Ch202-Lucky Lady

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Ch202-Lucky Lady

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A lot of things made sense, now that Sylver knew a dragon was being used to power the barrier. For starters, it made him understand the culture and mentality of the people here.

Most cities struggled to defend themselves from the monsters standing outside their gates.

It was why despite being largely inferior, warriors were still the most common type of combat unit. For a person to become a mage, a mage capable of using offensive magic, they needed a lot of training, time, and came with the risk of being unsuited for actual combat.

And a city that needed people capable of fighting right fucking now couldn’t afford that, even the people with good magical potential had no choice but to train to be a warrior.

But the Schlagen mountains were different.

They didn’t have to worry about monsters outside their barrier, or foreign armies, because breaching their barrier was literally impossible.

On top of that, the mana and Ki in the air made the soil ridiculously fertile and meant they weren’t starving. Aside from some very minor luxury items, these people didn’t have any reason to leave their cozy and well-protected bubble.

Sylver had seen similar civilizations in the past, but those were never so… infantile, the way this one was. Those were careless, but they weren’t stupid, they had some kind of plan for when their impenetrable defenses were eventually penetrated.

Sylver chose not to think about the implications of removing an entire country’s defense, because he didn’t want to, and if he was honest with himself, didn’t care. It was their own fault for standing between him and Edmund, and their own fault for being careless enough to let someone like him inside.

It wasn’t their fault, but at the end of the day, Sylver made a choice, and even if this ended up becoming another Red War type of scar on his name, it was a worthy trade for Edmund.

If it was just a dragon, then there would at the very least be a chance Sylver could threaten it or negotiate with it. But this one was the dragon, going against it would be akin to going against a god. A god that was holding Edmund hostage.

Sylver had a better chance of defeating Rose than he did defeating this dragon.

He did toy around with the idea of approaching the emperor and asking him to force the dragon into giving up Edmund, but that idea had a couple of minor flaws in it. Mainly Sylver wasn’t entirely certain as to what he could offer the man.

Make the dragon give me back my brother, or I will try to kill you?

Make the dragon give me Edmund, or I will work to free it?

All Sylver could offer were threats. And if his understanding of people was to be believed, the emperor would probably choose to kill him, either for threatening him or just in case. That’s what Sylver would have done if the roles were reversed.

Plus, the emperor was allegedly dead, so that further limited Sylver’s options.

The only real path forward was doing as the dragon said and preventing the emperor’s son, and the shield ancestor's daughter, from having a child, and waiting for the chain to snap on its own.

Sylver already knew where the son was, even if he wasn’t in a position to do anything about him. Sylver was “strong,” but invading the equivalent of a country’s capital required a bit more strength than Sylver or Faust, currently possessed.

Which was why Sylver was instead going to focus on finding the girl.

He almost wanted to dance when he had turned out to be right. The symbol carved onto the shield the dragon had shown him, was identical to one of the symbols inside the book Sylver had found in the home that belonged to Fobur Plateforged.

Sylver had read the book backward and forwards, and the symbol kept popping up every now and then. Whoever Fobur was, he clearly had some kind of connection to the shield girl.

The book was coded and Sylver couldn’t figure out how to read it, there were several houses marked on the map.

After he had had a chance to look through Fobur’s house again, Sylver planned on visiting the nearest marked building, and possibly learn of a secret shield ancestor worshiping cult, or something along those lines.

If it turned out to not have any connection, Sylver planned to travel upstream and wait for a boat carrying a girl with a birthmark on her shoulder to pass through.

Because of the fiasco at the Green Rabbit sect, Faust had decided it would be a better idea to send someone else, to trade the ingredients Sylver had gathered for jade. They were still seen as “thieves,” but now they weren’t so desperate as to accept whatever crummy deal was offered them.

More importantly, they only needed a little jade, for Faust to kickstart his alchemical career. All he really needed was a big cauldron, a fancy big cauldron, that was special in a way Faust couldn’t explain, but the important thing was that once he got it, he could make all the potions and pills that he wanted.

