The next morning, word came that the job was his.
In truth, the moment he'd named his price, everyone in the group chat had known there was nothing left to contest. He'd taken the job for a thousand yuan — what was there left to fight over?
The work might run two or three nights, an average of three to five hundred yuan a night. Earning that little while staying up until dawn? A man would be better off working as a male model at a bar.
To his peers' outrage, Yue Wen could only laugh it off.
After all, didn't fighting monsters bring him evil-suppressing coins as a bonus? Compared with that, cold hard cash mattered far less — so he'd just have to make everyone compete a little harder.
Let my rivals in the trade suffer a little; I'll shoulder the infamy myself.
He had arranged with the employer to come by at dusk, so Yue Wen could spend the daytime on his own affairs at the agency.
First he drafted a job posting.
"Hiring now: one demon expeller assistant. Must have cultivation level; realm unlimited; any gender, any age welcome. Expected monthly salary: 3,000 to 100,000 (base salary 3,000, task earnings split fifty-fifty), no upper limit. Interested parties, apply promptly."
When he finished, Yue Wen looked it over and added one more line.
"Limited openings. First come, first served."
With nothing but a 3,000 base salary, he would struggle to hire even a college intern, let alone a cultivator — hence the fat commission. At other agencies like his, not even a partner could ever hope for a fifty-fifty split.
"Surely that's at least a little appealing now, right?" Yue Wen murmured.
After all, he imposed no cultivation requirement whatsoever.
The cultivators of Jiangcheng City couldn't be so precious as all that.
Five hundred years earlier, Blue Star — until then a civilization of pure technology — had seen its spiritual qi concentration suddenly soar, soon reaching the stage where all things in the world began to manifest spiritual nature.
Heirs of ancient immortal sects came down from their mountains and declared that the world's spiritual qi moved like tides: three thousand years rising, three thousand years waning, three thousand years depleted.
One rise and one fall spanned ten thousand years.
Now the age of depletion had passed entirely, and the human realm was entering a full three thousand years of rising spiritual qi, all the way to its zenith.
At first people were wild with joy and called it the "spiritual qi revival."
But they quickly discovered that the revival had brought immense chaos to the world. Not only could human beings give birth to spiritual nature — the land itself quickened, mountains and rivers dissolved into primordial wilds, and among all living things, evil entities rose in swarms.
What endangered them most were the spatial barriers, loosened by the wild surge of spiritual qi. The many realms beyond the human world stirred in response; demons of other worlds, mighty in cultivation, descended and all but brought annihilation upon Blue Star, whose civilization of cultivation had barely begun.
For close to a hundred years the human world stood all but destroyed, and the survivors lived on in the shadows, unable to spend a single day without dread.
The "spiritual qi revival" came to be renamed the "spiritual qi calamity."
In the end, it was human cultivators whose strength slowly gathered and grew — together with a group of immortal-sect heirs who, following old archive maps, found the legendary Four Seas Dragon Hall and retrieved the vast immortal treasury left over from the previous age of spiritual qi.
Only then was the tide turned, and order restored to the human world.
To this day, vast wasteland zones and forbidden zones still lie beyond the satellite cities, and demons and evil entities of every level still exist. But at least the people within the cities can live and work in peace, and they have taken up their old technological lives once more.
As for otherworldly demons, they can descend only through chance spatial rifts; a large-scale invasion from the outer realms has not occurred in many years.
Over these centuries, cultivation civilization has flourished more and more. People born with spiritual nature who can cultivate are still one in ten thousand — but on a planet of over ten billion, one in ten thousand still comes to several million. Add in heretical cultivators artificially remade after the fact, and the number grows larger still.
Naturally, the lower the realm, the greater the headcount: of the cultivators' nine realms, the lower three realms hold more than seventy percent of them all. And "enthusiasts" who spend a whole lifetime stuck in the first realm are a dime a dozen.
Yue Wen's requirements were modest; he didn't need an assistant to actually help with anything. It was simply to satisfy the Supernatural Management Bureau's regulations.
One enthusiast would do.
...
The day passed quickly. Yue Wen cultivated alone at the agency all day, and not one soul came knocking.
The Yue Cultivation Agency's reputation was still far too small.
On one skinny utility pole: "Big Money for a Son," "Exorcism on the Cheap," "Same-City House Calls," "Lose Weight Without Dieting"... With that much crammed onto a single pole, it was hard to believe a genuine one was tucked in among them.
Even so, Yue Wen stayed optimistic. Once he hired an assistant and obtained a proper business license, he could finally deploy some advanced advertising methods in broad daylight — like handing out flyers on the street corner.
