Chapter 176: Leave No Problems

Chapter 176: Leave No Problems

Lower Lip District, 13 Fang Street.

Ulika, who was fat, dark brown-skinned, and small-eyed, sat on the sofa. Using sun-dried, scorched-yellow tobacco leaves, he wrapped nearly ten kinds of herbs and spices unique to the Southern Continent layer by layer inside them, then cut the result into long strips.

Afterward, he held the self-made “East Balam cigarette” in his hand and leaned toward the match his subordinate had lit. He watched the front end slowly blacken and curl, revealing bright red.

Biting down on the end and taking a deep drag, Ulika slowly exhaled white smoke tinged faintly with light blue. Satisfied, he said to the guest on the nearby single-seat sofa, “This is what cigarettes are. Real cigarettes.

“The ones from the Northern Continent are only fit for children!”

The guest on the single-seat sofa was a man in his forties. His nose bridge was high, his eyes close to blue, his facial lines relatively soft. His black hair was thick and slightly curly, and his skin tone was neither especially dark nor pale. He seemed to be of mixed Loenese and Balam ancestry.

Hearing this, he chuckled and answered in Dutanese, “Unfortunately, I am not interested in any kind of cigarette.”

“Enzo, you have no idea how to enjoy life…” Before Ulika had even finished speaking, the powerful spiritual intuition originating from his own pathway gave him a faint premonition of danger.

It arrived so suddenly, so urgently, that Ulika instantly judged that the problem was serious.

Before he could throw himself out of his original position, his vision had already gone dark. It was as though he had directly seen the deep night outside and was overcome by intense sleepiness, feeling tranquility from the bottom of his heart.

The whole of Fang Street, whether in houses where lights burned or where all illumination had gone out, became abnormally quiet at that moment. It was as if no living beings dwelled inside, or as if all of them had fallen asleep at the exact same second.

Just then, Ulika, whose mouth had already let out a snore and whose body had tilted and gone limp, suddenly sprang up. In his eyes, drowsiness and lucidity strangely coexisted.

At some unknown point, a little girl with skin so pale she seemed almost illusory had appeared, clinging to his back!

The area around the little girl’s eyes was blue-black, her lips were dark, and her gaze was faint and hollow as it stared to the side. Her pale, transparent hands and feet had all sunk into Ulika’s body, as though she were a spirit that could not be shaken off.

Her existence brought a coldness from the spirit body, allowing Ulika to barely resist the abnormal sleepiness and forcibly break free from the Nightmare’s influence.

Not yet fully awake, Ulika instinctively rushed toward the staircase and stretched both hands forward with force, as though pushing open an invisible door.

In an instant, a bronze-colored door covered in mysterious patterns, impossible to describe in detail, appeared ahead of Ulika. It swayed, creaked, and cracked open a narrow slit.

Beyond the slit lay darkness without end. Inside, one indescribable eye after another crowded densely together, gazing toward the outside world.

At the same time, near the slit, large numbers of wriggling, bizarre things temporarily impossible to see clearly were madly surging closer.

Ulika was just about to keep exerting strength and proactively open the door, letting the terrifying world behind it descend upon Fang Street, when he suddenly saw a pair of semi-translucent, pale hands leap out of thin air, pierce through the deep darkness, and press against the inside of the door crack.

This pair of palms had no source. They were not connected to any body. At the wrists, they were bloody, as if severed by someone!

Both sides exerted force simultaneously. The mysterious bronze door stopped there, unable to close and unable to open any wider.

Above house number 13, Sost, who had already become a Spirit Warlock, stood half-floating, half-drifting in the support of invisible power. In both hands, he held a golden sun crown and slowly raised it upward.

When the golden sun crown finally passed above Sost’s head, brilliant light suddenly flowed out, rapidly outlining and gathering together.

All at once, it was as though a sun had leapt out of the void in midair, scattering all its light and heat toward the house at 13 Fang Street.

Without causing the slightest damage, they passed through the building and fell upon the bronze door, enveloping Ulika standing right in front of it.

Ulika’s expression instantly became extremely pained. The pale, nearly transparent little girl on his back abruptly let out a miserable shriek, only to have it blocked back by the “sunlight” and swallowed by the surging flood.

She twisted, evaporated rapidly, and wisps of black vapor spilled out from her, dissolving inside the ocean of light.

Inside the house, not a single dark corner remained!

When the “sunlight” faded, the indescribable bronze door had already vanished. On the ground lay a corpse whose surface was bluish-black, swollen, and leaking pale-yellow grease.

With a tearing sound, the corpse split open down the middle, and a small, thin figure sprang out from within.

This figure had a face exactly identical to Ulika’s, but his skin was as black as if stained with ink. He was only around 1.2 or 1.3 meters tall, and viscous pus flowed across the surface of his body.

The instant he emerged, he rushed toward the staircase at an exaggerated speed, burrowed into the basement, opened a pre-prepared secret passage, and sprinted straight ahead.

In barely ten seconds, the shrunken, blackened version of Ulika saw the exit. He saw hope.

