Maurice

“She has the scent of necromantic alchemy on her.”

Lu Mao turned to Novia to confirm this.

Novia nodded slightly.

“Let's follow them first and see where they take her.”

She pulled Lu Mao into a secluded alleyway nearby and raised her hand to cast Invisibility. A faint, dark gold halo enveloped them both.

Then, she grabbed him by the back of his collar and pushed off the ground. The two of them leaped silently onto the rooftops. Lu Mao was nearly choked by his collar and almost coughed, but he grit his teeth and held it in.

The city guards escorted Kelulu through several streets and entered a secluded prison.

The two of them lay flat on the roof opposite, waiting for about fifteen minutes before the side door finally opened.

The catgirl was stuffed into a coarse burlap sack. The guard leader from earlier carried her out on his shoulder and handed her over to a man in plain clothes waiting in the alley.

The man paid a few silver coins, slung the sack over his shoulder, and walked away quickly along the path at the base of the city wall.

Novia dragged Lu Mao along as she glided silently across the rooftops, keeping a steady distance from the man.

The plainclothes man traversed several narrow alleys and finally stopped at the back gate of the prison.

A black carriage was parked in the back alley. The carriage had no windows, and a rusty iron padlock hung from the door. The man unlocked it and tossed the sack inside.

Peering down from the roof, Lu Mao saw four or five other figures, their hands and feet similarly bound, crammed inside the carriage.

“Are they human trafficking?” Lu Mao whispered.

Novia did not answer, but the dark gold light in her slitted pupils grew a fraction colder.

The carriage drove out of the back alley and traveled along a gravel road in the suburbs for about half an hour, finally stopping in front of a massive manor estate.

The estate was surrounded by iron fences, with an extremely heavy iron gate serving as the main entrance.

Novia dragged him along as she glided silently less than three feet off the ground, using the tree canopy as cover to slip through a gap at the edge of the barrier.

“A silencing barrier,” Novia whispered after they landed. “Anyone who can set up a barrier of this level is no ordinary alchemist.”

Following the carriage, the two of them slipped into the main building of the manor. After walking through a dimly lit corridor, the space suddenly opened up.

The main hall was brightly lit, the air thick with the smell of disinfectants and blood.

A row of iron cages lined both sides of the hall. Each cage held various demi-humans who were either unconscious or dazed, all wearing metal collars engraved with runes around their necks.

The carriage driver dragged the sacks out one by one, dumping the demi-humans inside onto the floor.

Kelulu rolled out of her sack. Opening her eyes dazedly, she met the numb stares of those inside the iron cages.

“Lord Maurice, the new shipment has arrived,” the driver called out respectfully toward the staircase at the far end.

On the other side of the hall, a man wearing an alchemist's robe slowly walked down the stairs. A white mask covered his face, and his hands were clad in brown leather gloves.

Novia pressed Lu Mao down into the shadows of the corridor corner. Holding his breath, Lu Mao stared at the masked alchemist. The contours of his brow bone and eye sockets were a seventy to eighty percent match with the portrait on the bounty notice.

His gaze swept over the shivering demi-humans on the floor, his expression laced with dissatisfaction.

“Why are they all such unhealthy specimens? Do you have any idea how much this will interfere with my experimental data?”

The driver trembled all over and quickly tried to defend himself.

“Demi-humans with no background, no registration, and whom nobody cares about are becoming harder and harder to find. The remaining ones won't easily show their faces unless they can barely survive.

“Besides, they usually disguise themselves very well, making them hard to spot. If you really cannot wait, My Lord, I can also find a way to kidnap a few humans...”

“Forget it. Do you think everyone in Falan City is like these low-grade demi-humans, whose disappearance goes completely unnoticed?”

The man paced slowly, barely maintaining his patience. “Spend some time fattening them up first. Don't even think about kidnapping humans. If the people from the Guild find out about this, all my plans will go down the drain.”

“When that happens, if the God's Favored blames us, no one will be able to bear the responsibility.”

A God's Favored, as the name implied, was a mortal directly bestowed with power by a deity, serving as the god's spokesperson and executor of their will in the mortal realm.

The title itself was not inherently evil—the High Clerics and Holy Knights of the orthodox churches all fell under the category of the God's Favored.

But by the same token, evil gods could also have their favored.

The cultists who had hunted Lu Mao back then belonged to the lowest tier of these favored.

They could not even be called God's Favored; at most, they were flesh-and-blood puppets mass-produced through the evil god's blessings.

The situation was far more complicated than the two had anticipated.

If it were just ordinary human trafficking and illegal experiments, Novia could have easily handled it alone with her strength.

But now that a favored of an evil god was involved, the nature of the situation was entirely different.

Since they dared to do such things right under the noses of Falan City's Mages' and Alchemists' Guilds, it meant they had the audacity to contend with the entirety of the city's guilds.

As the core city of the magical kingdom of Lumdor, Falan City was not some second-rate town like Rhode City, which only had a single Dragon Rank adventurer holding down the fort.

Falan City, home to the headquarters of the nation's two major guilds, had at least double-digit powerhouses stationed year-round whose combat strength rivaled the Dragon Rank.

Although Novia's strength far exceeded that of ordinary Dragon Rank adventurers, she would definitely not gain any advantage if she truly clashed with such opponents.

“Let's retreat first,” Lu Mao whispered, mouthing the words to Novia. “We'll go back and find Mayfield, and let him handle this.”

Novia nodded. Just as she was about to take him back the way they came, she saw Maurice move.

He was crouching down to inspect the newly arrived batch of demi-humans when he suddenly turned his head, as if sensing something.

He stood up, pulled a pair of glasses from the inner pocket of his robe, and put them on.

The lenses of the glasses were dark red, gleaming with an eerie light under the lamps. The frames were embedded with intricate rune circuits, clearly no ordinary tool for vision correction.

Maurice adjusted his frames and slowly turned toward the corner of the corridor, precisely where Lu Mao and Novia were hiding.

“Useless trash. You didn't even realize you were followed.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, he flicked his wrist. A slender scalpel slid from his sleeve into his palm, the movement as smooth as a magic trick.

The blade flashed only once under the light before plunging precisely into the driver's throat.

Before the driver could even scream, he clutched his neck and stumbled back two steps. Blood gushed through his fingers as he collapsed heavily to the ground, twitching twice before going completely still.

The demi-humans in the hall shrank back in terror, and the numb eyes of those inside the iron cages finally filled with fear.

Maurice didn't even spare a glance at the corpse on the floor. He adjusted his mask with a fingertip and tilted his head slightly toward the corner of the corridor, as if greeting old friends.

“You two must be tired after following me all this way. Since you're already here, why don't you come out and introduce yourselves?”