Chapter 597: In The Slums Once More [Bonus - ]

Chapter 597: In The Slums Once More [Bonus Chapter]

Before a single word could pass her lips, the dark basalt aisles, the glowing quartz rafters, and the small hooded woman in the porcelain mask vanished into an all-consuming blinding flash of white light, ripping Kara out of the depths and rocketing her back toward the surface of the world.

...

WHOOSH!

The white light collapsed and the air that rushed into Silas’s lungs was not spiced pear cider.

It was scorched rubber, stale urine, oxidized motor oil, and the sour grease of boiled tallow.

Kara blinked once, twice, adjusting her optical focus against the sudden murky yellow gloom.

High above, the smog of the lower industrial sprawl hung like a rotten wool blanket, choked with heavy particulates from the exhaust stacks.

Beneath her scuffed leather boots, a pool of black runoff water rippled softly against cracked greasy asphalt littered with discarded ration foils and broken glass.

’What the hell...’

Silas stood completely still in the dark silhouette of the single-armed woman with her jaw tightening as the familiar rancid reek crept straight up her nostrils.

’Sector Six slums...’

It was unmistakable.

Sector Five had been rough, the crumbling concrete tenements where he’d spent years scraping copper wire and hauling iron crates just to buy dry oats for Lia, but Sector Six was an outright graveyard for the living.

It was three tiers below the civil surveillance line, completely abandoned by civil enforcers alike.

’Fuck that porcelain-faced little bitch,’ Silas cursed bitterly in the cold silence of his mind.

Number Five hadn’t deposited him back in the staging pavilion to parade his loot in front of the council, nor had she deposited him outside at least...

The short woman had deliberately twisted the spatial extraction coordinates, dumping him straight into the armpit of the metropolis.

’She was definitely smiling under that mask when she pulled the lever,’ he thought, his mouth twisting into an irritated grimace. ’"It was... surprisingly... quite fun." Fun my ass. She was just waiting to throw me into an open sewer.’

Kara raised her single right hand, waving it sharply in front of her nose to cut through the reek of rotting tallow.

She stepped lightly out of the oily puddle, ducking into the deep shadow of an overhanging fire escape.

The brick alleyway was narrow, choked with rusted iron dumpsters and damp cardboard.

Silas paused, his dark eyes sweeping the perimeter.

Behind his skull, his senses rippled outward in an instant soundless pulse, mapping every rat scurrying through the foundation cracks and confirming what he already knew from years of gutter survival...

Nobody was watching and the city government didn’t waste credits putting surveillance lenses in a sector where people cannibalized the copper wiring out of the lampposts.

With a fluid motion of his single hand, Kara reached toward her hand, slipping off the plain silver signet ring that maintained the illusion.

SHUUUUUU!

The displacement was soundless as the broad shoulders narrowed, the long wild black hair sheared away and the imposing frame of Kara White collapsed inward like cooling glass.

Within the span of two heartbeats, the dark coat and tailored trousers shifted, replaced by a clean charcoal-gray bespoke wool suit, an unbuttoned white collar, and the sharp jawline of Silas Graves as he was much taller than before.

"Ah, feels good to be back."

He rolled his shoulders, feeling his native center of gravity settle back into his joints.

He smoothed down his lapels, adjusting the cuffs of his sleeves, and let out a long quiet breath into the damp gloom.

’Time to go home.’

Silas checked his internal circulation once more, ensuring not a single thread of the Dawn Blade’s lingering warmth or the feeling of the Phoenix Egg leaked past his pores even though they were in his Inventory.

In an area this destitute, a stray drop of that level of mana would draw every desperate rogue Awakened within five miles like sharks to an open vein.

’And I really don’t want to stress myself out dealing with them...’

He turned on his heel, moving down the alleyway with silent effortless strides.

His leather dress shoes barely clicked against the cracked flagstones, slipping through the maze of rusted metal and fire escapes until the towering tenements gave way to an open cracked boulevard that bordered the edge of the perimeter.

Silas reached into his breast pocket and drew out his personal mobile phone, not the pastel-pink kitten monstrosity Kara had used to extort forty billion out of Vanderbilt, but his own black one.

