Dawn, Henriqcal, Whitecard District.
There were pedestrians on the streets, as the nightlife revelers walked in hurried steps as no one would like to remain outside at a time like this.
A faint aroma of deep-fried meat permeated in the air from an unknown shop.
Lin Sheng tugged his jacket tight as he pulled down his hat to cover his face as he quickly made his way to a ten-story tall building.
A neon sign hung at the top of the building, lines of blue words moved slowly.
“Tomorrow, Happiness; Today, Hope; Yesterday, Forgotten.”
Two white searchlights shot out toward the sky from the floor on both sides of the building, and the signage light from the opposite Jarde Supermarket chain shone over, painting the entire building red.
Lin Sheng held his right hand out as he used his finger to feel the cold air outside. That refreshed him somewhat.
He had just spent a large number of spare souls and converted them into boiling Crag Dragon blood. Besides, Lin Sheng had not recovered from that state yet.
He slightly lifted his head, and walked towards the locked door. There was a CCTV camera on the upper right of the entrance, and a crack was heard. A green flash flickered as the camera broke.
Lin Sheng retracted his dark power strands as he placed his hand on the shut high-durability glass door.
*Crack.*
The two doors slowly opened up and revealed a dark entrance. From the entrance, there were rows of elevators with blinking red light on the left of the main hall, and on the right, was an empty reception desk.
At the center of the hall was a round pillar that had been hollowed out, with a few black vases placed within it as decoration.
*Hiss…* There were pieces of white flyers being blown about by the wind.
Lin Sheng slowly walked through the glass door, and swept his gazes across the area, and did not sense any of the monsters.
He did not get on the elevators, rather he went up the evacuation stairwell up the building.
All around the wall of the stairwell were all sorts of bizarre red sigils. Some looked like random graffiti, some were like characters, while others were some weird faces with creepy smiles on them and all sorts of cartoon characters.
Unless the green emergency lighting, the markings on the wall looked like as if they were written in blood, and looked rather terrifying.
Lin Sheng went up the staircase step by step.
The side rail of the stairs was totally rusted as the ground had smatterings of god knows what, perhaps blood or paint.
Based on the memories of the monsters he had absorbed, this building was the old base of the Sect of Thousand Graces in this district.
For him to get even more souls, going there was the most simple solution.
From the memories, Lin Sheng had a rough idea of the layout of the building, alongside the deployment of their members, and the rough level of their strength. He was equipped with the knowledge of all of that.
When the memories of the slain monsters were combined, it had created a particularly distinct mark of everyone within the building.
Especially when the people here did not even take any precautions against the monsters, and did not even bother masking what they were talking about. Heck, they even allowed them to simply wander about.
Perhaps they themselves could not see the monsters or thought that the monsters would not leak anything out. But regardless, all of this made Lin Sheng’s job easier, as no one could have known that he could absorb the soul and memory fragments of so many monsters.
“Go check things out.”
Li Sheng ordered as he stood by the emergency exit door on the second floor.
*Poff!*
Black smoke appeared beside him and transformed into a vault guard.
“Yes, My Lord.”
The soldier lowered his head as he pulled out his sword and shield, then he proceeded to the second floor.
Lin Sheng paused for a bit before he followed suit.
“The first floor is meant as a front and a reception floor. Everyone there is a normal person. Only the second level onwards comprise the cultivation levels, places where they cultivate the shades…”
Lin Sheng slowly followed behind the vault guard as a few more puffs of black smoke were released.
As they landed, the black smoke transformed into a few more vault guards, and without a word, they drew their weapons as they started searching the place.
“Ugh, they cannot see those monsters.” Lin Sheng suddenly frowned as he looked forward.
There was a young girl in a white dress sitting quietly in a corner as two vault guards simply walked passed her without noticing.
The girl had long black hair, and her frame thin, most of her face was hidden by her hair, and only the point tip of her chin was visible.
Having some ideas, Lin Sheng ordered his vault guards to turn into black smoke form, to search the place even more stealthily while he himself went ahead to investigate.
*Hngff!*
As he passed by the girl, before she could even yell, his right hand lashed out and grabbed her by the shoulder as a searing white lightning arc ran through her body.
The girl just exploded into gray light particles as a strand of black line entered his body.
Lin Sheng was impassive as he went about searching the entire place on that floor.
This was the old port for the Sect of Thousand Graces in this area, and based on the memories of the monsters, there were large amounts of shades being cultivated here, and even special types of shadow monsters as well.
As he made his way through the floor, past a few administrative areas, he took out a few more monsters, but their numbers were far lesser than he had expected.
With the second floor done, he went up to the third, and the third was empty.
Swiftly, he made his way up the forth, and fifth…
As he sped up, the number of monsters he ran into increased, but when he had gotten to the top fifteenth floor, he had only taken out about thirty of them.
The vault guards did not find any living person here, not even a security guard.
Dawn was breaking soon.
Not willing to give up, Lin Sheng started searching from top to bottom again.
…
The main hall on the first floor.
Inside the hollowed pillar were eight black vase-like decorative items, and the moment Lin Sheng passed through the security door, it lit up in faint blue light.
Weirdly enough, the blue light did not even light up the dark hall, nor anything around the vases.
The eight vases were like a living being, and the pattern on the surface was slowly moving.
If someone were to look on with a magnifying glass, they could see that the pattern was actually formed out of thousands of tiny white figures.
If further magnified, one could see that these tiny white figures were all clad in white, and their faces were the large number of commoners who had gone missing.
Some of them had gone missing in recent years, some even longer. And some, no one even knew where they came from, as if they had been inside the vases ever since.
These unknown tiny white figures formed ninety percent of the number. They were expressionless, their skin pale and pallid, as they wore a hooded white shirt forming into lines.
Some even sported hairstyles that were popular a very long time ago, but no one knew what era that was.
These large amount of tiny white figures seemed to be souls trapped within the vase, as they formed lines upon lines of white, and the lines converged into small, white eyes.
The eyes stared at the direction Lin Sheng had just passed through, and the moment it reached the edge of its vision, it disappeared and returned to normal.
