...

The "Spring Breeze" stronghold, central monitoring room.

"This is a kind of curse..." Nagano Souta tapped the tabletop with his metal fingers, one knuckle at a time. "I’ve seen it once before..."

"When?" Candle Dragon asked.

"Seven years... no, it should be eight years ago." Nagano Souta recalled. "I remember that squad very clearly. They had a total of four Mysterious Creature Hunters and thirteen seasoned mercenaries. One of the Hunters had only broken away from Dubhe Tower’s control and become a Free Hunter less than three months before. And before that, that Hunter’s rank on the Hunter leaderboard could squeeze into the top three hundred."

Nagano Souta drove the wheelchair under him over to a cabinet, opened it, and took out a small flask of sake.

"Boss... with the state your body is in now, you can’t drink..." The man in the suit who had introduced himself as the accountant immediately tried to dissuade him.

"I’m not drinking, I’m just tasting the flavor." Nagano Souta glared at his subordinate, then poured himself a small cup.

He lifted the cup and lightly moistened his lips with the sake before continuing: "They had accepted a commission from a rich man living in Shen City. The man wanted them to penetrate deep into the no-man’s-land, find his family’s old ancestral hall, and bring back the ancestral tablets left there when the clan migrated years ago."

"Looks like they didn’t manage to complete that job." Sun Hang muttered. "If you don’t mind my asking, how much was the commission?"

"Six million," Nagano Souta said. "Already higher than the reward for many missions collecting mysterious creature samples."

"They ran into the same situation?" Candle Dragon asked. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

"That’s right... They lost their way in the no-man’s-land and never reached the designated coordinates. Instead, they blundered into a bank of fog stretching nearly a hundred kilometers."

"A bank of fog stretching nearly a hundred kilometers?"

"Inside the fog, they were attacked by all kinds of mysterious creatures. After losing nearly half their manpower, they finally groped their way to the fringe of the fog zone," Nagano Souta went on. "But just as they were about to rush out of the fog in excitement, they heard a voice in their heads warning them—saying their souls and bodies already belonged to this place, and that if they forced their way out, they would suffer the cruelest curse in this world."

"Those Hunters and mercenaries didn’t take that creepy voice seriously at all." Nagano Souta raised his cup again and, under the accountant’s worried gaze, took a small sip. "The fog was crawling with lethal mysterious creatures; staying meant death sooner or later. The survivors barely hesitated before charging out of the fog. Once they got their bearings back, they started moving toward Yumen."

"But a few dozen minutes later, they realized what that voice had meant by ’curse’—their bodies were slowly melting like wax figures. The first to notice was a mercenary. He felt his body itch and burn, and the headband on his forehead seemed soaked with sweat. He took off his helmet on reflex and reached up to wipe, only to find his hand coming away full of pasty pus and blood. Terrified, he began screaming, frantically touching his own head... Very soon, his pale skull was fully exposed to everyone’s sight."

"The squad fell into panic. Everyone discovered their body was melting, some faster, some slower... But no matter what measures they tried, they couldn’t stop it. Some raised their pistols and pulled the trigger against their own temples; some went mad and ran straight back into the fog they’d just escaped from... Oh, I need to correct that: perhaps from beginning to end, they never managed to escape that fog at all."

"From what you’re describing, that squad had already lost their vehicles inside the fog. So how did they get back to Yumen? And who recorded all this?" Sun Hang asked.

"These records came from a mercenary’s logbook. Before he died, he used the last of his lucid consciousness to write these words," Nagano Souta said. "Later, another squad found their remains in the no-man’s-land and picked up the logbook. That’s how we learned what happened to them."

"Their luck was really rotten." Sun Hang sighed.

"Not only that. The squad that found the log also discovered something else: the victims’ skeletons were at least twenty kilometers from the location where the log said they were wiped out. There were no signs of terrain changes along that distance, and the bones didn’t look like they’d been through a sandstorm. So our judgment is, after they lost all self-awareness, they likely continued moving toward Yumen like walking corpses for twenty kilometers. Only when all the muscle and ligaments on their bodies were completely dissolved by the curse and they entirely lost the ability to move did they finally collapse out there on the Gobi Desert."

"Just like those Hunters in the convoy... They had vehicles, so they could still make it back to Yumen," Candle Dragon said. "If they hadn’t had vehicles, they’d probably have become just another batch of missing people in the no-man’s-land."

Nagano Souta nodded. "That squad later went looking for that fog again, but they couldn’t find it. So our speculation is that this fog that curses intruders might be a phenomenon-type mysterious creature. But we can’t rule out the possibility that it’s an environment-type mysterious creature with the ability to move, wandering around the no-man’s-land."

"Did you report the information about the fog zone to Dubhe Tower?" Candle Dragon asked.