We sat down in the big house of the village elder while he told me all about his nightmare.

That guy talked a lot, so I'll sum it up for you:

Basically, he was getting chased in his dreams for the past ten nights by a giant bao bun. It might not sound scary, but apparently he was so terrified that he forgot who he was after every dream.

Then I went around and questioned villagers all over town. The stories were all the same:

A giant, terrifying, horrendous baozi, sometimes red bean-filled, sometimes meat-filled, sometimes vegetable-filled, was chasing these people in their dreams.

The Terrifying Baozi had already driven at least five villagers to madness, and caused one villager to die of stress illness.

This was definitely the Soul Torment technique — a technique in which evil spirits were called upon to periodically torment someone's soul until they went mad from fear.

What was confusing me was this bao bun shit.

Why was the evil spirit showing up as a freaking baozi in everyone's dreams? Seemed kinda silly to me.

The most important question was: why didn't people just turn around and eat the big bun in their dreams, heh?

Anyways, I decided to look into this further. I sat the wispy-bearded scraggly village elder down.

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"I am going to perform the Memory Divination technique on you. Hold still."

With that, I grabbed the village elder's temples and closed my eyes, diving into his memories.

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In his memories, I saw many things. Lots of bao buns. Lots of munching on bao buns. Nightmares of being chased by an admittedly terrifying baozi that seemed to be dripping freaking blood (gross, who would eat that? I guess turning around to eat it wasn't a viable solution).

But then, I saw something else.

A memory from ten years ago — a young, pretty-faced boy, maybe eight or nine, stealing steaming bao buns from the village elder's kitchen. The village elder caught him and beat him to a pulp!

And then again, not long after — that boy coming in to steal yummy baozi again, getting caught, and getting beaten to a pulp.

And then again, and again! It was almost like the memories were showing on rerun, except the boy kept getting older little by little until the boy was about thirteen and had stolen about a hundred times! Damn, did he just never learn his lesson?

I felt around a little more in the village elder's rickety memory, searching for information on that young bao bun thief.

Suddenly, my eyes shot open.

"I know who the culprit is," I announced. The village elder gasped, along with a few other village leaders who had gathered round to watch me work.

"Who? Who's the culprit?" they chorused anxiously.

"Give me a moment, and I'll find him." I closed my eyes, sending out my newly advanced divine sense. The culprit couldn't be far. According to the reports I'd gotten, the nightmares had been occurring for years now. The one cursing this town with bao bun soul torture had to be nearby, since the technique required a certain radius of distance from the targets (barring those who had enormous power, like me, heheh — I could probably soul-torture someone across the world if I wanted! If I wanted, heheh).

I opened my eyes, smiling. "Got him."

With that, I pulled Destiny Blade out of the air, hopped on, and shot out of the room to go catch my criminal — the soul-torturer, and professional baozi thief.