“Recently, a certain girls’ high school in our city was attacked by monsters at dawn. Fortunately, our magical girls were prepared in advance and nipped the danger in the bud…”
“So boring…”
The girl pressed the remote, shutting off today’s news.
She raised her arm, her brilliant blue long hair swaying slightly.
Her porcelain-like, playful little face was tinged with a hint of weariness.
The faint dark circles under her eyes stood out a bit.
She flopped backward onto the sofa and muttered to herself.
“Xiao Qi, clearly no magical girls showed up that day. So why did the monster disappear?”
The girl seemed to be talking to something.
To outsiders, it would look a little creepy.
In reality, she was just chatting with her contracted beast.
That’s right.
Her contracted beast.
A ripple shimmered in midair, like waves on a lake surface.
A plush doll floated out from it, as if leaping from the water like a fish.
“It’s okay, Xiao Guang. Maybe some other superpowered person happened to pass by and took care of it for us.”
It wasn’t the red-eyed QB from next door, but the official contracted beast of the magical girls—one that represented hope and beauty.
A panda plush doll!
The cute panda plush doll spoke in a melodious girl’s voice from the bow tie tied around its neck.
“Whoa! Why did you come out? Go back quickly! My brother’s about to wake up!”
The girl panicked and pressed down on the panda plush doll, trying to stuff it back into the ripple.
“Ouch! It hurts! Xiao Guang, stop! Ordinary people can’t see me!”
Hearing this, the girl’s grip loosened at once. The panda plush doll slipped free of her control.
“Ahhh… It hurts, it hurts, Xiao Guang!”
The panda plush doll fiddled with the fluff on its head in distress.
This was the part it had carefully groomed.
“Sorry, sorry! I was just worried my brother and the others would discover you…”
The girl looked at the panda plush doll pitifully.
Her round, big eyes seemed like they could squeeze out tears with a single blink.
It looked as if the panda plush doll was the one bullying her.
Seeing the girl’s pitiful appearance, the panda plush doll didn’t know what to say.
It just silently explained.
“Generally speaking, only those with magical talent can see us. Your brother… you know, he’s just an ordinary person. So no need to worry about me being discovered.”
The girl’s real name was Li Guang.
She was a thirteen-year-old junior high school student and the youngest sister in the family.
She sighed softly and rubbed her sore arm.
Last night, she had patrolled the city again until three in the morning, but hadn’t even caught a glimpse of a single monster.
“This isn’t normal, Xiao Qi.”
She sat up, staring at the magical mark on her wrist that only she could see.
“Those monsters… seem to be getting cleaned up in advance by someone.”
“Maybe there’s a new superpowered person active?”
The panda plush doll speculated.
“Or some kind of unknown natural phenomenon?”
“What natural phenomenon would turn a monster into…”
Li Guang wrinkled her delicate nose.
“Into a pile of minced meat?”
She recalled the scene she had witnessed last week.
A wolf-type monster that should have been fiercely menacing had somehow turned into minced meat scattered all over the ground.
The scene was both eerie and disgusting.
Even stranger, there were no traces of magic left at the site, nor any signs of other magical girls appearing.
“I need to head out for a bit.”
Li Guang suddenly stood up.
“There’s abnormal energy fluctuation in the East District Industrial Park. It’s probably a monster. I can’t miss it.”
…
This was Li Chi’s seventeenth year since his crossing.
In other words, his seventeenth birthday.
No. To be precise, it wasn’t a crossing.
It was seeing his previous life’s experiences.
How to put it?
In his previous life, Li Chi had been far too ordinary.
Born into a middle-class family, he had gotten into an average university.
After graduation, he dove straight into the 996 grind.
Then, nothing surprising happened in his previous life.
The only thing worth sighing over was that he got cancer right before retirement.
This life ended without him enjoying much of anything.
It was quite lamentable.
Perhaps heaven couldn’t stand it anymore.
So it let him restart with his memories wiped clean.
But perhaps due to the unique factors of this world, Li Chi often saw “himself” from his previous life’s boring experiences in his dreams.
And it wasn’t inheriting those memories.
It was more like watching a movie, letting him remember the whole process.
Therefore, the youth was still the same youth.
He had just watched an extremely boring film.
Nothing else had changed.
Ahem… Got a bit sidetracked.
Right now, Li Chi was sprawled at the stairwell, secretly watching his sister Li Guang.
Seeing her put on her school uniform and prepare to head out, Li Chi finally crawled out from the stairs.
“Xiao Guang, are you going out?”
Li Guang, who was slipping into her beloved little leather shoes at the entrance, trembled slightly.
A few beads of sweat appeared on her forehead, and she immediately broke into a smile.
“Good morning, brother. You’re up really early today.”
“Mm. Good morning.”
Who sleeps like you, not sleeping all night.
Seeing Li Guang’s unnatural greeting, Li Chi silently complained in his heart.
Li Chi sighed and ruffled his sister’s hair.
Over the past half year, he had noticed Li Guang becoming increasingly strange.
She was always finding excuses to sneak out at night, coming back exhausted, with a faint burnt smell on her from time to time.
The most suspicious part was that she always claimed to be staying over at a friend’s house.
But her friends were always evasive about it.
His parents thought their sister was just going through a rebellious phase.
Only Li Chi knew the truth.
His sister was the bane of monsters—a magical girl who punished evil and promoted good!
Actually, he had known from the very beginning that Li Guang was a magical girl.
Because even earlier than that, he had obtained another powerful force.
A year ago, he had acquired a belt.
A knight belt.
From that moment on, Li Chi had gained the qualification to enter the inner world of this utopia.
It was an organization established by a group of people with extraordinary abilities, dedicated to fighting monsters.
The people in this world had exceptionally high quality.
The crime rate was ridiculously low.
Perhaps because of the existence of special abilities, the world’s productivity was also ridiculously high.
At some point, the concept of “nation” had long since vanished.
In its place was a union that coordinated the civilization and wisdom of all humanity.
And this great union was called ‘Utopia’!
Just as the name suggested, the entire society had approached those imagined utopias—and even surpassed some ancient people’s conceptions.
However, this world seemed to follow some special law. Once humanity’s own problems were solved, a group of monsters would inexplicably emerge from somewhere.
These monsters came in two types.
One was magical creatures born from human resentment—the archenemies of magical girls, known as “monsters.”
To be honest, these monsters were easy to deal with.
They were completely idealistic.
In other words, many monsters were like this: as long as you firmly believed in your convictions and thought you could do it, you could take them down.
Conversely, the more you feared the monsters, the stronger their power became.
It was quite absurd.
To the point that Li Chi always treated them like fish to be slaughtered.
As for the other type, those were Li Chi’s real enemies.
It was like the world had come down with a serious illness and casually created non-human creatures.
They had a collective name: anti-humans.
They were like natural enemies of humanity, born to restrain humans.
They clearly possessed human forms, yet were tainted with all sorts of inexplicable things, ultimately transcending the levels of both monsters and humans.
Even Li Chi, who clashed with them frequently, only knew the tip of the iceberg about these anti-humans.
What was known so far was that anti-humans could take various forms: humans, animals, inanimate objects, even a puddle of water.
Even their essence depended on their appearance.
As for how they were born, no one knew yet…
After Li Guang left, Li Chi got ready as well.
He changed into a fresh set of clothes, then headed to the backyard of his family’s standalone villa.
After taking a deep breath of fresh air, Li Chi suddenly shouted as if he had lost his mind.
“Good morning! Shanghai City!”