‘I think I’m here.’ Koya thought as he arrived at Building C, he had asked around the Irongate District and apparently this was a facility that had been abandoned since the early times of the Supercity and one of the oldest buildings here. ‘The only reason this place is being actively avoided is because of the fact that the locals believe that ghosts inhabit this place.’

Several people who had entered this building including children had disappeared and eventually people just restricted the locals from entering it, hell a few streamers who decided to camp in the abandoned building to prove this was false were found dead.

The building itself looked like it had been mid-construction when whoever was building it simply stopped so half the windows were boarded and the other half were open holes.

The concrete around the entrance had cracked in patterns that suggested something had hit it from the inside a long time ago.

He suspected that it was maybe one of the people in the district doing the killings though.

“Riffi, you ready?” I touched the cat familiar on my neck.

Renji or Question Mark did say that he shouldn’t bring another person… not that he shouldn’t bring his Familiars.

Koya would have brought out the others but there was a chance for him to get set up and even if ? revealed himself now, not only would he be able to protect himself but Riffi could do the same.

He still had two skill slots free and just in case he faced an opponent that he couldn’t beat or was really hard to beat, Koya would buy skills that would either help me escape the situation with Riffi or handle the situation himself.

“Yes Master.” Riffi said and he patted her head as he stepped into Building C, Koya half-expected something to happen as soon as we got in but strangely, there was nothing.

“Right, we need to get to the Sub-Level.” Koya muttered under his breath and a system map popped up in front of his face.

It showed him what direction to move in order to get there and he began moving through this place. “It’s really eerie.”

There was no mana in this place at all, you’d think in a place where someone called to meet would at least be a bit active.

‘But no, it’s dusty and smells like shit.’ He thought, there were crates here and there and the direction he was heading in was bad… The crates had been here long enough that whatever was inside them had collapsed under its own weight sine the wood was soft and dark.

Koya found out why the place smelled this bad shortly after.

‘They didn’t remove the corpses of the Streamers?’

There were several human corpses on the ground with different insects like ants surrounding them and feasting.

“They died live on stream and nobody even came for their bodies?” Koya asked, the cause of the death was unknown and the people were afraid of this place so they avoided it and he couldn’t blame them though something he noticed about the bodies was that they were very thin.

These two had died recently according to the residents but they looked bloodless and he wasn’t sure there were any blood sucking cockroaches in this world as far as he was concerned.

He crouched for a second to look closer at the nearest one.

There were no visible wounds nor were there signs of a struggle. The person was just completely drained, like something had taken everything inside them and left the shell.

Regardless, Koya walked around the corpses and finally at the edge of the long floor, he reached a large metal door with a handle and reached for it but stopped.

“Riffi, do you feel weird?” Koya asked, he had Domain Sense as well as the rest of his skills on as of this moment so he wouldn’t be caught off-guard by anything but still, he felt this strange feeling of weirdness when reaching for the door.

“A bit, Master but don’t worry, I’ll protect you.” She affirmed, if anything went wrong, Riffi was prepared to unleash her Mini-Domain in an instant.

“Sure, I’ll trust you.” Koya said and despite the nerves he was feeling, he yanked open the door but surprisingly it didn’t open, was the whole thing locked? “I didn’t want to destroy Public Property…”

He covered his fist in Fighting Spirit and reared it back, punching forward with a clear right hook.

The punch pushed through the door and bent it on the inside but it didn’t collapse completely. The metal groaned and held.

“It’s really durable Master… let me hand–”

Koya reared his hand back and collided again, this time the whole door broke off its hinges and flew inside, going down the staircase and colliding with the bottom floor of this whole place.

The sound it made when it hit the bottom echoed back up for a full three seconds.

“This place sure is dark.” Koya said as he lit up his hand in a blue flame, letting it kindle all around. It was an old staircase with no signs of anyone being here in a long time.

The walls on either side were close enough to touch both at once and every step echoed downward before it came back up.

Riffi’s ears were flat and her tail was very still, which was her version of being on high alert.

There were also no windows and Koya slowly went down the winding stairs that stuck close to the walls, Domain Sense was being expanded and he could feel the door he had punched down to the bottom floor and the full large room below but there was nobody else.

