Chapter 31: Got caught?
Papuyu didn’t knock. She kicked the luxury inn’s bathroom window open from the outside right as Kanos finished rinsing the soap out of his hair.
"We are moving," the woman said flatly. Rainwater was still dripping from the dagger in her hand.
Thirty minutes later, they were miles away from Marrath’s upper district. No more paved stone streets or bright oil lamps. They entered a narrow alley in the lower district that smelled like a mix of horse piss and rotten cabbage. Belida walked behind Kanos, carrying a giant burlap sack full of gold coins and iron chunks while ducking so his head wouldn’t hit the residents’ laundry lines.
"Sensor Bureau?" Kanos asked quietly, pulling up the hood of his gray cloak. The light drizzle made the street even muddier.
"Their hounds already caught the scent of an anomaly upstairs," Papuyu walked quickly in front, her eyes constantly scanning the dark street. "I put your status as dead in this month’s report. But your level fluctuation while sleeping at the inn caught the execution division’s attention. You leveled up way too drastically from the bottom of the hole."
Kanos clicked his tongue quietly. He had only enjoyed that soft bed for an hour.
Papuyu stopped in front of a rickety wooden door. A faded wooden sign with a picture of wheat hung above it. She pulled out a rusty iron key, unlocked the padlock, and pushed the door inward. Thick dust immediately greeted them. This basement room was stuffy, quiet, and only lit by the dim green glow of moss growing between the brick walls.
"Old grain warehouse," Papuyu lit a small torch near the door. "The floor structure is lined with thick lead left over from the old war. The Sensor Bureau’s tracking magic will bounce right off if they try to scan this area. Safe enough for you to mess around with your ink."
Belida lowered the burlap sack from his shoulder. The sound of coins and crystals inside clinking together was pretty loud, echoing in the cramped room. The giant knight immediately walked around checking the corners of the room, making sure there were no other entry points besides the front door.
Kanos approached the long wooden table in the middle of the room. It was infested with termites and had one wobbly leg, but the surface was fairly wide. He pulled out high grade parchment, a row of empty glass bottles, and several mid grade monster cores looted from Garrick. He arranged everything neatly on the table. The air around the table instantly dropped a few degrees when Kanos placed a purple crystal that was still emitting thin smoke.
Kanos sat on the wooden chair. He took a slow breath, staring at the blank parchment paper in front of him. His mind raced. If the Sensor Bureau was really sending an execution division to find him, his Shadow Wolf alone wouldn’t be enough. He needed an army. He needed different types of monsters.
Kanos’s left hand started moving across the paper, trying to draw rough sketch lines using leftover charcoal. Spine. Ribs. Joints. Center of gravity. But halfway through, his hand stopped. His charcoal lines were just a messy scribble.
Kanos slammed his charcoal onto the table. "I am stuck."
Belida, who was leaning against the door, folded his arms. "Stuck how? You made a perfect steel sword just from looking at it once."
"That sword is an inanimate object, Belida," Kanos rubbed the bridge of his nose hard. His head started throbbing just thinking about the complexity of living structures. "I could draw the wolf’s anatomy because I almost died getting bitten by that monster on the first day. I understand where its veins are and how hard its skull is because I smashed its head open with an axe."
Kanos pointed at his messy parchment paper. "But if I want to make a new type of golem, or a monster that can fly... I need clear references. Where do the muscles connect? How do the wing joints work? If I just blindly draw lines using pure core energy without understanding the structure, that shadow is going to blow up in my face. My brain is not an encyclopedia."
Papuyu, who had been quietly watching the door this whole time, finally turned her head. "You need intel."
"I need a high tier monster anatomy book," Kanos corrected. "Does the city library have one?"
"The upper library only has censored propaganda fairy tales," Papuyu answered dryly. "Information from floor fifty and below is illegal for regular citizens."
"So I have to dissect monsters one by one down there to study?" Kanos glanced at Papuyu. "We will get raided before I even finish."
"The black market," Papuyu said in a carefree tone, as if talking about the weather. "I know a broker. This guy has access to secret expedition logs, underground monster anatomy journals, even blueprints for ancient ruin weapons."
Kanos stood up immediately. "Can we trust him?"
"He is loud. A slippery con artist. Talks too much," Papuyu listed everything without changing her facial expression at all. "But his intel is accurate. Never wrong."
Belida lightly kicked the burlap sack at his feet. The gold jingled. "Just pile the gold in front of him and we take the book home."
Papuyu rubbed the scar on her left lip. "He is the most annoying broker in Marrath because he does not care about gold. You have to pay him with information he has never heard of, or an item he has never seen."
Kanos went quiet for a moment. He looked down at the glass bottles on his table. Inside one of those bottles, the dark smoke from a monster core was still swirling slowly, emitting a thick energy that made absolutely no sense to this world’s system.
"An item he has never seen," Kanos repeated Papuyu’s words quietly. The corner of his lips pulled up a bit. "That should be the easiest part."
Kanos shoved the glass bottle containing the core into his cargo pocket. He flipped his cloak hood back up to cover his hair.
"Lead the way, Papuyu."