The jade made from selling those would then be “lent” to the sect members to buy themselves proper gear and weapons, and they would then go out hunting for more potion ingredients. Faust would then “buy” the ingredients off them, and leave them with a small amount of profit, that they will use to settle their debts.

It was a bit of a roundabout way of handling things, but this was Faust’s idea, and Sylver trusted that he knew what he was doing.

Sylver’s hope of finding some kind of clue in Fobur’s house was squashed the moment the building came into view. Sylver hadn’t been certain as to what he hoped to find, but whatever it was, he was fairly certain the fact that the entire building had been turned into rubble meant he wouldn’t have found it anyway.

Scratch that.

There were still some walls left, and the height suggested something very interesting. Whoever had destroyed it, had stopped after they finished breaking apart the place where Fobur had hid his book and letters.

While it was possible this was just a coincidence, the more likely answer, and the answer Sylver preferred, was that the book was important somehow, and the fact that Sylver was in possession of it meant he had a bargaining chip.

All that was left was figuring out who he could bargain with.

***

There were 3 different symbols that marked the buildings on the map in Fobur’s book.

The people that lived in the houses marked with an upside-down Y had all mysteriously disappeared.

Sylver’s “forgetful old man looking for his granddaughter/grandson” act did wonders for learning the homeowner’s name, place of employment, and how recently they had left.

The first two weren’t that interesting, Sylver didn’t recognize any of the names, and none of the people worked for anyone important. They were gardeners, butchers, a fishmonger, and a bard, perfectly ordinary people.

Except they packed up their shit and left in the middle of the night, roughly an hour after the time Fobur was supposedly kidnapped.

They were just gone.

And while this may be a coincidence, Sylver did take note of the fact that none of them were “local,” they had all moved to this area during the last 10 years, but none of them grew up here.

The buildings marked with an O with a line through it were perfectly normal shops. Even when Sylver gave Spring half an hour to search every available nook and cranny, he didn’t find any hiding spots or any other secret wall compartments.

The only thing all of these shops had in common was that they were owned by sect elders that had the word “Green” in their name. The Green Snake, Green Goat, Green Dog, and so on and so forth.

It was almost nighttime when Sylver finished investigating the stores and arrived at the next to last marked location. There were only 2 buildings marked with an X, and in hindsight, Sylver should have probably started with those.

Only the fact that they were so fucking far away from the rest of the marked buildings made him decide to check them out last.

The sects followed a somewhat obvious naming structure, that only became obvious after Faust had offhandedly mentioned it. There were “rings” of red, green, blue, and white, within the barrier that surrounded the Schlagen mountains.

The closer you were to the middle of the barrier, the richer/more powerful your sect was, and the same was true in reverse. White was richest and colorless was poorest. It was quite similar to the system the Garden had, except people could move between the rings freely, ish.

Once Faust paid off the debt his sect owned, their name would be “Something Sect.” After he attained more land, and some part of his sect was within the “Red Circle” his sect would become the “Red Something Sect.”

From the way he explained it, the sects traded land the way hermit crabs traded shells.

Faust paid to buy the land belonging to a red sect, that then purchased land from a green sect, that then purchased land from a blue sect, that eventually had enough money to purchase land in the White Ring. The end result was that the “ring” would stay the same, but the people living in it would change.

There were other ways of attaining land, but since Faust was handling everything, Sylver left it to him to figure out. All Sylver had to do was not kill someone important, at most he could cripple, and if Faust could forbid it, he would have forbidden Sylver from killing. As it stood Faust asked that Sylver not kill anyone important.

These sects apparently needed an honorable reason to “attack” another sect, and the reason typically tended to be “that sect’s member, killed one of our sect’s members!”

Faust also attempted to explain to Sylver how he should act when speaking to someone “higher status” than him, but then decided that Sylver wouldn’t piss someone off for the fun of it and told him to do what he thought was necessary.

If someone started shit with someone as polite and amicable as Sylver, then they started shit with him for a reason, and there wasn’t much Sylver could do about it.