He arrived at the bottom of the Staircase and as he thought, the Sub-floor was abandoned apart from the door he had punched out.

The bottom of the stairs opened into a wide room and his flame light spread across it slowly.

Koya walked while looking around as his flames increased in intensity, shedding light all over. The room seemed as dusty as the stairs and there was absolutely nothing there.

“Maybe this isn’t the right floor?” He asked quietly, where were the ambushes at the very least?

“Oh this is the right floor alright.” A voice said from behind them and both Koya and Riffi were alarmed as Koya leapt back and got into a stance. “Don’t you think this is too much for a friend… Koya-kun?”

He hadn’t heard footsteps and neither had he felt the air shift.

Domain Sense had given him nothing… there was not even the baseline warmth of a living body. The person had simply appeared the way a word appears on a blank page.

“Stop wearing that face.” Koya said, not leaving his stance… Was ? really able to nullify his Domain Sense? Because even now, he didn’t believe it. This person wasn’t showing on his senses.

Or was it because this person was actually mundane?… Still that didn’t explain it since he could still feel the presence of Mundane people.

“Haah… Koya-kun, you always wanted to see my face right?” Renji said and placed a hand to his face, the face itself scrambled and then he threw the mask aside revealing a man with crimson hair reaching his neck and glasses with dark circles under them. “Well this is it, that’s how I really look.”

The face was tired.

“I doubt it.” Koya said, “Considering you’ve been lying for a great deal of time, I’d rather not trust a fake face.”

“Very cautious… I like it, now stop standing like you want to pounce on me. You did well to come here alone like I asked, since we were best friends. I will show you my plan.”

Renji… or rather ? said as he faced the wall and cleared his throat. “Let’s go, you want to get back before the ALI Mid-term results come out right?”

With that, the man walked through the wall leaving Koya behind in the room alone.

‘System, are there any traps in this place… also why can’t I sense him?’ Koya thought.

「After scanning, there are in fact no traps in the place where he is leading you toward, also ? is using a technique that makes him impervious to the four senses including mana. Would you like me to scan the whole place completely for 50k FP?」

‘Fuck off.’ He thought, there were no traps so what was the need of scanning… and why that price?

The System was trying to scam him again, though he was more interested in what technique that was?

The ability to make yourself disappear from all senses including mana? What kind of broken ass ability was that?

He had Domain Sense, Riffi had her own detection, and between the two of them they had found nothing.

Whoever ?really was, his ability to erase his own existence from perception was something Koya had never encountered before and he had fought a lot of things by now.

“Master, are we going?” Riffi asked and Koya nodded, approaching the wall.

He pulled his hand through it at first and it went through with no resistance, he could feel the air on the other side then Koya took a deep breath and walked through completely.

He appeared on the other side and it was a well-designed place that was white, the ceiling, walls and even the ground was white with stripes and ? looked at him before waving.

The contrast with what was on the other side of the wall was jarring.

Everything outside had been rot and dust and insects eating corpses. In here it was clean and even a bit futuristic… It cost millions to build a place like this.

“Finally, I was thinking that you weren’t going to show up.” ? said and then turned around again. “Welcome to my base of sorts, please feel free to make yourself at home and ask any questions you want.”

That was the last thing a villain like him should be doing, he was supposed to finish his evil plan on the low and let Koya find him later when he was done… Now it seemed like he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about his plans.

“I’d rather not.” Koya walked forward with his guard still up. “So why did you truly call me over here…”

He had also mentioned the Order in his letter which meant ? had been watching him so he probably knew the connection with Hakai.

“What? Someone can’t call his friend over?” ? asked as they walked down the winding hallway. “But truly, I wanted to show you my plans and I trust you can keep it to yourself.”

“That’s a lot of trust considering you lied to me about your very identity from the beginning.” Koya said with a sigh, regardless of how much he tried to throw it aside… Renji had been his first friend, it was weird to find out he was quite literally cat-fished.

Could it be put like that in terms since Tech Tube had said that the real Renji was an old man?

The android had been deployed to collect his DNA.

