Chapter 120
I had ended up following the thugs who robbed me of a warehouse. Given the way the families divided up the city, it was more accurate to say this was on the Stride family side of town. I didn’t know if that meant these warehouses were owned by their family. All I knew was that their family compound seemed to control this portion of the town, at least that is what the insignias of the majority of the guards patrolling down the street suggested.
Either way, just outside the warehouse, a mysterious person cloaked just like me had been able to instantly recognize my sentinel by the mana it gave off. I wasn’t even aware that the sentinel was giving off mana. At my level, I had almost no mana at all. I could barely even use magical items intended for mortal use. That said, I knew I contained a lot of mana. Mana was the building block of evolution in this world. How the statistic mana wasn’t a measurement of how much mana my body contained, but how much I had available to utilize.
I had managed to have a conversation with the Grandmaster about mana while we were drinking, and he had explained a bit about how mana worked in this world. I found that it was very similar to the way volume works in the lungs, even borrowing some of the terminology. During your normal breathing, you only inhale and exhale so much air, which is known as the tidal volume. However, your lungs both could inhale a great deal more air if needed, otherwise known as inspiratory reserve volume, and could push out a great deal more air if you wanted, which was expiratory residual reserve.
However, even if you exhaled all the oxygen your body could muster, you still had some left known as the residual volume. If you exhaled all the air in your lungs to the point there was none left, your lungs would collapse and you wouldn’t be able to breathe. This ended up being about 30% of your lung capacity. The 70% you could inhale and exhale was known as the vital capacity.
Similarly, I had a residual mana that supported my body and its respective evolutions. However, I didn’t have any vital capacity. It turned out that when evolved determined your level, they typically looked at your tidal volume. This was the amount of mana you typically gave off. Of course, you could use special medicines to store excess mana as an inspiratory reserve volume or expel excess mana as an expiratory reserve volume. If someone exudes too much mana, nearing their functional residual capacity, then they could experience headaches or even pass out unconscious.
Either way, my residual mana must have had some kind of connection with my sentinels that was detectable. I supposed that it had to be mana. Otherwise, it made no biological sense that I was able to control detached parts of my body using my mind, or was capable of splitting my mind into two bodies.
Although the mysterious person seemed to be able to detect me, I wasn’t ready to reveal myself. I immediately activated cell destruction, Apoptosis. The person seemed to sense something, tossing the sentinel away hastily. A moment after it left their hand, it exploded with a pop. The thugs stared with wide-eyed wonder. I was already in listening distance, so it made no difference if the sentinel was destroyed or not. I just was afraid they could track it back to me.
“Fools!” the mysterious person growled. “Do you know what would happen if someone found out what we were doing here?”
“B-boss… why would someone be spying on Grandmaster Bai?” One of the men asked.
“You idiots! Who do you think has been making the poison for us all of this time?”
“You mean… Grandmaster Bai makes the stuff we’ve been using to poison the Capala crops.”
“Shh! Do you even know how to keep your mouth quiet? Whoever is tracking us might be on their way right now. We’ll need to relocate.”
“Seriously?”
“That is an order. Destroy all traces of this operation.”
“How?”
“How? Dump all those spirits you have in there and light it on fire. Burn the place down!”
“What? Our alcohol?”
The person let out an irritated sigh.”You’re the idiots who let yourself get tracked. Just lay low for a few weeks. I’ll contact you.”
With that, the mysterious person turned around and left. Their body moved with a supernatural speed that told me they had to be evolved, and a higher one at that. The group of thugs looked at each other and then shrugged as they entered the building. They followed their boss’s order and immediately began pouring bottles of liquor all over the ground.
“What a waste… all our alcohol.” One of the men sounded slightly weepy as he took a swig before chucking the bottle onto the floor and smashing it.
“How is this our fault? The boss told us to follow the Grandmaster’s orders. He’s the one who told us to take the bag…” Another grumbled.
“Let’s just get the job done quickly. If it’s one of the other houses, this could be bad. Consider yourselves lucky that boss was looking over our shoulder.” That one came from the leader.
“Aren’t you the one saying you’re going to replace boss?”
“If you have time for yapping, you have time for setting a fire.”
The men continued to conduct their arson with a mood of having done similar things in the past. When they were finally done, one of the men made a small pile of combustibles and lit it. It was only after they left that I snuck into the building. They were carrying very little on them, which told me that this place had very little to begin with. At least, if there was wealth, it wouldn’t be stored in that factory.
I continued to rummage through the factory building as the fire continued to grow. By this point, the heat was spreading and dark smoke was moving along the ceiling. After adapting myself to that heat vent, I wasn’t scared of the heat a fire could produce. As for the smoke, I could go without oxygen if I needed to.
I eventually discovered an office in the back that had a pile of papers. They had gone out of their way to douse this particular pile of alcohol, but it hadn’t caught yet. I pulled the pile of documents into my Luminal space. That’s when I noticed a bag of some kind of chemical. I tossed that into my space too.
By that point, the fire had reached the office. If I was a human, I might have been trapped in that fire. However, I lifted my hand and sprayed out water in a stream. I walked out of the factory while continuing to dump water on the fire in my way. I managed to exit the factory just as I started hearing people shouting about the fire.
I looked back at the burning building for a moment and then sighed. The factory was pretty close to another building, and it looked likely the fire would spread. If the fire continued to grow, a lot of people could be affected by it. Waving my hand, I released a large quantity of water stored in my luminal space. It came out in a tidal wave. It slammed into the factory, causing a resounding sizzle as water met fire. It still was enough to flood the floor. What was a building inferno suddenly became a light sizzle.
With that settled, I lifted my hood and then ducked back into the shadows. Several people were running toward the factory thanks to the commotion. They should have their methods for dealing with fires, so I decided to leave it to them. After all, I already had a new target.
The mysterious person had stopped in a new location. They had destroyed the sentinel, but the sentinel was only a tool used to get some sensory feedback. Technically, any clump of cells was enough for me to track, and it so happened that my cells were left all over the back. It wasn’t a lot of cells, and I would lose sense after a certain distance, but they had stopped within my range.
This time, I moved quickly, leaping onto a rooftop and racing over to the location. I found the mysterious person sneaking over a fence. This appeared to be a compound. As I spread my senses out, I realized that this was the Stride compound. So, it was Stride after all. Curiously, I decided to follow after the figure. As I moved, I activated my chromatophores to change my color. I didn’t have control of it to the extent that I could look invisible, but I was able to darken my skin so that it would blend well with the yard.
At first, it was just my skin, but I quickly covered my cloak in chromatophore cells and then the same effect covered my entire body. If someone saw me, I’d easily be confused for a shadow person. With that, I followed after the mysterious boss and the bag of plants.
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