***

The X-marked house was almost literally on the other side of the “country.” Sylver had moved quite quickly, using [Fog Form], but it was still a ridiculous distance to travel without using Ulvic or Will. If he didn’t have to leave Mora to help Faust guard the sect, it would have taken her maybe 15 minutes of running/flying.

Instead, Sylver could already see the horizon starting to lighten up from one of the rising suns, as he approached the X-marked house.

If the women offering their services to the drunk men were any indication, Sylver had entered a red-light district, of a sort. With his bandages covering his face and hands, limp, bad back, and the fact that he was using Ria as a cane to help him walk, the women understandably left Sylver alone.

Except for a couple of ladies, that seemed desperate for customers, until they saw which sect Sylver was part of.

The building marked in the book wasn’t a brothel, it seemed to be some kind of residential building. The door was locked, but Sylver simply walked into the alleyway near it and promptly disappeared. He materialized inside the building, in an empty and rundown room, and waited for Spring to scout the place out for him.

There was a man sitting at the very bottom of the building, a guard, and everyone else was a woman, most of them were dead asleep.

Thankfully Sylver didn’t have to spend hours waking them up and asking them if they knew what Fobur’s book and letters were about, because he found a hiding spot identical to the one at Fobur’s home. Except this one was in the ceiling, not the wall.

Spring had initially missed it because of how flush it was with the ceiling, but the interference from the lead gave its position away. Sylver once again sent an invisible tendril of fog through the keyhole of the door, traveled down two floors, and finally materialized inside the room with the contraption.

A nude woman was sleeping with her back to the door, even without feeling her out with his mana, Sylver could tell she was one errant sound away from waking up.

Thankfully his magic suppressed any noise he could have potentially made, and his knowledge of soul magic meant that she wouldn’t feel his presence. The floor was tinkered in a very interesting way, it wasn’t that every single floorboard would make a sound, but instead, they were locked together like a spider’s web.

If someone stepped onto the floor, it would be slight, but someone actively looking for it would feel the wood move.

Sylver’s [Bracelet Of The Aurai] took care of this problem, as he very gently removed Ria from his robe, and pointed the staff towards the leaded mechanism. Ria didn’t make a sound as she slowly drilled a hole that was smaller than a human hair a short distance away from the hiding spot and worked her way into the mechanism.

Truth be told, if Sylver had eyes that saw in the dark, he very likely wouldn’t have noticed the woman. She had suppressed her soul so much that even though he was aware she was standing there, he struggled to focus on her.

She was still naked as she stood near the door and Sylver-

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

He could practically hear her heart jump to her throat. Anyone would be scared of feeling a presence in a dark and empty room and would rightfully shit themselves if they had an all-powerful system confirm the existence of the aforementioned presence.

Expect it wasn’t quite fear that Sylver felt emanating from the woman.

Sylver wasn’t sure what to do or say, as the woman stared at his left knee since he was crouching midair, as Ria continued tinkering with the contraption above them.

He would later question what exactly was going through his mind, as he used [Fog Form] to materialize behind her and proceeded to form a deafening sphere around her head, as he tried to stop her from running away.

The reason he would later question what was going through his mind, was because the woman didn’t try running away as Sylver grabbed her, she instead dislocated her left shoulder as she twisted her body to face Sylver.

She then headbutted him so hard that the cartilage of his nose got crushed, and one of the loose bones in his face pierced his brain. It didn’t even take Sylver a full second to recover from the sudden brain death, but that fraction of a second was more than enough for the woman to just fucking disappear.

As Sylver stabilized his body and looked around, his best guess was that the massive hole in the wall, where the window used to be, was probably the direction the woman had gone.

Granted, Sylver’s moves were limited by the fact he didn’t want to give his position away and didn’t want to attract attention, but even with that, this was still an unexpected outcome.

It was downright embarrassing.

Even the fact that the woman scratched her forehead on Sylver’s lower teeth was pure stupid luck.

Sylver walked over to Ria and silently tapped her a question, as he felt the whole house awaken from the sound the woman made when she destroyed the wall during her escape.

“How big is it?” Sylver asked, as Ria understood what he was planning on doing, and etched four lines into the ceiling.