He was not careless. With a gentle clench of his right hand, seven or eight transparent, illusory figures emerged from inside his body.

They were bizarre in shape, like aberrant entities formed from a fusion of human, plant, or animal traits. Some dragged Ulika by the arms; others lifted his legs, preparing to carry him in wild flight.

Immediately afterward, a mechanism button sank down, gears creaked into motion, and the exit door abruptly opened, revealing a quiet, dark corner of the street outside.

Beyond it were roads that could be looked down upon, houses on both sides of those roads, and the sea rippling with red moonlight.

Just as Ulika was about to fly out of the secret passage with the help of those spirits and blend into another district of Gurain, his eyes suddenly reflected a lake shrouded in thin mist.

The surface of the lake shimmered with a tranquil beauty. From its center, ripples spread in circles, and a beautiful, illusory figure slowly rose to the surface.

This was a powerful spirit, one often given the title “Lady of the Lake” in human legends!

—The strength of a Necromancer often depended on what dead and natural spirits they could find and control. This was also true for Spirit Warlocks, though Necromancers leaned more toward the deceased, while Spirit Warlocks were better at controlling natural spirits.

At that moment, the transparent, bizarre figures around Ulika all let out frightened, monotonous cries. They dropped the arms and legs they had been dragging and lifting, and like gusts of wind, burrowed back into that black, thin body.

With a thud, Ulika fell to the ground, but he felt no pain, because powerful sleepiness descended from nowhere, wave after wave, causing him to unknowingly enter a dream.

At the exit, Daly Simone, wearing a Spirit Medium’s robe and blue eyeshadow and blush, walked out from who knew where. Looking at the blackened Ulika only 1.2 or 1.3 meters tall inside, she spoke directly:

“The dead spirit he fused with is very strange. Without a living human body as its ‘house,’ it will soon wither and dissipate.

“We must seize the time to obtain intelligence.”

From the shadow beside her, Leonard Mitchell walked out. He glanced at Daly Simone with slight surprise and said, “Aren’t you a Necromancer? How can you control a Lady of the Lake?”

“Aren’t you a poet? Why can’t you write poetry?” Daly snapped back irritably.

…

On the other side of the street, along a cliff face that was not too steep, a figure grabbed protrusions and swiftly climbed downward, soon landing in a dark corner of Chin Street.

His skin was relatively light, his eyes leaned blue, and his black hair was thick and slightly curled. He was precisely Enzo, the man who had been a guest in Ulika’s home at 13 Fang Street in Lower Lip District.

Enzo was not a member of the Numinous Episcopate. He belonged to the group of people who had defected from the Life School of Thought after being tempted by the Rose School of Thought.

Furthermore, he was not one of the Beyonders of the Pharmacist pathway who could become vampires, nor did he worship the Primordial Moon. He simply did not wish to continue accepting the many rules laid down by his teacher and his teacher’s teacher. He hoped to live as he pleased, making full use of the advantage of being a Winner.

This mentality made him deeply agree with the ideology of the Rose School of Thought’s indulgence faction. It had not taken long before he formally joined them, freely satisfying all kinds of desires.

This time, he had come to Gurain on behalf of the Rose School of Thought to contact the Numinous Episcopate and discuss possible cooperation on several matters. He had never expected that Dark Dead Ulika would actually suffer a Night Church raid—and one of such a high level!

“Fortunately, I am skilled at anti-divination. The Evernight Church people did not know in advance that I was at Ulika’s place, so they did not pay enough attention to me and treated me as Ulika’s subordinate. That gave me the chance to break away from the central area. Also, that ‘sunlight’ mainly purified things with death, evil, or filthy powers, so it did not harm me too badly… That should have been a demigod-level attack…”

Enzo walked within the shadow on the side of the street, unable to stop recalling what had just happened.

After escaping quite a long distance, he turned to look behind him and discovered that no one was chasing him. He immediately let out a long breath and gave a laugh.

“A Winner is a Winner—always a Winner!”

Enzo regained his usual confidence. Wearing a smile, he continued to a certain point on the street, then turned left and quickly descended along the stairway.

It was a steep, long stairway connecting several layers of roads.

…

Near Fang Street, Sost suddenly opened his eyes and said to Leonard and Daly Simone, “There was another person in Ulika’s home just now named Enzo. He is a member of the Rose School of Thought. His Sequence is not low, and his position should be relatively important.

“Search the surroundings as soon as possible and see whether you can discover his trail. Strive to capture him successfully and leave no problems behind.”

As for the other Red Gloves and the supporting local Nighthawks, some were catching the remaining Numinous Episcopate members, some had already entered the dreams of the captives in hopes of obtaining firsthand intelligence immediately, and the few remaining were responsible for guarding against accidents and protecting their companions.

“Yes, Captain Sost.” Leonard accepted without the slightest hesitation.

Daly grabbed at the wind, brought her hand to her ear, and listened for two or three seconds.

“The nearby little ones told me that someone did indeed escape from the cliff face over there.”