He tapped the glass, intending to call a cab, when his thumb hovered over his primary applications.

’I told Martha and the girls I was leaving for an early morning business trip,’ he mused, a faint genuine warmth softening the cold edge of his eyes.

It wasn’t technically a lie.

He had spent the morning extorting the nine most powerful monarchs on the planet, looting a vault, and securing autonomy.

That was about as high-stakes as business got but Lia didn’t need to know about the World Council, the Destruction mana, or the four golden Hero Tickets sitting in his Lord Inventory.

’Lia deserves a normal life,’ Silas thought firmly. ’She deserves to wake up without worrying about rent, eat fresh fruit until she’s full, and complain about math homework with her friends...’

As for himself, Silas liked his current trajectory.

He wasn’t some tragic avenger brooding in the dark as he had a territory to feed, an army to build, and a life here in the civilized sectors that was rapidly stabilizing.

’That said... I need to start liquidating the raw ores we hauled from the mines,’ he calculated, his mind shifting into cold commercial gears.

Blessed Land had stripped tons of high-grade ores during their mining arc and right now, it was sitting in his warehouse reserves, doing nothing.

To turn that raw haul into functional untraceable capital for his regular identity, he needed an established institutional partner.

’The Obsidian Anvil Consortium...’ Silas recalled, his eyes narrowing slightly as he recalled the market reports.

The Obsidian Anvil was a massive cross-continental mining and metallurgical syndicate currently running a major commercial partnership with the LAB as of right now.

According to the trade circulars, if an independent contractor supplied them with more than five tons of verified high-purity star-iron within a single calendar month, the syndicate would issue an Obsidian Black Card, an elite border-free commercial passport that bypassed standard customs duties, granted private shipping corridors, and offered unlimited banking clearance.

’Kara White handles the world,’ Silas thought, a slow razor-sharp smirk tugging at his lips. ’After all, she’s a Gold Core monster who terrifies the Council but Silas Graves needs to be a titan in his own right down here... When the time comes to formally present myself to the Bloom family, so when Seraphina and I bring our agreement to the table, I won’t have Matriarch Etilga looking down her nose at me like a penniless orphan clinging to her daughter’s skirts.’

CLACK!

The sharp heavy metallic sound of a hammer cocking broke the quiet of the empty boulevard and Silas stopped in his tracks.

From the mouth of a ruined concrete stairwell ten feet ahead, two men stepped out into the murky streetlights.

They were haggard, hollow-cheeked, and reeked of cheap synthetic narcotics and unwashed linen.

Their clothes were patchwork rags bound with industrial duct tape with their eyes wide, bloodshot, and ugly with the hollow desperation unique to drug fiends.

The taller one raised a rusted large-caliber semi-automatic pistol, pointing the barrel straight at Silas’s forehead.

His hand was trembling violently, his finger twitching against the trigger.

"P-Pockets," the man rasped, spitting flecks of yellow saliva onto the pavement. "Right now, suit boy. Watch, wallet, comm-pad... Throw ’em on the ground or I swear to the void I’ll blow your pretty brains all over that wall!"

Silas stood completely still with his hands resting easily at his sides as he looked at the rusted barrel of the gun.

For a brief quiet second, a strange distant nostalgia rippled through his chest.

He remembered when he was sixteen, dragging home a sack of bruised potatoes through Sector Five, freezing in terror whenever a piece of iron was pointed in his face.

In those days, a single lead slug traveling at high velocity was the hand of death as it meant Lia starving alone in a freezing room.

...Now?

Looking at the lead chamber, Silas didn’t even feel his pulse rise.

With his current bodily refinement and the passive power of his channels, that lead slug would flatten against his forehead like a wet wad of tissue paper, barely leaving a red mark.

A gun felt less like a deadly weapon and more like a poorly manufactured plastic toy.

The second man, shorter and holding an iron pipe wrapped in barbed wire, took an aggressive step forward.

"He didn’t hear you, Mal! Take his coat first! That wool is worth fifty credits easy—"

Silas let out a small tired sigh.

"You mean five hundred thousand..."

STEP!

Silas however simply leaned his weight forward, closing the ten-foot gap in a fraction of a second.

CRUNCH!

