Picking up the note, I began reading… only to realize the letter was extremely short.

---

Tobias, I’ll see you later. Don’t do anything stupid.

Borrowing your umbrella.

-Rin

---

Slipped the letter into my bag, I closed my eyes to think.

That answered some questions and opened up several others. It is just like her to leave such a short letter.

Biting my lip, I found myself frowning.

There was no mention of God-hunter. Rin would’ve mentioned taking God-hunter had she done it… Has something had gone wrong? I continued searching around the room and confirmed what I already knew, God-hunter definitely wasn’t here.

Someone found must’ve taken God-hunter. She might've been pulled into that illusionary universe with me. If God-hunter was able interact with the real world, she would’ve fought back.

Without special circumstance, that means someone took her whilst she couldn’t fight back.

A cold fury filled my body and my eyes turned cold and emotionless. Yet, a surreal calmness underlined those emotionless eyes hiding a pool of anger.

Hell hath no doors, yet thou hath barged inside.

Causing my anger is extraordinarily difficult. I’m not the kind of person who gets angry over things, but…

Nobody touches my family.

Before anything else, I need to find out who took God-hunter. The clairvoyant should be able to help with that.

I head upstairs and found the staircase door unblocked, the man remained petrified inside the bar. I might unpetrify him eventually, but that would be long after solving my current problems.

Stepped out onto the street, I gazed around the street. There weren’t many people around, but there was still a few.

As I glanced over them, the people all turned into stone statues.

Whoops… Uhh? Eh. Whatever, they aren't dead and I don’t have time to care about them. None of them look familiar.

I’m on a time-limit. There are 14 hours left on the system battery (I guess I didn’t wake me up immediately). While that’s not a hard time-limit, finding God-hunter will probably become exponentially more difficult without being able to communicate.

I need to do something about this petrifying gaze. Going around petrifying everyone isn’t exactly conductive to holding a thorough investigation.

Trying to control my petrifying gaze whilst I walked around the hard difficulty portion of the residential zone.

I failed. As the growing line of petrified pedestrians attests.

As I continued walking around, I realized one of the people petrified was leaning down to pick up a pair of glasses.

Picking up the glasses, I placed them on my face.

Blurry.

They’re prescriptive glasses.

I had to blink multiple times to adjust my eyesight. Everything is blurry and difficult to concentrate on.

Saluting toward the petrified person who’d surrendered his glasses for the overall good of the public, I continued walking forward.

Utilizing the glasses to block my direct line of vision worked, as I quickly discovered. A stroke of good fortunate as I found a large crowd of people rush toward the petrified statues with weapons drawn.

Ignoring them, I continued walking.

The crowd stopped upon seeing the statues. They began talking amongst themselves.

“What happened?”

“Did Medusa walk by or something? Why are they all petrified?”

“Who are you kidding? Medusa is only a legend.”

“It definitely Bai Xiaobao’s fault! He’s struck again!”

Bai Xiaobao?

Pausing…I glanced back toward the crowd. Hearing my disciple’s name had successfully caught my attention.

I hadn’t seen him in awhile.

While I’m busy, if he’s nearby… Bai Xiaobao might be the person who stole God-hunter. Knowing his troublesome nature, it definitely isn’t impossible.

“Split up and find him.” Someone shouted, the crowd continued forward searching through the statues.

I felt a headache, and couldn’t help but quietly stare toward the blurry crowd of people that had their weapons drawn.

What had Bai Xiaobao done to anger everyone?

“He’s here!” Said someone pointing at a statue.

The crowd quickly gathered around and decided to following after them.

Sure enough, one of the statues was Bai Xiaobao. He had panicked expression and his eyes were glancing sideways. He was clutching a round object in his hands.

“He’s turned to stone? Was this an accident this time?”

“Do you think he’s responsible for everyone turning to stone?”

“Who cares, let’s smash him. Maybe it’ll save everyone else.” A muscular man shouted waving a war hammer.

“Such a painless death?! I want blood!” A woman protested.

Wow, this crowd is extremely bloodthirsty. They plan on killing him? That’s kind of harsh. Even if Bai Xiaobao causes trouble, he means well and isn't that bad.

Amidst the crowds arguing, I noticed Bai Xiaobao’s statue had begun to drip sweat from his forehead.

I blinked in surprise and looked carefully at him. A drop of sweat dripped from Bai Xiaobao’s brow, his eyes momentary blinked before the stiff panicked expression returned to his face.

He… he isn’t actually a petrified? He’s only pretending? What sort of insane plan is that?

How did he even get a fake petrification stone coating surrounding him? If it weren’t for him moving around, I wouldn’t have even noticed.

Regardless, I didn’t have time to waste waiting around for whatever his insane escape plan is.

“Show’s over, folks.” I said, trying to attract the crowd's attention, “Buzz off, unless you want end up like the rest of the pedestrians around here.”

A muscular man waved his war hammer around, “Who are you?”

My cold eyes landed on his blurry and undefined face (I really need to find non-prescription glasses). Blinking in an attempt to clear up the blurriness, I asked, “Do I need to repeat myself?”

I released my mana in a threatening manner. A portion of the crowd backed off and the rest seemed to hesitate.

Suddenly, electricity formed midair and shot down toward my head.

Failing to avoid it, a barrier from my <Glove of the Hated One> deflected it.

I sighing in relief, before another lightning bolt from the growing pile of static electricity midair struck down and pain shot through my body.

