Sam and the team are currently in leader 1's territory.
They are currently in the city where the branch that they used and set up the whole scenario is located.
They are looking at the chaos that is occurring in the shadows without the citizens even knowing. They were surprised by the sheer number of experts that are under the command of Leader 3.
From the memories they gathered from the subordinates, they didn't get any information from this. There are more than a hundred Late transcendent cultivators under Leader 3 which is something that neither Sam nor the rest of the leaders expected.
Sam tried to gather some information, but everything is so tight with both of the branches, they are both attacking and defending against each other.
The team started thinking of ways to get a dead body and find some information, but for over a week, they didn't manage to get any. Shadow mice got some information, but nothing is crucial, it is more or less the battle plans of both parties.
Sam didn't want to make his presence known at the battlefields first. Most of them are assassinations and both sides are going at it discreetly. There are very rarely any flashy battles and provided by the fact that the first week both parties started taking out the weaker parties on each side just to reduce the numbers are morale for their opponents, it is completely understood.
To get more information, Sam even tried to get some dead bodies that died in this assassination spree and extract them from their souls, but that didn't happen, because every time they wanted to proceed someone from either side is coming to the spot.
Unless there is one high-profile clash with multiple members in the battle, it would be hard for them to get a hold of a body of a person that has any notable information.
So, they are pretty much just spectators for the whole week.
After one week though, they managed to find a place where a large-scale battle would take place.
It is an ambush on the remaining son of Leader 3 being planned by the branch manager of Leader 1 who also happened to be his son.
Son of Leader 3 and son of Leader 1 are going to clash and the people that are assigned to both of them are of pretty high level and are bound to have the proper information.
So, Sam and the team waited near the ambush place.
The son of Leader 3, from what Sam heard, he is actually no brain and only brawn. He is the guy that would look for a way to brute force through anything and the only time his brain works is when is assassinating somebody.
He doesn't have any talent in management whatsoever. In the past week from what Sam could estimate, he killed around eighteen members on the other side. Combining both the people that came after him and the people that he went after, he reached eighteen.
Now that he bared his fangs like that, the other party understood that he should be eliminated as soon as possible.
But Leader 3 is not stupid, so he immediately made preparations and sent a bunch of elites to protect his son and also kill everyone that came at them.
From the sheer numbers, Leader 3 is a clear advantage, now all that depends on the quality. From the looks of the people, it seems like Leader 3 also had an advantage in that.
As Sam saw the performance of these people, he is tempted to modify his plan.
At this moment, he wants both the leaders to fight each other and destroy each other forcing them to reveal their true prowess in both numbers and strength, he would only reveal himself at the last minute and finish them off and escape with the heirloom fragments without making his presence known.
Then, he would proceed to deal with the rest of the Black curtain.
But now that he saw Leader 3's prowess, he has half a mind to let him cause more chaos in the Black curtain. If he successfully destroyed the rest of the branches and even if he didn't, as long as he could damage them enough, Sam could swoop in and take everything away.
This ambush might be the deciding point of the change of plans. As far as Sam knew the Leader 3's son wouldn't know about the ambush, so he could see their group's performance.
As they hid a fair distance away, they looked through the surveillance set up as they waited for the ambush to take place.
After half an hour or so, Leader 3's son walked into the area with his group. But as soon as they walked into the group and the Leader 3's son became alert and made the first move. Sam was pretty impressed by this.
The battle went on, everyone is making killer moves and trying to defend themselves from others.
Just one proper hit is enough as long as it lands on the opponent and they will die. They are indeed skilled assassins.
The battle went on fifteen minutes and the Leader 3 group has the upper hand. But when Sam saw that one of them is dead and Leader 1 group already had several casualties, Sam thought of something and took out a different puppet, he changed the energy cell inside and let it go towards the battle field slowly.
He ordered the puppet to explode and an extremely flashy explosion occurred right in the middle of the battle field.
Even though it is flashy, it is not exactly powerful, but this made the already tension-filled contestants in the battlefield to flee without taking care of their fallen comrades.
Both sides thought that the explosion was caused by the opposite party and they thought that their opponents might have reinforcements coming to them.
Sam knew that this bluff wouldn't last long, so he immediately sent Night Ghost to capture all the corpses and they ran away instantly.
After reaching a hidden spot, they took out the corpses and performed the memory extraction.
Sam went through those memories and got as much information as they could.
The members of the Leader 1 group didn't give much information, it seems like Leader 1 operated the whole organization pretty calmly, the only secret he got is that the presence of death soldiers.
These are the specially groomed people that perform the mission they were assigned to irrespective of the cost.
They would blow themselves up if they have to kill the enemy. Their attitude towards death and their recklessness is their main weapon. They don't have any feelings, emotions and they couldn't be bought off.
And every branch leader has these people.
But just from one body of the Leader 3 group, they got some serious information.
For starters, the Leader 3 group also has death soldiers, but they are not that high in number, that is also the reason that even though the other leaders took Leader 3 as a threat, they didn't rank him as the highest threat.
As for the rest of the information, it shocked Sam.
There are other forces under the Leader 3 group that the rest of the groups didn't know of. The groups act as completely independent forces and on the surface they don't have any connections with the Black curtain, they managed to cover it up really well because they are mostly disguised as the merchant groups.
These people are called the External forces of Leader 3 and they act mostly in intelligence and scouting.
They operate a myriad of businesses and they come in contact with many types of people making it easier for them to gather any form of information.
They also look for talented kids in perilous situations and send them to Leader 3 who nurtures them into the deadly soldiers under him.
And then came the Dead clients.
Dead Clients is another force under Leader 3 and the existence of these forces is only known to extremely close confidants.
They are actually the people that are supposed to be dead under the hands of the Black Curtain, particularly under the hands of the rest of the groups other than the Leader 3.
Leader 3 has a great spy network by which he managed to gather a lot of information in other branches. But what most people know is that the spies of Leader 3 are not exactly focused on getting into high positions, but rather they are focused on getting into lower positions like the attendants who take jobs, or people who record the registry of the clients and the assassination targets.
His main target is that information and once someone obtains the information of someone putting a bounty on a powerful target, they will relay to the Leader who will try to contact the target before the Black curtain could take action and convinces him to join his force.
Even though it doesn't work most of the time, there are some targets who took his help to escape the situation in exchange for a favor.
Sam was impressed as he went through the memories and got more and more information.
