Hunter of Mysterious Creature-Chapter 527 - 111: Emotional Aberration

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"Yes, yes, yes, I’m at the shopping center in the new district. There’s a mysterious creature here, it interfered with the communication signals in this area. I took care of it, so the signal block was lifted. It’s as simple as that." Sun Hang said into the phone, "I have other things to deal with right now, I probably won’t be coming over for the time being. Leave Yang Lian to you as her sister. Alright, that’s it, I’ll hang up first... Oh, wait, I forgot to say, send a squad to the entrance of the shopping center to pick someone up."

"You ask who? Just a scavenger." Sun Hang finished speaking and directly hung up Yang Qi’s call.

The scavenger girl looked at Sun Hang with trepidation—during the call, Sun Hang had glanced at her several times, and even though her hearing was impaired, she wasn’t stupid. She could see that Sun Hang’s conversation had something to do with her.

Sun Hang walked over to her, placing his hand on her shoulder—and the next second, Sun Hang’s voice rang directly in her mind: "Someone will pick you up at the entrance of the shopping center later, just go with them."

With a "thud," the scavenger girl, pale-faced, immediately knelt down, trembling, "Please... please don’t hand me over to the Investigation Bureau... don’t..."

"Uh... you might have misunderstood, the ones coming to pick you up aren’t from the Investigation Bureau, but from the Mysterious Creature Research Institute."

Not saying would have been better, as soon as Sun Hang mentioned the institute, images of "dissection," "live experiments" flashed through the scavenger girl’s mind, making her tremble even more intensely.

"What I mean is, since you provided useful information, I can overlook the fact that you shot me with a crossbow." Sun Hang also realized the ambiguity of his words, "As for why I’m having the institute’s people pick you up, it’s because their medical facilities can cure your ears. Once your ears are healed, you’re free to go wherever you want... Of course, if you get caught by the Sheriff for theft or something else later, that’s not my problem."

Although Sun Hang could also use the ability of Yi 423 to heal the scavenger girl’s ears, he didn’t do so.

There were more severe issues with this girl than just her ears.

Or rather, it’s not just her problem, but an issue for the entire city of Tianfu.

The upper echelons’ attention was entirely focused on Chimera 17, and very few people could see the struggles of these people at the bottom.

Sun Hang is not a saint, he doesn’t care much about the life and death of those unrelated to him... However, in those people who were "assimilated" by mysterious creatures, and those who were infected by contaminated water sources and turned into mysterious creatures, Sun Hang felt an extremely strong negative emotion.

Including these scavengers, everyone struggling on the line of subsistence, even those who were unable to go out for long periods due to martial law, all of them would turn into breeding grounds for negative emotions.

Sole reliance on existing policies makes it difficult to ensure everyone can access psychological counseling services provided by the government.

Not to mention the methods of counseling, many people don’t even know such services exist. Some, even when their negative emotions have concentrated to the point of consuming them, won’t think there’s anything wrong with their psychological state and wouldn’t resort to seeing a psychologist.

They will vent their resentment on other things, resenting the mysterious creatures, resenting the Federation Government, resenting their fate... even resenting those around them.

Such individuals are the most prone to "emotional mystification."

And ironically, those people have the lowest probability of accepting psychological counseling.

This is a critical flaw in current policy.

Just now Sun Hang saw shadows named "fear" and "despair" behind the scavenger girl, but after he told her that the institute’s people were coming to help heal her ears and assured her she would regain her freedom after treatment, those shadows visibly faded...

Sun Hang even felt that they were just one step away from crossing that dangerous "threshold."

If this issue isn’t handled correctly, the city of Tianfu might be flooded with new mysterious creatures born from "emotional mystification" in the near future... And the most fatal part is, once the secret of emotional mystification spreads among the public, the induced panic could lead to an extremely severe vicious cycle!

It’s not that knowing negative emotions can lead to mystification would naturally cause people to vent them... If humans could easily control their emotions, the profession of psychology wouldn’t be so popular, and numerous criminal cases triggered by emotions could be avoided...

Sun Hang suddenly recalled a joke about a device that could monitor human brain activity. A group of volunteers was invited to participate in the test of this device—all of them had electrodes attached to their brains, and the researchers conducting the test stood among them, asking them various questions.

When the researcher said, "Please don’t imagine an elephant, whatever you do, don’t think of an elephant," according to the monitoring results, almost everyone’s mind conjured up images of elephants.

Except for one person.

That person came from a country in the Arctic Circle, had never received education, couldn’t read, didn’t use the internet, and had never watched television... He didn’t even understand what the word "elephant" meant, as mentioned by the researchers.

Ignorance is bliss, continuing to keep the secret of emotional mystification is the best current solution, but how long this secret can be kept is uncertain.

Sun Hang took a deep breath and retracted the mycelium he had spread out—he had already absorbed the remaining memetic residue from the mysterious creature’s remains, but unfortunately, those memetic fragments did not grant him new abilities, only slightly restored his heavily depleted mana.

This mysterious creature wasn’t particularly strong, its ability to block communication signals was achieved by leveraging the shopping center’s machine room. Its actual combat capability wasn’t even as good as a Tai Sui... The only somewhat interesting point was its "interaction effect" with the videotape as an "Alpha-type mysterious creature."

As long as the videotape hasn’t been played to that crucial point, it’s almost invincible—it’s like a spectator breaking through to the fourth wall, unable to affect this world, and not influenced by anything from this world.