Silas’s right hand shot out with his fingers wrapping around the slide and barrel of the semi-automatic pistol like a steel vise.

With a casual, almost absentminded clench of his knuckles, the hardened steel sheared like dried bread.

Springs snapped, the firing pin cracked in two, and the entire receiver crumpled into an unrecognizable lump of crushed scrap metal with tiny brass shards scattering onto the asphalt.

The gunman stared down at his empty shredded palm, his bloodshot eyes threatening to pop clean out of his skull.

"W-Wha—"

"Run along," Silas said calmly, his voice smooth and lacking any malice. "Before I decide your kneecaps look better facing backward."

The two men didn’t wait.

They let out twin high-pitched shrieks of primal terror, turning on their heels and sprinting down the boulevard as if the devil himself had sprouted wings behind them!

Silas watched them scramble for about five paces.

’Wait a second...’

His eyes narrowed as he studied the frayed blue jacket of the taller man and the jagged scar across the back of the short one’s neck.

A memory from three years ago clicked into place.

He had spent two days in an abandoned processing plant cleaning industrial sludge out of a ventilation turbine, earning forty credits to buy penicillin for Lia’s lung fever.

On his walk home, these exact two bastards had ambushed him in a blind corner, cracked his ribs with an iron pipe, and taken every single copper, forcing him to beg a clinic nurse for sample packets in the pouring rain.

’I remember you two,’ Silas murmured with a cold vindictive smile spreading across his face.

VUM!

Silas released an invisible needle-thin sliver of his spiritual pressure, barely a fraction of a percent of his Gold Core density.

THUD! THUD!

Thirty feet away, both men dropped instantly with their consciousness snuffed out like candles in a hurricane.

Their faces planted into the greasy asphalt, completely unconscious.

Silas walked over with his shoes clicking leisurely against the stone as he crouched down beside the taller man, rummaging through his foul-smelling pockets with two fingers.

RATTLE!

He withdrew three crumpled paper bills and a handful of stamped brass tokens.

’Thirty Spirit Credits,’ Silas observed, counting the cash with a dry shake of his head. ’Filthy poor but considering you stole forty from me three years ago, I’ll count this as thirty credits plus interest... Call it divine retribution...’

He pocketed the notes, tossed the empty duct-tape wallet aside, and continued walking toward the sector boundary.

...After breaking their legs and ribs of course.

’Thirty credits... that’s just enough for a high-priority cab to Silverleaf.’

As he crossed the rusted iron bridge that separated the Sector Six quarantine zone from the outer ring, Silas let his mind drift back to the deeper archives of the World Vault.

’I still need to see Aki,’ he thought, his brow furrowing slightly as a serious edge entered his mind.

During his three hours wandering those ancient aisles with Number Five, he had skimmed dozens of personal journals belonging to the early World Kings.

He’d read the erratic paranoid treatises of the First King, and the classified royal medical manifests.

The Castellian bloodline was a walking miracle of genetic dominance, but it was also a curse.

The royal house had accumulated hundreds of lethal enemies over the centuries who lacked the power to challenge the World King openly.

Many of the early princes and princesses had suffered from congenital meridian blockages, esoteric spiritual parasites, and generational curses woven into their bloodlines before they were even drawn from the womb.

’Aki’s channels aren’t inert because she’s defective...’ Silas realized, the memory of her desperate tear-stained eyes flashing in his thoughts. ’When she was using the gloves, I felt the mana circulating through her veins easily so it wasn’t dead... I can guess that it was suppressed or deactivated somehow so maybe her Awakening wasn’t a failure but it was artificially halted from the inside.’

Whether it was a foreign curse planted by an imperial rival, or something far darker buried within the palace itself, he couldn’t be certain yet.

But he knew one thing... He wasn’t going to leave her rotting in that golden cage.

’I’ll have to examine her personally when the summit delegations disperse,’ Silas decided firmly.

Reaching the neon-lit perimeter of the main thoroughfare, Silas spotted an idling cab with its yellow roof-light glowing through the exhaust haze.

He stepped up to the driver’s window, shoved the thirty Spirit Credit notes through the glass, and leaned down.

"Silverleaf District," Silas instructed. "It’s a private residential estate with a good fence and step on it."