Becoming an Evil God and Stealing His Wife - Chapter 7

A sudden realization struck Li Jiu.

When he was walking home from his shift last night, he had distinctly heard a bizarre sound trailing closely behind him. At the time, it had triggered his fight-or-flight response, alerting him to immediate danger.

The moment Shen Guan materialized; however, Li Jiu had stopped analyzing the noise altogether, simply assuming the silver-haired man had been the source of the disturbance.

But mapping the sequence out now, that theory completely collapsed. When Shen Guan had seized him and dragged him into the blind alley, he had moved with absolute, ghost-like silence. The frantic clicking and shuffling he had heard earlier matched the anatomical profile of the multi-legged Louse Anomaly perfectly.

Could it be that the entity hunting me from the very start last night was actually the Louse Anomaly?

If so, it perfectly aligned with his working hypothesis regarding the handbook: to populate a new entry, he merely had to “encounter” the anomaly.

Li Jiu massaged his temples in mild frustration. If he had just risked a single glance backward last night, he wouldn’t be standing here playing detective. Then again, looking back might have cost him his life.

Bottom line: he was still far too weak.

Setting his lack of physical combat prowess aside for a moment, he refocused entirely on the mechanics of the handbook.

If he had indeed crossed paths with the Louse Anomaly last night, where did the creature go afterward?

An intuitive feeling told him that Shen Guan had likely slaughtered it on the spot.

Does the handbook require the target entity to die before its corresponding ability can be plundered?

Yet, this world was undoubtedly crawling with thousands of monsters that perished daily, but his handbook remained completely empty save for two distinct entries.

Therefore, it was highly probable that the plundering mechanic required a specific sequence: he had to personally “encounter” the anomaly, and that specific anomaly had to die while satisfying an additional, yet-undetermined set of criteria.

Granted, these were all working hypotheses. But bold assumptions paired with careful verification was a solid strategy at least it gave him a definitive direction.

Moreover, possessing the Stealth trait significantly elevated his survival rate, which meant the scope of operations he could safely undertake had just widened.

Having rested long enough to restore a baseline level of motor control, Li Jiu pushed himself up from the floor and settled into a rickety wooden chair, rubbing his knees which were throbbing fiercely from his abrupt collapse.

Li Mengmeng’s voice drifted in from the courtyard: “Brother! The buns are perfectly steamed!”

“Coming!” Li Jiu called back. He willed the handbook to vanish and stepped out of his bedroom.

“Are you still planning to head out for your morning jog, Brother?” Mengmeng asked, looking up. “If you are, I’ll wait until you get back to eat.”

“Let’s skip the run today and eat right away.”

His legs were shaking like reeds under a heavy wind, and his knees were in agony. It took everything he had just to maintain a normal, upright posture. Going for a jog was out of the question.

During breakfast, Li Jiu devoured four massive meat buns in rapid succession before his internal systems finally leveled out and even then, his stomach still grumbled for more. Under normal circumstances, two of these large buns would have completely filled him up. To see his intake instantly double while still feeling a lingering void was concerning.

He was facing a massive logistical problem.

Because he lacked a refined grip on the Stealth ability, his trajectory during his test run had been incredibly clumsy, allowing him to control only a general direction. To truly transform this trait into a viable survival tool, he would need to practice frequently, gradually increasing his precision while carefully managing his stamina.

It was a non-negotiable requirement. If he bungled a move while facing an actual anomaly, a single misstep would mean instant death.

Furthermore, standard physical conditioning remained mandatory. Since utilizing an anomalous trait completely drained his baseline stamina, elevating his core physical endurance would naturally expand the number of times he could invoke the ability before collapsing.

However, this rigorous training regimen would drastically burn through his biological energy reserves, plunging him into a perpetual state of starvation and causing his grocery consumption to skyrocket.

By extension, his newly acquired, relatively comfortable salary at the noodle house was about to shrink dramatically under the weight of his food bill.

What absolute bad luck, he lamented. When is it finally going to be my turn to be wealthy?

He desperately needed to figure out a secondary stream of income.

Wait… the promotional gift from yesterday!

Li Jiu’s eyes lit up. He bolted back into his bedroom, flipped open his cloth bundle, and snatched up the boutique paper bag.

Selling it off was definitely the right play. He would just mask his face, drop by a market, and ensure no one could trace the transaction back to his identity.

How much could it fetch? One hundred credits? Fifty? He’d happily settle for twenty. Pure profit was pure profit.

In a thoroughly brightened mood, Li Jiu peeled open the adhesive seal of the boutique bag and peered inside, only to find the interior entirely hollow.