Every conversation, every moment he thought was genuine friendship was data collection instead.

He kept walking, there was no point sitting in that feeling but it was there regardless.

“What? You can’t blame me, I was trying to make more friends and you seemed very appealing. I have to admit, I’ve grown fond of you, Koya-kun.”

“Please don’t make it sound gay…”

? chuckled and they arrived at the first place on their list which was a door and the moment he stepped in front of it, the door opened by sliding to the side automatically.

“How the hell did you even afford a place like this?” Koya couldn’t help but ask.

“Well, I used to be rich so it wasn’t hard to do.” ? said and entered the room while Renji followed, in this specific room, there were huge tubes everywhere whether you were looking at the side or even up front in the middle of the room. “This is my blood sample room, it took decades of gathering but you can see the sheer amount of blood I’ve gathered.”

Koya had thought it would be a bit of blood considering the small small samples he was taking but seriously, what the hell? He had more blood than a full water tanks.

The tubes went floor to ceiling. Some were clear with red that had gone dark from age and others were sealed black. A few had labels on them that he couldn’t read from where he was standing.

“…”

“It isn’t easy but I managed to gather blood from both dead and alive people and group them into clans.” ? said as he ran his hand through the several big tubes. “Like I have the blood of the former Clan Head of the Aozora clan here mixed with the blood of the commoners from that same clan.”

He had the blood of the dead clan head? How the hell did he get it?

“Oh, you’re wondering how I got the blood?” He waved his hand. “I actually killed the guy, it’s really not easy to kill all powerful people when you put your heart in it… Now I’m sure you’d like to hear the next one, especially since you’re married to one of them.”

He said it the same way someone would mention they had taken out the trash. ? didn’t really care about that man at all, but how the hell did he take out a Clan Head of that level?

He placed his hand on a larger tube with dark bubbling blood in it.

“You see, this is the blood of the Hoshigaki clan. You’re surprised? What, your wife didn’t tell you? The Hoshigakis used to be a clan decades ago… that were trying to ascend to Great Clan status and they even had a branch family under them known as the Kuroyami clan but on the day of the great purge, the Kurohane clan attacked the Hoshigakis and murdered everyone there, except two of them and that was because they weren’t around at that time.” ? explained.

“Which was the very young heiress and her half-sister and after that, they went into hiding. She came back officially around maybe thirty or so years later and began Star Enterprises which is the biggest business in Keropolis at the moment but leaving that aside, the blood that was sprayed across the now demolished Hoshigaki clan building… Every bit of it is here so you could say your wife has been looking for me.”

There were a lot of things Koya just learned from this… now he knew that the Hoshigakis actually used to be a clan, and he had more reason to hate the Kurohane clan as a whole though he was more surprised by the fact that Hakai had a half-sister. Where was that sister now? Dead…?

But still… How old was she exactly?

“There are also other blood samples from different clans everywhere, though the Kuroyami clan are just a mere imitation of the Hoshigaki clan, I have their blood too and even something special… I now have the White King’s blood.” He said while looking at a container that had quarter the blood of every other tube.

“How the hell did you get the blood of the White King?” Koya didn’t mean to glaze but it was said that the White King hadn’t bled past a drop of blood in his life, well he technically did bleed but it was only a drop of blood which came from a self-inflicted injury and then he licked the blood back so realistically there was no way to get this much blood of the White King.

The container was smaller than every other tube in the room but it sat in the center, the blood was much redder than the other blood in the tubes.

‘Even if it sounds cringe… the System confirmed it was true.’ Koya thought so he couldn’t argue with that.

? walked over to the tube and stroked it lovingly before turning back to him with a smile.

“It wasn’t hard to get surprisingly… after all, you are the Wh–”

Koya couldn’t hear anything, it wasn’t because the man had stopped talking but rather it was because the whole world around him was scrambling.

It was like every signal his body sent was being returned wrong and sound came in distorted through his ears.

The white walls bent at angles and several colors filled his vision as well, his mana felt like it were being pulled in different directions at once and he couldn’t control it.

“Haaarghhh!!!” Koya yelled out as he collapsed onto his knees and his head exploded.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep