Slam.
A thick stack of folders were slammed into Liu Tang's coffee table. Jiang Shen and Yuan crossed their arms and waited for Liu Tang to check all of these one by one to help them with their cases.
"I have to finish all of these?" Liu Tang asked. "But there are so many."
"Sixteen cases to be exact," Jiang Shen counted. "Those are the ones who had no lead and evidences whatsoever. A lot of them are gruseom deaths, but we couldn't find any clue. Everything was clean."
"Just like in the case of Ms. Quan Rui," Yuan added. "Her body was mauled, a lot of her organs were missing but there didn't seem to show any signs of struggle at all."
"Signs of struggle?" Liu Tang asked.
"When you face someone who's about to attack you, your instinct would be to fight or run," Yuan said. "Quan Rui did not show either of those signs."
"That'sā" Liu Tang paused. He was still hesitant to tell them about the Bureau of Transmigrated Cultivators. They didn't say that their identity was top secret, but they also didn't state that just anyone could know of their identity.
"Do you know something?" Jiang Shen asked, to which Liu Tang denied.
"No. I don't know how the scene got cleaned, but I do know what happened to her," Liu Tang said. "But I do know that I killed the culprit. It was a Taotie, a beast that eats human flesh and is one of the Four Chaos."
"If you would've told me something like that before earlier today, I wouldn't have believed you and think of you as a fool," Yuan confessed. "But after a dragon, lion, bird hybrid took our car, I believe you all too well."
"I'm going to read all of these cases by tomorrow," Liu Tang said. "I want to rest now. The Pixiu tired me so much."
The police officers left Liu Tang's apartment not long after. He watched the pile of files in his table and groaned, thinking that he was actually entangled into such a difficult position.
The man sat on the sofa and took the first folder just so he could read it. It was a case from three years ago.
"The Walking Torso," Liu Tang reas the case title. "Several corpses had been reported to the police. These corpses were missing a single body part which was common to all of them, the torso. The torsos of these said corpses would eventually be reported walking in the middle of the night."
"Walking?" Liu Tang scrunched his face. "What the hell?"
He took out the case photos and grimaced when he saw a full torso of a human but there were four pairs of elongated human legs attached to it. There were two on the shoulder region while two on the hip region.
"How come they never thought that this was spiritual when they saw something as gruesome as this?" Liu Tang scoffed. He continued to read through the papers until he saw the victims.
There were seven of them but only three were identified. The rest were buried in nameless graves, without any families.
This irked Liu Tang for some reason. He felt like there was something more that's happens underneath all of these cases. A foul play was happening, but he couldn't quite figure out what.
He continues to read until he reached the end where there was a note from Yuan himself.
"For all the time I spent in this job, this is the first time I ever felt fear," Liu Tang read the message aloud. He sighed, but understood where Yuan was coming from.
Even his hair stood at the sight of the walking torso. It wasn't something that he had seen before, and he had seen a lot of gruesome things in his lifetime.
In the case files also included the parts that the torso was cut from. These parts were horrifying to look at, seeing the head and limbs detached from the body.
"How come," Liu Tang paused for a moment. "How can any beast have done this?"
"Hello!"
Liu Tang stood and immediately spun after he heard a small woman squeak behind him. He was still too immersed into the horror and mystery of the case that the little sound the woman created made him snap.
"Oh, I'm sorry," the woman bowed. "I'm Mary from the Bureau of Transmigrated Cultivators. I'm from the Management Division and was meant to take your file from from the Admissions Division, but it's my first task so I was lost."
"What?" Liu Tang scoffed. "What does all of this mean?"
"I will be your manager," Mary said. Mary was a small young girl with a frail body. Her eyes were dark blue and her hair was blonde, easily making her stand out from the rest. She was a foreigner. "I will hand you the missions and will be measuring your progress."
"And why do I need a manager?" Liu Tang scoffed. "And why am I in here in the first place? I was supposed to fight DongFeng in a battle an defeat him and them achieve the Celestial status."
"That is out of my hands, sir," Mary suddenly cried after hearing Liu Tang raise his voice at her. "It's only my first task and they already gave me a hard time."
"I'm sorry for snapping at you like that," Liu Tang had finally calmed down. "I was just frustrated about all of these. Why did I get sent here in the first place? What was the reason."
"It's the will of the Heavens, sir," Mary said. "Achieving a Celestial status is not just by burning Qi. You must help another planet by ridding them of the bad spirits and evil beasts so you can go back to your own and become a god."
"Why do I need to help them?" Liu Tang sighed. "And why could I cultivate through making coffee and not by burning my Qi in the Astral Zone?"
"Now that is something that I cannot answer," Mary said honestly. "To be honest, I'm as lost as you are. I don't even know why you guys are being sent here apart from helping the worlds without any cultivators to get rid of the threats. I don't know if it's just a final requirement for you or anything at all. I have no idea."
Liu Tang stood there, watching Mary ramble on. He slammed his palm in his face and groaned. "You do realize that you just told me what I wanted to know, right?"
"I did?" Mary tilted her head to the side. "But I don't know anything."
"This is the final requirement to achieve the Celestial status," Liu Tang said. "This world does not have cultivators with them, so the heavens would pick some cultivators from other worlds and test them here."
"I guess that's what's happening, yeah," Mary nodded. "It's good that my cultivator is smart and could easily catch on."
"And it's my bad that my manager is dumb and stupid," Liu Tang sighed, but he didn't have a choice. "Alright. The heavens wanted me to help this world, then I will cultivate as much as I can to help it."