Fighting through the pain, I released my suppression on the rest of my mana. The threatening atmosphere projecting from my body increased dramatically. The sudden mana pressure caused the crowd to suddenly begin gasping for air, clearly they were having trouble breathing.

The electric static midair increased dramatically.

Tiny bolts of lightning flashed throughout the air above and seemed to be preparing to strike downward aggressively. Countless bolts of electricity were slamming into my body and overloading my pain senses.

“Screw off!” Roaring loudly, I tried to summon a spear from my wristband. The UI of the wristband had changed unknowingly and I couldn’t summoned out the spear swiftly, thus I abandoned that plan.

Forcing out my musket, I fired a shot into the air up toward the accumulating lightning bolts.

The lightning bolts were unaffected and quickly stuck toward me again.

The electric shock ran through my body. Whilst the damage it caused was quickly healed by my rapid regeneration, the pain and loss of muscular control was a problem.

“Enough.” I roared, whilst taking off my new glasses and purposefully petrifying the entire crowd around me.

Despite the petrification of the crowd, the lightning continued to accumulate overhead which indicated that the crowd hadn’t actually been responsible for its appearance.

Electricity ran through my veins and my mind calmed down. Theorizing an escape, I realized that the electricity started when I released my mana pressure.

An automatic counter measure?

Forcefully restraining my mana pressure, I hid my presence.

The lightning slowly dissipated. Checking my surroundings, all the crowd had been turned into stone. The statues had terrified expressions and some were holding their throats displaying their struggling to breathe.

Tsk.

What sort of crappy automated countermeasure is that? What is even the point? It can be canceled by simply restraining my mana.

Glancing back toward Bai Xiaobao, I found him still pretending to be a stone statue.

“You can stop pretending.” I said tapping his forehead.

Except Bai Xiaobao didn’t move and my hand contacted with freezing cold stone. When I examined him closely, I quickly realized the problem.

… I’m not wearing glasses and currently thinking about petrification. Bai Xiaobao actually got turned to stone.

Whoops.

Well… easily solvable.

Grabbing an impressive and fancy dagger from a nearby petrified pedestrian. I slash my wrist… but the knife merely slid across my skin without doing any damage.

Is this a blunt blade?

Frowning. I tried another weapon, only to have a similar result and I realized the problem.

My transparent scales hidden atop my skin were blocking the blades and prevent them from cutting through to my skin.

Cycling through every weapon I had available, I quickly discovered that none of them could break through my scales. Regardless of the amount of pressure I used.

My musket’s bullets bounced off with breaking through, even if I used the maximum amount of mana the musket could accept. Meanwhile, the spear from my wristband cannot get enough pressure to break through skin (The UI for the wristband added more options that I’ll have to look at later).

Needless to say, breathing fire on my skin also did nothing.

This is definitely a problem.

My usually response would be to turn to God-hunter. I’m confident my all-powerful daughter could break through my skin and draw blood… but, alas, she has been kidnapped.

I hadn’t realized my scales had gotten this powerful. I mean, this is certainly good... but how am I supposed to reverse petrification?

Feeling a headache whilst I tapped on the random sword from the pedestrians, my frown deepened.

Casually testing my strength and the sword snapping in two, I tossed the pieces to the side and decide to just search to see whether Bai Xiaobao had God-hunter.

I rummaged through his bag.

God-hunter is nowhere to be seen on him. Shame, that would’ve been too easy. Seems Bai Xiaobao didn’t take God-hunter. 

Comrade and disciple… your sacrifice has been noted (then promptly forgotten). When I find another method of drawing blood, I’ll come back and free you (if I remember).

Saluting toward my petrified disciple before slipping back on those glasses, I walked off leaving the crowd of ‘realistic statues and not people turned into statues I swear, officer’ behind.

The first goal is to begin annoying the clairvoyant until he provides the location of Rin and God-hunter.

If I can remember where their guild is…

Tucking in my glasses, I searched around until I found Phoenix guild’s headquarters.

Unlike last time when we were guided inside by that guard, I just decided to break inside.

Last time, I examined the wards protecting the place and they were mediocre at best. Most guilds seem to have the same problem putting accurate security on their wards.

Their understand of the phenomenon behind warding is impressive, they have a solid grasp on the principles and can accomplish things I didn’t even know were possible… but they’ve utterly ignored the activation mechanism.

I don’t know if they just haven’t realized it, or if they’ve simply hyper-focused on the impressive effects of their wards.

Regardless of the reason behind it, the result was an easily breakable security system.

Hacking into the control scheme of the wards, I entered myself as a valid entrant and for the hell of it gave myself permanent access. (Although I said ‘hacking’, it’s more like entering ‘12345’ into a password box. Honestly, it not particularly impressive.)

Anyway, unless they completely discard their current wards, I should be able to return anytime in the future.

Entering into the clairvoyant’s office, I found him lazing off behind the desk with stack and stacks of uncompleted papers.

… How do I want to communicate with him?

Running a mental analysis, I observed him and tried to figure out the swiftest way to get him to cooperate.

The clairvoyant shouldn’t care about money as the leader of a large guild. Nor does he care about professional work edicts, judging by the piles of papers in front of him.

Honestly, I preferred when Stanley did all the talking and I just had to nod afterward.

I cannot pull off a friendly personality… or at least, not particularly well. Especially when I am breaking into the building.

Should I just introduce myself or threaten him into submission?

Hmmm… Let’s start with friendly.