“Where the hell are my lace panties?!”

After finishing his breakfast, Li Jiu offered a lingering, dramatic sigh as he stepped over the threshold of his home. “Mengmeng, ensure the front door is securely latched behind me.”

The neighbor’s young boy remained in his usual spot, staring blankly ahead with his arms tightly wrapped around his knees.

The muffled sounds of an intense domestic dispute leaked through the walls of the adjacent house. This was the exact hour the boy’s father typically stumbled back home, reeking of stale alcohol and cheap, pungent perfume a routine that inevitably triggered their daily screaming match.

Li Jiu pivoted and began his trek out of the cramped alleyway.

Since his new position at the noodle house provided both lunch and dinner free of charge, he had left every single remaining meat bun on the kitchen table for Mengmeng.

As he closed the distance to the small boy, the child slowly lifted his head.

Li Jiu met his gaze evenly for a fraction of a second, offering no outward reaction as he continued past. The boy immediately lowered his eyes back to the dirt.

After a few steps, however, Li Jiu halted his stride, turned back around, and retrieved a perfectly whole, roasted grey taro from his bundle. Now that he had secured steady employment, sparing a single taro wasn’t going to break his budget.

He had provided food for the boy yesterday, but he was entirely unwilling to let the child view his charity as an entitlement. That was precisely why he hadn’t immediately presented the freshly roasted taro when walking past the first time; he wanted to gauge the child’s raw reaction.

If the boy had displayed a single flash of resentment, entitlement, or anger at being ignored, Li Jiu would have cut ties instantly and withheld the taro permanently. He had no intention of fostering an enemy out of a beneficiary.

But the boy had merely lowered his head in silent acceptance, proving he understood completely that assistance was a kindness, not an obligation. For someone with that level of awareness, Li Jiu was more than willing to extend a helping hand whenever it was within his power to do so.

He knew exactly how agonizing it felt to starve.

The little boy looked up in sheer disbelief. Meeting Li Jiu’s reassuring nod, he reached out with both hands, cradling the warm taro tightly against his chest.

“Th-Thank you…”

Li Jiu offered a small smile, turned on his heel, and walked away.

The boy began devouring the grey taro with animalistic speed, his eyes tracking Li Jiu’s departing figure down the lane.

Even though his mind seems a bit broken since he keeps insisting his dead little sister is still alive, he really is a genuinely good person, the boy thought.

On his commute to work, Li Jiu intentionally took a detour, tracing the exact route he had taken during his frantic flight the previous evening.

As he neared the blind alley where Shen Guan had effortlessly hauled him off his feet, Li Jiu cast a sharp, searching glance into the corridor.

However, the interior looked entirely mundane. Normal civilian traffic moved through the space, and there wasn’t a single out-of-place element to be found.

If that entity actually died here and left a massive carcass behind, there should be some lingering evidence or public commotion, he reasoned. Did I miscalculate the location?

A wave of mild disappointment washed over him. Shaking it off, he adjusted his trajectory toward the commercial district, accelerating his pace to ensure he wouldn’t be late for his shift.

Just as he was about to cross into the perimeter of Ring Street, a cluster of hushed, animated voices drifted over from a nearby corner.

“Have you guys heard? Someone was brutally murdered over here last night.”

A tight crowd of local residents had bottlenecked at the mouth of a narrow alleyway, creating a dense pocket of gossip. The initial statement wasn’t loud, but it carried clearly through the morning air, drawing the attention of passersby who immediately drifted closer to investigate.

Li Jiu slipped into the periphery of the crowd, arriving just in time to hear another resident chime in with horrific details.

“I heard! They say the state of the corpse was absolutely grotesque blood was literally splattered across the entire cobblestone path. When the eldest son of the Wang family stepped out of his front door this morning, the sheer sight of it caused him to faint dead away on the spot.”

“Look over there!” Someone else shouted, pointing a finger toward the interior masonry of the alley. “Even though a cleanup crew already came through and scrubbed the stone, you can still see the dark residual staining right along the brickwork.”

Li Jiu peered over the shoulders of the crowd, his gaze locking onto the damp, heavily saturated stone floor. Higher up along the alley wall, faint, atomized patterns of dark brownish-red fluid were clearly visible against the mortar.

This was the exact coordinates where he had first detected that horrific, rhythmic clicking sound last night.

“Do they have an identity on the victim yet?”

“The perpetrator must be an absolute psychopath to inflict that level of violence. Have the authorities established a suspect?”

