Chương 20: Void Bite and Lies

The early morning alternate-world jungle was cloaked in a faint, thin mist. Without Terra's pungent sulfuric acid rain, the air here was moist and filled with an intoxicatingly pure mana. Hum... On Rowan's right wrist, the Möbius ring birthmark, which had been dim for an entire day, finally ended its cooldown period. He adjusted his tactical chest rig, pressing the priceless [Mana Primordium] and its companion water-weed securely against his body.

Turning his head, he saw the rotund Crystal-Scaled Pangolin lying in the corner of the tree hollow, contentedly digesting the giant crocodile meat it had swallowed yesterday. Seeing the faint luster returning to Rowan's wrist, its little obsidian eyes instantly lit up. It waddled over, excitedly wagging its stubby tail.

"Listen, little guy," Rowan crouched down, reaching out to tap the pangolin's forehead, which was covered in semi-transparent crystalline scales. He knew perfectly well how atrocious the environment of the Seventh Abyssal Hive was. It was swarming with highly aggressive mutated sewer beasts. Bringing back a living mana-beast radiating natural energy—one covered in bizarre crystal scales, no less—was tantamount to streaking through the dark while holding a blazing torch.

Even if it could conceal its mana fluctuations, its appearance alone would make it impossible to pass off as some creature that wandered out of a nature reserve. No one would believe it. Once targeted by the authorities or a Consortium's biological laboratory, not only would the pangolin be dissected, but Rowan himself would be hunted down.

"You stay right here," Rowan pointed at the floor of the tree hollow, his tone stern, regardless of whether it could understand him.

"Don't go anywhere. Don't run off. I will come back." The pangolin tilted its head, seemingly only half-understanding Rowan's words. But its attention was clearly entirely focused on the Möbius ring. Time to go, Rowan muttered in his heart. A pitch-black spatial rift, flickering with deep blue electrical arcs, silently peeled open in front of him. The exact moment the rift formed, the pangolin became so excited that all its scales stood on end.

Its four limbs violently pushed off the ground, and like a cannonball leaving the barrel, it lunged straight toward the spatial rift! Rowan, who had anticipated this, was just about to kick it back, but suddenly realized its trajectory wasn't aimed at following him; it was aimed slightly to his side. The pangolin missed the opening, but a spine-chilling scene unfolded— It didn't crash into the mud. Instead, it opened its mouth in mid-air. In the final 0.

1 seconds before the spatial rift could completely seal shut and fade into nothingness, its two rows of fine, dense teeth precisely locked onto the dissipating spatial ripples and viciously bit down! Crack. A bizarre, faint sound echoed, like glass shattering in a vacuum.

Standing at the other end of the tunnel, just before his vision was entirely swallowed by the darkness, Rowan clearly saw it: the edge of the spatial rift, which should have naturally mended itself, was forcibly bitten out of a tiny "notch" by that little fatty before it slowly stitched itself back together! The pangolin landed on the ground and even smacked its lips as if it hadn't had enough, acting as though it had just swallowed a delicious mouthful of the "void."

"Just what kind of monster is this..." Huurk— After an intense sensation of weightlessness, Rowan's feet once again touched hard, freezing concrete. The Seventh Abyssal Hive was, as always, dreary, damp, and suffocating. But at this moment, Rowan touched the rock-hard crystal against his chest and felt that even the acrid, rotting stench in the air smelled like the sweet fragrance of money. He didn't delay.

He quickly changed into a baggy grey raincoat treated with an anti-infrared coating, pulling the hood extremely low so that the majority of his face was hidden within the shadows of a gas mask. Half an hour later, Rowan slipped through the slums' blockade line and arrived at the edge of the mid-tier zone. This was the location of the "Greedy Jaws" underground exchange.

Unlike the petty, oil-stained black-market stalls of Scrap Iron Street at the absolute bottom, this was the core hub where elite mercenaries and the black gloves of the wealthy fenced their illicit goods. Even the security guards stationed at the door were implanted with Tier-D subdermal alloy armor. After stating his business to the exchange's guide and showing photos of a few minor materials, Rowan was ushered into an absolutely soundproof VIP room.

Sitting behind a massive solid-wood desk was a slightly plump man with slicked-back hair, wearing a gold-rimmed monocle. Everyone on the streets called him Voss the "Smiling Tiger".