Sylver used [Deadly Darkness] to carve out a rectangle out of the ceiling, and with Ria still inside of it, pulled it out of the ceiling as a solid block. He proceeded to jump out of the hole the woman had made, and with the wooden brick weighing him down, jumped from roof to roof, until he found a good enough hiding spot.

He very carefully collected the tiny amount of skin the woman had scrapped on his teeth, as Ria continued working on the potentially explosive safe.

Sylver’s face made a squelching sound as he pulled his nose out of his face and discovered that the woman had sent some sort of shockwave into his head. His bear soul armor took the brunt of it, but without it, Sylver’s liquified brain would have exploded out of the back of his skull.

These cultivators were really fast.

Sadly, the woman’s attack only caused about 300 HP worth of damage and wasn’t enough for [Hare’s Great Escape] to activate. Sylver turned away from Ria and pushed the shattered cartilage out of his face and rewrapped his face with fresh bandages.

His body was healing, but Sylver wanted his arms and legs to be healed first before he started working on his head and face.

He heard a soft click noise from where Ria was and saw the wooden door open. Just like in Fobur’s house, there was an identical notebook inside, along with 4 sealed and booby-trapped envelopes. Sylver stored them away in his [Bound Bones] storage and used [Dead Dominion] to separate the woman’s skin from Sylver’s blood-soaked bandages.

“Are you alright?” Ria asked, as Sylver placed a small wooden bowl onto the floor and moved the tiny skin scraps into it.

“I’ll be fine,” Sylver said, as he slowly mixed some blood from the jar full of clone blood with the skin scraps and waited for it to dissolve.

“I mean no offense when I say this, but this is the second time you’ve lost a fight. First when that boy decapitated you, and just now,” Ria said, and Sylver could do little but shrug his shoulders.

“I could have killed him if I wanted to, and I could have killed this woman, but I wanted that guy alive, and I wouldn’t have been able to talk to a corpse… Not yet anyway, talking to the dead is very difficult if you don’t have the right magical affinity,” Sylver explained, as the blood in the wooden bowl started to gently bubble, as if it was boiling.

“I’ve noticed you’ve been a lot more hesitant since we came here. Normally you would have leaned out of the way of her head, or headbutted her first, but you barely reacted,” Ria said, as Sylver watched as the blood floated out of the bowl and started condensing into a needle.

“I am unused to fighting cultivators. Normally I can predict what a person will do by looking at their mana, or their primal energy field, but cultivators don’t have the same tells, so to speak. I’ll get used to reading them in a couple of weeks, but we will hopefully be done with all of this before I have to,” Sylver explained, as the needle flickered with a golden light, and stopped floating.

Sylver caught it in the palm of his hand and made it float again. The needle flicked left, then right, and then as if there was an extremely powerful magnet acting on it, pointed forward, and a bit down.

The woman was hopefully in a safe house or something.

“Would you mind picking all the lead out of it?” Sylver asked with a gesture towards the wall fragment.

Several clinks later, all the lead-lined gears were sitting in a small pile away from them, while Sylver disappeared the wooden wall fragment into his [Bound Bones] storage, to dispose of later.

Sylver was glad for his lack of eyes, being blinded by the sunrise while following the woman’s trail would have been an annoyance he didn’t need right now.

***

The woman led Sylver even further away from Faust’s sect.

And Sylver almost decided it wasn’t worth the effort when the needle finally stopped moving. The woman had walked/ran for nearly 6 hours, and Sylver had to hop from roof to roof, each time worried that she would get out of the tracker’s range.

He had considered returning to her room to look around for loose hair, nail clipping, or the like, but he decided to only do that after he lost her.

While he was on the move, Sylver flipped through the woman’s book and discovered the vast majority of it to be identical to Fobur’s. There were maybe 10 pages in total that were different from his, and the only reason they were different was that they were missing words.

Even the maps and marked buildings were the same.

The area Sylver was in right now was right next to the river. To be more accurate, the “town” was built with the river at the center. The buildings were tall and were leaning over the river like an arched bridge, with small rope bridges connecting them to one another, while simultaneously holding them together.

