“How serious are things? You look really concerned.” Rash asked when he took a small piece of note paper from Josephine Wong: “I’m not good at reading facial expressions yet. But I can sorta tell you are worried.”

“Yes, I am worried. You can read the notes and see why.” Josephine Wong sighed.

“I wish I could help.” Rash petted the white fur ball for a brief moment and said: “Too bad I am still recovering - eating the wrong stuff is hella hard to recover from. You wanna pet Snowball here? It’d give you a good mood and brighten your day a bit.”

“Huh. This is a minor spirit isn’t it?” Josephine Wong ran her fingers through the soft white fur on the fur ball’s body, the fur ball purred comfortably and rolled around on the desk like an actual animal.

“Yeah, apparently it’s brought here by Mr. Yu’s students.” Rash chuckled: “It’s quite… wonderful we could still have these. In the wild they’d just been killed or eaten.”

Snowball turned its big and shiny eyes on Josephine Wong and blinked a few times, as if it was a cat enjoying the touch of its owner.

Josephine Wong chuckled and shook her head, then she stood up and went into the kitchen and found a clay jar from under one of the counter drawers: “Rash, when he’s back, tell him that I had to borrow this jar.”

“Okay, sure, what is it?” Rash asked.

“It’s his mixed oil. Tell him I’ll pay him later.”

“No problem, he told me you can take anything.” Rash nodded: “But I’ll be sure to pass your message to him. Anything else I can help you with?”

“I’ll take some of these as well.” Josephine Wong put the clay jar into her tiny purse, then she proceeded to take a few bottles of wine stored in the most inner corners of the fridge with paper coverings on the openings. The paper coverings had all sorts of hand drawn patterns on it, and with some Mandarin texts describing the purposes of the wine.

“No problem. I - I think Mr. Yu will surely be okay with you taking those as well.” Rash nodded.

“Thanks Rash.” Josephine Wong put all the bottles into her little purse and said: “Please be sure to tell him - find me immediately. If he can’t find me, tell him to go to Clearwater Municipal Hospital. There’s something he’ll definitely be interested in.”

“Understood.”

“Thank you Rash. And congratulations.”

After Josephine Wong left, Rash started reading the notes she left for Jianmen, as she indicated that it would be okay for him to do so.

“Clearwater Municipal Hospital.

“Located in the deserted plains at the edge of San Jose, at least one hour drive from the closest civilian areas. In the surrounding areas, three sealing arrays were placed to prevent the dark energy from spreading.

“Official records about the operations of the hospital were mostly damaged or corrupted beyond recovery. The rest are missing, classified or permanently redacted. There are ongoing investigations into the operation history of the hospital, the Division will also start collecting records from side sources like local newspapers and local civilian government archives.

“The Division suffered five casualties during a routine investigative and dark energy suppressing operation. The site seemed to be the place of dormancy belonging to an instance of clustered malice, which is beyond unconventional since the Division has the duty to document all instances of clustered malice with sufficient details, especially for instances of this kind of scale.

“Yet, the documents and records are mostly missing. The Division didn’t even have an official entry in the database or archives. The previous team that were in charge of the maintenance of this site were disbanded due to multiple resignations before the current liaison took office.

“From two personal visits into the site, I was able to witness a few pieces of memory replay, and thus was able to deduce some information regarding its past, combining some other pieces of information my team found.

“First is Eric Shaw, the Chief Administration Officer of the hospital. He graduated with mediocre grades from a well known medical school, and got selected as the Chief Administration Officer through some kind of personal connection. There was very little indication that he was aware of the true nature of the paranormality related experiments that were being done in the hospital.

“Second thing is Nurse Shirley, from multiple records, including some second hand gossip gathered from Jason Lin’s friends and some real life experience from Mr. Lin himself, she was the one that tried to stop the experiment by feeding some unknown substance to three of the subjects. My team was able to find interesting records regarding this nurse. She has an aunt who acted as a medium and fortune teller around the San Jose area around the same time the hospital remained operational. Judging from the memories replayed in and around the room 3-5-13, she may have found some kind of substance that acted as a repelling agent to repel malice being cultivated inside these subjects.

“The third thing is, the memory replays aren’t normal and natural occurrences due to the energy fields present on site. They seemed to be periodically triggered, and some kind of energy seemed to be extracted from each replay. The thing that keeps triggering the energy replays seems to be utterly unclean,corrupted and corrosive, and it shows some distinct features from the normal core of an instance of clustered malice. Judging that the maintainer of the core of the clustered malice residing inside the hospital is absent, there might be something else maintaining it, and seems to be far more dangerous and insidious. I suspect it could even be a living source of karmic corruption.”

“Crap.” Rash closed the note, thought about it for a while, then he ran his hand across the pages, then he took out a piece of paper and with a wave of his hand the texts from Josephine Wong’s handwriting was somehow copied onto that piece of paper.

Next, Rash folded the paper up and put it right into his mouth. After a short moment, he spit the folded paper out of the window and up towards the sky. The piece of paper turned into a light green energy arrow and disappeared into the clouds in a blink of an eye.

“Hopefully it could reach you in time, Mr. Yu.”