"I heard my friend here has some exceptionally rare goods?" Voss interlaced his fingers, leaning back in his leather chair, sizing up the heavily muffled, mysterious figure before him with an amiable smile. Rowan didn't waste time with words. He directly slammed a heavy anti-magic alloy box onto the desk—a box that had cost him 200 Terra Credits. Click. He popped the latch open. A dazzling deep blue radiance instantly pierced the dim lighting of the secret room.

Pure mana permeated the air, so potent that it even caused a half-dead decorative plant on the desk to begin uncurling its leaves. The pupil behind Voss's monocle violently contracted, his breathing instantly slowing down.

"A Mana Primordium?! This purity..." Voss's Adam's apple bobbed imperceptibly. But he was, after all, a black-market kingpin who had weathered countless storms. Merely three seconds later, the raw greed in his eyes was replaced by an intense, heavy wariness. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. He abruptly slammed the lead box shut, his expression darkening as he waved his hands repeatedly.

"Friend, are you pulling my leg? I don't dare take this," Voss pushed his gold-rimmed monocle up, his tone turning cold and hard.

"Mana Primordiums are strategic resources monopolized by the Government and the Consortiums.

"Every single one bears a special Government mark and is registered at the foundational level within the Akashic Network." Voss stared dead into Rowan's eyes.

"Are you just ignorant, friend, or did you come here to get me killed? If I accept this, the Contraband Search Squad will be knocking on my door by tomorrow morning."

"Who told you this was official overt goods?" Rowan's voice, disguised by a voice changer, sounded hoarse and icy. He leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms in a relaxed posture.

"This Primordium is freshly unearthed. It's perfectly clean 'new goods' that hasn't left a single trace of a record in the Akashic Network."

"Impossible!" Voss immediately retorted with a cold sneer.

"Ruin excavation on Terra is strictly monitored by the Explorer's Association. Even a fly flying out of a ruin has to go through a security scan. How could there possibly be an unnumbered, clean Primordium?" Rowan didn't continue defending his claim. Instead, he directly tapped the personal terminal on his wrist (a device he had bought on a small loan right before coming here) and projected a holographic video onto the desk. In the footage, a micro-mana spring was bubbling steadily.

"Our Night Owl Exploration Squad has had some good luck recently. We discovered this spring in a newly found, unmapped, undeveloped Tier-D3 micro-ruin." Rowan maintained a straight face, boldly using a fake backing to bluff his way through.

"They felt the vampires at the Explorer's Association were taking too greedy of a cut and didn't want to hand over such a premium Primordium for a lowball price. So, before officially reporting the ruin, they commissioned me to come to the black market and test your bottom line." The name Night Owl Exploration Squad was something Rowan had picked up while chatting with Rad. Rowan closed the projection.

His fingertips gently tapped the lid of the lead box, producing muffled thuds that seemingly struck directly against Voss's heart.

"A perfectly clean, premium Primordium. As long as you can swallow it, you just need to find a high-tier alchemy lab to wash it. Then, you can sell it at thirty percent above market price to those Consortium executives desperate to etch Source Runes into their illegitimate children. I'm just asking you: do you dare make this money?" Voss stared at the box, a shrewd glint flashing in his eyes. An unregistered, clean Primordium! As long as it was handled properly, the profit margin would be astronomical!

He took a deep breath, forcing himself to resume his professional, smiling facade.

"Since you are a friend of Night Owl, I will take this deal," Voss extended three thick, stubby fingers.

"Thirty thousand Terra Credits. This is my sincerity." Rowan breathed a sigh of relief internally, but his face revealed absolutely nothing. He nodded.

"Deal." Voss pulled a pure black, unregistered obsidian card from his drawer. This type of card was a VIP card issued by the banks; on Terra, they were almost exclusively seen in massive underground transactions. He performed a series of convoluted operations on his desktop terminal, then slid the magnetic card over to Rowan.

"Unregistered account, thirty thousand Terra Credits. You can use it to withdraw funds at any Dark Web ATM at any time." Rowan picked up the magnetic card, scanned it with his terminal to confirm the balance was correct, then turned and decisively walked out of the VIP room. The very instant the heavy alloy door of the secret room slowly clicked shut... The smile on Voss's face vanished without a trace. It was replaced by the cold, venomous glare of a viper. He pressed a hidden button on his desk.

Two assassins, fully equipped with optical camouflage and silent-assist cyberware, stepped out noiselessly from a hidden door.

"Boss, should we go get that thirty thousand credits back?"

"The money is a trivial matter. The secret this lone wolf is hiding is the true gold mine," Voss tugged at his tie, picked up a cloth, and wiped the spot where the box had rested, sneering coldly.