“If you ask me, I don’t think a human hand committed this murder at all!”

“Heavens, what makes you say that?”

“If it wasn’t a person, what else could it possibly be?”

“Let me tell you,”the speaker whispered, dropping his tone significantly. “I heard a series of incredibly bizarre noises outside my window last night. Shortly after, I caught the faint echo of an absolute blood-curdling shriek, but I didn’t dare crack my shutters to look. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the sounds bouncing off those walls weren’t produced by any human vocal cords.”

Another resident nodded fervently. “It has to be an anomaly. I caught a fleeting glimpse of the casualty from a distance before they cordoned it off the body was completely unrecognizable, literally torn to shreds. If a common criminal had committed a homicide, how could they possibly tear flesh apart like that?”

A skeptic countered immediately: “It could easily have been a rabid stray or some wild beast that wandered in from the outer perimeter. When a predatory animal attacks a human, do you think it cares about leaving an aesthetically clean crime scene?”

The gathering immediately dissolved into a chaotic debate regarding the systemic existence of supernatural anomalies.

Sensing the peak of the crowd’s engagement, the man who had initiated the conversation let out a loud, performative cough, a smug grin tracing his features. Once he had successfully recaptured the collective focus of the huddle, he lowered his voice to a theatrical whisper.

“As you all know, given the nature of my morning trade, I am consistently the earliest person awake in this entire district.”

“In the dead hours of dawn today, while the sky was still pitch black, I noticed a group of individuals conducting some highly unusual operations in the parallel alleyway over there. Naturally, I crept closer to get a better look.”

“Care to wager what I witnessed?”

The crowd pressed closer, their curiosity fully piqued. “What did you see, Old Jin? Out with it!”

The man slowly adjusted the heavily frayed collar of his tunic, deliberately dragging out the suspense.

“Old Jin, stop stalling! Tell us!”

Old Jin’s grin widened, visibly basking in the validation of being the center of attention. “I saw a specialized unit actively processing the carcass of a massive anomaly!”

The crowd let out a collective gasp. “No way!”

Old Jin extended his arms wide, gesturing frantically to illustrate the scale. “The corpse was absolutely massive, completely jet-black, and possessed an incredible cluster of long, horrifyingly articulated legs. It was terrifying just to look at.”

“The only reason the victim’s body over here wasn’t cleared out immediately was because that specialized unit was completely occupied with containing and transporting the anomaly’s carcass first. That’s the only reason the Wang family’s eldest boy ran straight into the crime scene and fainted.”

He scanned the faces of his audience, his eyes briefly locking with Li Jiu’s neutral gaze before he finalized his point: “So I tell you, the rumors are entirely real monsters exist!”

A cynic scoffed from the back. “Are you sure you aren’t just spinning a wild yarn, Old Jin? It sounds entirely fabricated.”

The vast majority of the huddle murmured in agreement with the skeptic. The governing authorities maintained an absolute, ironclad embargo on any information regarding anomalies; without witnessing a manifestation with their own eyes, who would willingly believe such fairy tales?

Frustrated by the sudden pushback, Old Jin began defending his claim aggressively. “I witnessed the entire extraction with my own eyes! How could it be false? I even saw the distinct tactical uniforms worn by the retrieval team they were carrying official state-issued identification!”

The pieces fit perfectly, Li Jiu thought internally, a chill running down his spine.

He possessed absolute confirmation that anomalies were real. This verified beyond a shadow of a doubt that the creature tracking him last night was indeed the Louse Anomaly, and Shen Guan had executed it with absolute prejudice.

Shen Guan literally saved my life a second time.

As for the specialized unit processing the carcass in official tactical gear, they were almost certainly operators from the Night Patrol Department.

This confirmed that his baseline theories regarding the handbook were entirely accurate: “Encountering” an entity logged its anatomical data, and if the target perished while satisfying specific conditions, the system would successfully plunder its anomalous trait.

Li Jiu lingered for a few more moments, but the crowd offered no further actionable intelligence. Realizing his shift was rapidly approaching, he quietly detached himself from the huddle and continued down the street.

He hadn’t walked more than fifty meters before the sound of hurried footsteps caught up to him from behind.

“Young man?” an elderly voice called out.

Li Jiu stopped and turned, his eyes narrowing slightly as he assessed the stranger. “Can I help you?”

The individual was an old man who appeared to be well into his late fifties, his expression intense and probing. “I noticed you stayed for the entire duration of Old Jin’s account just now. Tell me… do you already happen to know the underlying truth behind that man’s horrific demise?”