When the time looked right, he locked up the storefront and set off on his little electric scooter.
He rode east to the edge of the Seventh Satellite City. From far off he could already see a chaotic, blurred curtain of light ahead, standing from earth to heaven, without end in any direction.
Satellite cities ringed the main urban district, and beyond the satellite cities stood a guardian formation. Outside the light curtain of this city-protecting grand formation lay the boundless wasteland zones.
The grand formation could not shut out every demon and evil entity — lone evil entities could still slip through the gaps. But once an intruding demon's or evil entity's aura grew strong enough, the formation would trigger, averting large-scale demon tides and safeguarding the city as a whole.
East City Cemetery sat in this far suburb.
The dusk sky was dark and dim. At a glance, the plots on the hillside, divided by stretches of woods, bristled with raised stone steles. Many were blank, or bore only a time of death, kept on hand in case a family came to claim them someday.
In this day and age, ordinary people's living conditions had in fact grown harsher; accidental deaths were alarmingly numerous every year.
Back at the dawn of the spiritual qi revival, a number of ordinary people had panicked at cultivators wielding such tremendous power, fearful that a flood of it would throw society into chaos. There had even been experts trumpeting "if everyone cultivates, things won't get out of hand."
Laughable, when you thought about it.
On the slope beside the cemetery stood a little cottage, the graveyard keeper's home. Yue Wen putt-putt-putted up on his little electric scooter, stopped outside, parked, and locked it.
Out of the house came a balding old man who looked somewhat scruffy. He bustled over beaming. "Young fellow — you're the one here to clear out the evil entities, right?"
"That's right, uncle," Yue Wen answered.
"Surname's Huang. I'm the cemetery's caretaker. These next few nights are yours. When you're tired from the work, come in and rest." The old man showed Yue Wen around the cottage.
"Uncle Huang, rest easy — you can leave it all to me," Yue Wen said with a smile.
Inside, the furnishings were simple: some everyday household appliances, and a small yellowed bed.
"Our cemetery buries ordinary folk. No great evil entity is going to turn up here — there's no problem at all, I guarantee it." Old Huang pointed at a drawer. "There are a few stacks of yellow paper inside. Help yourself whenever you need."
"Got it." Yue Wen nodded.
Quite the stock of preparations — though he had never studied talisman arts, so the stuff was no use to him.
"There are a few cucumbers in the fridge. Eat them whenever you need." Old Huang pointed again.
"Understood." Yue Wen nodded again, thinking the old man rather thoughtful.
"There are a few yellow books on the shelf. Whenever you need, feel free to..." Old Huang pointed at the bookshelf across the room.
"No need for that," Yue Wen said, shaking his head quickly.
Good grief.
Everything in this room just had to take after your surname, didn't it?
I'm a respectable man, uncle.
"Fair enough — the internet's booming again these days." Old Huang sighed and chuckled, as if lamenting that in this new era there was no longer any flight that would carry him.
With dusk nearly over, Old Huang left Yue Wen the keys with their little yellow duck and putt-putt-putted away on a little yellow electric scooter of his own.
Alone in the house, Yue Wen flipped through a few of the books on the shelf — purely out of curiosity.
Sure enough, they were all works like There's No Way I'm a Goddess; Pray, My Lady, Slay the Demon; The Immortal Maiden's Command... titles that promised nothing respectable at a glance.
He idled the time away, and once the sky had gone completely dark — once the creatures of the yin were about to stir —
Yue Wen stepped out of the cottage and into the cemetery grounds.
Compared with demons, which had physical bodies, the "wraith" — an evil entity born of a living being's residual mental force — was far more insubstantial: under the sun it left no trace whatsoever, yet in the dark of night it could be reborn.
Yue Wen had gone only a few steps when he saw a ball of baleful green ghost-fire come drifting out of the distant woods. It wasn't his first sighting, but out of caution he still put on the demon-revealing mirror, stilled his mind, drove his true qi, and got a read on the thing.
Besides revealing an evil entity's aura, the mirror could trace its origin and assess its combat strength — plenty of key information. The weaker an evil entity's spiritual power, the more the mirror would lay bare.
A perception promptly surfaced in Yue Wen's mind.
[Lantern Wraith: a wraith formed when the last scrap of a corpse's lingering resentment latched onto a tattered paper shell — unquestionably the weakest evil entity in the world. An adult specimen's combat strength is roughly equal to one quarter that of a healthy human grandmother.]
Chapter 4