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 hadn't 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 increased 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.