Cranes and large metal hooks hang several feet above the rushing water below. Every now and then, a boat would pass, and without stopping, the cargo would be caught and lifted into the buildings above. They were using some kind of pulley system, where the cargo being lowered onto the boat, was timed perfectly with a similar cargo being lifted upward.

There was a lot of shouting, and people jumping over one another, and yet amidst the chaos, nothing fell, got tangled, or didn’t go where it needed to go. The people here were particularly short, and Sylver stood out like a sore thumb, even if he hadn’t been wearing black, while they all wore beige and brown.

Thankfully Sylver found a good spot out of people’s sight, and he proceeded to use [Fog Form] to travel in the last direction the compass had shown.

It actually hurt him to suppress his soul this much, but it was worth the effort. The woman had no idea he was here, and while a part of Sylver didn’t feel great about watching a woman change clothes, he didn’t particularly mind.

Especially since he was able to confirm she didn’t have a birthmark on her shoulder. Things would have been a lot simpler if she did.

Still, this wasn’t a good spot for an ambush/conversation, the woman could very easily disappear through the floor, ceiling, or any of the rickety wooden walls. She could then use her insane speed to jump from rope to rope, and ultimately dive into the river and disappear.

Sylver considered his approach, as he watched her rummage through a small leather backpack and then watched as she began wrapping some kind of bandage around her chest.

She expertly increase the tension, and with every pull, compressed her chest until it was almost perfectly flat. She took her time further adjusting the bandages so that they didn’t impede her movement.

Sylver had to decide if he should attack her and get a bigger sample of blood so he could track her down when she ran, or if there was a way of demonstrating he was just here to talk.

The problem here was that the woman wasn’t letting her guard down, not even for a second. She was alone in an enclosed room, the only way in or out was bolted shut, and her only source of light was a small grey-colored candle.

Sylver planned to hit her on the back of her head, knock her out, and then tie her up so he would have a couple of seconds to explain himself.

Somehow, he didn’t get the feeling she would be all that willing to talk if he did that.

If he used [Deadly Darkness] to wrap her in his shadow, or [Necrotic Mutilation] to pin her down, he doubted they would hold out against her shockwave attack.

In the end, Sylver had a rather stupid idea but couldn’t think of anything better. If it worked, great, if not, he had Spring and the shades on standby to at the very least get some blood out of her.

Sylver materialized in front of the woman, with the two books in one hand, and the letters in his other hand.

“I come in peace,” Sylver said to the frozen woman.

Her muscles weren’t tensing, but if he hadn’t watched her moving around a few seconds earlier, he could have believed she was a statue.

She’s compressing her Ki, Sylver realized, as even the woman’s heart stopped beating, and her primal energy field became denser with every passing second. He didn’t know if he could figure out a way to counteract such an attack.

“I need your help to rescue Fobur Plateforged,” Sylver said.

It wasn’t a lie, if he wanted to rescue Fobur, he would need her help. The fact that he didn’t want to rescue him, had nothing to do with the fact that he needed her help if he did.

5 seconds of silence passed, and Sylver decided that if the woman didn’t react positively to his next attempt, he would have to kill her if she tried to run away.

He summoned 5 gold coins on top of the two books.

The woman didn’t react.

Alright, shot in the dark.

“Fuck the emperor?” Sylver said, and if he had needed to breathe, would have breathed out a sigh of relief alongside the woman.

Still got it.

NEXT CHAPTER 

(AN: This is most likely the last post for February. It took 200 chapters but we're finally going to start unraveling a bit of the initial question of "Why did the MC wake up in a needle?" Probably.

Other than that, I don't really know to say. It's still a bit surreal that I'm earning money from my writing. 2 years ago I had a whole plan for my life, I'd work here, I'd do this, I'd do that, and if I'm lucky, I'll end up here and here.

Instead you lot came in and derailed all of that by going "here's the money you used to make in a year, in a fucking month, and instead of doing something you hate, you're going to actually give a shit about your work, and you're going to love it." 

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is thank you for all the support! I wouldn't be here without you!)