"His lying skills are quite excellent. It's just a pity he didn't know that my own blood brother is a supervisor in the Logistics Department of the Explorer's Association." Voss's eyes flickered with the light of shrewd calculation.

"The Night Owl squad hasn't deployed for a single mission in the past month!

"More importantly..." Voss recalled the radiance emitted by the Primordium earlier.

"The mana dispersion of that Primordium was extremely low, its luster full and vibrant. With my twenty years of appraisal experience, I guarantee that thing was unearthed less than a week ago!

"A lone wolf full of lies, yet he produces a freshly unearthed, unregistered premium Primordium," Voss's voice grew thick with greed.

"This means he isn't a proxy at all. He has his own independent channel. He might even control a completely hidden micro-ruin entrance that hasn't been discovered by any faction!

"But boss, he's already far away. The mid-tier zone is crowded and chaotic..." an assassin whispered.

"He can't run," a cruel curve hooked the corner of Voss's mouth.

"During the handover just now, I activated a ['Ghost Moth' micro-tracking spell] within the physical chip layer of that unregistered card. Scanners can't even detect that thing.

"Follow him. See exactly which rat hole he crawls back to. I want the coordinates to the entrance of that micro-ruin!" On the fringes of Scrap Iron Street, Rowan, wrapped in his grey raincoat, wove through the labyrinthine alleys with apparent casualness. However, possessing a Tier 1 Source Crystal Core, his five senses had long since undergone a terrifying qualitative evolution. Coupled with twenty years of honed anti-reconnaissance instincts from surviving in the underhive...

He acutely sensed that within the curtain of rain behind him, two microscopic mana fluctuations—almost perfectly blended with the environment—were biting onto his trail like maggots in a corpse!

"High-end gear with optical camo? Smiling Tiger really was up to no good." Rowan's eyes turned icy. He immediately altered his route, deliberately diving into the abandoned, maze-like sewage pipe networks flooded with high-intensity radioactive waste. Left turn, vaulting a wall, sliding into an underground underpass...

Rowan exhausted every single trick he had previously used to shake off Public Security officers, but ten minutes later, that faint yet distinct sensation of being locked onto still lingered at his back.

"Something's not right!" Rowan abruptly stopped in the shadows of a dead-end alley. He gasped heavily, his brain operating at lightning speed.

"No matter how good my stealth is, they haven't shown a single sign of losing my trail. This absolutely isn't visual or scent-based tracking." Rowan's gaze instantly fell onto the inner pocket of his coat, where the pure black anonymous card he had just received from Voss was resting. He carefully recalled every single detail of the transaction in the secret room. When Voss brought out the magnetic card, his thumb had lingered over the chip area for an extra half-second.

At the time, Rowan assumed he was performing an authorization unlock, but thinking back on it now...

"There's a tracker!" Rowan's expression instantly darkened. He kicked open the back door of a nearby abandoned mechanic shop and found a dust-covered "zombie terminal" in the corner, a device specifically used for underground hacker transactions. He inserted the card. Rowan's fingers flew across the terminal.

Without a shred of hesitation over the cost, he paid the exorbitant 10% Deep Web money-laundering fee, routing twenty-seven thousand Terra Credits through hundreds of dummy accounts until it safely landed in his encrypted alternate account. Beep. Transfer complete. Hearing the prompt from the terminal, Rowan extracted the now completely empty physical card, a dangerous, cold smirk curling his lips.

He walked out the back door of the mechanic shop just in time to see a massive automated train—used for transporting high-hazard, radioactive mana-slag from the underhive—slowly starting up on the tracks. Rowan strode over quickly and brutally jammed the magnetic card carrying the micro-tracking program deep into the crevice of a sludge pump at the bottom of the train—a pump flooded with highly toxic treatment chemicals and high-energy radiation.

Having done all this, he scaled the adjacent ventilation pipes like a weightless spider, silently vaulting onto a roof over a dozen meters high. A few seconds later, two silhouettes draped in optical camouflage rushed into the alley. Looking at the tracking red dot on their tactical visors, they didn't hesitate for a second. They chased after the roaring radioactive train, sprinting madly toward the Seventh Abyssal Hive's waste incinerator plant.

Standing high atop a rain canopy, Rowan apathetically looked down at the two assassins gradually disappearing into the distance. He glanced at his terminal, confirming the massive sum of over twenty-seven thousand credits securely sitting in his account, and let out a faint chuckle.