.

Lu Li's honest answer made Katerina doubt him.

"But how is that possible... How old were you twenty-four years ago? Ten? Fifteen?"

Katerina sized up Lu Li, who was just as filthy as she was. The stubble made him look rather pathetic, but his neatly trimmed hair lent some credibility to his words.

"For certain reasons, only twenty-four days have passed for me," Lu Li said.

The woman didn't understand the temporal mechanics of it, but she grasped the essence of "twenty-four days." "So you thought twenty-four days had passed, but it's actually been twenty-four years?"

"Yes."

Katerina seemed to accept this answer. She let out a breath and said, "I don't know whether to call you lucky or unlucky... So, are you a pureblood human?"

"A pureblood human?" Lu Li repeated.

Katerina pulled the Anomaly from her foot and plunged it into her own eye socket. With a black dot now in the center of her pupil, she stood up, lifted her shirt, and lowered her pants, revealing a hollow abdomen with protruding hip bones.

And on her stomach was a round growth.

Katerina parted the growth—or rather... an eyelid—revealing a sleeping, twitching eye.

"See? Everyone alive in this world is contaminated by anomalies. Only a child born from a pureblood human will be less contaminated. And if both parents are purebloods, the child will be a pureblood too."

Lowering her shirt, Katerina returned to the bed and sat down, pulling the Anomaly from her eye and plunging it back into her foot.

"If you're a pureblood, then you're as lucky as the shelter residents. If not, you're just another unlucky soul like me. And your life isn't worth a thing."

"Where does the contamination come from?"

Lu Li was still picturing the sleeping eye on the woman's abdomen.

"From everywhere," Katerina shrugged, answering with indifference. "Contaminated food, a low Mind Level, faith in an evil god, mating with outsiders, frequent use of Anomalies, visiting forbidden places, being marked by a powerful entity, heredity..."

"What happens when the contamination gets worse?"

"Nothing special. You turn into an outsider or a monster, or you go to the city and sell yourself."

"Sell yourself?"

"You make a contract with the city head or the mayor, get some money and a suppressor collar, and then you go fight monsters outside the city until you're killed, or you turn into a monster yourself and the collar destroys you."

"So you'd better be a pureblood."

"So the shelter residents are headed for a terrible fate?" Lu Li asked.

"Terrible? Not at all," Katerina looked at him like he was insane. "How can you think that? A safe, warm home, no fighting monsters in the wastes, you don't have to do anything for yourself, clean and delicious food, fresh water, and a hand-picked spouse. It's... it's..."

The word was on the tip of her tongue, but Katerina couldn't quite remember it.

"Like pigs," Lu Li supplied.

"...Like princesses. Pigs? That sounds crude, but I suppose it fits," Katerina wasn't the least bit offended by the word "pigs."

"And what were you before? Just a civilian?"

Lu Li glanced down at his chest—the spirit exterminator's badge had been gone for a long time.

But that didn't change who he was.

"I'm an exorcist."