Late at night.
Inside a bar in Whitecard District, two figures dashed out of it as they ran outwards.
Both of their clothes were messed up, and one of them was Felle who was together with Mylissa.
“Run!”
The moment they got out of the bar, they split up and ran towards different directions.
There were all sorts of stalls and night markets in the area, and very quickly, the two disappeared into the crowd.
Just as the two ran away, the bar’s main door was smashed open by a group of red-haired brutes.
The lead brute had a gold earring as he bit on a thumb-sized cigar, puffing out white smoke from his nostrils.
“Where are they?”
“They ran in two directions.” A powerful-looking black man beside him sniggered.
“Get them! And be careful not to wreck it. There are only so many people who could come into contact with that. If it is really on that tiny brat, I won’t be able to help you if it breaks,” the leading brute said.
“Yes, sir!”
A few other red-haired brutes responded in unison before splitting up.
Only the leading brute remained as he looked at the crowd, and took a big puff as he gently pressed onto something inside his pocket.
A formless signal was emitted and traveled into the night sky in the distance.
Having done that, he returned to the bar as the silver-ash colored door closed shut.
…
Both Felle and Selena panted hard as they sped across the alley. After running for a good while within the labyrinth of alleyways until the point they could not make out the directions did they slowly stop, and breathed hard while bending low.
“What’s with those guys!? Suddenly rushing it to capture us. If not for me noticing earlier, we’re probably dead meat.” Felle grunted with a pained look.
“I recognize them. Those… those are the people those monsters won’t attack!” Selena said between pants. “They are probably… Those people from the Sect of Thousand Graces we heard before.”
Felle was stunned as he recalled the three of them tailing a monster in secret to a place. It was an abandoned plaza, and inside it was all sorts of converging monsters.
What surprised them was, that there were living people conducting rituals inside.
They simply looked at those monsters being sucked into a small vase held by the living person without any resistance. It was from that time that they had eavesdropped on the conversation and learned about the Sect of Thousand Graces.
“The Sect of Thousand Graces… This is probably some heretical sect pulling some stupid stunts. So what do we do? Go back to school?” Felle said, his voice helpless.
Selena shook her head.
“No one else can see those monsters, and it’s dangerous even in school. We need to look for a place without those monsters.”
“Somewhere without any monsters… our school’s professors have their own miniature hidden realms, all of the top tier workshops are built within that hidden realm. If not, we can ask Mylissa…”
Felle suddenly recalled that Miss Mylissa was not only an ace student but also an apprentice of the Soul Fortress, one of the strongest workshops in the academy.
“A hidden realm… No, we should not trouble Miss Mylissa any longer. We just need to find somewhere else to hide. The Sect of Thousand Graces won’t dare to run rampant and cause too big of a ruckus.”
Selena suddenly had an idea.
“Come with me, I’ve got a good place in mind,” she said as she pulled Felle away from the alley.
…
Whatever happened to the Sect of Thousand Graces, Lin Sheng had no idea and had no mind to care about. Ever since the night he obtained the thing that looked suspiciously like a dragon crystal, he had been shutting himself inside the room.
One was to study what that mysterious thing actually was, and another was to train his dark powers and increase his holy power at the same time.
He had fully absorbed and consumed the souls within the eight vases and converted them into Crag Dragon blood.
Ever since then, his stamina was at its peak, and he had not felt any sleepiness for the past three days. That was because the Crag Dragon blood was continuously absorbing energy from the outside world and was nourishing his internal organs.
The change supercharged his stamina and kept his mind alert. At the same time, Lin Sheng could feel the same sensation when he summoned the Night Lord’s body.
With the transformation of his body, his soul too was nourished.
As he was unable to enter the dream, Lin Sheng focused all of his attention on the training of his dark powers.
With regard to his actual capabilities, due to the lack of any reference material, he had no idea how far he had grown. After all, he had completely no idea how much power his Crag Dragon blood infused with both dark and holy powers could unleash.
He only knew that his current body’s parameters were many times stronger than before.
The Crag Dragon was a powerful being that was powerful in both strength and defense, much different from the Shadow Dragon of the Night Lord or the Flame Dragon of the Steel Lord.
Compared to the Steel Lord, Lin Sheng’s Crag Dragon blood was much more suited to defense.
Of course, in terms of how strong it was, Lin Sheng still needed a proper opponent to determine that.
“Now that I’ve used up all of the souls and can no longer convert them into holy power, things have gotten problematic…” Lin Sheng sat on the sofa and he shoved a chopstick full of instant noodles into his mouth.
He had practically been feeding himself that for the past few days.
The instant noodles had a few cubes of pre-cooked, dehydrated eggs and vegetables, and that made it much more palatable.
“Seems like the source of everything, is still the soul…” Lin Sheng did not just past his time doing nothing. Aside from training and meditating, he had been doing something else.
That was to absorb the memories of those tens of thousands of souls.
Tens of thousands! Imagine that!
Even if everyone had just given him a memory about the length of a short film, tens of thousands of them would take him some time to fully absorb them.
He could only pick up the useful ones by key phrases, and absorb them whole.
First, it was the memories of various languages. As he had learned the Deviltongue before, Lin Sheng was particularly interested in the learning of languages.
He thought that, if he had sufficient mastery of languages, he could move mountains. And in this regard, the runes and sigils too were a type of language, and in fact, symbols themselves are a form of language.
So he had picked out and compartmentalized about eleven foreign languages from the memory fragments. Aside from some pointless slangs, all these eleven languages by far were the most widely used languages in the world.
If not for Lin Sheng discarding the memories of a couple of tongues that sounded a little too ancient, the number of languages he would have masters would have been much, much more.
But even those had taken him quite a bit of time.
Having the memories itself was not enough as he needed to use, and practice it, only then could he assimilate it as a part of him.
Lin Sheng estimated that he needed at least a few more days to fully absorb those.
After he was done with the foreign languages, the second thing he picked out were the specialist knowledge and experiences.
Yes, among the dozen thousands of souls that he had absorbed, an extremely small number of them belonged to learned scholars.
While there were no memories of top field-leading scholars or scientists, but there were still memories of intrepid researchers with a proper knowledge system.
Since they were memory fragments and not complete personal memories, Lin Sheng could only piece together knowledge from different fields one at a time.
With sufficient numbers, he could still piece together quite a decent amount of basic knowledge. Basic chemistry, biology, and the like. These were things that many of the souls had studied before, and were compiled by Lin Sheng, and absorbed whole.
