December 30th, 2995
At Number 20 Mark Street, hidden deep within a narrow alley far from the city's noise, stood a building drenched in exhaustion and decay.
The place felt dead.
Not physically.
Spiritually.
Which made it a perfect reflection of Quân's current condition.
"Mmmph! MMMMPH!!"
Tears nearly spilled from Quân's eyes.
He wanted to cry.
God, he wanted to cry.
But the last fragments of pride holding his psyche together refused to let him break down like a child.
Because at this moment, Quân was tied tightly to a wooden chair, a rag shoved into his mouth, while enduring one of humanity's greatest psychological horrors:
Mathematics.
Not normal mathematics.
Spatial mathematics.
Quân, for context, had dropped out in ninth grade.
The man never even touched high school. He didn't know what derivatives were, couldn't calculate the area of a circle, and the only statistics he understood involved gambling odds and dice probabilities.
And now Ron had him restrained in a chair while calmly explaining the structure of the impossible labyrinth Quân had escaped from earlier.
Fractals? Euclidean planes? Gabriel's Horn?
What the hell was a metric? Finite? Infinite? Coordinate systems?
Who invents this kind of shit?!
The only thing Quân truly understood was that Ron had somehow proven the space he'd been trapped in resembled a Gabriel's Horn.
That was also the final thing he understood before his consciousness attempted to leave his body permanently.
Unfortunately, every single time Quân started blacking out, right as heaven itself seemed ready to accept him into eternal peace, Ron would scrape a fork across the blackboard and drag him violently back into reality.
"MMMMMPH!!!"
Quân thrashed around like a feral animal, kicking wildly with all six of his legs until Ron eventually suspended him midair using steel wire just to keep him under control.
"That's enough for today," Ron said calmly. "You cooperated fairly well. Everything we covered was only basic higher mathematics."
"MMMMMPH?!"
Pure terror filled Quân's eyes.
Ron still had another lesson prepared.
It was currently five in the afternoon.
Ron had already forced him through over three hours of nonstop training.
Training what?
Martial arts. Observation exercises. Literature, for some incomprehensible reason. Piano for some even worse reason. And mathematics.
The subjects kept changing constantly, though not because Quân was talented.
Every lesson simply ended in catastrophe.
During martial arts training, Ron made him throw a thousand low kicks into a sandbag until his legs nearly gave out.
During literature practice, Quân accidentally spilled ink across an entire page.
During piano lessons, several strings somehow snapped.
Granted, those had technically been accidents.
Probably.
Ron finally removed the gag.
And Quân immediately lunged forward to bite him.
"Christ," Moris muttered from the sofa. "I thought the previous two lives were already bad enough. Where the hell did this little demon come from?"
Wearing his usual shapeless black hat and mask, Moris lazily held a newspaper in one hand while sipping tea through whatever impossible mechanism existed beneath the mask.
"YOU SON OF A-"
A storm of deeply personal insults erupted from Quân's mouth, most of them dedicated to Ron's bloodline, future descendants, and overall worth as a living organism.
Which was understandable.
One moment he'd been peacefully hiding at old Keil's house trying to sleep.
The next, he woke up inside a dusty but strangely luxurious building while some psychopath attempted to teach him higher-dimensional geometry.
Still, Ron ignored the abuse entirely.
"I already told you," he said. "Tonight's mission is important. Both of us are going."
"Work?!" Quân stared at him. "What kind of lunatics hire a fifteen-year-old?"
The question sounded genuinely foreign coming from him.
Quân had spent most of his life surviving through debt, gambling, and shameless dependence on other people. Employment, as a concept, barely existed in his worldview.
Ron studied him quietly for a moment.
"You know what's strange?" he asked. "Your observational ability is unusually sharp. So how exactly did you become an addict?"
"Addicted my ass!"
Quân barked back immediately.
A cornered dog barked louder when it lost its fangs.
"…I've seen plenty of addicts before," Moris added casually. "There was a time this place had white powder every three steps."
He still hadn't actually read the newspaper in his hand.
Instead, he tossed it toward Ron.
"Here."
Ron caught the paper effortlessly and unfolded it.
The front page carried a public notice.
A serial killer was currently hiding somewhere within society.
A monster rumored to have consumed over a dozen liters of human blood.
This was not an ordinary newspaper.
It was an internal publication from Jinlus Village.
Meaning this wasn't merely a warning.
It was a request.
A threat.
And bait.
Human beings were naturally skeptical creatures. Most people rationalized what they saw. Even if the authorities received countless false reports, eventually someone would stumble upon the truth buried beneath the noise.
"Này, Quân," Ron said quietly without lifting his eyes from the paper. "You asked what kind of work we do, right?"
He folded the newspaper shut.
"We start tonight."
Then his hand suddenly stopped.
A drop of blood landed against the surface of the paper.
It came from Ron's face.
But there was no wound.
Ron calmly wiped the blood away with his finger before rubbing it beneath his nose.
"Hm."
His expression didn't change.
"Guess I've been eating too much spicy food."