Agent Hall followed Jianmen as he jumped and ran around the site, seemingly looking for something. And after a few turns and hops over some buildings, they reached a place where some historic buildings resided. Just like many other buildings in the area, these buildings looked like they were not heavily damaged, but reeked of something unpleasant.
Agent Hall was feeling more disturbed when he approached these buildings - he came to this area before and was creeped out by them, but the feeling back then was not even half as strong as today. It was as if the area around him was reacting to the presence of this Mr. Yu in front of him. The creepy feelings these buildings gave him were due to his gift - he could hear the flow of energy, especially supernatural energy, if he paid close attention, he could even hear the “sound” of sunlight and the gravity pulling big objects down. Usually, the sounds he heard all had some kind of rhythm or flow to them, and in the case of sudden energy bursts like lightning strikes or explosions, the sound would be sudden jolts of loud or high pitched noises. But when he got close to these buildings, all he could hear from them were voices of intangible mumbling, low screams and occasional painful moans.
And right now, even with the protective earplugs on, he could still hear these disturbing sounds, only they sounded somewhat different than last time he came here - the voices seemed to be angrier, more fearful, and -
“Angrier, isn’t it?” Jianmen smiled at Agent Hall: “It doesn’t want us here.”
“What is it? Why is it making these kinds of noises - why is it rebuilding the houses and even placing the trash back in their places? ”
“The job description mentioned that the graves of past saints and other esteemed figures were vandalised before the catastrophe happened.” Jianmen snapped his fingers, and an energy bubble appeared around Agent Hall and kept him inside: “And it’s kind of a by-product of corrupted remains of saints and esteemed individuals. Stay where you are. This should be over quick.”
Three streams of dark liquid broke the ground around Jianmen and gushed into the air. Countless cries, angry curses and moanings instantly struck Agent Hall like someone turned on hundreds of loudspeakers around him at the same time. Agent Hall covered his ears instinctually, but that did not help at all.
“Hell.” Jianmen snapped his fingers again, the energy bubble around Agent Hall became thicker and blocked off all of the voices.
The three streams of dark liquid shot up into the sky and rained down in droplets. These droplets turned into leeches, snakes, flies, snails and all other kinds of bugs and poisonous creatures in the air. The dark liquid was also starting to flood the ground around the holes and moving to surround Jianmen.
Jianmen waved his left hand and took a few balls of liquid from the main flow, and a rattan broom appeared in his right hand.
“Back off, fucking filth!” Jianmen slammed the broom against the ground, a ring of shockwave exploded from him, impacting everything around him except the protective energy bubble and Agent Hall.
The dark liquid around Jianmen all got burnt and turned to ashes and smoke in an instant. The ground beneath cratered and collapsed. A loud rumble came from the ground under Jianmen, and no more dark liquid appeared or remained around him.
A few other buildings around them collapsed, which included the building at which Jianmen threw a rock at earlier.
“So, to answer your question - this is the power of ‘memory’.” Jianmen retracted the spell that constructed the energy bubble around agent hall and let him land on his feet: “This might be surprising to you, but sometimes things can have memories just like us. And corrupted remains of saints and esteemed individuals could have this effect - it kinda ‘remembers’ the area in which it resides in a certain state, and that memory itself has the power to maintain itself and keep things the way they are remembered to be. I won’t bore you with the details - just think of it as one of the weakest forms of ‘one wills it and thus it be’.”
“Shit.” Agent Hall only had one word to say.
“Alright, I’ve got my samples.” Jianmen showed Agent Hall the three balls of the dark liquid he collected earlier: “Let’s head back. We’ve got work to do, I will analyze the contents of these, and I will make a list of all the material I’ll need you to put out an order for me. I’ll need them all collected within 12 hours.”
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“... and typically for all of these kinds of controlled clustered malice, they impose a great toll on the controller as well.” the call with Jianmen did not take long, so when Caroline and Jason went back to their class, the topic Assistant Professor Jackson was discussing did not shift too much from that when they left for the call: “And we know, that there are actually many cases where the controller ended up getting consumed by the clustered malice. So in more recent documented cases, it became quite common that the controllers of clustered malice will employ some kind of strong hypnotic spell to force the entire instance of clustered malice to go into a dormant state - this means that the instance will ‘go to sleep’ just like animals and us.
“When clustered malice lies dormant, it will become less dangerous and harmful and the process of overgrowth will slow significantly, which allows the controller to rest, regain strength and make use of its power when the opportune time comes. But again, this comes with a problem in itself - anyone wants to take a guess?”
The entire classroom went silent for a while, then finally someone other than Jason and Caroline raised their hand and asked: “Does it dream? Since cluster malice has some kind of primitive hive mind and integrated consciousness - it could still have the ability to dream right?”
“Indeed, yes, very nice, Mr. Anderson.”
